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19.01.2015

HOW OLD IS THE AZERBAIJANI NATION: ONCE AGAIN ABOUT THE IDENTITY OF ABSHERON MUSLIMS

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Haykaram Nahapetyan
Correspondent of the Public Television of Armenia in the USA

Modern Azerbaijan, akin to “caviar diplomacy” also develops “caviar science” not only in Azerbaijan, but also by ordering “research” in foreign countries that present the current territory of Azerbaijan, as well as Artsakh, Zangezur and Yerevan as millennia-old Azeri homeland. Baku post factum declares the Christian monuments on these territories or other Armenian settlements as Caucasian Albanian. Even if those were Albanian, Azerbaijan has no priority over Armenia to claim heritage of the historically Christian territories of Caucasian Albania. On the contrary, the Albanian civilization was very close to the Armenian one and had no commonalities with the Turkic-Tartar nature of Azerbaijan.

Population of modern Azerbaijan may claim historic rights on the Christian monuments of Albania as much as Egyptian Arabs could claim historic ownership to the pyramids. The difference is that no such absurd claims are ever made in Egypt.

One thing Baku is physically unable to change, is the studies already published in previous centuries or decades regarding our region. At the time there was no independent Azerbaijan or none at all, and hence, “caviar diplomacy” and Heydar Aliyev Foundation did not work, so the foreign specialists were free to carry out maximally unbiased research.

Studying these sources may actually shed light both on Artsakh and other history-related Armenian-Azeri disputes. Moreover, most of the mentioned researchers did not have anti-Azerbaijani or pro-Armenian stance. They simply recorded the objective reality.

What is written in the encyclopedias of the world?

The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published in the 18th century (between 1768 and 1771). The Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary was published in 1890-1907. Publication of the first Encyclopaedia of Islam started in 1913, when its first volume was printed. Groups of dozens of specialists from the best scientific institutions had worked on encyclopedias. What have they said regarding Azerbaijan and Armenia?

The Encyclopaedia of Islam is especially interesting, the first edition of which was printed in Leiden, Netherlands, in 1913-1930 and the full title of which was The Encyclopedia of Islam: A dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan peoples. Publication of the second, expanded edition titled The Encyclopedia of Islam: new edition started in 1960. In the two editions the articles on Azerbaijan are presented quite differently. Their comparison shows the evolution of international perceptions of Azerbaijani identity.

In the first edition (1913) the toponym Azerbaijan refers solely to the Iranian Atropatene. No Caucasian Azerbaijan is mentioned in the encyclopedia. This encyclopedia (the one published in 1913) states that “modern Azerbaijan borders Caucasus in the north.” [1, p. 134]. Thus, according to the encyclopedia there is no Azerbaijan in Caucasus, but only the one to its south.

The encyclopedia also comprehensively expounds on Armenia as a country in geographic proximity to and contacts with the Muslim world. The article about Armenia comprises 14 pages, while Azerbaijan is presented in 1.5 pages.

In this book Gandzak, that is Yelizavetpol area and Ordubad city are considered part of the Russian Armenia. Regarding Nakhichevan and Artsakh the following is mentioned: “Nakhcawan which, like Erivan, has played a pre-eminent role in Armenian history… Shusha situated in the region of Kara-Bagh and formerly the capital of a separate khanate…” [1, p. 445]:

The existence of Karabakh khanate is not denied in Armenian historiography. The question is, how it is related to Azerbaijan? The khanate was never called Azerbaijani, it was never part of independent Azerbaijan and till the Treaty of Gulistan was under Persian rule, not Azeri. Otherwise, in 1813 Rtischev would have to sign the treaty with Azerbaijan, rather than Persian authorities. Modern Iran has never used an excuse of having ruled Caucasus previously to lay claims to its territory. Yet the Baku pen-pushers have somehow “privatized” the period of Persian rule, and, as we shall see in further, also the Persian poets.

In the context of the medieval history of Karabakh, the five Armenian melikdoms (principalities) are relevant, as they ensured semi-independent status for Artsakh.

The second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam (1960) shows a somewhat different picture. Here Azerbaijan is again presented as one of the regions in Persia. However, some three paragraphs comprising half a page mention that there is also non-independent Azerbaijan in Caucasus. It is interesting what the authors wrote about a newly-emerged “Azerbaijan-2”. As the encyclopedia states:: “The Turkish troops under Nuri Pasha occupied Baku on 15 Sept. 1918 and reorganized the former province under the name of Azarbaydjan—as it was explained, in view of the similarity of its Turkish-speaking population with the Turkish-speaking population of the Persian province of Adharbaydjan.” [2 (vol. I), p. 191].

