Persian Literature and Cultural Life in Central Asia: From Civilizational Roots to the Reform Movements in Bukhara (Late Nineteenth Century – Early Twentieth Century)

Abstract

This study examines the transformation of Persian literary and cultural life in Bukhara and its wider Central Asian environment from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, with particular attention to the relationship between literature, education, literacy, journalism, and cultural identity. Rather than treating literary modernization as an exclusively aesthetic development, the study approaches it as part of a wider transformation in the production, circulation, and social function of knowledge. It argues that the reformist turn associated with Ahmad Donish and subsequently developed by Sadriddin Ayni and other Jadid intellectuals redefined the role of Persian literary culture: literature increasingly addressed social conditions, educational limitations, injustice, and intellectual reform, while newspapers, new-method schools, textbooks, and accessible literary styles expanded the potential readership of reformist ideas. The study also examines Russian colonial rule without reducing the period to a simple opposition between Islam and modernity. Drawing on Persian, Tajik, Arabic, Russian, and English-language sources, it shows that educational and literary reform emerged through a complex interaction between inherited Islamic scholarly traditions, local intellectual initiatives, and new forms of knowledge circulating across the Muslim world. The article concludes that the modernization of Persian literary culture in Bukhara was inseparable from attempts to broaden access to knowledge and reshape cultural identity, making literature an important medium of educational and social transformation.