Muznib

Biography

Muznib — his given name has not survived in full in the sources, and in literary scholarship it is sometimes recorded only as a pen name — was one of the lyric and satirical poets and calligraphers of the 19th-century Kokand literary circle, and had a manner all his own. He lived in the years when the culture of the khanate was flourishing and carried on the traditions of classical literature. Muznib was active in the first half and the middle of the 19th century, and above all under Amir Umarxon (Amiriy) and his successors. He was educated in a madrasa and gained a perfect command of Arabic and Persian grammar and of the rules of the aruz; the sources present him as a learned man who had studied classical Eastern literature deeply, and as a calligrapher. He was in creative contact with the poets and artists of his day — Mushrif, Mahmur, Hoziq — took part in literary gatherings and in the compiling of bayaz anthologies. Muznib's work is many-sided: he wrote a great many ghazals and muhammas on themes of love and of Sufi gnosis, in which the experiences of the human heart, the lament over an unfaithful beloved and the trials of fate are set out in the flowing measures of the aruz. One of the marks of the 19th-century Kokand circle was its mockery of social injustice, false piety and ignorance, and Muznib too, in some of his musaddas and satires, held the failings of his age up to bitter laughter. A didactic spirit is strong in his verse as well: moral and instructive ideas, counsel on honesty and on the pursuit of learning, addressed to the young. Although no complete divan of Muznib's own has come down to us entire, many of his ghazals, muhammas and ruba'is were taken into the Kokand and Fergana literary bayaz anthologies compiled in the late 19th and early 20th century. Several rare manuscript collections containing his work are kept in the fonds of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan and in the museums of the city of Kokand.

Works

• G'azallar
• Muxammaslar
• Musaddas va hajviyalar
• Ruboiylar
• Bayozlarda saqlangan she'rlar