‘Azerbaijan and Aran (Caucasian Albania)’
A study by Enayatollah Reza
Edited with an annotated translation by Ara Ghazarians
Release date: June 25, 2014
176 pp; 14 color maps
$25; ISBN 9781908755186
“Today few are aware that this part of the Turkish-speaking Caucasus in the past had a name other than Azerbaijan. Naming this region of the Caucasus ‘Azerbaijan’ led to the view that Azerbaijan is a country divided into two: one part in the north and the other half south of the Araxes River. First in the Caucasus and then later too in Iran, writers and poets began to elegize, yearn, and lament the ‘division’ of the country into two, and soon expressions of ‘Northern Azerbaijan’ (i.e., the Turkic-speaking region of the Caucasus) and ‘Southern Azerbaijan’ (the real, historical Azerbaijan) began to appear. A number of Soviet historians and writers began using these false and misleading names in their books and articles to such an extent that our younger generation is now completely misinformed and unaware of the real facts and events.”
–Enayatollah Reza
Iran’s late Qajar period saw the major loss of territories in the northeast to Russia during the 19th century, including the region to the north of the Arax River historically known as Aran (Caucasian Albania) and later as Shirvan. In the upheavals that led to the establishment of the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, revolutionaries in Shirvan set up the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918, which later became the Republic of Azerbaijan. This adoption has continued to be a provocative one for the historical bearer of the name, the province of Azerbaijan in Iran.
The prominent Iranian historian Enayatollah Reza (1920–2010) extensively researched the historical geography of Iran and the Caucasus. Here, in Azerbaijan and Aran (Caucasian Albania), he provides a clear picture of the boundaries ancient and modern of the two territories of Azerbaijan to the south and Aran to the north of the Arax River. In the process he documents the advent of the Turks on the world stage and their migration into Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Anatolia.
A chapter in the book discusses the cultural character of these lands at the time of the arrival of the Turks, followed by a response to the Pan-Turkist historians in Turkey and Azerbaijan who claim that the Turkish ethnic element was present in these territories before any others. Other topics in the book include a discussion of the arrival and incorporation of the Turkish language in the Iranian province of Azerbaijan and the Indo-Iranian roots of the people there upon whom Turkish was imposed.
For more information or interview requests, contact Anna Rundgren at Bennett & Bloom Press by calling +44-7961-154590 or e-mailing press@bennettandbloom.com; or visit www.bennettandbloom.com.
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It is highly significant that the term “Azarbaijani” was not used in reference to the Turkic-speakers of the Caucasus. This is corroborated by none other than Joseph Stalin himself, who during his tenure as the chief Communist authority on Russia’s nationalities in Russia, described the peoples of the Caucasus and the south Russian steppes in 1913 as “Tatars,Armenians, Georgians and Ukrainians”. There is no mention of “Azarbaijanis” when referring to Caucasian Turkic-speakers within the Russian empire.
This highly significant book has first been published in Iran in 1980 and since then has gone through eight editions and reprints. It was translated into Armenian by the late Yervand Papazian in Paris and to Russian by Prof. Garnik Asatryan in Yerevan, but this is its first appearance of it in English.
The significance of the book is that an Iranian professor of History, educated in Tehran, Baku and Moscow proves beyond doubt that Azerbaijan and Aran (Caucasian Albania, where the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan is located) have always been two separate countries and peoples. Furthermore, north of the Arax river prior to 1918 there never was a country with the name of Azerbaijan, a name borrowed from the north-western province of Iran.
It is great that the book on Caucasian Albania has been translated into English by Ara Ghazarian whereby most people don’t know that the Azeri Turks are now occupying those lands. Between the Seljuk Turks, the Mongol Turks, & then the Ottoman Turks whom came from Mongolia and devastated the area killing millions of Christian Armenian’s & other Christian People and forcing millions to become Moslems from 1064 A.D. to the present century with not one nation standing up to this Barbaric hoards of Mongols whom are so intermixed with other races. Congratulations on the new edition of this book being translated.
I suspect that the turanist CUP Turks who founded Azerbaijan the nation, named the country ‘Azerbaijan’ as a built-in mechanism for the purpose of more easily grabbing the province of the same name from Iran at some future date as part of their pan-Turkist expansion ideology. That could be accomplished after they also create a fake revolution in Iran and show the world that hey look the Azeris of the Azerbaijan province in Iran are oppressed and need to be ‘liberated’! (a la Cyprus) and the province belongs to Azerbaijan the country which is the “real thing”.
Then we can also understand why Artsakh is so important. The funny thing is, Iran seems to be playing the same game but in reverse, it could work the other way around too, and Iran can claim the rest of its province also needs to be liberated, especially since the Iranian Talysh are a noticeable minority living in the southeast part of Azerbaijan, and whose plans of a new Talyshistan was about to be realized during the NKR war but ultimately abandoned.