In this case too, the article on Azerbaijan constitutes four pages, whereas 16 pages are devoted to Armenia. Apparently, there was nothing much to tell about Azerbaijan and generally it was not very clear how to deal with “Azerbaijan-2”. Stalin’s tyrannical regime was certainly capable of inventing a new ethnicity, then fabricating a history and devising poets for it and finally coercing all of this within the totalitarian system. However, in the international academic circles, where Soviet decisions did not matter, confusion ensued for a while.

Referring to the unfortunate Alexandropol treaty of 1920, the article about Armenia in the new edition of encyclopedia reads: “Turkey retained Kars and Ardahan, annexed the region of Igdir to the southwest of Erivan and demanded that the district of Nakhcawan (Nakhitchevan) be transformed into an autonomous Tatar state.”

This is the 1960 edition of encyclopedia, i.e. just 54 years ago the authors referred to the modern Azerbaijani as Tatars.

As for Karabakh, it is mentioned that previously this was Artzakh province of Armenia and that “in 1918-1920 Karabagh enjoyed freedom from foreign control.” [2 (vol. IV), p. 573]. So it was not part of the Musavatist Azerbaijan, as the Azeri propaganda claims.

In 1940s the first edition of encyclopedia was reprinted in Turkey with revisions. As historian Rouben Galichian has noticed, one of the revisions concerned the article on Azerbaijan and had a funny phrasing: “The name Azerbaijan had been used for Iran’s northwestern part and rarely for Aran and Shirvan. After May 28, 1918 the state of Caucasian Azerbaijan was officially named Azerbaijan” [3, p. 24]:

The last sentence may cause laughter by its absurdity. Essentially, by this paragraph official Ankara had tried to help their younger brother through falsification and distorted the original text of the Leiden edition. Nonetheless, in Azerbaijan of the 21st century this paragraph would hardly be acceptable, because only 70 years ago for brotherly Turkey the territories north of Arax river were “rarely called Azerbaijan” (and not continuously, as it would be desirable for Baku) and according to the Turkish source modern Azerbaijan received its name (if not nickname) just 97 years ago.

Before the 14th edition, there is no mention of Caucasian Azerbaijan in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The 14th edition published in April 1930 states: “AZERBAIJAN, the north-western province of Persia. It is separated on the north from the Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia by the river Aras (Araxes)”. The Encyclopædia Britannica mentions no other details about the Absheronian country. Incidentally, among the residents of Iranian Azerbaijan the Britannica mentions Turks, Armenians, Persians and Kurds, but not Azerbaijanis [4 (vol. II), p. 827]. The same source states that “on the east it abuts on the Talish country”, which is the modern Lenkoran region. It turns out that according to perhaps the most reputable encyclopedia of the time, there are no Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis, but there are Talysh people and Talysh country.

The same encyclopedia contains around seven pages about Armenian history, literature, culture and language, illustrated with maps and pictures [4 (vol. II), pp. 374-384].

Publication of the Encyclopædia Britannica 14th edition was finished in 1973 and the next year they started publishing the 15th edition named New Encyclopædia Britannica. This time with regard to Azerbaijanis it is written that these people have mixed ethnic background [5, p. 756]. There is no allusion whatsoever that southeastern part of Caucasus has ever historically belonged to Azerbaijani people.

According to the Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, Азербейджанъ is the northwestern part of Persia, which is separated from Russian Armenia by Arax River [6, p. 212]. Hence, the imperial encyclopedia considered the entire Karabakh as a part of Russian Armenia.

In encyclopedia Muslim Peoples: A World Ethnographic Survey published in 1984 in the USA, the section Azeri contains the following text: “Azeri Turks, sometimes called Azerbaijanis… are divided politically into two groups, one dominated by Persians, the other by Russians.” [7, pp. 63-64]:

From Alexandre Dumas to Joseph Stalin: Tracking down the Transformation from Tatar to Azerbaijani

Alexandre Dumas, père, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and other bestsellers of the time, visited the Russian Empire from June 1858 to February 1859, of which the last three months he spent in Caucasus, including Tiflis, settlements in Daghestan and Baku. His memoirs were crystallized in Le Caucase book published in spring of 1859 in France and in 1861 in Russia (abridged version).

The Russian gendarmes followed Dumas and sent telegrams to St. Petersburg about the movements of the French writer. Azerbaijan or Azerbaijanis are mentioned neither in Dumas’ memoirs, nor in reports of vigilant Tsarist gendarmes. For example, the police reported on October 14, 1858 that Dumas visited Astrakhan governor Struve’s residence, where he observed “Armenians, Tatars and Persians in their everyday life, dressed in their national clothes” [8, с. 22].

