Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy

Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy was born on 19 January 1875 in the village of Bakhshitepa near Samarkand, the son of Behbudkhoja, son of Solihkhoja, an imam and preacher. His uncle Muhammad Siddiq taught him to read, he learned the Qur’an by heart under his father, and from the age of fifteen he studied Arabic, logic and Islamic law with another uncle, the mufti Mulla Odil. He attended madrasas in Samarkand and Bukhara, but after his mother died in 1893 and his father in 1894 he had to give up his studies and earn a living.

He first worked as a clerk (mirza) at his uncle’s qadi court and then rose to the rank of mufti, a post he held until 1916. In 1899–1900 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca; on the way he stopped in Istanbul and Cairo, looked at old and new schools there, al-Azhar among them, and brought home newspapers and books. Afterwards he became a regular reader of Ismail Gasprinski’s newspaper “Tercüman” and later wrote for it.

In 1903, at his initiative, his pupils Abduqodir Shakuriy and Siddiqiy Ajziy opened the first new-method (Jadid) schools in the villages of Rajabamin and Halvoyi outside Samarkand. Behbudiy wrote textbooks for them, among them “Risolai asbobi savod” (1904), “Risolai jug'rofiyai umroniy” (1905), “Kitob ul-atfol” (1908), “Amaliyoti islom” (1908) and “Tarixi islom” (1909). In the 1900s he travelled to Moscow, St Petersburg, Kazan and Ufa, and in 1908 he opened the Behbudiya reading room and library in Samarkand.

In 1911 he wrote the play “Padarkush” (“The Patricide”): Toshmurod, a rich man’s son left without schooling, falls into bad company and ends up an accomplice in the murder of his own father. It came out as a book in 1913 with the approval of the censor in Tiflis, was staged in Samarkand on 15 January 1914 and in Tashkent on 27 February by Abdulla Avloniy’s “Turon” troupe. The history of Uzbek drama and of the national theatre is usually counted from these performances.

In April 1913 Behbudiy began to publish the newspaper “Samarqand” in Uzbek and Tajik (45 issues had appeared by September), and in August he founded the weekly magazine “Oyina” (“The Mirror”), which ran until 1915. In its first issue he published the article “Not Two, but Four Languages Are Needed”, arguing that an educated person must know Turkic, Persian, Arabic and Russian. Altogether he published more than two hundred articles in newspapers and magazines. In 1914 he travelled again to the Middle East and Turkey.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he entered politics: he spoke at the congresses of Turkestan’s Muslims and was elected to the Samarkand city duma and to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. In November 1917 he took part in the congress in Kokand that proclaimed the Turkestan Autonomy and joined its National Assembly; the Bolsheviks crushed the autonomy in February 1918.

Early in 1919 Behbudiy was seized in Shahrisabz, on the territory of the Emirate of Bukhara, and on 25 March he was executed in Qarshi on the orders of the emirate’s officials; where he was buried is unknown. From 1926 to 1937 the city of Qarshi bore the name Behbudi, and from 1937 his name was banned. In independent Uzbekistan his writings have been republished; in 2020 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit”, in 2021 a house museum opened in Samarkand, and in 2025 the 150th anniversary of his birth was marked by a presidential decree.