Uzbek Quotes

Not that he [Uzbek] rejected Mendel's proposals or rebelled against his decisions; but he exercised a subtle, passive abrasion against every active thrust: like dust in a watch, Mendel thought to himself. He's got dust in him, even though he is young. It's stupid to say the young are strong. You understand many things better at thirty than at twenty and you can also bear them better.

Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound 'hay hay.

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

Çinlilerde 360 küy vardır. Türk kağanlarının toplantılarında bu 360 küyün her biri, bir gün çalınmak suretiyle tüm küylerin icrası bir yılda tamamlanırmış. Bu 360 küyün en büyüğü dokuz küg üzerine temellendirilmiştir. Bunların adları: Uluğ küg, Aslançep, Purs, Kuladu, Kutatku, Burstarğay, Cantay, Halnisay, Şanduk.

What is there to hold a post-prosperity, constrained-liberty, un-dreamt America together? The nation's ruling class has, in practical terms, already seceded from the idea of America. In the ever more fractious, incoherent polity they're building as a substitute, why would they expect their discontented subjects not to seek the same solution as Slovenes and Uzbeks?

At the first such gathering, I politely sat with them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.

Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used, great Uzbek anti-Shiite potato and sturgeon curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass, and a unity of purpose among the Sunni witches which was likewise difficult to achieve.

I pray God that whoever will lead our country may be, in his heart, as much Pashtun as Tajik, as much Uzbek as Hazara. That his wife may counsel and assist him; that he may choose advisors of great character and wisdom. That books may replace weapons, that education may teach us to respect one another, that our hospitals may be worthy of their mission, and that our culture may be reborn from the ruins of our pillaged museums. That the camps of famished refugees may disappear from our borders, and that the bread the hungry eat be kneaded by their own hands. I will do more than pray, because when the last talib has put away his black turban and I can be a free woman in a free Afghanistan, I will take up my life there once more and do my duty as a citizen, as a woman, and, I hope, as a mother.

Nevai’nin kendisi musikiyi Hoca Yusuf Burhan diye ünlü bir musiki âliminden öğrendi. Musikiyi teorik veya pratik yönden iyi bilirdi. Babür Mirza kendisinin meşhur eserinde Nevai’nin eserlerini sayarken, ilm-i musikiye güzel şeyler kazandırmış; iyi nakışları ve peşrevleri vardır diye Nevai’nin usta bir bestekâr olduğunu kaydetmiştir.

Not that they give a damn in America, mind you. What do they care that Pashtuns and Hazaras and Tajiks and Uzbeks are killing each other? How many Americans can even tell one from the other? Don’t expect help from them, I say. Now that the Soviets have collapsed, we’re no use to them. We served our purpose. To them, Afghanistan is a kenarab, a shit hole. Excuse my language, but it’s true.

The First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union, in 1926, had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count: it overtly queried Soviet citizens about their nationality. Its findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were in the minority when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed a Central Asian heritage, such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Georgians, and Armenians. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate these cultures, by “reeducating” their populations in the deracinating ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

Back in New York, my dad refused to admit that he had a wife, much less a daughter on the way. This fantasy came to an end when he picked up his mail to find a postcard from a grinning woman, with a swelling belly, firing off automatic weapons with a group of equally happy Uzbek men. The caption read, 'Enjoying the afternoon with your daughter!' On July 19, exactly four weeks before I was born, my father opened the door to find a woman wearing a burka, the traditional dress of Iran. When my mother finally went into labor at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, my dad was finally forced to venture outside his circle of comfort. Having done so—and meeting me—he realized it wasn't so bad out there.

The pistol had been one hell of a find, because it hadn't quite been what she'd thought it was at first blush. Not simply the S&W Mk 39, but rather a modified version of the same, the Mk 22 Mod 0, also called the "hush puppy". It was Vietnam-era, not the most reliable gun in the world, but wonderfully silent, not only equipped with a silencer to eliminate the sound of gunfire, but also with a slide lock, to keep the actual mechanical operation of the gun quiet as well. She'd test-fired the gun at the market before purchasing, and been stunned that it still worked. The Uzbek vendor had offered to sell it to her cheap. "It's too quiet," he'd explained. "No one wants it." Chace shut her eyes, half smiling at the memory.