The Caucasian notes of Dumas put modern Azeri researchers in an uncomfortable situation. The writer’s global fame is attractive, and for Azeri propaganda it would be very desirable to present warm memories of the renowned novelist about Azerbaijan. But what to do with the small nuisance that just 170 years ago there was neither Azerbaijan in Caucasus, not Azerbaijanis (unlike for example, Armenians, Georgians and Lezgians). Aygun Eyyubova, an Azeri doctor in history living in France, decided to ignore this inconvenience in her article titled «Le voyage au Caucase» d'Alexandre Dumas et ses impressions sur l'Azerbaïdjan. She went even further, adding from herself in the article that Dumas liked Azerbaijan very much and urged to trust specifically the Azerbaijanis among other peoples of Caucasus1. Eyyubova’s task becomes somewhat more difficult, when direct citations from the French author are needed. What should she do, if Dumas speaks about Persians and Tatars living in Absheron or for instance, characterizes Baku as a “city with Persian flavor”? In such cases an editorial addition is placed next to the quote, which explains that actually Dumas did not mean what he wrote when he mentioned Tatars or Persians. As for how the 21st century Azeri specialists found out these nuances, nothing is mentioned about that:

“As a reminder to the reader, Dumas meant Azerbaijanis, when he wrote about “Tatars” and by Tatar language he meant the Azerbaijani language – ed.” reads Eyyubova’s article published in Irs-Heritage Azeri journal2. The same article cites Dumas elsewhere with parenthesized comment next to it, as follows: “We went to Mahmud-Bek. His house is one of the most fascinating Persian buildings I saw from Tiflis to Derbent. (In Duma’s novel Azerbaijani people and the term “Azerbaijani” sometimes are also called Persians and Persian, respectively – ed.).” 3

Given the citations are followed “ed.” abbreviation and not the initials of the article’s author, one may suppose that Eyyubova did not dare “correct the mistakes” of the great novelist, and this was done later by editors of IRS-Heritage.

Dumas did not travel to Armenia. August von Haxthausen (1792-1866), a German traveler did, who visited Yerevan and northeastern parts of Armenia.

“The Circle of Elisabethpol… district of Shamsadinsk is inhabited by Armenians and Tatars, the former dwelling in the mountains, and Tatars, who are the majority, in the fertile plains. The Armenians are principally engaged in agriculture, gardening and the culture of vine… Tatars are more occupied with breeding cattle… they are for the most part well off, but lazy, whereas Armenians are extremely industrious”, the German traveler wrote [9, p. 182].

The ethnonym Azerbaijani in any of its versions (Azeri, Azerbaijani, Azerbaidjani) appears in none of the encyclopedias published in late 19th and early 20th centuries that were reviewed in the first part of this article.

In 1913 Joseph Jughashvili-Stalin mentions Caucasian Tatars 11 times in his article Marxism and the National Question, but never mentions “Azerbaijani”4. After the October revolution, on November 20, 1917 Vladimir Lenin’s appeal to the Muslims of the East contains nothing about Azerbaijanis, but rather, mentions “Turks and Tatars of Caucasus”5. In the same period the American press refers to Muslims as “Tartars”. The New York Times used the version “Hariars” in its article titled “Says Baku Armenians face extermination”.6 The White Guard commander Anton Denikin called Azerbaijan an artificial country in everything, including its name [10, с. 297].

In 1926 the first population census took place in the USSR. Again, there were no “Azerbaijanis” among the recorded ethnicities. The census results mention such ethnic groups as Yakuts, Mordvins, Buryats, Vainakhs, Permyaks, but not Azerbaijanis. The ethnonym “Turkic” is listed, people in part registered under which were later called Azerbaijanis. The ethnonym Azerbaijani again is absent in Transcaucasia in Numbers statistical bulletin published in 1929 Tiflis. On January 21, 1936 during the reception for the Soviet Azerbaijan delegation, Vyacheslav Molotov described the peoples living in Azerbaijan as “Russian, Armenian and Turkic”7. The Soviet Prime Minister (Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars) did not know the word “Azerbaijani”.

Stalin’s Gulag was ethnically as diverse as the Soviet Union. Starting 1934 the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) prepared annual reports for the Soviet government regarding the ethnic composition of the convicts. Till 1940 (!) “Azerbaijani” is not mentioned in the in the NKVD reports. Even Koreans and Japanese are listed, but not Azerbaijanis [11, N 6, c. 17]:

Viktor Zemskov, a Russian historian has presented the ethnic composition of imprisoned citizens in a series of articles titled GULAG: Historical and Sociological Aspect published in 1991. The researcher’s article contains a table clearly indicating that the term “Azerbaijani” first time was used in 1940, while for the previous years Zemskov notes that “there are no data for Azerbaijanis” and adds that prior to 1939 Azerbaijanis were recorded under “other ethnicities”.

In 1939 the NKVD reports contained no ethnonym “Azerbaijanis”, though in the census conducted same year Azerbaijanis are already mentioned, unlike the 1926 census data. This controversial situation lasted for another decade.

