Muqimi

Muqimi was the pen name of Muhammad Aminkhoja, son of Mirzakhoja. He was born in the Begvachcha quarter of Kokand; the National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan gives the year as 1850, while Soviet encyclopedias say 1850 or 1851. His father, a native of Tashkent, supported the family as a baker, and his mother Oyshabibi came from Khujand. She knew a great many tales and songs by heart and was the first to awaken her son's interest in poetry. The boy learned to read and write at the school of his neighbourhood.

Muhammad Aminkhoja went on to study at a madrasa in Kokand and in the early 1870s moved to Bukhara to continue his education at one of its madrasas, where he gained a thorough knowledge of Persian and of the rules of classical prosody. In 1876, the year the Kokand Khanate was abolished, he returned home and married. For a time he worked as a mirza, or clerk, in the office that surveyed land, and in the late 1870s he collected fares on the Oqjar ferry across the Syr Darya north-west of Kokand. Both posts showed him village life and the ways of officials at close range, and both found their way into his verse.

After his father's death the poet was left without means, his family life was unhappy, and around 1885 he moved into a cramped cell of the Hazrat madrasa in his home quarter. He lived there in near poverty for the rest of his life, earning his keep as a calligrapher and copyist of manuscripts. Together with his younger friend Furqat he led a circle of Kokand poets, among them Muhyi, Zavqiy and Nisbat, who met for literary gatherings. In 1887–1888 and again early in 1892 Muqimi travelled to Tashkent, his father's city, to see its cultural life, and on the second visit he met N. P. Ostroumov, editor of the Turkiston viloyatining gazeti (Turkestan Native Newspaper), which had first printed some of his poems in the autumn of 1891. He also travelled more than once through the Fergana Valley.

Lyric poetry is the core of Muqimi's legacy: ghazals, murabbas, mukhammases, and takhmises on ghazals by Navoi, Jami, Fuzuli and his contemporaries. He regarded Jami as his master, yet wrote of earthly love, friendship and loyalty in plain language close to folk song, and hafiz singers were performing many of his ghazals in his lifetime. His satire made him just as well known. In “The Land Surveyors”, “The Election” and poems about local rich men he mocked the extortion and high-handedness of colonial and local officials, the greed of merchants and the hypocrisy of some of the clergy; at times, following the views of his day, he also wrote against Dukchi Ishan, the leader of the Andijan uprising. Some thirty comic poems about a horse, a cart, mud, flies and fever sketch the daily life of a provincial town. His journeys produced the verse “Travelogue” in four parts, with which the travel sketch began in Uzbek literature. About ten of his letters in verse and twenty in prose also survive.

In his last years Muqimi was seriously ill but went on writing: in January and April 1903 the Turkestan Native Newspaper printed his poem about a rich man of Kokand and his verse chronicle of the devastating Andijan earthquake. The poet died in Kokand on 25 May 1903.

The first collection of his poems, “Divan-i Muqimi”, was published by Ostroumov in 1907, followed in 1910 and 1912 by “Divan-i Muqimi with Satires”. His work was studied by Ghafur Ghulam, Oybek, Hodi Zarif and other scholars; a two-volume edition of his works appeared in Tashkent in 1960, and a Russian volume, “Muqimi and Furqat. Selected Works”, in Leningrad in 1972. The Uzbek State Musical Theatre and a street in Tashkent and a town in Fergana Region bear his name, and his house museum is in Kokand. Sobir Abdulla wrote the novel “Mavlono Muqimiy” and the play “Muqimiy” about him.