Munavvar Qori Abdurashidkhonov

Munavvar Qori Abdurashidkhonov was born in 1878 in Tashkent, in the Darkhon neighbourhood of the Shaykhontohur quarter. His father Abdurashidkhon, son of Sotiboldikhon, was a madrasa teacher (mudarris); his mother Khosiyat Otin, daughter of the scholar Khonkhoja Shorahimkhojayev, taught girls to read at home. Munavvar was the third son; his father died early and his mother gave him his first lessons. Under the Tashkent teacher Usmon Domla he learned the art of Qur’an recitation (tajwid), memorised the Qur’an and earned the title “qori”, reciter. He studied at the Yunuskhan and Eshonquli Dodkhoh madrasas in Tashkent and at the Mir-i Arab madrasa in Bukhara, but left without finishing and went back to Tashkent, where he served as imam of the Darkhon mosque and as a teacher.

In 1901 Munavvar Qori opened Tashkent’s first new-method (Jadid) school, where children learned to read by the phonetic method, and later more such schools in other parts of the city. He drew up their curriculum and wrote their textbooks: the primer “Adibi avval” (“The First Teacher”, 1907), which went through eight editions by 1917, the reader “Adib us-soniy” (“The Second Teacher”, 1907), the arithmetic book “Usuli hisob”, the Qur’an-reading manual “Tajvid” (1911), books on religious practice, on the history of the prophets, of Islam and of the Turkic peoples, and the geography textbook “Yer yuzi” (“The Face of the Earth”). In 1914 he published “Sabzazor”, an anthology of contemporary Uzbek poets.

From 1906 he wrote for the newspaper “Taraqqiy”, and when it was shut down he founded and edited his own paper, “Khurshid”, which the authorities banned in turn after ten issues. He later guided the newspapers “Shuhrat”, “Tujjor” and “Osiyo” from behind the scenes, was deputy managing editor of “Sadoyi Turkiston” in 1914–1915 and the unofficial editor of the journal “Al-isloh” in 1915–1917. In 1909, with Tashkent merchants, he set up the charitable society Jamiyati Imdodiya and became its deputy chairman; it paid for the schooling of poor children and sent young men to study in Ufa, the Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt.

In 1913 Munavvar Qori and Abdulla Avloniy founded the Turon society, with a library, a reading room, a publishing house and an amateur theatre troupe. On 27 February 1914 the troupe staged Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy’s play “Padarkush” (“The Patricide”) in the Colosseum building in Tashkent, one of the first performances from which the history of the Uzbek national theatre is counted.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he became one of the leaders of Shura-i Islamiya, an organisation founded in Tashkent in March, and headed the preparations for the first congress of Turkestan’s Muslims (16–23 April), which first raised the demand for the region’s autonomy. He founded the newspaper “Najot”, edited “Kengash”, and at the end of the year supported the Turkestan Autonomy proclaimed in Kokand. In 1918 he was among the organisers of the Turkestan Muslim People’s University: with Murodkhoja Domla and Burhon Habib he drew up its programme, and he taught the native language and literature there, but the Soviet authorities closed the university that September.

In 1920–1921, at Fayzulla Khojayev’s invitation, he headed the waqf department of the education ministry of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, and in September 1920 he was a delegate to the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku. In 1921 he spent several months under arrest. He then taught in Tashkent at the Navoi school, the Narimanov pedagogical college and the women’s teacher-training institute (1923–1925), wrote the four-part textbook “O'zbekcha til saboqligi” (“Lessons in Uzbek”, 1925–1926) with Shorasul Zunnun and Qayum Ramazon, worked as a researcher at the Samarkand museum and served as secretary of the Tashkent–Fergana branch of the committee for the protection of ancient monuments (1927–1928).

On 6 November 1929 Munavvar Qori was arrested together with dozens of Uzbek intellectuals in the case of the secret organisations Milliy Ittihod and Milliy Istiqlol, and the investigation was moved to Moscow. On 25 April 1931 the OGPU Collegium sentenced him to death, and he was shot in Moscow on 23 May; he was buried at the Vagankovo cemetery. He was rehabilitated in the last years of the Soviet Union. In independent Uzbekistan his selected works were published (2003), and in 2020 he was posthumously awarded the Order “For Outstanding Merit”.