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.

This is how we put the reason at the time, writing in about 2004:

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.

Fonus

From 2001 we published Fonus, a quarterly in Tajik, Russian and English, “a publication devoted to culture as a peace-making instrument”. Munira Shahidi was its Editor-in-Chief. It set out to work on peace-building as an instrument of democratisation, on peace in language, literature and music, and on the contradictions in the history of Central Asia. It ran until 2017. UNTOP, the UNDP, UNESCO, the OSCE, the Swiss cooperation office and the Iranian embassy in Dushanbe paid for it at one time or another, and the contributors wrote from Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. No complete run of it exists online. If you have print copies, please write to us.

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 city’s eightieth, with the French and Austrian embassies and the Bactria Centre. Three concerts, and discussions, rehearsals and seminars around them. What our own report of it dwells on is the audience: young people, in a capital where most of the population was under twenty-four.

“Music of the Silk Road” came later, funded by UNESCO and tied to the centenary in 2014, with partners in Azerbaijan, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States. From 2017 to 2022 we were the Tajik partner in GCRF-COMPASS, a £2.93m research programme led by the University of Kent, and the grant names us as one of its four hubs of excellence.