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Abdullah Qodiriy wrote his classic origin story of the Uzbek people, O’tkan Kunlar, at a time of great tragedy and triumph when the cultural landscape of Central Asia grappled with the countervailing forces of reform and modernity. He was born on April 10, 1894 and died during Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror on October 4, 1938. Qodiriy belonged to a short-lived phenomenon of Central Asian intellectuals known as the Jadid movement which are now largely lost to general western readerships. Hailing from what is now the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Jadids represented a generation born in Turkistan – an area that comprised most of the Former Soviet Central Asian Republics, Northern Afghanistan and Xinjiang. Their lives straddled Tsarist rule, the Bolshevik Revolution and the delimitation of borders that created the Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics in 1924. Qodiriy’s world witnessed great promise through the rise of ideologies that were poised to disrupt the socio-cultural makeup of societies on a global scale. Advances in technology gave impetus to forms of expression that helped solidify national identities. By the time of the publication of O’tkan Kunlar in 1926, Central Asians witnessed revolution, famine, civil war and ethnic violence not just as distant global events but as a part of their daily lives.

Central Asia before Russian conquest could be described as the classic ecumenical society of the Turco-Persian-Arab-Indo world. The Jadids' overall political agenda represented that of many colonized peoples at the time – reform, modernity, self-rule. Drawing upon their rich Central Asian heritage in order to recast disparate, nascent ethnic identities into a form suitable to their idea of a nation state was central to their agenda. Their weapons were the products of the Enlightenment: the printing press, the journal, the novel, the play, the implementation of agrarian and medical reform.

A great deal about the Jadids has filled academic papers both in Uzbekistan and the West. Debate continues regarding the exact nature of the movement: Where did they lie on the spectrum from Avant Garde to traditionalist? Were they dedicated Communists, or Muslims, or both? Did they seek reform within the framework of Islamic Law? A compelling body of evidence shows that the Jadids were not the only reform minded individuals in Turkistan at the time, but that the Khanates and Emirate too attempted internal reforms in the face of a globalized world. Perhaps the especially diverse ethnic makeup of the Qoqan Khanate, where the novel is set, forced the ruling Shahrukhid dynasty to constantly accommodate and balance the interests of the various contending factions within their court. This style of leadership had a profound influence on attempts at self-rule post-Bolshevik Revolution, as seen through the short-lived Qoqan Autonomous Republic whose multi-ethnic makeup selected a Kazakh as their first leader.

With O’tkan Kunlar then, we not only gain insight into the Qoqan Khanate twenty years before the Russian conquest of Tashkent. We also witness an indictment of the political, economic, and cultural shifts that wracked early 20th century Turkistan. Qodiriy in his novel uses the tropes of Memory and Loss to warn his readers not just of the death of the ecumenical world typical to the Central Asia of his youth; he foretold what the dissolution of his hopes and dreams for reform held for their own lives— we will have our world dictated to us, we will forever pine for the lost hope of self-rule.

Many of the issues that Central Asians faced in the early part of the century have eerie parallels to our own period Post-9/11: What is the role of Islam in society or government? What is the role of women in Islam? How should we counteract corruption? What defines a marriage? How will we define ourselves? How will we define ot hers? In Qodiriy’s case especially, in doing so, how do we maintain our humanity?

Abdullah Qodiriy came from a family of simple means. Through his own force of intellect, he managed to achieve both a Madrassa and modern education, most notably through the Russian model. Comfortable in Turkic, Persian, Arabic, and Russian, Qodiriy began his career as a scribe for a Tashkent merchant but found his way to the Briusov Institute to study journalism in Moscow by 1924.

His two main novels, O’tkan Kunlar, or Bygone Days, and Mehrobdan Chayon, or The Scorpion from the Mihrab, set the standard for Uzbek prose and provided the benchmark for aspiring Uzbek authors. O’tkan Kunlar, written between 1920 and 1926, was initially printed as a serial in the journal Inqilab, or Revolution, before being consolidated into one text. His plays, such as The Pederast, depicted the moral degradation of Central Asian society, in this case through the trials and tribulations of a Bacha, or dancing boy. The appeal of theater to Qodiriy and his colleagues (the writer Cholpan rendered Shakespeare’s Othello into Uzbek) was the ability to reach a largely illiterate society through a well-established oral tradition – much of the dialogue in O’tkan Kunlar seems formulaic as if meant for theatrical performances.

