Ishokhon Tura Ibrat

Ishokhon Tura Ibrat was born in 1862 in the village of Turakurgan near Namangan, into an educated family. His given name was Is’hoqxon; “tura” marks his descent, and “Ibrat” (“example”, “lesson”) was his pen name. His father, Junaydullakhoja, was a lover of poetry, and his mother, Huribibi, kept a school for girls at home where she taught reading and calligraphy. By his own account, five years at the neighbourhood school left him still unable to read, and it was his mother who taught him; in his writings he often honoured her as his teacher.

In 1878 he entered the Muhammad Siddiq Tunqator madrasa in Kokand, where he studied until 1886. In Kokand he moved in the circle of the poets Muqimi, Furqat and Zavqi, learned Arabic, Persian and Russian, and first came across the “Turkestan Native Newspaper” and Ismail Gasprinski’s “Tercüman”; it was then that he began to write verse under the name Ibrat. Back in Turakurgan he opened a school that taught reading by the sounds of the letters (usul-i savtiya), but conservatives soon had it closed.

In 1887 Ibrat took his mother on the pilgrimage to Mecca; she died in Jeddah. He then spent nearly nine years travelling: he lived in the cities of Arabia, saw Istanbul, Sofia, Athens and Rome, spent time in Afghanistan, and from 1892 to 1896 lived in Bombay and Calcutta. He earned his living by ornamental painting, cutting seals and carving inscriptions on gravestones. In these years he mastered Arabic, Persian, Hindi-Urdu and English and studied French and ancient scripts. In 1896 he returned home by way of Kashgar.

From the late 1890s into the 1920s Ibrat served as qadi (judge) of Turakurgan. His “Lughat-i sitta alsina”, a dictionary setting side by side words in Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Turkish, Uzbek and Russian (the Russian written in Arabic script), could be published in Tashkent only in 1901 because of the censors. In 1907 he opened a new-method school for thirty village children in his house and, at Munavvar Qori’s invitation, spent several months in Tashkent; that year the Governor-General of Turkestan awarded him a robe of honour for a work of calligraphy in seventeen scripts.

In 1908 he bought a lithographic press in Orenburg on ten years’ credit, brought it by train to Kokand and from there by camel to Turakurgan, and set up the Matbaa-i Is’hoqiya printing house in place of a bathhouse he had built. Its first book was the literacy and calligraphy manual “San’at-i Ibrat” (1908); in 1910 the press moved to Namangan. It printed his collection of poems “Ilm-i Ibrat” (1909) and his history of writing systems, “Jome’ ul-xutut” (1912). In 1910 he laid out a park for the people of Turakurgan; in 1913 he applied for permission to publish a newspaper, “Al-Tijor al-Namangan”, and was refused, and that year he opened the Kutubkhona-i Is’hoqiya library in his house.

As a historian Ibrat wrote “Tarikh-i Farghona” (“The History of Fergana”), a chronicle of the Kokand Khanate, as well as “Tarikh-i madaniyat” (“The History of Culture”) and “Mezon uz-zamon”. He wrote poetry in Uzbek, Persian and Arabic: in poems such as “Qarz” (“Debt”), “Bo’lubdur” and “Qalaysizlar” he attacked colonial rule and the vices of society, and in a mukhammas on the railway carriage he welcomed the coming of the railway to Namangan. His poems and articles appeared in the “Turkestan Native Newspaper”, “Sadoyi Farg’ona” and Behbudiy’s magazine “Oyina”. He gathered thirty years of verse into the “Divan-i Ibrat”, but the manuscript has not been found.

Under Soviet rule his printing house was confiscated and most of his library was plundered. In 1935 Ibrat was removed from all his posts and was not even granted a pension. In the spring of 1937 he was arrested on a charge of “anti-Soviet propaganda” and sent to the prison in Andijan, where he died that April without having been tried. His burial place is unknown. In independent Uzbekistan his writings have been republished; in 2018 the Ishokhon Ibrat memorial complex opened in Turakurgan, and in 2022 the Namangan State Institute of Foreign Languages was named after him.