Musa Bigiev was a Tatar Hanafi Maturidi scholar, theologian philosopher, publicist and one of the leaders of the Jadid movement. After receiving his education in Kazan, Bukhara, Istanbul and Cairo, he became a political activist for the Ittifaq, the political organisation of the Muslims of Russia. He also taught in Orenburg, wrote journalistic texts and translated classic works into Tatar. After emigrating from the Soviet Union, he travelled Europe and the Middle and Far East while writing and publishing.

The Jadids were a political, religious, and cultural movement of Muslim modernist reformers within the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century. They normally referred to themselves by the Turkic terms Taraqqiparvarlar ("progressives"), Ziyalilar ("intellectuals"), or simply Yäşlär/Yoshlar ("youth"). The Jadid movement advocated for an Islamic social and cultural reformation through the revival of pristine Islamic beliefs and teachings, while simultaneously engaging with modernity. Jadids maintained that Turks in Tsarist Russia had entered a period of moral and societal decay that could only be rectified by the acquisition of a new kind of knowledge and modernist, European-modeled cultural reform.