About

The evening is dedicated to the life and work of Muhammadjon Shakuri (1925/6–2012), a renowned scholar, public figure, literary critic, linguist, member of the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan and Iran’s Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and one of the founders of modern Tajik culture. He was also the author of the Tajik Language Law and a recipient of the Abū ʿAbd Allāh Rūdakī State Award. Shakuri made a significant contribution to the development of modern Tajik culture.

From the 1920s, during the formation of the ‘nation-states’ under Soviet rule, until the early 1950s, Tajik culture experienced a series of profound changes that can be briefly summarised as follows. First, in the 1920s, the very existence of the Tajiks, as well as that of their Persian culture, was questioned in Soviet Central Asia. Some Soviet ideologues, including proponents of Pan-Turkism, claimed that the Tajiks were descendants of Persian settlers from Iran, while regarding the Persian language and Persianised culture as alien to the region and as having been forcibly imposed there by the ruling classes.

Secondly, during the 1920s and 1930s, a spirit of revolutionary nihilism shaped attitudes towards Persian culture within Tajik cultural and educational circles. It was seen as a remnant of a backward feudal society. The rejection of the culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Emirate of Bukhara was particularly harsh. The Persian culture of pre-revolutionary Bukhara was deeply religious, with Islamic norms remaining very strong. For this reason, it became the primary target of revolutionary denial, the aim of which was to sever the connection between the modern generation of Tajiks and their Muslim ancestors.

By the 1940s, however, Bolshevik ideology in Central Asia had undergone significant changes, reflecting the broader evolution of the Stalinist regime towards partial de-ideologisation and the consolidation of a totalitarian personal dictatorship. The Tajiks were recognised as an indigenous people of Central Asia, which legitimised their quasi-statehood within the USSR. A ‘national’ socialist Tajik culture began to be constructed on the basis of secularism and the active adoption of Russian culture.
Significant changes also took place in cultural strategies: the revolutionary nihilism of the early years of the Russian Revolution was replaced by a more nuanced approach to the earlier cultural tradition.

From the early 1950s onwards, a new Tajik identity, language, scholarship, and culture began to take shape. The typological parameters of Tajik culture established between the 1950s and 1970s remain relevant today, despite the significant changes that have taken place over the past fifty years.

The development of the new Tajik identity and culture was driven mainly by a small group of young intellectuals working at the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan and Tajik State University, as well as by writers represented by the Union of Writers of Tajikistan. Many of them formed active links with political and intellectual elites in Russia, especially in Moscow and Leningrad, and used these connections to promote their conceptual ideas of modern Tajik identity and explore ways of expressing it.

Among the most prominent representatives of this new generation of intellectuals was Muhammadjon Shakuri (Shukurov). He played an active role in many major projects aimed at reinterpreting the cultural history of the Tajiks, as well as in the development and safeguarding of the modern Tajik language, which had fallen into a deep crisis following the violent rupture with the pre-revolutionary Persian-speaking tradition of Bukhara and the rapid Russification of public life. He was a leading figure in the creation of the Dictionary of the Tajik Language, a key achievement in his lifelong work on the purity and modernisation of the Tajik language. His work in literary criticism and his pioneering exploration of tradition and modernity in Tajik literature have influenced generations of modern Tajik writers. His scholarship was recognised through his election to the Tajik Academy of Sciences in 1987.

One of Shakuri’s lifelong pursuits, closely related to his broader effort to establish an unbiased historical and cultural understanding of Tajik heritage, was the restoration of the reputation and legacy of his father, Ṣadr-i Żiyā (1865–1932). Ṣadr-i Żiyā was a qāḍī, or judge of the sharīʿa court, and a significant cultural figure in the Emirate of Bukhara. The Bolshevik government portrayed Ṣadr-i Żiyā as a representative of the exploiting class and accused him of being ‘an enemy of the people’. For many years, Shakuri remained firm and courageous in defending his father’s public and cultural legacy, often facing strong and public opposition from high-ranking Soviet officials.

These efforts ultimately led to the recognition of Ṣadr-i Żiyā as an ‘enlightener’ and a ‘progressive’ public figure who had nurtured the younger generation of Tajiks, thereby setting an important precedent. In particular, this facilitated the broadening and deepening of efforts by Shakuri’s colleagues and students to reinterpret positively the legacies of many other public and cultural figures from Bukhara, Samarkand, and other political and cultural centres of Central Asia. Consequently, the continuity between historical and modern Tajik culture and identity began to be restored, developed, and integrated into modernity.