Particularly, in referring to the statistics of 1944 and 1947 Zemskov notes that the number of Azerbaijanis in Gulag camps is several times smaller than those for Armenians and Georgians. “We believe the explanation for this is that the list includes some “Turkics”. Azerbaijanis and Turks are Turkic-speaking peoples and most likely the Gulag statisticians recorded a significant part of prisoners of these two ethnicities as “Turkic”, he wrote [11, N 7, c. 4].

Forming a newly-minted ethnicity was especially boosted after the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic dissolved in 1937. Thus, Azerbaijan became a Soviet Union republic, which unlike Georgia and Armenia had no history, and for which it was urgently needed to invent a history [12, c. 142]:

Svante E. Cornell, author of the book titled Azerbaijan since Independence made a remarkable point on January 13, 2001 at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. He asked out loud Azerbaijan’s ambassador at the time Yashar Aliyev “Who are you? Azerbaijanis, Azeris, Turks?” The shocked ambassador responded after a short pause – Azerbaijanis.

The fact that the author of a book on Azerbaijan could not understand what is the ethnicity of the people he deals with, indeed speaks volumes.

Who is the first prominent Azerbaijani?

Azerbaijan often accuses Armenians in ascribing Armenian descent to various prominent people who have non-Armenian names. It has to be admitted that such phenomenon does exist. We often seek Armeniancy outside Armenia. However, is it so baseless? Over the centuries there has been mass migration from Armenia to the four corners of the earth and these Armenians gradually assimilated into the respective societies, whether it was Poland, Singapore, Hungary or the USA. In the past Armenian specialists had to conduct a thorough work to prove the Armenian origins of foreigners with non-Armenian names, but now the DNA tests make it easier to determine the magnitude of Armenian genes in societies abroad. One of the recent, much publicized instances was information about Armenian origins of British Prince William and Princess Diana. 8 It can be assumed that some high-profile revelations are still ahead, as DNA tests develop further.

However, a deeper analysis shows that appropriating foreigners is a lot more characteristic to modern Azerbaijan. The reason is obvious: in addition to self-advertising, it is part of the policy to attribute centuries- and millennia-long past to their ethnicity. As it follows from the numerous examples above, there has been no Azerbaijani ethnicity till modern times. Hence, any attempt to discover an Azerbaijani in any historical period inevitably has elements of misinformation.

We shall discuss several prominent persons that Baku claims were Azerbaijani – from Nizami to Muslim Magomayev.

The only argument to confuse an unaware person and “prove” that poet Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) was Azerbaijani, is that he lived in Ganja-Gandzak, which is located on the territory of present-day Azerbaijan. By the same “logic”, Armenian historian Kirakos of Gandzak (1203-1271) could also be claimed to be Azeri, because he lived in the same city and during approximately the same period, even though his work is called History of Armenia.

Of course, Nizami was not Azerbaijani. That did not prevent Elin Suleymanov, the ambassador of Azerbaijan in the USA, to make the following “epochal” statement in January 2013 at an international conference on cultural diplomacy: “the scientists have not determined yet whether Azerbaijani poet Nizami was influenced by Shakespeare, or Shakespear was influence by Nizami.” This once again shows how our neighbors can find themselves in, put it mildly, ridiculous situations when doing falsifications. Actually, Shakespeare lived four centuries later than Nizami, so the latter could in no way be aware of the English writer’s works. The opposite is also unlikely: Shakespeare could have hardly been impressed by Nizami’s poetry, because he did not have a command of Oriental languages, so that he could read it and be influenced. In Shakespeare’s time Nizami’s works had not been translated in English, while Google translator or other software did not exist. To make the falsifications more plausible, Baku tries to make sensational statements, but instead achieves the opposite effect.

About 120 years before Suleymanov’s statement Wilhelm Bacher (1850-1913), a Jewish Hungarian scholar published a comprehensive study about Nizami. In 1970, he defended a graduation thesis on Nizami at Leipzig University, which later was published as a book and was translated in English in 1873. In this book Bacher considers Nizami a Persian poet, whose mother was Kurdish. As Bacher wrote, “To his mother, who was of Kurdish descent, the poet dedicates some verses [13, p. 9].

My mother, of distinguished Kurdish lineage,
My mother, in like manner, died before me.
To whom can I make my sorrowing supplication?
To bring her before me to answer my lament?”9

This is what Nizami himself wrote. The poet’s verses about his Kurdish descent absolutely do not prevent the Azeri propaganda to persistently claim that he was Azerbaijani.

In 1876 Bacher published another book called Persian Poetry for English Readers, which was based on his earlier works. As the title tells, the author again characterizes Nizami as a Persian poet.

Privatization of Nizami occurred in late 1930s. This affair was led by Yevgeni Bertels, an Iranian Studies scholar. Interestingly, earlier, during the Tsarist period he had written works where Nizami was called Persian. This historical episode was described in detail by Aris Ghazinyan, a researcher and journalist [12, c. 149-163]:

It has to be noted that Nizami is considered Persian also by the Encyclopedia of Islam, while the Britannica relates that according to a version, he was born not in Ganja, but in Persia proper, in city of Qom, about 125 km south-west of Tehran, and then moved to Ganja.

