Muhammad Ali Madali


Muhammad Ali Madali was an ishan of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, who led an 1898 revolt against Russian domination, centred in the town of Andijan.
Madali, seeking to rid the area of the Russians and restore the formerly independent khanate of Khokand, called for "holy war", and led 2,000 men against the Tsarist Russia. However, his force was blocked outside the city on Andijan by the Russian 20th Line Battalion and defeated. Of those 2,000, 546 were put on trial, and Madali and five of his lieutenants hanged.
Most of the sentences people were Kyrgyz people in the Ferghana valley and mountainous areas in Chatkal, Aksy and Ketmen-Tobe in nowadays Southern Kyrgyzstan. Among them was a prominent poet-improviser and composer Toktogul Satylganov, who was jailed by a false accusation by his political foes in the Ketmen-Tobe valley about his alleged participation in the revolt. He returned from a Siberian prison, in the village of Kuitun near the town of Irkutsk, in 1905.

Outcome and interpretations

In the post-Soviet historiography in Central Asia, the Andijan revolt has been described as a progressive anti-Tsarist movement aimed to establish an independent state in the Ferghana Valley.