Temellerini Arap ve İran’dan alan musiki sanatı, Timur’dan önce de Orta Asya’da vardı. Timur’un buyruğu ile her taraftan getirilen uzman âlimlerin gayretleriyle bu sanat birdenbire canlandı ve ayağa kalktı. Doğudaki İslâm ülkelerinin her tarafından getirilen çalgılar ve çalgıcılar, bizim bugünkü klasik musikimizin yükselmesine ve yücelmesine hizmet vermişlerdir. Az zamanda yerli halktan büyük musikişinaslar yetişmişti. Hatta Tühfetü-s-sürür’un söylediğine göre; meşhur Mirza Uluğbek’in kendisi de musiki âlimlerinden sayılmıştır. Ülke yönetimi Emir Timur’un çocuklarındayken; kanuncu Derviş Ahmedî (Semerkantlı), neyci Sultan Ahmed (Semerkantlı), Türkçe ve Farsça iki divan ile musiki hakkında bir risalesi bulunan Karagöllü Hisamî, musiki hakkında bir kitap yazan Harezmli Abdulvefa, doktor ve musiki âlimi olan Belhli Mevlana Sahib ve ünlü bestekârlardan sayılan Şehrisebizli Abdulbereke gibi kişiler yetişmiş ve musikimiz için hizmet vermişlerdir. Nakkareci ve şair olan Kadimî, Nevai’nin musiki muallimi Hoca Yusuf Burhan ve Nevai’nin dayısı Muhammedelî Ğaribî de bu zamanın meşhur musikişinaslarındandılar.

What matters is the need to move from the rigidity of national stereotypes towards something more truly human; what matters is to discover the riches of human hearts and souls; what matters is the human content of poetry and science, the universal charm and beauty of architecture; what matters is the magnanimity of a nation's leaders and historical figures. only by exalting what is truly human, only by fusing the national with what is universally human, can try dignity - and true freedom - be achieved. It is the struggle for freedom of thought and expression, the struggle for a peasant's freedom to sow what he wants to sow, for everyone's freedom to enjoy the fruits of their own work - this is the true struggle for national dignity. The only real triumph of national freedom is one that brings about the triumph of all human freedom. For small nations and large nations alike, this is the only way forward. And it goes without saying that the Russians too - as well as Armenians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Kalmyks and Uzbeks - must understand that it is precisely through renouncing the idea of their own national superiority that they can truly affirm the grandeur and dignity of their own people, of their own literature and science.

Nevai, musikimize olan hizmetini yalnızca küyler bestelemekle sınırlandırmamıştır. En büyük musiki üstatlarına ve en yetenekli musiki öğrencilerine eğitim vermeye başlamıştır. Onları bilim yönünden zenginleştirmek için yeni musiki risaleleri yazdırmıştır. Bu doğrultuda Babür Mirza’nın Babürnâme eserinde Üstat Kulmuhammed-ü Şeyh-i Nâyi ve Udî Hüseyin çalgılarında çok iyilerdi. Nevai’nin eğitim ve desteğiyle yükselmiş, ünlenmişlerdir demiştir. Nevai, Hemsetü-l-Müteheyyirîn adlı kitabında Üstad Kulmuhammed’in öğrencilik dönemlerinde çok yetenekli olduğunu ve her şeyi yeniden öğrenerek iyi bir çalma yetisine ulaştığını söylemiştir. Nevai, Üstad Kulmuhammed ve Udî Hüseyin’in musiki hakkında daha fazla teorik bilgiye ulaşmalarını sağlamak için dört büyük üstada, dört tane musiki risalesi yazdırmıştır. Risaleler Fenn-i Ta’lim tarafından uygun görülmediği için son olarak Abdurrahman Cami’ye beşinci risaleyi yazdırdığını eserinde not etmiştir.

