Suyima Ganiyeva

Suyima Ganiyeva was born on 20 February 1932 in Tashkent. She graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the Central Asian State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan) in 1952 and did postgraduate work at Leningrad State University in 1953–1956. In 1956 she defended a candidate’s dissertation on the scholarly-critical text and literary analysis of the third and fourth sessions of Alisher Navoi’s “Majolis un-nafois”.

From 1956 she was a junior researcher at the Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan and later became its scientific secretary. She headed a chair at the Tashkent State Conservatory and was a professor at the Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies; according to available accounts she taught there from 1993, and her scholarly career spanned nearly sixty years.

Her main field was textual study of Navoi’s legacy. The scholarly-critical text of “Majolis un-nafois” appeared in Arabic script in 1961; she also translated the work into Russian and published some fifty articles about it in several languages. She identified and published Navoi’s “Munojot”, which had remained unknown to scholarship for many years. Editions of Navoi’s works in nine, seventeen, nineteen and twenty volumes were prepared under her direction.

Ganiyeva wrote 14 monographs, more than 350 scholarly articles and over 20 teaching manuals on classical Uzbek literature and its place in world culture. Her books include “The Life and Work of Alisher Navoi”, “The Ideas of Humanism in the Work of Alisher Navoi”, “Motives of Nobility in Navoi’s Ghazals”, “Navoi’s Testament” and “Navoi’s Autograph”.

Her work was recognised with the State Prize of the Republic of Uzbekistan. She received the Order “El-yurt hurmati” in 1999 and the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (“Buyuk xizmatlari uchun”) in 2008, and in August 2015 she was given the title Hero of Uzbekistan by presidential decree.

Suyima Ganiyeva died in Tashkent on 1 September 2018, aged 86, and was buried in the Chigatai cemetery. A documentary film, “The Way”, is devoted to her scholarly life, and in 2022, for the 90th anniversary of her birth, the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan held a scholarly and literary conference.