Days Gone By

Otabek, the son of Yusufbek Hajji, is a 19th century Muslim reformer and trader (and soon to be husband of two wives), who takes us through a Turkistan twenty years before the Russian conquest. From the teeming caravanserais, mosques and chai khanas of Tashkent and Margilan to the inner sanctum of the Qoqan Khanate, our hero bears witness to a world heading into a future of memory and loss, offering reform and resistance as the only hope to save the soul of a people. Not just Otabek, but his friends and enemies alike face a cultural and political landscape of family obligations, ethnic conflict, and a khanate lost to corruption and intrigue. At stake for Otabek and his loved ones is not only the destruction of a way of life—a world cast within the traditions of the Turco-Persian world—but a crisis of faith and identity that have persisted for one hundred and fifty-four years. Published in 1926, the author Abdullah Qodiriy brought his masterpiece to a readership beset with the same concerns as those of the beloved characters of this historical novel. Qodiriy uses the lessons of the past as a warning to his own generation experiencing the politically charged period after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Many describe the novel as a guide to the same issues that Uzbek society contends with today— in what is now seen as the national narrative of modern Uzbekistan, perhaps its origin story.