The Treasured land of Thinkers and Scholars.

Byline: Muhammad Asif Noor

Alocal proverb goes like this "In all the other parts of the world light descend upon earth. From holy Samarkand and Bukhara, it ascends" reflects great knowledge and cultural history of the region and the people whose geniuses and intelligence made this region shinning out of the other geographical regions of the world.

Central Asia is at momentous junction of the prehistoric world and today's modern civilizations with its own splendor and glamour of history, heritage and traditions. Wealth and ideas from all over the world merged and synergized there, giving academics the opportunity and means of making new breakthroughs.

One cannot agree more with the James Elroy Flecker, Hassan, 1913, who was once quoted as saying "For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the golden road to Samarkand." The region, what we now called as Uzbekistan has a history of thousands years of work of great and prolific scholars who had spend their lives working and discovering what today's modern science, medicine and other fields have taken aspirations from.

As great scholar of Samarkand Ulughbek(1428) said: "Religion disperses like a fog, kingdoms perish, but the works of scholars, remain for an eternity." It is true in a sense that one of the great flourishing of early civilizations, which has led to the development of modern civilizations, has been sprouted from this region. This region has remained the centre of world's economic attention because of the great Silk Road hence making it the great centre of excellence of travelers from across the world.

The great route had also turned into the reason behind spreading new principles, religions, ideologies, arts, crafts, traditions, values, cuisines and technologies. The multicultural architecture of Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva demonstrate the ancient and varied nature of the country's historical heritage.

One gets loss of words while describing the splendors and grandeurs of these scholars and the amount of impact they had on today's world felt from Middle East till East Asia. In the beginning let me share with you that it is also needed to clear some misperceptions about the geographical and ethnic identities of these geniuses.

As most of us had developed our perceptions that these geniuses were Arabs but when we trace their roots then we observer that these were not 'Arabs" more of the Turkic and Persian ethnic origin living mostly in the regions what we today...