Ibragim Muminov

Ibragim Muminov was born on 7 November 1908 in the village of Tezguzar in the Shafirkan district of the Emirate of Bukhara, into the family of a trader, Abdulmumin Fayzullabayev. His mother, Magfirat, opened a school for girls in the village. He studied first at a traditional maktab and, after 1920, at a Soviet school; from 1922 to 1927 he attended the Institute of Education in Bukhara, and from 1925 he taught at a school himself.

In 1927 Muminov moved to Samarkand and in 1931 graduated from the socio-economic faculty of the Uzbek Pedagogical Academy as a historian and philosopher. His teachers included the orientalist V. L. Vyatkin, Sadriddin Aini and Abdurauf Fitrat. He began teaching in Samarkand in 1931; when the academy was converted into the Uzbek State University in 1933 he became dean of the combined literature faculty, then dean of the history faculty in 1933–1935, and he headed the philosophy department until 1941 and again in 1944–1955. In August 1937 the NKVD arrested his elder brother Arabboy Muminov, and Muminov took in the brother's three children.

In 1941 he defended a candidate's dissertation on the philosophy of Hegel; in 1943 he was elected a corresponding member of the newly founded Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1950 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1955–1956 he directed the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he became a full academician and vice-president of the Academy, a post he held until 1974. In 1958–1959 he organised the Institute of Philosophy and Law and served as its first director; from 1959 he was a professor at Tashkent State University, and in 1958–1974 he chaired the republican «Znanie» (Knowledge) Society. As a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR over four convocations, he chaired its standing commission on foreign affairs in 1966–1974.

His main field was the philosophical heritage of Central Asia and the East: he wrote on Mirza Bedil, Ahmad Donish, Navoi, Jami, Ali Qushchi, al-Biruni and Ibn Sina, and took part in organising Russian and Uzbek translations of their works. In 1968 his book on the role and place of Amir Timur in Central Asian history appeared; attempts to study the Timurid heritage met resistance from Soviet ideological bodies, and the book was reprinted only in 1993. More than a hundred candidate's and about thirty doctoral dissertations were defended under his supervision.

Muminov was chief editor of the journal «Social Sciences in Uzbekistan» (1957–1974) and the first chief editor of the Uzbek Soviet Encyclopedia, whose first nine volumes were prepared under him. He edited «The History of Samarkand» (two volumes, 1969) and the four-volume «History of the Uzbek SSR» in Uzbek (1967); he was one of the organisers of the first All-Union conference of orientalists in Tashkent (1957), led the Uzbek delegation at the 25th International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow (1960), and initiated the UNESCO symposium on the art of the Timurid era in Samarkand (1969) and the conference marking the city's 2,500th anniversary (1970).

Muminov received two Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner of Labour (1950, 1954), the Badge of Honour (1965) and Soviet medals, was a laureate of the Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR (1967), and held the title of Honoured Scientist of the Uzbek SSR. He died in Tashkent on 22 July 1974 and was buried at the Chigatay Cemetery. In 2003 he was posthumously awarded the Order «Buyuk xizmatlari uchun». Streets in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara and schools in Bukhara and Shafirkan bear his name; the Institute of Philosophy and Law he founded was named after him from 1975 until it was closed in 2016.