Munis Khorezmi

Shermuhammad, son of Avaz-biy, known by the pen name Munis, was born in 1778 in the village of Qiyot near Khiva. He came from the Uzbek Yuz clan, and his father and forebears served the khans of Khiva as mirabs — the officials who allotted irrigation water. According to the Uzbek Wikipedia his mother belonged to the Nayman clan. He received his first schooling in his home village and then studied in the madrasas of Khiva.

In 1800, after his father’s death, Munis entered court service as chronicler and secretary, first under Avaz Inaq, then under his son Eltuzar and under Muhammad Rahim Khan I. Later he held the office of mirab as well, which his family had long filled; after his death it passed to his nephew Agahi.

Munis wrote verse in nearly every genre of classical poetry. In 1804 he composed the poem “Savodi ta’lim”, devoted to the Arabic alphabet, and compiled his first divan, “Munis ul-ushshoq” (“Friend of the Lovers”). The divan was later enlarged, and his poetic legacy is estimated at about ten thousand couplets. Manuscripts and lithograph editions of it are held at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent.

In 1806, at the order of Khan Eltuzar, he began a history of Khorezm, “Firdaws al-iqbal” (“Paradise of Fortune”). It has an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion: it opens with Adam, goes on to the Turco-Mongol rulers and Eltuzar’s forebears, and ends with the events of the author’s own time. The eighteenth century is told in particular detail, apparently from the accounts of contemporaries and perhaps of the author’s own father. Munis brought the narrative down to 1812–1813 and then turned to translation.

From 1819 he worked on an Uzbek translation of Mirkhond’s Persian chronicle “Rawdat al-safa”. In 1823–1826, at his request, Khudoyberdi ibn Qushmuhammad made an abridged translation of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi’s “Zafarnama”. In this way a Khivan school of translation and historical writing grew up around Munis. He is also known for a treatise, “Arnalar”, on irrigation canals and land relations.

Munis died in 1829 at the age of 51 and was buried in Khiva. He had finished only the first volume of the Mirkhond translation and had carried the chronicle only into the early nineteenth century; Agahi completed both. “Firdaws al-iqbal” has been studied by N. Muravyov, V. Bartold, S. Tolstov and others, and in 1999 Yuri Bregel published an English translation of it.