The Foundation

It was constituted in February 1992, in the first year of the Tajik civil war, by the Shahidi museum together with the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, the Academy of Sciences, the National University and the Kayra-Kum carpet factory. Munira Shahidi, the composer’s daughter, founded it and led it for thirty-four years.

Its own statement of why, written around 2004, is worth reading whole:

At that time, Tajik society had split into two contradictory ideological fronts which threatened to annihilate the values created by the previous generation, and there was a distinct need for a foundation of this kind.

The Foundation aimed to overcome the conflicts in the country’s cultural life which had been hidden during Soviet times, but which came to light in the post-Soviet period, causing a re-evaluation of societal values.

The argument is that culture is what a society has left to hold onto when the politics has split in two. It was made in 1992 by people who were watching that happen, and the Foundation has gone on making it since.

Fonus

From 2001 the Foundation published Fonus, a quarterly in Tajik, Russian and English, “a publication devoted to culture as a peace-making instrument”. Its stated research focus was peace-building as an instrument of democratisation, the study of peace in language, literature and music, and the contradictions in the history of Central Asia. It ran until 2017, funded at different times by UNTOP, the UNDP, UNESCO, the OSCE, the Swiss cooperation office and the Iranian embassy in Dushanbe. Contributors came from Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. No complete run of it exists online. If you hold print copies, the Foundation wants to hear from you.

Festivals and dialogues

The first Ziyodullo Shahidi International Festival of Contemporary Music ran in Dushanbe from 14 to 19 May 2004, for his ninetieth anniversary and the eightieth of the city, with the French and Austrian embassies and the Bactria Centre. Three concerts, discussions, rehearsals and seminars, and — the detail the Foundation’s own report is proudest of — an audience of young people in a capital where most of the population was under twenty-four.

The Foundation’s later projects worked the same seam. “Music of the Silk Road”, funded by UNESCO and tied to the centenary in 2014, brought in Azerbaijan, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States. From 2017 to 2022 the Foundation was the Tajik partner in GCRF-COMPASS, a £2.93m research programme led by the University of Kent, named in the grant as one of its four hubs of excellence.