Zaynabidin Abdirashidov

Zaynabidin Abdirashidov was born on 21 November 1973 in the Osh region. From 1991 to 1996 he studied at the Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies, qualifying as an Orientalist philologist and teacher of Arabic, and in 1993–1995 he studied at Al-Azhar University in Egypt.

Before turning to scholarship he worked in 1996–2001 at the State Fund of Scientific and Technical Information under the State Committee for Science and Technology and at a joint Uzbek-Korean company. From 2001 he taught at the Faculty of Uzbek Philology of the National University of Uzbekistan, as lecturer, senior lecturer and then associate professor; in 2011–2014 he was the faculty’s deputy dean for educational and spiritual affairs.

In 2006–2010 he did doctoral studies at the Institute of Central Asian Studies of Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2010 he defended a dissertation on Ismail Gasprinsky and Turkestan in the early twentieth century (connections, relations, influence); a monograph on the subject came out in Tashkent from the publisher Akademnashr in 2011.

He has held international grants, among them from DAAD, the Volkswagen Foundation, TÜBİTAK and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. In 2014–2015 he was a visiting professor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University, and in 2018 he also taught at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Since 2016 he has headed the Department of Oriental Languages at the Alisher Navoi Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature. His research deals with the literature and history of Jadidism in Turkestan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in 2023 De Gruyter published his English-language book on Abdurauf Fitrat’s years in Istanbul.