Tajik Websites Provide Access to Literary Heritage

Geographically remote Tajikistan lays claim to several highly influential poets, though readily available information in Tajik about them has been very limited. With funding for literature preservation and printing in short supply, there is an increasing threat of losing cultural heritage and people growing up without knowledge of the country’s literary past. In cooperation with Tajikistan’s Terminology Committee of the Academy of Science and the Central Municipal Library, six citizens of Kurgan-Tube designed websites on national poets after completing a web-design course at local IREX-administered internet center in February.

To confront the limited existing information online about the famous poets and to mark the 800th anniversary of the birth of Rumi and 1150th anniversary of Rudaki (both poets born in parts of the Persian Empire now in Tajikistan), the participants decided to create a website about poets who are the pride of Tajikistan and who played tremendous roles in the development of Central Asian poetry.  

The websites and training were made possible through the USAID-funded Internet Access and Training Program (IATP), administered by IREX. At present, there are seven IATP centers operating throughout Tajikistan. In February 2008, over 2,000 residents of Tajikistan visited IATP centers almost 5,000 times, and over 170 people attended training courses. IATP's server in Dushanbe hosts more than 500 noncommercial websites created by IATP users.

The newly created poet websites are in local Tajik language and offer information about the authors’ lives, their role in the history of Tajik and Persian literature, and copies of their poetry and writings. The 13th Century poet Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī is represented at http://masnavi.freenet.tj/, where there is information about his thoughts, his acquaintance with his mentor Shams-i Tabrezi, and about his famous work Mathnawi. The two other sites celebrate the work of Abdullah Jafar Ibn Mohammad Rudaki, born in 859, who was considered a founder of Persian classical literature and composed poems in the Perso-Arabic alphabet script; and Layeq Shir-Ali, a Tajik poet who also translated several literary master pieces into Persian language.

Website author Azizulloh Olimov commented, "Our central library has one copy of Mathnawi by Persian mystic Jalaluddin-i Rumi for Kurgan-Tube, a city with 80,000 people. Many people who want to read the book cannot get it. For this reason, we created the website to enable citizens of Tajikistan and other countries to have an opportunity to read it." For over ten years, IREX, through IATP, has worked throughout Eurasia with citizens to increase local-language online resources and enhance people’s understanding and access to the World Wide Web.