1875 – 1943
Abduqodir Shakuriy
Educator, Jadid reformer
A Samarkand Jadid educator who founded a new-method school and a school for girls and wrote many textbooks. A school and a street in Samarkand bear his name.
The school at Rajabamin
Abduqodir Shakuriy was born in 1875 in Rajabamin, a village on the edge of Samarkand, into a gardener's family; his mother was an otin, a woman teacher who taught girls at home. After a traditional primary school he studied at the Arifjonboy madrasa in Samarkand. His mother tongue was Tajik (Persian); he also knew Uzbek and Arabic and later learned Russian and Turkish.
In the late 1890s, at the invitation of fellow reformers, he went to Kokand to see the new-method schools there, and in 1901 he opened a school in his home village that taught secular subjects as well — one of the first new-method schools around Samarkand. He printed his own textbooks at his own expense, among them the Persian primer Rahnamoi Savod and the readers Jami al-Hikayat and Zubdat al-Ash'ar (1907), some written together with Saidahmad Vasli and Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy.
A school for girls
In 1909 he met Tatar reformers in Kazan, and in 1912 he studied new schools in Istanbul. Later he opened a school for girls, taught by his wife Roziya, herself an otin. When the couple merged the two schools and began teaching boys and girls together, it astonished the local clergy and the more conservative part of society.
Shakuriy was close to Behbudiy, Hoji Muin, Vasli, Sadriddin Ayni and Fitrat, helped found Behbudiy's library and wrote for Jadid publications. From 1921 he headed School No. 13 in Samarkand, teaching language and literature, and was named an Honoured Worker of Public Education. He died in Samarkand in 1943.
