Mirzaabdulla Bokiy

Mirzaabdulla Nasriddinov, known in literature by the pen name Bokiy (Baqi), was born on 9 May 1882 in the village of Rishtan in the Kokand district (now in the Fergana Region), into a mullah’s family. His pen name comes from an Arabic word meaning “everlasting”.

He first studied at a local school and then at several madrasas in Kokand. There he joined the circle of poets of his day — Muqimi, Furqat, Muhayyir, Zavqi and Nadim Namangani — and exchanged verses with Muqimi and Nadim Namangani.

His deep command of classical Eastern literature earned him the nicknames “Navoiykhon” and “Bedilkhon” among contemporaries. He wrote ghazals in Uzbek and Persian and composed muhammas on Navoi’s ghazals, but never compiled a divan of his own; his poems were gathered into collections later.

In the 1930s he took part in transferring Navoi’s works from the old script into the new alphabet. During preparations for the Navoi jubilee (1938) he was scientific consultant to the jubilee committee, and in 1939 he translated Navoi’s qasida “Tuhfat ul-afkar” from Persian into Uzbek.

From 1940 to 1943 he worked as a senior consultant at the Institute of Language, Literature and History. In 1943, when the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR was founded, he was elected a corresponding member.

Mirzaabdulla Bokiy died on 4 April 1967 in Rishtan and was buried in the Sufi Sodiq cemetery there. A street, School No. 20 and the central library in Rishtan bear his name, and a collection, “Bokiy guldastasi”, was published in Fergana in 2024.