Hamza Hakimzade Niyazi

He was born in Kokand on 6 March 1889 (New Style; the Russian article and Wikidata give 22 February in the Julian calendar), the youngest of four children of a wealthy apothecary, and was educated at a maktab and then a madrasa for seven years ^{1 2}. He opened free schools for the poor — in Kokand in 1911, and later at Margilan — wrote textbooks and poetry under the pen name Nihoniy, and became one of the first Uzbeks to join the Communist Party ^{1 3}. His works treated women's rights, social inequality and the prevalence of superstition ¹.

Stationed at Shohimardon, Hamza campaigned for the hujum and literacy and held that the shrine of Ali there was not Ali's resting place and that its custodians used it to extort the peasants; the local clergy accused him of promoting atheism, and on 18 March 1929 he was stoned to death ^{1 3}. The Urdu article gives the same date with a different account of the killing — shot by Basmachi gunmen ⁴.

In the Soviet period Hamza was hailed as a martyr in the struggle against feudalism and religious fanaticism, and streets, a theatre and a state literature prize bore his name ¹. After independence he became significantly less revered in Uzbekistan, and the Russian article records that he has been publicly declared an enemy of the Uzbek people and Islam amid the renaming of places named for him ².

The English article's lead states that Hamza, born to a devout Muslim family, became an atheist over time, and Wikidata carries atheism ^{1 4}. The Russian and Uzbek articles make no atheist attestation, and that portrait descends substantially from Soviet-era hagiography of an anti-religious campaigner, an interested family, which post-Soviet sources contest rather than corroborate ^{2 3}. Both readings are preserved in his record's note, and his faith segment is recorded as unknown, flagged for the founder, under the doubt rule.

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.