Kurmanjan Datka

She was born into a wealthy family of the Mungush clan in the Osh region of the Khanate of Kokand ¹. At eighteen she was to be married to a man she had never seen; on meeting him at the wedding she broke with tradition, fled first toward China, and finally stayed with her father Mamatbay ¹. In 1832 Alimbek, the feudal lord who had taken the title Datka and ruled all the Kyrgyz of the Alai, married her ¹.

Alimbek, an instrumental politician in the decaying Kokand khanate, was murdered in a palace coup in 1862. His widow was recognised by the khans of Bukhara and Kokand as ruler of the Alai and given the title Datka herself ¹. She held the Alai until 1876, when the region was annexed by the Russian Empire; recognising the futility of resistance, she persuaded her people to accept Russian overlordship ^{1 2}.

In 1893 two of her sons and two grandsons were charged with contraband trade and murdering customs officials. When her favourite son Kamchibek was sentenced to death, she refused her followers' urging to attempt a rescue, saying she would not let her private hopes cause suffering for her people, and she attended his public execution in 1895; the others were exiled to Siberia, and she retired from public life ¹.

In retirement at Mady she received a gold watch from the emperor Nicholas II, and in 1906 the Finnish officer Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, then a colonel in Russian service, visited and photographed her ¹. She died at Mady on 1 February 1907, aged over ninety-five, and was buried at Osh beside her son Kamchibek ^{1 3}. Her portrait appears on the Kyrgyz 50 som banknote; monuments and streets in Bishkek and Osh bear her name, the year 2011 was declared hers in Kyrgyzstan, and the 2014 epic film Kurmanjan Datka: Queen of the Mountains tells her life ¹.

The only school statement for Kurmanjan in any edition read stands in the Russian article's infobox — Sunni Islam — an infobox field referenced to no text; the Russian text itself calls her only a Muslim woman, the Uzbek article's infobox gives Islam in general, the English article names no religion in its text, and the Kyrgyz article and Wikidata carry no religion value at all ^{3 4 1 5}. Her rule, her diplomacy and her family's story are acts and milieu, not attestations. Her faith segment is therefore recorded as unknown, flagged, with the Sunni infobox reading preserved in the record's note.

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