A salient characteristic of all of Qodiriy’s work is that he drew upon the lives of all strata of Central Asian society to render his prose into a language evocative, humorous, and often dripping with irony and sarcasm. His readership recognized his writing as their own colorful linguistic cacophony that meant everyday life in Turkistan: Old, dying Chagatai usages, the language of Babur and Navoi, slowly made way for modern Uzbek. The once permeable line between Turkic and Persianate languages solidified along national lines – hence the complicated relationship between their offspring Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tajik. The colonial reality of Russian with its promises of upward social mobility and a reorganized society became an irresistible pull.

The Turkic literary language Chagatai was seen as the natural progenitor of the Uzbek language for purposes of reform. Persian is for literature and the court, Arabic for the law, and Turkic for war was a time worn adage that harkened back to Alisher Navoi’s period. The Jadids 400 hundred years later were forced again to argue that Uzbek was perfectly capable of handling the demands of modernity – a debate still ongoing today. The transition from Chagatai to modern Uzbek is a complex discussion delving deep into the bowels of linguistic inquiry. The quote sited at the beginning of the introduction is a small sample of the orthographic and grammatical changes that took place to reform the old into the new. We should know, however, that the Jadids were central to the effort to create a modern idiom suited for the demands of their day.

After the publication of O’tkan Kunlar to great acclaim, Qodiriy found himself in jail for deploying his characteristic wit against Akmal Ikramov, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, in the journal Mushtum, The Fist, where Qodiriy served as Editor. Upon release Abdullah Qodiriy refrained from working in the press but continued to translate. He is well known for having rendered Nikolai Gogol’s Marriage and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard into Uzbek. Both plays were controversial for their period and closely mirrored Qodiriy’s own agenda of depicting the benefits and pitfalls of social reform. Throughout the 1930s he continued to write and eventually became a delegate to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic’s (UzSSR) Writer’s Union – an organization established in 1934 meant to consolidate disparate literary groups and modulate writing along Soviet ideological lines. Interestingly a year before the establishment of the Writer’s Union was published for the first time in a Latin script, Yana Alif, rendered from the original Arabic script, Yana Imla. Shortly thereafter Qodiriy’s work was vilified as nationalistic and antagonistic to Soviet rule and he was again arrested in December 1937, and executed in October of 1938. O’tkan Kunlar was subsequently banned and illegal to own. Such is the emotional dissonance of Abdullah Qodiriy’s work and life that he was the first of those murdered in 1938 to be rehabilitated in 1956.

In 1958 his novel was republished in Cyrillic, albeit heavily censored. Almost every Uzbek of that generation can remember the time they were first allowed to own a copy of the novel. After Uzbekistan’s independence the Jadids received wide acceptance as the progenitors of artistic expression and martyrs for their fierce convictions in championing reform. Indeed, Qodiriy’s prose holds such weight that many Uzbek dictionaries today use phrases from O’tkan Kunlar as the basis to explain colloquialisms and obscure usages no longer extent in modern Uzbek.

The narrative of the novel follows Qodiry’s hero Otabek through the political and cultural landscape of Turkistan twenty years before Russian conquest. Otabek is the son of Yusufbek Hajji who is a local notable and member of the Ulama in Tashkent. We find Otabek at a caravanserai in Margilan, a town in the eastern region of Uzbekistan, with the Azan, or Muslim call to prayer, sounding throughout the night sky. The Azan sets the daily rhythm of life in the Muslim world, but it is also uttered upon the birth of a child as an affirmation of faith. So begins the life-cycle of Qodiriy’s Turkistan and the overall tone of the novel.

Otabek in this initial chapter is pining for the woman he glimpsed on the banks of a stream while performing ablution. That woman, Kumush, is destined to be his bride not through a traditionally arranged marriage but as an act of love – much to the ire of the groom’s mother Uzbek Oyim. What follows is a voyage through a world in decline beset by the avarice and corruption of the denizens of the Qoqan Khanate. Qodiriy gifts us with the street life of Turkistan with its chai khanas, shrines and mendicants. We also gain insight into the corruption undermining the court of Khudayar Khan. Matters of good governance, marriage reform, the role of Islam in society, the rights of women, and ethnic tensions between sedentary and nomadic peoples depicted in 1845 as the reason for Central Asia’s conquest held as much truth in Qodiriy’s own epoch as they did then. Even today the current President of Uzbekistan in his struggle to reform Uzbek society references the novel, especially regarding Kundashlik, or polygamy, as an unassailable literary foundation for his policies.