The enemy segregated itself into three tiers, with Al Qaeda (foreign Arabs) on top, Uzbeks and Chechens in the middle, and Afghan Taliban on the bottom. A caste system of sorts, where the Arab fighters actually forbade the Taliban from speaking directly to them.6 A rigid hierarchy, no communication, no shared reality, we’re in business, I thought.

This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.

At first Abdulla attributed Vinokurov’s brutality to the fact that he was a Russian, but he then recalled that among the men who searched his house there had been an interrogator who spoke Uzbek like a Tatar, replacing all his ‘j’s with ‘y’s.

And as if blowing it up, flooding it, and keeping it behind the klyon wasn't enough, State Security special forces patrolled the area until 1989. Some locals say there was an additional 'live fence' of thousands of vipers specially bred for this purpose by Uzbeks along the southern Black Sea, under something called decree number 56. Why Uzbeks? Why vipers? Did decree 56 read: 'Let us fulfil the five-year snake plan in one year'?

Pushed by Casey, American scholars and CIA analysts had begun in the early 1980s to examine Soviet Central Asia for signs of restiveness. There were reports that ethnic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kazakhs chafed under Russian ethnic domination. And there were also reports of rising popular interest in Islam, fueled in part by the smuggling of underground Korans, sermonizing cassette tapes, and Islamic texts by the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing networks.

Russians and Ottomans pinched off the western end of the steppes between 1500 and 1650; in central Asia, Mughals and Persians pushed the Uzbeks and Afghans back between 1600 and 1700; and in the east, China swallowed up the endless wastes of Xinjiang between 1650 and 1750. By 1727, when Russian and Chinese officials met at Kiakhta to sign a treaty fixing their borders in Mongolia, the gunpowder empires had effectively shut down the steppe highway.

The C.I.A.’s main target that spring was a long-haired, charismatic militant leader of the Wazirs named Nek Mohammad. He ruled Wana and distrusted the Pakistan Army. He was a complicated figure—a tribal nationalist who consorted with international terrorists. He accepted Al Qaeda and Uzbek refugees. In Islamabad, C.I.A. station chief Rich Blee used the assassination attempts against Musharraf to try to motivate the president and I.S.I. to strike back: “You have to kill them or they’re going to kill us.

The Uzbek people believe they will suffer misfortune if bread is left upside down in their home.

Swagger, of course, couldn't try the vodka, knowing he'd end up in Siberia with a new Uzbek wife and nine children, plus some really cool tattoos;

To me, it’s nonsense—and very dangerous nonsense at that—all this talk of I’m Tajik and you’re Pashtun and he’s Hazara and she’s Uzbek. We’re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter. But when one group rules over the others for so long…There’s contempt. Rivalry. There is. There always has been. Maybe

Türk musikisinin bizde kalan en eski izleri bahşı, ozan ve kobuz sözleridir. Bahşı sözünün bugünkü manası halk şairi veya çalgıcısıdır. Halk arasında kobuz veya donbura çalıp destanlar okuyan özel kişiler, yani şair veya çalgıcılar vardır. Biz bunlara bahşı diyoruz. Hâlbuki hicrî IX. asırda Ali Şir Nevai zamanında bu söz, Uygurca yazan kitap anlamında kullanılmıştı.

Supposedly troubled that women would no longer be treated as property, these man saw the hujum as another kind of expropriation, much like the land and water redistribution. One was quoted as saying that unveiling was merely an extension of Soviet land reform, since it aimed to seize the second, third, and fourth wives of bois and transfer them to the poor landless peasants who had to hire themselves out as field hands. (This was a common view, as many Uzbeks also saw the hujum as transferring women from male control to that of the state.)

The Aralqum Desert is too new, too large, and its outline too changeable to be on any maps. It’s a desert that used to be called the Aral Sea. The new name is gaining favor, although it’s not quite as exotic as it sounds. Qum is Uzbek for “sand.

Doğu musikisi âlimleri nağmelerin birbirleriyle olan ilintilerini çıkış noktalarıyla olan ilişkilerine göre belirlerlerdi. Nağmelerin çıkış yerleri insanın gırtlağıdır; fakat musikişinaslar gırtlak nağmelerini notaya alamadıkları için nağme örneklerini olduğu gibi çalgı üzerine aktarmışlardır.

