The Voice of Mirza Xazar

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Plaut

 

 

 

It is one of the great ironies of the 21st century that anti-Zionists and anti-Semites on both the Left and the Right, have returned to racialist arguments against Jews that most of us thought had died out after World War II.

 

 

 

One of the most bizarre aspects of this "re-racializing" of anti-Semitism is the role played by the Khazar myth.

 

 

 

 

The newly fashionable Khazar mythology holds that modern day Ashkenazim, and especially the European leadership of the Zionist movement, are not Jews at all in the racial sense, but rather descendents from non-Jewish Khazars; therefore, the Khazar "theorists" claim, Zionists and Israelis have no legitimate claims to the Land of Israel.
It would be hard to exaggerate how widespread the misuse of the Khazar myth is among those seeking to delegitimize Israel and Jews today. A recent investigation showed nearly 30,000 websites using the Khazar "theory" as a bludgeon against Israel and Zionism.

 

 

 

Some two hundred websites claim to describe a cabal known as the Khazarian Zionist Bolsheviks (KZV). Neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial organizations and websites are particularly fond of the Khazar myth. It is also growing in popularity among left-wing anti-Zionists.

Arab and Islamofascist propagandists have long bandied about the Ashkenazim as Khazars theory and Iran's genocidal leaders adore it. Al-Jazeera has been using the Khazar story to urge a worldwide Christian religious war against the Khazar pseudo-Jewish imperialists.

Groups promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion often cite the nefarious role of Khazars as "proof" of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy (I counted 700 such websites). And even Jewish anti-Zionist cranks like Alfred M. Lilienthal and the Swedish "Israel Shamir" have used the Khazar myth to attack Zionism.

 

 

 

 

Why are these various groups suddenly interested in a rather esoteric and archaic group of people in Central Asia that disappeared nearly a millennium ago?
The answer is very simple.

 

 

 

 

According to the Khazar theory of the new anti-Semites, most Jews today, particularly Ashkenazi Jews, are not racially Jews at all but descendents from the Turkic tribe of Khazars, whose ruling class and parts of its rank and file population converted to Judaism in the 8th or early 9th century CE. Hence, argue the racialists, Ashkenazi Jews have no rights to live in the racially Semitic Middle East and especially not in the Land of Israel.

 

 

 

Fact and Legend

 

 

 

For Jews, the history of the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism is best known from essays in The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, a medieval book composed by the great Spanish poet and philosopher Judah Ha-Levi.

 

 

 

Only part of the book actually deals with the Khazar kingdom, about which little was known, and the historic claims about them in the book are not considered fully reliable.

In any case, The Kuzari purports to report the debates at the Khazar royal court that supposedly led to the Khazar elite's conversion to Judaism. Other senior Jewish officials in the Spanish Muslim regimes actually corresponded with the Khazar kingdom - most notably Cordova Rabbi Hasdai ibn Shaprut (whose letters have survived). And the great Iraqi sage Saadia Gaon is believed to have maintained correspondence with Jews in the Khazar kingdom.

It is commonly thought that part of the motivation for the Khazars' conversion was to establish political neutrality for the Khazar kingdom, which faced potential threats from the powers of both Christendom and Islam.

 

 

 

The Khazars themselves left no documentary records. The Arab historian ibn Fadlan wrote about them, but he did so two centuries after the conversions to Judaism had occurred. Some Jews, having sought refuge from Byzantine persecutions, probably lived in the Khazar kingdom long before the conversion of the royalty there.

 

 

 

One ironic historical twist is that the Khazars contributed to the Cyrillic alphabet, in which Russian and some other Slovak languages are written. Saint Cyril came to Khazaria in 860 in an attempt to convert the Khazars to Christianity. Since the Hebrew of the Khazars and Greek were the main alphabets known to St. Cyril and the early Slavs, they borrowed from both.

 

 

 

Western interest in the Khazars was stimulated largely by the 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler, a writer better known for his lifelong battles against totalitarianism in all its forms. Koestler's book was largely based on the earlier book The History of the Jewish Khazars, by the historianD.M. Dunlop.

 

 

 

Dunlop rejected the idea that large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews could trace their origins to the Khazars, but not so Koestler. By grossly and sensationally exaggerating the role and numbers of Khazar descendents among European Jewry, Koestler - who was a strong Zionist - inadvertently provided today's racialist anti-Semites with all the ammunition they could want, and many of them frequently cite his book as the basis for their racialist denunciations of Israel.

 

 

 

A number of more serious books about Khazars are now on the market, including The Jews of Khazaria by Kevin Alan Brook. Rabbi Bernard Rosensweig was one of the leading figures in debunking the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi Jewish origins. Writing in Tradition (16:5, Fall 1977, pages 139-162), he dismissed it as "wobbly scholarly foundations without historical support."

 

 

 

Likewise, the Swedish archaeologist Bozena Werbart, an expert on the Khazars, wrote: "In the Khazar kingdom, Koestler wanted to see the origin of the eastern European Jewry. Nevertheless, all the historical and linguistic facts contradicted his theories."
As The Encyclopedia of Judaism (1989) emphatically states, "The notion that Ashkenazi Jewry is descended from the Khazars has absolutely no basis in fact."