The encyclopedia states: “His native place, or at any rate the abode of his father, was in the hills of Kum, but as he spent almost all his days in Ganja in Arran (the present Elizavettpol) he is generally known as Nizami of Ganja or Ganjawi.” [14, vol. XIX, p. 719].

Interestingly enough, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica Ganja is not in Azerbaijan, but in Arran.

During the above-mentioned conference Azerbaijani ambassador Elin Suleymanov claimed that another writer, Kurban Said is Azerbaijani. If in the case of Nizami the Azeri propaganda is unanimous about claiming him as an Azerbaijani, for Kurban Said there are a few exceptions where even in Azerbaijan some accept that Kurban Said was not Azeri after all10.

Generally, an atmosphere of mystery has been formed around Kurban Said’s name. In 1935 the manuscript of his most recognized novel Ali and Nino inexplicably appeared in the Austrian publishing house E. P. Tal, which published it in 1937. The book became a bestseller. Next year the house published Kurban Said’s second and last book, The Girl from the Golden Horn.

Tom Reiss, an American researcher has found out in his The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life that Ali and Nino was written by Lev Nussimbaum [15]։

Lev Nussimbaum was born in 1905 to Jewish parents in Kiev, although according to Reiss he may have been born on a train during the Nussimbaums’ travel from Zurich to Tiflis and the exact place of his birth is unknown. It is known that Lev Nussimbaum’s father Abraam Nussimbaum was a businessman from Tiflis [15, p. 4]. His mother Berta Slutzkin Nussimbaum was a Jew from Belarus and a revolutionary.

When Lev was one year old, his parents moved to Baku to do oil business. In 1918, during the rule of 26 Baku Commissars they left Baku for the opposite shore of the Caspian Sea, then moved to Persia and returned back to Baku. As Bolsheviks seized power in Baku in 1920, 14-years-old Lev Nussimbaum and his father finally left Baku for Menshevik-ruled Georgia, then traveled to Istanbul and continued their journey to end up in Germany, where he subsequently got involved in literary work [15, p. 47]:

The Azerbaijani propaganda machine claims that Kurban Said is the penname of Azerbaijani writer and diplomat Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, and not Lev Nussimbaum. The former was Musavatist Azerbaijan’s ambassador in Istanbul, and after the Soviets seized the power, he moved to Paris, then in 1926 sought permission from Sergey Kirov, then-leader of Soviet Azerbaijan to resettle in Baku. Permission was granted and Chamanzaminli returned to Baku11. In 2011 the Azerbaijan International journal published in the USA dedicated a whole issue to “prove” Chamanzaminli’s copyright for the novel Ali and Nino. The Institute of Literature of Azerbaijan (incidentally, named after Nizami) decided to publish the novel indicating its author as Yusif Chamanzaminli, rather than Kurban Said12.

Chamanzaminli is the author of the book as much as Nizami was Azerbaijani. The Azeri “arguments” to prove his authorship of Ali and Nino are presented below, along with parenthesized comments:

a. Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli was a writer and author of a number of fiction and literary writing (so was Lev Nussimbaum. He authored up to 40 books in Europe, mostly under penname Essad Bey).

b. Chamanzaminli, as the book’s protagonist Ali Shirvanshir, had received diplomatic assignment to Paris (not true – he worked in Istanbul, and later simply moved to and resided in Paris after Sovietization).

c. Chamanzaminli’s daughter studied in a gymnasium, as the book heroine Nino (whereas Kurban Said studied in the same gymnasium as the book protagonist Ali).

d. Chamanzaminli attended the opera in Baku (we shall leave this “very logical” argument without a comment)13.

Here are some simple arguments that exclude Chamanzaminli’s authorship. First, the book manuscript was presented to the Austrian publishing house in 1935, when the Musavatist figure had been living in Azerbaijan already for a decade. As mentioned, the novel was written in German, whereas the Azerbaijani writer/diplomat did not have a command of German language. The Azeri propaganda asserts that he studied German in the school. The question is, would the school knowledge be sufficient to write a book 20 years later?

The book contains some mistakes about Baku, which could not have been made by Baku native Chamanzaminli, while in case of Nussimbaum, who left Baku at the age of 14, these were quite possible.

There are some phrases in the Ali and Nino novel, which make it unlikely if impossible that its author is a Musavatist. Here are some examples:

Protagonist Ali Shirvanshir’s father tell his son “Do not forgive your enemies. We are not Christians.”14

“Since then this country has been called Karabagh. Before that it was called Sunik and before that Agwar”15։

“Isn’t it stupid—this hatred for the Armenians,” 16 etc.

