A Tashkent Jadid leader and a founder of new-method schooling and the Uzbek national press. In 1917 he headed the Shura-i Islamiya organisation; he was shot in Moscow in 1931.
Munavvar Qori Abdurashidkhonov was born in 1878 in the Darkhan mahalla of Tashkent'sSheikhantaur district, into a family of madrasa teachers. Losing his father early, he was taught first by his mother and older brothers and then studied in the madrasas of Tashkent and Bukhara; “qori” marks one who knows the Quran by heart. Back in Tashkent he worked as an imam and teacher. In 1901 he opened Tashkent's first new-method school in his own home, drawing up its curriculum and writing phonetic-method primers, “Adibi avval” and “Adibi soniy”, and the geography textbook “Yer yuzi”. He went on to open several more such schools around the city.
Press and politics
From 1906 Munavvar Qori worked on the newspaper Taraqqiy and that same year founded his own paper, Khurshid; later he guided the papers Shuhrat, Osiyo and Sadoi Turkiston, and he helped shape the national theatre. The colonial authorities arrested him several times. In 1917 he led the Muslim organisation Shura-i Islamiya and backed the Turkestan Autonomy. Under Soviet rule he worked in teaching and research, including as a researcher at the Samarkand museum. Arrested in 1929, he was sentenced to death in April 1931 and shot in Moscow that year.
Remembrance
Munavvar Qori was rehabilitated in 1989 (some sources say 1991) and in 2020 posthumously awarded the Order of Outstanding Merit. Streets and schools in Tashkent bear his name, and since independence the Jadids' legacy has been studied anew, with his textbooks and articles republished. A walk through old Tashkent — Sheikhantaur and the area around Hazrati Imam — evokes the world he lived in.
Built eastward from the Caspian shore under General Mikhail Annenkov, the Trans-Caspian Railway reached Samarkand via Bukhara (Kagan) in 1888. Trains first crossed the Amu Darya on a wooden bridge; a permanent one was completed only in 1901. In 1898 the line was extended to Tashkent and Andijan, and the opening of the Tashkent–Orenburg railway in 1906 linked Central Asia directly with central Russia. The railway boosted cotton exports dramatically, and new settlements grew around stations such as Kagan and Khavast and in the Russian quarters of towns like Jizzakh. The old station buildings of Kagan and Samarkand recall the era.
On the night of 29 May 1898 some 1,500 armed men led by the Naqshbandi sheikh Muhammad Ali Madali, known as Dukchi Ishan, attacked the Russian army camp at Andijan. The rising fed on resentment of colonial rule, taxation and land policy, as well as on religious appeals. The troops quickly recovered and beat off the attack, and within days the revolt was crushed. Dukchi Ishan and other leaders were executed, many participants exiled and their villages punished. The episode pushed the authorities to tighten control over Muslim institutions in Turkestan.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a reform movement took shape in Turkestan: the Jadids, advocates of usul-i jadid, the “new method”. Inspired by the Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinsky, Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy, Munavvar Qori, Abdulla Avloniy, Is'hoqxon Ibrat, Abdurauf Fitrat and others opened schools teaching literacy by the phonetic method and wrote textbooks. From 1906 Uzbek-language newspapers such as Taraqqiy and Khurshid appeared in Tashkent, and Behbudiy's play “The Patricide” (Padarkush), staged in 1914, launched a national theatre. The Jadids sought to renew society through education, the press and reform. Many were repressed in the 1920s–1930s; their legacy is being rediscovered today.
On 25 June (8 July) 1916, at the height of the First World War, Nicholas II decreed the conscription of Turkestani men aged 19 to 43 for labour behind the front. Issued at harvest time and enforced through unfair lists, the decree provoked mass unrest. In July there were protests in Khujand, Tashkent and towns of the Fergana Valley; in Jizzakh the rising turned into armed fighting and was crushed with great brutality by punitive detachments, which left the old town badly damaged. The revolt also spread across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Tens of thousands of labourers were eventually sent to the front zone regardless.
After the October Revolution of 1917, power in Tashkent passed to a Bolshevik-led soviet that excluded the local Muslim majority. In response, the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Turkestan Muslims, meeting in Kokand on 27 November 1917, proclaimed a Turkestan Autonomy within a Russian federation. Its government was led by Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev and then Mustafa Chokay, with Jadids among its members. In February 1918 Red Guard units sent from Tashkent stormed Kokand; much of the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed. Short-lived as it was, the autonomy is seen as a milestone in the region's pursuit of national statehood.
After the Turkestan Autonomy was crushed, an armed movement against Soviet rule spread through the Fergana Valley from 1918. Soviet sources called it the Basmachi movement; Uzbek historians today more often describe it as a struggle for independence. It was led by local commanders, or kurbashi, such as Ergash, Madamin Bek and Shermuhammad Bek (Kurshermat). After 1920 the fighting shifted to Eastern Bukhara and the mountains of Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya, where Ibrahim Bek was a leading figure; the Ottoman general Enver Pasha joined in 1921–1922 and was killed in 1922. Large Red Army forces had largely suppressed the movement by the mid-1920s, though isolated bands held out into the early 1930s.
