ʿABD-AL-RAḤMĀN SAMARQANDĪ

 

ʿABD-AL-RAḤMĀN B. MOḤAMMAD LAṬĪF MOSTAJERR SAMARQANDĪ, MĪRZĀ MOLLĀ, late 19th century secretary (mīrzā). A Tajik, he was a native of Samarqand. For some years he was interpreter and secretary for the Russian orientalist, A. L. Kuhn, with whom he traveled in Central Asia. In 1870 they took part in a Russian military expedition to the lake Iskandar Kul in the upper Zarafšān valley (in the regions of Masča and Fālḡar). ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān kept a diary of the journey in Tajik. It contains valuable material of the area’s antiquities and especially on local Tajik folklore, and also texts of Persian inscriptions on rocks and buildings (mss.: Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, D 133, D 134). It well deserves publication.

ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān accompanied Kuhn again in the Ḵīva campaign of 1873 and kept a diary partly in Tajik but mainly in Uzbek (mss.: Archives of the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, collection 33 [Kuhn’s papers], register 1, nos. 104, 134, 221, 222). He probably also wrote the diaries of the trips with Kuhn to the khanate of Bokhara and to Šahr-e Sabz (mss.: the same collection, nos. 217, 220). In 1872 he visited a Polytechnical Exhibition in Moscow; he described it in a Tajik work, Rūznāma-ye vīstafka-ye Māskab (“Diary of the Moscow Exhibition,” ms. in the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, B. 806). 

Bibliography:

N. D. Miklukho-Maklay, Opisanie tadzhikskikh i persidskikh rukopiseĭ Instituta vostokovedeniya, Moscow and Leningrad, 1959, pp. 242-43.

Idem, Materialy arkhiva khivinskikh khanov po istorii i etnografii karakalpakov, Moscow, 1967, pp. 59-62.

B. V. Lunin, Sredn yaya Aziya v dorevolutzionnom i sovetskom vostokovedenii, Tashkent, 1965, p. 124.

(Y. Bregel)

Originally Published: December 15, 1982

Last Updated: July 14, 2011

This article is available in print.
Vol. I, Fasc. 2, p. 147

Cite this entry:

Y. Bregel, “'Abd-Al-Rahman Samarqandi,” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/2, p. 147; an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abd-al-rahman-samarqandi-late-19th-century-secretary (accessed on 16 January 2014).