1875 – 1919
Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy
Jadid leader, playwright, publisher
Leader of the Jadid reform movement in Turkestan and author of the first Uzbek play, The Patricide. In Samarkand he founded new-method schools, a library, a newspaper and a magazine.
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From judge to reformer
Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy was born in Samarkand in January 1875 (some sources say 1874), the son of an imam, Behbudkhoja; after 1868 the family moved to the nearby village of Bakhshitepa. Educated in the madrasa, he became a qadi (judge) and later a mufti. A pilgrimage in 1899–1900 took him through Istanbul, Cairo and other cities and introduced him to reform movements across the Muslim world; the ideas of the Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinski left a deep mark on him.
Behbudiy championed the new-method (usul-i jadid) schools around Samarkand and wrote textbooks for them, including books on geography. In 1908 he opened a library and reading room in the city, helped by his friends Hoji Muin, Vasli Samarqandi and Abduqodir Shakuriy.
The Patricide, Samarqand and Oyina
In 1911 he wrote Padarkush (The Patricide), a cautionary play about an uneducated youth who kills his own father. Published in Samarkand in 1913, it was first staged in the city on 15 January 1914; a month later Abdulla Avloniy's troupe performed it in Tashkent. Padarkush is regarded as the birth of Uzbek national theatre.
In 1913 Behbudiy founded the newspaper Samarqand and the magazine Oyina (The Mirror), which he produced almost single-handedly for twenty months. His articles argued for education, the mother tongue, women's rights and national self-awareness.
Death and remembrance
After 1917 he threw himself into politics and backed autonomy for Turkestan. Early in 1919, while travelling, he was seized on the territory of the Bukhara Emirate and executed in Qarshi; news of his death reached Samarkand only much later. Fitrat, Ayni and Cholpon wrote elegies for him. For much of the Soviet period his name was suppressed. Today Samarkand has a monument to him, and his house museum opened in 2021.
