Agahi

Agahi was the pen name of Muhammad Riza, son of Erniyazbek. He was born on 17 December 1809 in the village of Qiyot (Kiyat) near Khiva. His family belonged to the Uzbek nobility of the Yuz tribe, and several generations of his forebears had served the khans of Khiva as mirabs, the officials who allotted irrigation water. His father died when he was very young, and he was brought up by his uncle, the poet and historian Shermuhammad Munis, who taught him to read and write and introduced him to the circle of Khorezm poets.

Muhammad Riza studied at the madrasas of Khiva, gained a good command of Arabic and Persian, and read Navoi, Fuzuli, Bedil and other classics. While still a student he compiled an anthology of Persian ghazals by Jami, Navoi, Hafiz, Bedil and Fuzuli and added fifteen ghazals and two mukhammases of his own. When Munis died of cholera in 1829, Allah Quli Khan appointed Agahi mirab in his place. The post kept him travelling around the oasis, and he came to know the hardships of its farmers at first hand. In 1845 he fell from his horse and lost the use of a leg, and in 1857 he gave up his office; he spent the rest of his life in want and poor health.

In 1839–1840, on Allah Quli Khan's orders, Agahi took up Munis's history of Khorezm, “Firdaws al-iqbal”, which Munis had brought only as far as 1812, and completed it with the first years of Allah Quli's own reign. After that he chronicled each reign in turn: “Riyaz al-dawla” is devoted to Allah Quli Khan, “Zubdat al-tawarikh” to Rahim Quli Khan, “Jami al-waqiat-i sultani” to Muhammad Amin Khan, “Gulshan-i dawlat” to Sayyid Muhammad Khan and “Shahid-i iqbal” to Muhammad Rahim Khan II; the last breaks off with the events of 1872, on the eve of the Russian capture of Khiva. The orientalist Vasily Bartold observed that from Rahim Quli's reign onwards these works become the notes of an eyewitness. Written in an ornate style with passages of verse, the chronicles give a detailed account of the Uzbeks, Turkmens, Karakalpaks and Kazakhs of the khanate and of its dealings with its neighbours; the historian Bayani carried Agahi's chronicle further.

Agahi did as much as a translator, rendering more than twenty historical, literary and moral works from Persian into Uzbek. They include Saadi's “Gulistan”, abridged so that a wide readership could follow it; Nizami's “Haft Paykar”, retold in prose; Jami's “Yusuf and Zulaykha” and Hilali's “The King and the Beggar”, translated almost couplet by couplet; the “Qabusnama”; Kashifi's “Akhlaq-i Muhsini”; histories by Mirkhond and Mahdi Khan Astarabadi; and the memoirs of Vasifi. His translations of Yazdi's “Zafarnama”, Jami's “Salaman and Absal” and Amir Khusrau's “Hasht Bihisht” have not been found.

Among the people Agahi is known above all as a lyric poet. In 1872 he gathered his scattered verse into the divan “Ta'wiz al-'ashiqin” (“Amulet of Lovers”): some 18,000 lines, including 470 ghazals, 89 mukhammases, 80 rubais, 19 qasidas and poems in some fifteen other forms, among them 1,300 lines in Persian. Love is its main theme, but it also has much to say about the times and his contemporaries, lamenting injustice and hypocrisy. Agahi lengthened the ghazal to as many as 23 couplets and devised a new form of the mustazad, and his ghazals fit the melodies of the Shashmaqam and of Khorezm folk tunes. He set out his advice to a ruler in the “Qasida of Counsel”, addressed to Muhammad Rahim Khan II, himself a poet under the name Feruz; the khan had Agahi's couplets carved in marble in the halls where petitions were heard.

Agahi died on 14 December 1874. His divan was lithographed in Khiva in 1905–1909, a six-volume edition of his works appeared in Tashkent in 1971–1980, and parts of his chronicles were published in Russian translation in 1938 in “Materials on the History of the Turkmens and Turkmenia”. The Khorezm Regional Music and Drama Theatre in Urgench, streets and schools bear his name; in Qiyot there is a park named after him with his house museum and a creative school. In 1999 Uzbekistan issued a postage stamp dedicated to the poet.