Mirkarim Osim and “Light in the Darkness”

“Zulmat ichra nur” is a historical novella that Mirkarim Osim wrote in the 1960s, on the eve of the 525th anniversary of Navoiy’s birth. It describes little Alisher’s childhood, at the ages of four to six. The reader meets Alisher’s father G‘iyosiddin, his uncles who write poetry, and his friend Husayn (later Husayn Boyqaro). Alisher falls in love with books and poems very early and can even recite lines of a ghazal from memory. When the family moves to western Iran, six-year-old Alisher talks with the historian Sharafiddin Ali Yazdiy in a dervish lodge in the village of Taft; on the way back he falls asleep on his horse in the Yazd desert and is separated from the caravan. The “light” in the title can be explained as the future great poet’s striving for knowledge and poetry, and the “darkness” as the hardships of his time.