Furqat: his life and ghazals

Zokirjon Xolmuhammad o‘g‘li Furqat was born in 1859 in Kokand into a merchant family; his father Mulla Xolmuhammad loved poetry. In less than a year he finished reading “Haftiyak” and “Chor kitob”, at eight learned Attar’s “Mantiq ut-tayr” by heart, then studied Navoiy. At fourteen he became a madrasa student, but the Kokand khanate was abolished and the madrasas closed; in 1879 he went to Yangi Marg‘ilon, opened a shop, worked as a calligrapher and took the pen name “Furqat”. In 1880 he returned to Kokand and compiled a divan at 21–22. In 1890–1891 he worked in Tashkent as a translator at the “Turkiston viloyatining gazeti” and stepped into journalism. From 1891 he went to Samarkand, Bukhara and Istanbul, in 1892 to Egypt, Syria, Mecca and Medina and Bombay, and in 1893 via Kashmir, Tibet and Khotan to Yarkand, where he lived to the end of his life, dying far from his homeland in the autumn of 1909. His work consists of lyric, journalism, translations and scholarly works; people regard him mainly as a lyric poet (about 200 ghazals). Exile and longing for the homeland are important themes, and in one muxammas “furqat” is also read in a Sufi sense – separation from the true homeland and the Beloved.