Ali-Shir Nava'i

Born 9 February 1441 in the Timurid world, Nava'i moved through courts as poet, painter, statesman, and mystic. He held an uncommon conviction: that his native Chagatai was richer and more precise than Persian for literature, a claim he defended in "Muhakamat al-Lughatayn" (The Comparison of the Two Languages). His poetry in Chagatai became the proof. He died 3 January 1501, but the afterlife has been civic: Central Asia named a province, a city, institutions after him; monuments stand in Tashkent, Ankara, Tokyo, Moscow, a dozen other capitals. The case he made in verse became a canon.