It is hard to believe that a Musavatist official could refer to Karabakh as Sunik, which is an Armenian toponym, and then Agwar, which apparently is corrupted Aghvank, again an Armenian name. Having learnt about the theses of Azeri propaganda, Tom Reiss stated: “I was surprised that anyone could give this theory credence, Vezir was clearly an ardent Azeri nationalist…” [16, p. 142]:

Jewish Lev Nussimbaum lived in Germany and Austria during the times when Nazism advanced. Initially he signed his literary writings with penname Essad Bey, thus concealing his Jewish origin. However, in 1935 it was revealed that Essad Bey is Jewish. That is why he chose another alias – Kurban Said.

It has to be noted that during his research Tom Reiss found Lev Nussimbaum’s autobiography, which was signed Kurban Said. Chingiz Husseinov, an Azerbaijani journalist writes: “It appears to me that Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli in no way could have authored this novel, however desirable it is.”17

The Soviet generation knows well singer Muslim Magomayev. He successfully collaborated in particular with renowned Armenian composer Arno Babajanian, as well as with Alexey Hekimyan, Alexander Dolukhanian. Magomayev was born in 1942, in Baku, and dedicated songs to the city. But was he Azerbaijani?

“My mother looked catchy… perhaps mostly because she was of mixed origin. her father was a Turk, and her mother was half-Adyghe, half-Russian. She was from Maykop,” Magomayev wrote.18

Magomayev mentions that his paternal grandmother Baydigyul was a Tatar. Since the singer wrote his memoirs in the Soviet period, when the word Azerbaijani already existed, it can be safely assumed that he meant Tatar proper. Till present there is 25,000-strong Tatar minority in Azerbaijan. They speak Tatar language and some of them descended from Crimea. Baydigyul is a Tatar name, not an Azeri one.

Let us turn to Magomayev’s paternal grandfather, i.e. the Magomayev family. Abdul-Muslim Magomayev, his paternal grandfather played a key role in Muslim’s pursuit for singing career. He was a composer and led the Baku philharmonic. Naturally, in Azerbaijan they claim that he was an Azeri. But it is hard to escape the fact that “Azerbaijani” Abdul-Muslim Magomayev was born in Grozny.

The official website of Chechnya Ministry of Culture informs that “Magomayev family hails from Starye Atagi village of Chechnya”.19 Abdul-Muslim Magomayev was born in Grozny on September 6, 1885 to the family of a blacksmith/gunsmith named Magomet, hence the last name Magomayev. Abdul-Muslim’s brother Malik Magomayev was a musician who always lived in Chechnya and was never called an Azeri. Malik Magomayev authored a dance melody Shamil Lezginka which is well-known in Chechnya.

In 1960s young Muslim Magomayev even lived in Grozny for a while. He resettled in Baku quite inadvertently: he went to Azerbaijan for holidays, where he was invited to Komsomol central committee and offered to represent Azerbaijan in Helsinki at the International Youth Festival. The young singer won the first prize and then went on to perform successfully at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses in Moscow. Naturally, after such success the communist leaders of Azerbaijan would have never returned him to Chechnya. Using incentives, such as providing him an apartment, they had him settled in Baku.

Chechen singer Magomet Yasayev said he was inspired by Magomayev. Yasayev noted that Muslim Magomayev’s grandfather was born in Chechnya and studied music in Gori, but when he returned to Grozny the Russian imperial authorities did not allow him to teach, because in that period only Christians could work as teachers in Chechnya. Thus Abdul-Muslim Magomayev decided to move to Baku, where the situation was more lenient20. Incidentally, Azerbaijani websites prefer to point out such works written by Abdul-Muslim Magomayev in Soviet period as “On the fields of Azerbaijan” or “Dance of the liberated Azerbaijani woman”, but they never mention his Chechen-themed symphonic pieces. No information can be found in Absheronian websites regarding his works “A Chechen Dance” or “Songs and Dances of Chechnya”.

Renowned Chechen dancer Mahmud Esambayev once asked Muslim Magomayev, why he introduces himself as an Azerbaijani (although not always – H.N.).

“I was born and lived whole my life in Azerbaijan,” responded the singer.

“So what? If I were born in a garage, that wouldn’t mean I’m a car,” Esambayev joked.21

Yet these facts mean nothing to Azeri propaganda, which once and for all labelled Magomayev as “Azerbaijani” – a hardly comprehensible ethnicity to which Muslim Magomayev had no genetic relationship.

During the World War II, the commander of the 35th Guards Tank Brigade Hazi Aslanov used to utter “shimon” before every battle. It was unknown to many what does “shimon” mean, including to his subordinate Major Stepan Milyutin. Aslanov died in battlefield mere months before the war ended, on January 25, 1945 and the meaning of this word would become known to Milyutin years later. He learned from Davlat Gakhramanov, a Talysh, that “shimon” means “forward” in Talysh language22.

