A writer born near Gijduvan who studied in Bukhara's madrasas and lived in Samarkand. The founder of modern Tajik literature, he also wrote in Uzbek; his Samarkand home is now a museum.
Sadriddin Saidmurodzoda was born on 15 April 1878 in the village of Soktare near Gijduvan, in the Emirate of Bukhara, to a peasant family. Orphaned by a cholera epidemic in 1889, he went to Bukhara and studied at the Mir-i Arab, Kukeldash and other madrasas, earning his keep as a cleaner and cook. From 1896 he wrote poetry as Ayni. Inspired by the ideas of Ahmad Donish, he joined the Jadids, opened new-method schools in Bukhara and wrote a textbook for them, “The Education of Youth” (1909). In April 1917 the emir had him given 75 lashes and thrown into the zindan; Russian soldiers from Kagan freed him, after which he moved to Samarkand.
Writer and scholar
In Samarkand Ayni worked in education and the new press, writing poems, articles and stories in Tajik and Uzbek. His best-known works are “The Executioners of Bukhara” (1922), “Odina” (1924), “Dokhunda”, the first major Tajik novel, “Slaves” (1934), the satire “Death of the Moneylender” (1939) and the four-part “Memoirs” (1949–1954), a vivid portrait of late 19th-century Bukhara's madrasas, bazaars and neighbourhoods. He wrote studies of Ferdowsi, Rudaki, Ibn Sina and Navoi, compiled the anthology “Specimens of Tajik Literature” (1926) and, using written sources and local tradition, identified Rudaki's grave in the village of Panjrud.
Remembrance
In 1951 Ayni became the first president of the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan. He died in Dushanbe on 15 July 1954 and is buried there. His Samarkand house near the Registan and the Gur-e Amir, his home from 1917 to the early 1950s, is now a memorial museum preserving his living and work rooms, desk, manuscripts and the trees he planted. In Bukhara, the madrasas described in his Memoirs can still be seen today.
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.
