Pahlawan Mahmud

The memorial Pahlawan Mahmud with Khanqah with a blue dome

Pahlawan Mahmud (* 1247 , † 1326 ) was a choresmic wrestler , poet - philosopher , furrier and Sufi teacher, who is venerated as a saint . His tomb was built over the course of centuries as a memorial to Pahlawan Mahmud and is the cultural center of the city of Khiva or its historic old town Ichan Qalʼа and an outstanding part of the UNESCO World Heritage .

Live and act

Pahlawan Mahmud lived during the years of Mongol rule over Central Asia . Both as a professional wrestler and as a poet-philosopher he achieved great fame at the time . Above all, he is said to have been a high-ranking Sufi teacher. A biography by Bacha ad-Din Naqshband describes a meeting between the Sheikh and Pahlawan Mahmud's disciples.

A specialty of the school of Pahlawan Mahmud was the education of the pupils through the martial arts wrestling, a discipline with which he had made a name for himself as far as Persia and India: Pahlavan is in Persian as well as Old Uzbek (Tschagatay) and Hindi / پهلوان (other spelling Palvan / پلوان) a wrestler, hero, champion.

In 1326 Pahlawan Mahmud died in his workshop in Khiva, where he was also buried. In the following centuries a cemetery was built around the grave of Pahlawan Mahmud, who was venerated as a saint . In 1810 Khan Chiwas Muhammad Rahim I ( reigned 1806 to 1825) had the tomb rebuilt and a new mausoleum built. This became the central site of the necropolis of the Khans of Khiva.

literature

• Alexey Arapov: The Historical Monuments of Uzbekistan . Tashkent Samarkand Bukhara Chiva Shahrisabz. SMI-ASIA, Tashkent 2016, ISBN 978-9943-17-075-9 , Chiva, p. 101 .