Hazi Aslanov (1910-1945) was born in Talysh-Mughan region, specifically the village of Gamyatuk near Lenkoran and he was also privatized by Baku naming him an Azeri. After the war one of the soldiers of the same tank brigade, Ivan Ogulchanski wrote a book about Major-General, Hero of the Soviet Union Aslanov. In this biographical work it is clearly seen how the writer avoids specifying the ethnicity of Hazi Aslanov. Since 1937 the Talysh identity was banned in the USSR, while the author apparently did not want to write “Azerbaijani”. Hypothetically it is possible that Ogulchanski wrote “Talysh”, but the censorship struck it out. There are a few interesting episodes in the book related to Aslanov’s ethnicity:

“The man with wide shoulders asked him out loud:

‘What is your ethnicity?’

Aslanov responded.” [17, c. 262]:

Ogulchanski does not mention what Aslanov answered specifically.

One of the Ukrainian heroes in the book says to Aslanov: “Long live friendship between Ukrainians and Azerbaijan [17, c. 99]. The fact that it is said “Azerbaijan” and not “Azerbaijanis” (which would be more logical), once again shows the equivocal position of Ogulchanski.

In 1985 a movie about commander Aslanov “I loved you more than life” was filmed in Azerbaijan. The film’s protagonist speaks Azerbaijani along with Russian, but also mentions his native Lenkoran, without mentioning his ethnicity. It can be assumed that the film producers left out this sensitive issue. Yet in the film the “shimon” was replaced by Azeri “gyattiq.23

Today they act more self-confidently in Azerbaijan. Just two years ago it was mentioned in the Wikipedia article that Aslanov is Talysh. However, through Azeri propaganda efforts this “redundancy” has been removed and currently Aslanov is presented as exclusively Azerbaijani in this electronic resource. To substantiate this assertion Wikipedia’s Azeri pen-pushers refer to Ogulchanski’s book and even point to the number of page, which however, contains no such wording.24

All these famous people were not Azerbaijanis. Any attempts to find a prominent Azeri in the past are doomed to fail. For instance, Uzeyir Hajibeyov was Daghestani and his brother even wrote under alias Daghestani.

The pinnacle of hijacking foreign people of art and finding oneself in a ludicrous situation was perhaps the sensational thesis of proclaiming Sayat-Nova an Azerbaijani. The new ethnicity of the medieval bard Harutyun Sayatian was invented by Azeri journalist and cultural studies researcher Elchin Alibeyli.25 However he did not clarify how come an “Azerbaijani” was buried in the yard of the Armenian Cathedral of Saint George, Tbilisi, and his gravestone is still there.

According to our observations, Heydar Aliyev can be conditionally considered the first more or less renowned Azerbaijani. Despite all the falsifications there are simply no other prominent (or even notorious) Azerbaijanis who lived earlier.

Conclusion

Let us return to the question of this article’s title – how old is the Azerbaijani nation? Based on the Soviet census, the answer is 75 years, while according to the NKVD paperwork, 74.

Of course, an ethnicity cannot be created by a single census. However, the paperwork of Stalin and Beria dated 1939-1940 can be symbolically deemed as the “birth certificate” of the Azerbaijani ethnicity. After all, it was Stalin who made sure Artsakh is gifted to Azerbaijan (majority of the Caucasus Bureau were against it), and it was Stalin’s decision to “turn” Nizami into an Azeri. In 1937-1938 the NKVD repression machine suppressed the identities of the ethnic groups in Azerbaijan by banishing and killing intellectuals of the Talish, Lezgi, Udi and other peoples, shutting down their newspapers and schools, and “optimizing” hundreds of thousands of people as Azerbaijanis. Dissolution of the Transcaucasian Federation in 1936 and Stalin’s constitution of the same year kicked off the artificial and exaggerated formation of the Azeri identity. Finally, it was in this very NKVD system where Heydar Aliyev made his first career advancements, whom Zardusht Alizadeh has described as “the last representative of Stalin’s political legacy.”

So there is no reason why the mentioned period should not be seen as the birthdate of Azerbaijani nation.

Joseph Stalin was called “Father of Nations” in his time.

At least one nation may call him so at present, too.

P.S. In 1764 Carsten Niebuhr, a German scholar, copied and brought to Germany the Behistun Inscription carved in cuneiforms on a mountain rock in Persia. When it was deciphered later, the following text was read in its 26th paragraph: “Says Darius the king: Dadarshish by name, an Armenian, my subject, him I sent forth to Armenia…”

Behistun Inscription was carved 2500 years ago. At this point it is the oldest known record about Armenians…

1 See: Книга Кавказ Александра Дюма и его впечатление об Азербайджане, irs Heritage, N 2, 2007, http://irs-az.com/pdf/090621161211.pdf

2 Ibid, p. 22։

3 Ibid, p. 23։

4 Mарксизм и национальный вопрос, И.В. Сталин, Просвещение, 1913, NN, 3, 4, 5, http://www.marxists.org/russkij/stalin/t2/marxism_nationalism.htm

5 Ленин и Татарский вопрос, http://www.islamrf.ru/news/culture/legacy/12382/

6 “Says Baku Armenians face extermination”, The New York Times, 03.05.1920.

