[12] According to Zaynobidin Abdurashidov, it was in the beginning of the 20th century that Fitrat went on a pilgrimage through Asia to Mecca during which he spent some time in India, where he earned some money for the journey home as a barber.

Abdurashidov's explanation of why Fitrat did not take part in the activities of the first group of jadids in Bukhara refers to the strict, anti-liberal regime under emir 'Abd al-Ahad Khan.

Abdurashidov continues that Fitrat became interested in reformist ideas approximately in 1909 and suggests that this happened under the influence of the magazine Sırat-ı Müstakim by Mehmet Âkif Ersoy.

[18] Around 1909, jadid actors in Bukhara and Istanbul (Constantinople) built an organizational infrastructure in order to enable Bukharan students and teachers to study in the capital of the Ottoman empire.

[21] "Sometimes", says Sarfraz Khan from the University of Peshawar, Fitrat's departure to Turkey is described as an effort to flee from the persecution by the authorities after a conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Bukhara in January 1910.

According to Abdurashidov's analysis, Fitrat was integrated in the Bukharan diasporic community (he often gets mentioned as one of the founders of the benevolent society Buxoro ta’mimi maorif), he worked as a vendor at a bazaar, as a street cleaner, and as an assistant cook.

[33] The outbreak of the First World War rendered Fitrat's completion of his studies in Istanbul impossible and forced him, like many other Bukharan students, to return to Transoxania prematurely.

[47][48] After Kolesov's unsuccessful campaign in March 1918 Fitrat went on to Tashkent (then part of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic),[23] where he worked in the Afghan consulate[49] and where he served as an organizer of the nationalist intellectuals.

Fitrat and like-minded companions managed to coexist with the Bolsheviks for some time, but Basmachi activists in the center and the east of the republic and a dispute about the presence of Russian troops overcomplicated the situation.

[62] Together with the head of government, Fayzulla Xo'jayev, he tried without success to ally with Turkey and Afghanistan to secure Bukhara's independence[66] Instigated by the Soviet plenipotentiary[67] the then political leaders with nationalist tendencies,[68] including Fitrat, but not Khodzhayev,[2] were ousted and expulsed to Moscow on 25 June 1923.

[59] After Bukhara had lost its independence and changed side from nationalism and Muslim reformism to secular communism, Fitrat wrote a number of allegories in which he criticized the new political system in his homeland.

[70] Little is known about Fitrat's time in Moscow, even though he published important enlightenmental works such as Ro'zalar "Fasting in Ramadan" and Shaytonning Tangriga Isyoni "Satan's Revolt against God" (1924).

Fitrat avoided serious involvement in the affairs of the new state and is said to have declined the option to teach at the Central Asian Communist University or to work permanently at the Commissariat of Education.

Around this time Communist ideologues, the next generation of writers and the press began criticizing Fitrat's perspective towards questions of nationality and labelling his way of presenting classics of Chagataian literature as "nationalist", thus non-Soviet.

[76] Fitrat felt the necessity to acquaint the following generation of literates with the traditional rules of prosody (aruz), since by the 1930s the Uzbek language had become emphatically contemporary and ruralist and therefore detached from historical poetry.

[89] The case was discussed on 4 October 1938 by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, whereupon, according to the transcript, a 15 minutes long show trial took place the following day without hearing witnesses.

[90] Said archival documents also show that at the time of his arrest Fitrat was living together with his mother, his 25-year-old wife Hikmat and his 7-year-old daughter Sevar in the mahallah of Guliston in the city of Tashkent.

The reevaluation of Fitrat's controversial works in the light of Marxist–Leninist ideology which was initially planned by the commission could, according to Kara, not be carried out under the control of the conservative government of the Uzbek SSR of that time.

As Kara explains, distancing Fitrat's oeuvre from the changeable reality of his lifetime is a legacy of Soviet academia, where either positive or negative properties of a person were exaggerated.

[110] The fact that in 1924 Hind ixtilolchilari („Indian rebels“, 1923) received an award by the Azerbaijani People's Commissariat for Education proofs that Fitrat's writings were appreciated beyond the limits of Transoxania.

[124] What Fitrat demanded was less a compromise between western and Islamic values and more a clean break with the past and a revolution of human concepts, structures and relations with the end goal of freeing Dār al-Islām from the infidels.

[126] As per Hélène Carrère d’Encausse Fitrat's revolutionary tone and his refusal of compromise were peculiarities that set him apart from other Muslim reformers, such as al-Afghani oder Ismail Gasprinsky.

[134] Hisao Komatsu wrote that Fitrat was a "patriotic, Bukharan intellectual".,[99] but that his understanding of watan had changed over time: Initially, he had only referred to the city of Bukhara with this term, but later he included the entire emirate, and finally all of Turkestan.

After the creation of the Uzbek SSR and the Tajik ASSR in 1924/25 and especially after the Communist Party started exercising strong control over culture and society, Fitrat wrote less on political matters.

[139] Fitrat reacted to restrictions on press freedom by stopping to freely express his political views in print[140] and by choosing subjects that followed Bolshevik notions of society.

In Fitrat's oeuvre a series of nonfiction and educational publications can be found: Rohbari najot ("The leader towards deliverance", 1916), for example, is an ethical treatise supporting the jadidist reforms with citations from the Quran.

[167][63] According to Alexander Djumaev Oʻzbek klassik musiqasi va uning tarixi is more of a juridical document, which created and consolidated a national cultural identity, than it is a scientific source.

Through his choice of words, Fitrat made his subversive messages accessible only to those privy to contemporary Central Asian literature, while his anger found the form of indirect, entertaining criticism.

[173] Zulkhumor Mirzaeva (Alisher Navoiy University for Uzbek language and literature) argued that in these works the Soviet censorship was deceived by an allegedly antireligious essence and that sociopolitical ideas were communicated that way.

Only a few years earlier, prose had started gaining ground in Central Asia; by including satirical elements, reformers like Fitrat succeeded in winning over the audience.