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Nearly six centuries after his birth, who owns Alisher Navoiy, the ‘father of Uzbek literature?’
Translations
Alisher Navoiy metro station in Tashkent decorated with art evoking the 15th-century culture of the poet. Photo by Filip Noubel, used with permission.
February 9 marks the 580th anniversary of the birth of Alisher Navoiy, a 15th-century poet, linguist and thinker who has come to play a central role in the nation-building process of Uzbekistan.
The concept of nations is relatively young in Central Asia, a region that for centuries identified more around religion, important urban centers and language. People defined themselves as being Sunni, Shia, Jewish, or as coming from regions gravitating around key cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, Kokand, Ghulja, Kashgar where local political and military power concentrated.
Linguistically very mixed, Central Asia has mostly combined two main language families: Persian and Turkic. Persian was the language of the court, of literature and philosophy, but also penetrated Turkic languages with hundreds of words. To this day, many Central Asians are equally fluent in Tajik or Dari, languages belonging to the Iranian group of languages, and Uzbek, Turkmen or Kyrgyz, for example.
Arabic also played a major role in religion, education and knowledge, while Russian entered the space as a colonial language in the 19th century.
As for Turkic languages that evolved over time into separate modern languages, known today as Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur or Uzbek, they all shared a common literary language known as چغتای or Chagatai, written in the Arabic alphabet, and used from the 15th to the 20th century.
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