Speech by H.E. Ambassador Mohammad Hassan President, ECO Cultural Institute Session on Introducing Uzbekistan ECO Cultural Institute, Tehran, 23 September 2026
Speech by H.E. Ambassador Mohammad Hassan
President, ECO Cultural Institute
Session on Introducing Uzbekistan
ECO Cultural Institute, Tehran, 23 September 2026
Excellencies, Distinguished Ambassadors, Esteemed Scholars and Researchers, Dear Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the ECO Cultural Institute for this session devoted to Uzbekistan.
I say “pleasure” quite deliberately, because Uzbekistan is not a country one can speak about simply by looking at a map. To understand Uzbekistan, one has to look at the roads that passed through it, the people who travelled along those roads, and the ideas and cultures they carried with them.
For centuries, Uzbekistan has stood at the meeting point of three great cultural worlds: the Turkic world, the Persian world, and South Asia. Few countries in Central Asia have had such deep and sustained connections in all three directions.
That, for me, is what makes Uzbekistan so important to the ECO.
When we think of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Tashkent or Andijan, we should not think only of magnificent monuments and ancient cities. We should think of them as places where people met—where languages met, where religions and philosophies travelled, where scholars exchanged ideas, and where poetry, music, science and art moved from one civilization to another.
And perhaps no story illustrates this better than that of a young man born in Andijan: Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur.
Babur was a prince of the Central Asian Timurid world. His early life was tied to Ferghana and Samarkand. But history took him beyond Central Asia. He crossed the Hindu Kush, established himself in Kabul, and eventually entered South Asia.
What is fascinating is not simply that Babur founded the Mughal dynasty. What fascinates me is what happened culturally after these worlds met.
Babur did not enter an empty land. He entered one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world. He brought with him memories of Central Asia, the Timurid tradition, Persian literary culture, an appreciation of gardens, architecture and poetry. In India, these traditions encountered an equally rich South Asian civilization.
Out of that encounter emerged something new.
This is how cultures grow—not by remaining isolated, but by meeting.
And the movement was never only from Central Asia towards South Asia.
Long before Babur, ideas had travelled in the other direction.
Think of Taxila, in present-day Pakistan, one of the great centres of learning of the ancient Gandhara region. Through the Kushan world, the cultural space stretching from Central Asia through Afghanistan and Gandhara into northern India became deeply interconnected.
Buddhist thought and Gandharan artistic traditions travelled through these routes into Central Asia. Bamiyan became one of the great Buddhist centres of the region.
So we can follow one road from Taxila towards Central Asia, and centuries later another from Andijan through Kabul towards South Asia.
These are not two unrelated stories.
They are chapters of the same story—the story of a region that has always been connected.
And this is where Uzbekistan becomes so interesting.
Its connection with the Persian world is equally deep. Persian was for centuries a major language of literature, scholarship and administration across Central Asia. Samarkand and Bukhara became names familiar to Persian poets and historians.
At the same time, Uzbekistan became one of the great centres of the Turkic literary tradition.
And here we must remember Alisher Navoi.
Navoi showed the extraordinary literary possibilities of the Chagatai Turkic language and became one of the towering figures of Turkic literature.
So in Uzbekistan, Persian and Turkic traditions did not simply exist beside each other. They interacted, influenced one another and enriched the intellectual life of the region.
Perhaps that is one of the great lessons of Uzbekistan.
Its strength came not from being isolated, but from being connected.
We can see the same thing in the intellectual history of the country.
We remember al-Khwarizmi, whose name is associated with algebra and, ultimately, with the word “algorithm.”
We remember Imam al-Bukhari, whose scholarly legacy reaches Muslims throughout the world.
We remember Mirzo Ulugh Beg, who turned Samarkand into a remarkable centre of astronomy.
And we remember Navoi, whose poetry remains part of the shared heritage of the Turkic world.
These men lived in Central Asia, but their intellectual heritage belongs far beyond Central Asia.
And that is why I believe Uzbekistan occupies such a special place in the ECO family.
It connects worlds.
It connects Central Asia with Persia.
It connects the Turkic world with the Persianate world.
It connects Central Asia with Afghanistan and South Asia.
And, through these connections, it reminds us that our modern borders are much younger than our cultural relationships.
There is another beautiful example of this in language.
Take Urdu, a language familiar to many of us in Pakistan.
Urdu developed in South Asia over centuries. Its grammatical foundations are South Asian, but its vocabulary and literary culture absorbed enormous influences from Persian and Arabic and from the wider Turkic and Persianate worlds.
The Mughal period became one important setting for this interaction.
So when we listen to Urdu poetry today, we are hearing, in a sense, the echoes of several civilizations meeting.
This is why cultural history matters.
It tells us something that political maps cannot.
It tells us that people may belong to different countries and still share memories that are centuries old.
For the ECO Cultural Institute, this is particularly important.
Our task is not simply to organize cultural events. It is to help our peoples rediscover one another.
When we bring scholars from Uzbekistan and Pakistan together, when Persian literature is discussed alongside Central Asian literature, when artists, universities and museums cooperate, we are not creating connections from nothing.
We are renewing connections that have existed for centuries.
And I believe Uzbekistan has a particularly important role to play in this work.
If I may put it simply: Uzbekistan is one of the great cultural crossroads of the ECO region.
Perhaps even more importantly, it is a crossroads that still lives.
Samarkand is not only a monument from the past.
Bukhara is not only a page in a history book.
Andijan is not simply the birthplace of Babur.
These are living places, with living people, living traditions and a new generation that can carry these connections forward.
This is why I am particularly happy that today's session is being held here at the ECO Cultural Institute.
I hope we do not simply talk about Uzbekistan today.
I hope we talk with Uzbekistan, and that this conversation opens the door to many more exchanges—between universities, scholars, artists, writers, museums and, above all, young people.
Because the old Silk Road carried silk, spices and manuscripts.
The roads of our time can carry something equally valuable: knowledge, friendship and understanding.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
If we begin in Andijan, we can follow Babur to Kabul and South Asia.
If we go further back, we can follow the cultural routes from Taxila and Gandhara towards Central Asia.
If we look west, we find the deep Persian cultural world.
If we look across Central Asia, we encounter the vast Turkic world.
And at the heart of these connections stands Uzbekistan.
That is why, when we speak about Uzbekistan, we are speaking not only about one country.
We are speaking about a bridge between cultures.
We are speaking about a shared history.
And we are speaking about a part of the cultural geography that binds the ECO region together.
I warmly welcome all of you to this session, and I particularly welcome our Uzbek friends and colleagues.
May today's gathering help us rediscover some of the old roads between our peoples—and perhaps build a few new ones for the generations to come.
Thank you very much.