Indeed, the author’s most biting criticisms in the novel point toward the moral turpitude within his own society. The enemies on the horizon that both Otabek and Yusufbek Hajji warn against, i.e. the Russians, are depicted as a force of nature abstract and not yet fully realized. As the novel reaches its denouement the reader can discern the bitterness felt by the author toward his own failed venture of self-rule. Fittingly, as with all life cycles in the Muslim world, the novel ends with the Jannazah, or burial, of our hero Otabek in Tashkent.

Abdullah Qodiriy holds a sacred place in the collective memory of Uzbeks. He bore witness and gave voice to the creation of a world increasingly unfamiliar to his generation, more homogenized, more artificial. In many ways his personal narrative reflected the fates of millions like him who suffered, with great bitterness, from the broken promises of the early 20th century to rewrite society. Yet, Abdullah Qodiriy represents at times an inconvenient hero to the Uzbek people. His life was not that of a distant 15th century ruler, but one within the relatively recent memory of Uzbeks one generation removed from his murder— making his work immediate and relevant to their own circumstances. The very question of Reform infers imperfection. No matter what the issues are that ail a society, whether through external or internal causes, Reform demands that the society in question engages in acts of self-reflection.

So, Qodiriy for many years in post-Independent Uzbekistan did not receive the acknowledgement he deserved. His work was spoken of but in hushed, reverent tones. Dissertations and conference papers were written surrounding his work, but often relegated to a few specialists in Uzbek academia, not constituting a national discourse. His image was often fetishized both in Uzbekistan and the West, but his ideas were never publicly recognized.

Thus, I believe Uzbekistan suffers from a profound crisis of context. With such a rich world heritage, everyone from Europe to the vast landmass of Asia can lay claim to it as their own. One could say, however, that Abdullah Qodiriy’s memory and message consciously or unconsciously for years formed the underlining strata of Uzbek identity that the citizens of the republic most desired. When someone in Tashkent lays flowers at a statue of Amir Timur that individual also renders homage to those who died attempting to preserve his memory. When one reads poetry under the shadow of Alisher Navoi’s monument, a stone’s throw from Uzbekistan’s parliament building, they complete the circle that the people of Turkistan began in the early 20th century – a modern state based upon their distinct Turkic heritage, one made on their own terms. Perhaps through the death of Abdullah Qodiriy and his cohort, Uzbeks came to understand that the pain of memory and loss fills the space between surrendering your old world for a new one.

Yet, that new world is now one of their own making. Two years ago, I was invited for the first time in many years to attend a function at the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Washington DC. Ambassador Javlon Vakhabov that week had his diplomatic credentials recognized and the embassy prepared an event to celebrate. What immediately struck me was how un-Soviet the event was. The exuberance of the youth attending was palpable— something I had not seen since the early 1990s. Uzbeks in their 30’s and 40’s with educations in the West and in positions of responsibility mingled and laughed, excited for the future. Most of the crowd would have had memories of the Soviet period during their early childhood, but it was their parents' historical and cultural reference point. The majority of those attending had their whole lives ahead of them. They knew they were the future leadership of Uzbekistan. As the ambassador delivered his speech, people beamed with pride. I shared in that moment as well. A good portion of my youth was spent handing out exchange applications, starting NGOs, teaching, and, most of all, learning in Uzbekistan, not to mention starting a family. I felt that those around me 20 plus years prior could have been my students and they all turned out well.

That night you could sense a fragile moment of hope for reform in the air. It would demand from those who would pick up the mantle of change to engage in visceral acts of reckoning and reconciliation. It was clear that crowd was up to the challenge. Perhaps it is through the lens of Abdullah Qodiriy’s O’tkan Kunlar that we can step forward, lend a hand, and have our children measure our success.

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Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

Paul Georg Geiss, Pre-Tsarist and Tsarist Central Asia (London: Routledge, 2003): 44–45.

Paolo Sartori, Moving Beyond Modernism: Rethinking Cultural Change in Muslim Eurasia (19th-20th Centuries), Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59/1-2 (2016)

Devin DeWeese, It was a Dark and Stagnant Night (‘til the Jadids Brought the Light): Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59/1-2 (2016)

Edward A. Allworth, The Modern Uzbeks (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990)

Scott Levi, The Rise and Fall of the Khoqand Khanate, Central Asia in the Global Age, 1709–1876 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)