Jahonotin Uvaysiy

Jahonotin Uvaysiy (1780–1845), was a Sufi poet from Margilor in the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan. She was an Otin-Oys, an Uzbek religious women held in great esteem.

• If I build a castle of love [i.e., mystical knowledge]
  for the suffering people, they kill me!
  If I don’t build I die!
  • (Uvaysiy 1980:58) Quoted in Female Celebrations in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan: The Power of Cosmology in Musical Rites by Razia Sultanova, in The 2008 Yearbook For Traditional Music, Volume 40, page 14