Siddiqiy Ajziy

Saidahmad Hasankhoja ugli Siddiqiy, known by the pen name Ajziy, was born in 1864 (some sources say 1865) in the village of Halvoyi near Samarkand, in what is now the Jomboy district, into a craftsman’s family. He lost his father early and grew up with his grandfather; to earn a living he was apprenticed to a watchmaker.

He studied in madrasas of Samarkand and Bukhara, mastered Arabic, Persian and Azerbaijani, and later learned Russian. In 1901 he set out on the hajj, then travelled to the Caucasus, Arab lands and Russian cities; for a time he was an interpreter at the Russian embassy in Jeddah. In the Caucasus he came to know the Azerbaijani press, and his poems appeared in the magazines “Molla Nasreddin” and “Dirilik”.

Back in Samarkand he opened a new-method school in Halvoyi and taught there, and he compiled textbooks for schools. The school he built still stands and bears his name. In 1908–1910 he translated stories by Leo Tolstoy, fables by Ivan Krylov and Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” into Uzbek and Tajik; in 1914 he opened a bookshop called “Zarafshon” in Samarkand.

He began writing poetry in the 1880s, working in Tajik, Azerbaijani and Uzbek in a manner close to Bedil and Fuzuli. In the dastan “Mir’oti ibrat” he described the condition of Turkestan and ways out of it, arguing that a nation without learning, a state, a language and law has no future; in “Anjumani arvoh” he criticised the stagnation of the khanate and its officials. According to Tajik encyclopedic sources, in 1914 the clergy of Bukhara and Samarkand declared him an unbeliever for this poem. The verse collections “Ganjinai hikmat” and “Ayn ul-adab” are also his.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he took part in public life; in 1918–1921 he worked in the Samarkand regional justice department (as commissioner of justice). From 1922 he returned to teaching. He helped to set up the Samarkand satirical magazines “Mashrab” and “Mulla Mushfiqiy”, published in Uzbek and Tajik, and the newspaper “Zarafshon”, where he printed satire under the signatures Mayna, Ginagina, Shashpar, Tir, Gumnom and Olmos.

Ajziy died in Samarkand in 1927. His legacy was collected and prepared for publication by the literary scholar Begali Qosimov: a volume of selected works appeared in 1973, and “Ibrat, Ajziy, Sufizoda. Selected Works” in 1999.