Shoislom Shomuhamedov

Shoislom Mahmudovich Shomuhamedov was born on 16 April 1921 in Tashkent. In 1941–1942 he fought in the Red Army on the fronts of the Second World War. After the war he studied at the oriental faculty of Central Asian State University and graduated in 1952.

The rest of his academic and teaching life was tied to that university (now the National University of Uzbekistan). He began as a lecturer, was an associate professor in 1958–1960, and from 1960 to 1972 headed the oriental faculty. In 1966–1972 he chaired the department of the literature of foreign Eastern countries, in 1972–1985 he was vice-rector for research, and from 1985 he worked as a professor of the department.

His research covered classical and modern Iranian literature and Persian-Tajik poetry. His candidate dissertation (1957) was on the Iranian writer Ehsan Tabari, and his doctoral work on the development of humanist ideas among the classics of Persian-Tajik literature. He became a Doctor of Philology in 1968 and a professor in 1970. He wrote books on the life and work of Ehsan Tabari, Omar Khayyam, Jami, Saadi, Hafez, Malek o-Sho‘ara Bahar and Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, as well as a student manual on Persian and Tajik prosody.

Translation held an important place in his work. He compiled and translated into Uzbek a collection of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains (1970) and the aphorisms of Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, and the new three-volume Uzbek translation of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (1975–1979) was produced under his direction and with his participation. He also translated poets who wrote in Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Azerbaijani, Tajik and Turkmen.

In all, Shomuhamedov was the author of about ninety books and more than five hundred scholarly works, and also published some ten collections of verse and prose for children and adults. He received the international Ferdowsi Prize (1973), was an Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR (1978) and held the Order «El-yurt hurmati» (1998). He died in 2007.