page_title: Abdurauf Fitrat
section_title: Education in Bukhara
hierarchical_section_title: Abdurauf Fitrat / Life and Work / Education in Bukhara
caption_attribution_description: Bukhara, Mir-i-Arab Medressa
context_page_description: Abdurauf Fitrat was an author, journalist and politician in Central Asia under Russian and Soviet rule. He was a jadid reformer and made major contributions to modern Uzbek literature with both lyric and prose in Persian, Turki, and late Chagatay. After the end of the Emirate of Bukhara he accepted several posts in the government of the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic before being executed without a trial during Stalin's Great Purge. After his death, his work was banned for decades, but is now being claimed by both Tajiks and Uzbeks.
context_section_description: Fitrat was born in 1886 (he himself stated 1884) in Bukhara. His father Abdurahimboy, a devout Muslim and well-travelled trader went on hajj with his son and then left the family in the direction of Margilan and later Kashgar. After his education at a maktab, Fitrat in 1899 began his studies at the Mir-i-Arab madrasa, which he completed in 1910. Between 1907 and 1910, Fitrat travelled through Russian Turkestan and the Emirate of Bukhara. Fitrat came by most of his worldly education through his well-read mother Mustafbibi, who brought him into contact with the works of Bedil, Fuzûlî, Alisher Navaiy and others.
  In his autobiography, published in 1929, Fitrat wrote that Bukhara had been one of the darkest religious centres. He had been a devout Muslim and initially had opposed the reform movement of the Jadids (usul-i jadid ‚new method‘). However, under his mentor Mahmudkhodja Behbudiy, he joined the reform movement and started to criticize the incompetence of the mullahs, the imams and the emir, whose politics he opposed.
caption: The Mir-i-Arab madrasa in Bukhara
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