Art, Literature & Music
A poet who set out to prove his language was enough
In the fifteenth century, serious literature in this region meant Persian. Alisher Navoi spent a career demonstrating that Chagatai Turkic could carry anything Persian could — and then wrote a book arguing the case directly.
Words
Navoi's Khamsa — five long narrative poems — answered the Persian classics on their own terms, and his Muhokamat al-Lughatayn ("Judgement of Two Languages") made the argument in prose. Babur's Baburnama, written a generation later, is something else entirely: a frank first-person memoir by a working king, unusual in world literature for how much he admits. In the twentieth century Abdulla Qodiriy's O'tkan kunlar established the Uzbek novel, and Cho'lpon's lyric poetry pulled the language toward the modern.
Sound and image
Shashmaqom — "six maqams" — is the classical court repertoire of Bukhara, a cycle of suites that takes years to learn and was added to UNESCO's lists in 2008. It is played on dutar, tanbur and doira. Separately, bakhshi epic singers recite Alpomish and other verse epics from memory, sometimes for hours. And in Nukus, far out in Karakalpakstan, Igor Savitsky assembled a museum of Soviet avant-garde painting that had been banned elsewhere — roughly 100,000 items, in the last place anyone would look.
Highlights
- Navoi wrote Muhokamat al-Lughatayn specifically to argue that Turkic was the equal of Persian as a literary language
- The Baburnama is among the earliest true autobiographies written in the Islamic world
- Shashmaqom entered UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage lists in 2008
- The Savitsky Museum in Nukus holds one of the world's largest collections of Soviet avant-garde art