Ziyauddinkhan Babakhanov

Ziyauddinkhan ibn Ishan Babakhan was born in January 1908 in Tashkent. His father, Ishan Babakhan ibn Abdulmajidkhan, was imam of the Tilla Shaykh mosque and later the first head of the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The boy grew up listening to his father’s lessons, learned Qur’an recitation from Hakimqori, imam-khatib of the Tilla Shaykh mosque, and knew the whole Qur’an by heart at twelve.

In 1920 he entered the Kukeldash madrasa. He studied hadith and tafsir under several teachers, among them the Syrian scholar Muhammad ibn Said al-Asali ash-Shami at-Tarabulusi, who had moved to Tashkent in the 1920s and whom he later regarded as his principal teacher. After the madrasa he served as imam-khatib in Tashkent mosques. In the years of militant atheism the Babakhan family was persecuted: its property was confiscated in 1928, and in 1941 he was arrested together with his father, although the case was closed that October.

When the state’s attitude to religion softened during the war, the first congress of Muslims in Tashkent in October 1943 set up the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM). He was elected its executive secretary and the qadi of Uzbekistan, and took charge of reopening mosques, drafting fatwas and helping the families of soldiers at the front. In 1947–1948 he studied with sheikhs of al-Azhar in Cairo and visited Mecca and Medina; after his return he was elected deputy chairman in 1948.

After his father’s death he was elected chairman of the Administration and mufti of five republics at the third congress in June 1957, and held the post until 1982. An edition of the Qur’an prepared under his direction appeared in 1957, with further editions in 1960 and 1968. At his initiative al-Bukhari’s “Al-Jami al-Sahih” and “Al-Adab al-Mufrad” were published in Arabic. In 1962 the Department of International Relations of Muslim Organisations of the USSR was formed, and he was chosen to head it.

He became a well-known figure in the Muslim world: he helped organise conferences in Samarkand (1974, for the 1,200th anniversary of al-Bukhari), Tashkent (1976 and 1980) and Moscow, and belonged to the Supreme Council of Mosques (Mecca, 1976) and the World Peace Council. In 1971 the Imam al-Bukhari Islamic Institute opened in Tashkent, the first higher Islamic school in the USSR, a result largely of his efforts. He translated Ibn Sina’s book on hygiene into Uzbek and Russian, published a book in Russian on Islam and Muslims in the country in 1979, and wrote poetry under the pen name Futuhiy.

He retired in October 1982 because of poor health and died in Tashkent on 23 December of that year. With the permission of the government he was buried beside his father near the mausoleum of Kaffal Shashi. His son Shamsiddinkhan Babakhanov succeeded him at the head of the Administration. A mosque and a street in Tashkent bear his name; an international conference marked the 90th anniversary of his birth in 1998, and in 2023 he was posthumously awarded the Order “Oliy darajali Imom Buxoriy”.