7 Molotov joldasьn nitqi, Эдэбиjjaт гэзэтти, 08.02.1936, N2, (52).

8 Princess Diana’s Hidden Ancestral Secret Revealed, http://www.abcnews.go.com, June, 14, 2013.

9 English translation from S. Robinson, Persian poetry for English readers: being specimens of six of the greatest classical poets of Persia: Ferdusī, Nizāmī, Sādī, Jelāl-ad-Dīn Rūmī, Hāfiz, and Jāmī, with biographical notices and notes, McLaren & Son, Printers, Glasgow, 1883.

10 See Nikki Kazimova, Fingerprints of a Legend, http://www.tol.org/client/article/22142-fingerprints-of-a-legend.html, Azerbaijani translator Charkaz Qurbanov also stated that Lev Nussimbaum is the author of the book.

11 Суад Рафиев, «Роман Али и Нино сокровище азербайджанской литературы», http://yusif-vezir.narod.ru/meqale/jurnalistskoye_rassledovaniye_ru.html

12 Azerbaijan International, Chamanzaminli’s son Orkhan Vezirov counters Reiss’s tale, p. 140, 2011.

13 Суад Рафиев, «Роман Али и Нино сокровище азербайджанской литературы», http://yusif-vezir.narod.ru/meqale/jurnalistskoye_rassledovaniye_ru.html

14 Kurban Said, Ali and Nino, Trans. Jenia Graman. New York: Anchor, 2000, p. 31

15 Ibid, p. 43

16 Ibid, p. 100

17 Чингиз Гусеинов, «Кто же автор Али и Нино?», Эхо, 9 Октября, 2004.

18 Любовь моя мелодия, Муслим Магомаев, http://www.magomaev.info/book/files/biography.pdf c. 17,

19 И Все таки Муслим Магомаев чеченец, 19.01.2012,

http://mkchr.com/main.mhtml?Part=29&PubID=1820

20 ЖЗЛ: М.Магомаев, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGDu070y5NU

21 Чеченские мотивы Муслима Магомаева, 12.10.2011, http://www.100lichnost.ru/rubrica/31/16706

22“Ази Асланов – генерал Шимон”, "Tolışi Sədo" № 3 (111), see also http://www.talish.info

23 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_auSVa0Mx6c

24 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Асланов,_Ази_Агадович

25 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey3myIafxV0#t=652

References and Literature

1. M. Th. Houtsma (ed.), E. J. Brill’s First Encyclopedia of Islam 1913-1936, reprinted, 1987.

2. P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs et al., Encyclopædia of Islam, 2nd Edition., 12 vols. (vol. 4), Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960-2005.

3. Islam Ansiklopedisi, 1942, as quoted in Rouben Galichian, Clash of histories in the South Caucasus.

4. The Encyclopædia Britannica, 14th edition, 24 vols., London-New York, 1929.

5. The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 1, 2010

6. Энциклопедическiй словарь, томъ 1, С-Петербургъ, 1890.

7. Muslim Peoples: A World Ethnographic Survey, 2nd edition, Greenword Press, Westport, CT, 1984.

8. Александр Дюма, «Кавказ», Тбилиси, 1988, (предисловие Михаила Буянова “O «Кавказе» Дюма”).

9. August Franz L.M. Haxthausen, Transcaucasia. Sketches of the Nations and Races between the Black sea and the Caspian, London, 1854.

10. Антон Деникин, Очерки Русской Смуты, том 4, Вооруженные силы Юга России: Распад Российской империи. Октябрь 1918 – Январь 1919. Харвест, Минск, 2002.

11. В.Н. Земсков, ГУЛАГ (историко-социологический аспект), Социологические исследования. 1991, N6, с.10-27; 1991, N7, с.3-16.

12. Арис Казинян, Полигон «Азербайджан», Ереван: Центр общ. связей и информ., 2011.

13. William Bacher, Nizâmî's Leben und Werke, und der Zweite Theil des Nizâmî'schen Alexanderbuches, Leipzig, 1871.

14. The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, 29 vols., Cambridge, England, University Press, New York, 1911.

15. Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: solving the mystery of a strange and dangerous life. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006

16. Azerbaijan International, Chamanzaminli’s son Orkhan Vezirov counters Reiss’s tale, 2011.

17. Иван Огульчанский, «Ази Асланов», Москва, Военное Издательство МО, 1960г.


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