Alisher Navoiy was born in 1441 in Herat, now in Afghanistan but historically a Persianate city. He wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai, the Turkic literary language used all over Central Asia in the Middle Ages and considered the ancestor of modern literary Uzbek. In one of his most famous treatises, he compared Persian (with a centuries-old literary tradition even back then) with Chagatai and found the latter superior — which made him a key figure in constructing an Uzbek identity in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. – Global Voices