Bizim edebiyatımızda olduğu gibi musikimizde de iki akım vardır. Edebiyatımızda aruz vezninde şiir yazma ve aruzsuz, yani parmak vezninde şiir yazma üslûbu vardır. Aruz vezni İran ve Arap etkisinde kalan medrese ve saray şairleri arasında, parmak vezni ise halk şairleri arasında yaygındı.

Musikimizde usul vezninde yazılmış küyler olduğu gibi usulsüz olan küyler de vardır. Usul veznindeki küyler musiki nazariyatını iyi bilen, medrese ve saray etrafında yetişen çalgıcılarımız tarafından kullanılmıştır. Usulsüz olan küylerimiz ise halk tarafından, halk çalgıcıları ve halk aşulecileri tarafından icra edilmiştir.

Abdurrahman Cami’nin Risâle-yi Musikiy eserinde gösterilen esaslar incelediğinde anlaşılıyor ki çalgı üstatlarımızın perde belirlemeleri için en doğru yol buydu.

Doğu musikisi âlimleri nağmelerin birbirleriyle olan ilintilerini çıkış noktalarıyla olan ilişkilerine göre belirlerlerdi. Nağmelerin çıkış yerleri insanın gırtlağıdır; fakat musikişinaslar gırtlak nağmelerini notaya alamadıkları için nağme örneklerini olduğu gibi çalgı üzerine aktarmışlardır. Nağmelerin çıkış yerlerini çalgı üzerinde ince hesaplarla zor bir şekilde belirlemişler ve her birini bir harfle göstermişlerdir. Böylece belirlenen seslerin çıkış noktalarını musikinin perdeleri gibi adlandırmışlardır. Musikişinaslarımızın perdeleri belirlemek için sarf ettiği büyük emekleri gören bir kişi doğu musikisinin bilimsel temeli yoktur diyen “ukalalara” karşı kendini gülmekten alıkoyamaz.

Should I tell you about my life as the head of the Engels collective farm in the Samarkand region for the past twenty years as a mother who, besides raising six children of her own, adopted ten children of different nationalities during World War II, that having graduated from Samarkand Agricultural Institute, I am now working on a Master’s thesis on the selection of the new, very sweet variety of Sultana grapes. . . . My biography, the biography of an ordinary Uzbek woman, would be a vivid example of what Soviet power has given to the women of the East.

Nearly half the Turkmens in central Asia live outside of Turkmenistan, many of them in Afghanistan and Iran. there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. In Samarkand and Bukhara, both in Uzbekistan, the main language is Tajik. The Uzbeks for their part, account for a sixth of the population of Kyrgyzstan and at least a fifth of the population of Tajikistan.

People did often not know which nationality they were. In the 1926 consensus, people could name their tribe and family, but could not always answer if they were Uzbek, Kyrgyz or Tajik.

One man builds a bridge; a thousand men cross it. Uzbek proverb

My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.

Russian authorities distinguished between steppe Islam, suffused, they believed, with Shamanism, and the Islam of the Uzbek cities, which they considered hotbeds of fanaticism. Catherine viewed Islam as a "civilizing" tool that would first make Kazakhs good Muslims, then good citizens, eventually good Christians. She used Tatar teachers, her subjects, who could travel among the nomads and speak their language, to preach a more "correct" Islam. The Tatars became an important factor in implanting in the steppe an Islam that adhered more closely to traditional Muslim practices.

The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well. Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realize that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We're bound to coincide sometimes.

Where Tsarist Russia had promoted religion as the basis of political and social organization of the empire, the Bolshevik communists now dramatically changed direction and sought to encourage narrowly defined ethnic groups as the basis for organization of the Soviet Empire in a divide-and-conquer process. Hence, instead of working with a broad Turkic ethnicity, for example, the Soviets developed separate political republics for each separate Turkic language—Uzbek, Tatar, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Azeri, and so on. Ethnicity had now become the tool by which to destroy the Islamic identity and possible pan-Turkic nationalist ideas.