Muhammadjon Shakuri stands, in many respects, as a paradigmatic and central figure for understanding modern Tajik culture. On the one hand, he was an active participant in the Tajik national revival and one of its intellectual leaders. On the other hand, owing to his origins, he served as a bridge between pre-revolutionary Bukhara and contemporary Tajik culture. Through his deliberate and persistent efforts, he ultimately succeeded in restoring the continuity between the old and the new Persianism. It is notable that, at the time of Shakuri’s death in 2012, many mourners and commentators in the Tajik media and press regarded him as the last great Bukharan of Tajik culture.

Even more remarkably, Shakuri made a significant contribution to the post-Soviet reinterpretation of Tajik identity. He was the first, both in scholarship and in public discourse, to situate Tajik identity within the broader context of ‘Greater Khurasan’—the historical region encompassing the present-day provinces of Khurāsān in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, most of Kyrgyzstan, the southern territories of Kazakhstan, northern and western Pakistan, and western China—and to assert the enduring cultural and historical unity of this region over the millennia.

He consistently promoted the global connections of Tajik culture by establishing close contacts with Iranian and Afghan intellectuals. He also played a significant role in promoting Persian-language unity through his publications and media appearances, especially in Iran. Shakuri became the first Tajik intellectual to be elected to membership of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature in Tehran in 1992 (Farhangistān-i zabān-u adab-i fārsī) and to receive the title chihra-hā-yi māndagār-i Īrān in 2006, the highest public honour awarded to prominent figures of Persian culture.

Short biography of Muhammadjon Shakuri

Muhammadjon Shakuri (1925/6–2012) was a distinguished Tajik scholar, philologist, literary critic, public intellectual, and one of the founders of modern Tajik culture.

He was born in Bukhara into the family of Muḥammad-Sharīf Ṣadr-i Żiyā (1865–1932), a distinguished Bukharan intellectual, writer, sharīʿa judge, philanthropist, and bibliophile. After his father’s death in 1932 and the death of his mother, Musabbiha, shortly thereafter, he lived alone in his parents’ house until the late 1930s, when his aunt Iqbāl-khān persuaded him to move to Stalinabad, now Dushanbe, and live with her.

In Stalinabad, Shakuri, then known as Shukurov, graduated from the Pedagogical Institute in 1945. Shortly afterwards, he married Klavdia Lukanina, with whom he had three sons: Sharif (1948), Anvar (1952), and Rustam (1961). From the early 1990s until his death in 2012, Shakuri shared his life with Dilafruz Ikromi.

Through his extraordinary persistence and resilience, exceptionally hard work, and clear and consistent system of moral values, he built a distinguished academic career, authoring dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Tajik, Persian, Russian, English, and other languages. He earned his doctoral and habilitation degrees in literature from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow. Shakuri became a full member of the Tajik Academy of Sciences in 1987.

Shakuri is regarded as the founder of Tajik literary criticism. He was a leading authority on Tajik prose and established the fundamental terminology and research methods of the discipline.

Shakuri was a dedicated defender of the Tajik language, publishing widely on spoken Tajik and working to safeguard it against Russifying influences. One of his most notable contributions was his leading role in preparing the monumental Dictionary of the Tajik Language (Farhang-i zabān-i tājīkī), which was first published in Moscow and later in Tehran. He drafted the Tajik Language Law, which declared Tajik the official national language and was ratified by the Tajik Parliament on 22 June 1989. As part of the implementation of the law, he made significant contributions to the development of modern Tajik vocabulary in the sciences, culture, and social and political spheres.

During the later stages of his academic career, he authored several influential works on the medieval and modern cultural and political history of the Tajiks in Central Asia. These works played a key role in shaping modern Tajik identity and self-awareness. Many of his former students now hold leading positions in Tajik academia and cultural life.

During the 1990s, he built strong ties with Iranian scholars and gained broad recognition in Iran, where he became a key intermediary between Tajik and Iranian cultures.

Throughout his life, Shakuri dedicated himself to supporting Tajik culture both at home and abroad. His notable efforts included promoting the Tajik culture of his native Bukhara and of other Tajik-speaking areas of present-day Uzbekistan.

These texts were prepared by Prof. Rustam Shukurov, Dr Dagikhudo Dagiev, Prof. Anvar Shukurov.