 

 

 

What Became of the Khazars

 

 

 

The actual Khazar kingdom was partly subjugated by the early Russians in the 10th century, and whatever was left was annihilated as a result of the Mongol invasions of Central Asia.

What exactly became of the Khazar Jews is simply not known. Those who retained their Judaism probably integrated themselves into other Jewish communities around the world. Some groups of Khazars joined the Magyar invasion into what became Hungary and may have merged with local Jews already living in those lands; indeed, archeologists have found Jewish stars in the remains of Hungarian Khazar villages.

 

 

 

Small groups of Khazar mercenaries probably found refuge in other places. Most likely the largest integration of Khazar Jews among other Jews took place in Iran and Iraq, the large communities closest to the Khazar kingdom and with whom close ties had been maintained. (An urban legend holds that red-haired Jews are descended from Khazars, though that could hardly explain King David, not to mention Esau. Arthur Koestler claimed many were blond with blue eyes.)

 

 

 

In any case, Khazar political existence ended a thousand years ago.

 

 

 

So what are we to make of the Khazar myth concerning Ashkenazi Jews and their supposed lack of legitimate claims to Israel due to their Khazar origins? The greatest irony is that even if the entire Khazar theory of Ashkenazi Jews were correct - and virtually none of it is correct - it would be entirely irrelevant. Judaism has never defined Jews on racial grounds. Anyone from any race is welcome as a convert to Judaism as long as he or she is sincere.

The biblical Israelites themselves were already a racial hodgepodge. They absorbed the "mixed multitude" that left Egypt together with them at the time of the Exodus. There are biblical references to Jews of different racial features, including the black-skinned Shulamit mentioned in the Song of Songs.

 

 

Jews always defined themselves in religious, ethnic-national and at times linguistic terms, but never along racial lines. If all Ashkenazi Jews were indeed converted Khazars, as the racial anti-Zionists claim, they would be no less legitimately Jews - and, as such, would have the same legitimate claims to the Jewish homeland as any other group of Jews. (Given the traditional Jewish deference to righteous converts, maybe more so.)

Pseudo-History and Poppycock

 

 

 

The actual details of the Khazar theory concerning European Jewry are simply pseudo-history and crackpot poppycock.

 

 

 

Jews already lived in Europe a thousand years before the Khazar kingdom was formed. There are no genetic markers or indicators at all showing that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Turkic tribes. In fact, there exists considerable genetic evidence showing that European Jews are closer to Levantine and Syrian Arabs than to Central Asians.
After the Mongol invasion most Khazars probably assimilated into the Jewish communities of Iran and Iraq, which of course eventually emerged as important Sephardic centers, formed mainly of Jews with Semitic racial characteristics, descended from migrants and exiled Jews from the Land of Israel. In any case, there are more "Semitic" Sephardic Jews in Israel today than there are European Ashkenazi Jews. And if the Khazars looked Turkic, how on earth could they give Ashkenazi Jews a European complexion?

 

 

 

There are other problems. If all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from converted Khazars, why are there Cohens and Levis among them? One inherits the status of a Cohen (priest) or Levite from one's father. Descendants of converts through the male line can never be a Cohen or a Levite.

 

 

 

And why are there no Khazar surnames among Ashkenazim, or Khazar names for towns in Europe where Jews lived? And why did most Ashkenazi communities speak variations of Yiddish rather than Turkic?

 

 

 

As mentioned, the popularity of the Khazar myth among anti-Semites represents a return of modern anti-Jewish bigotry to the racialism of the 1930's and earlier.

Nearly every anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi website denounces Zionists and Israelis as "Khazars." Web chat lists in which Jews defending Israel are dismissed as "Khazar usurpers" are too numerous to count.

 

 

 

The racialism once again in vogue holds that Jews would only have legitimate claims to the right of self-determination in their homeland if they were appropriately Semitic from a racial point of view. Palestine is part of the Semitic racial lebensraum and those who do not possess the correct pure racial markings have no business being there. Racial purity is suddenly the new basis for national rights.

 

 

I discovered scores of neo-Nazi websites claiming that "Khazar Zionists" were really behind the 9/11 attacks. I found thousands of websites claiming that "Khazar Jew-pretenders" are in a conspiratorial league with Freemasons, the Vatican, the Illuminati and others to control the world.

 

 

Khazar conspiracists get nuttier by the day; a widely cited Ku Klux Klan website claims that the pro-Israel evangelist Pat Robertson is really a Khazar Jew. The neo-Nazi American Patriots Friends Network claims Khazars are themselves descended from the Magog race and secretly control America.

 

 

If we take the racialist argument to its logical conclusion, Palestinian Arabs have the right to exercise all claims to sovereignty in Israel due to their being true racial Jews, while Zionists are non-Jewish Khazars - racial imposters and usurpers.
To make things even sillier, Arabs themselves are, of course, a mix of racial strains, with a particularly large Caucasian component thanks to Arab intermixing with Spanish and Italian Europeans, Caucasian Berbers, Vandals, Goths, and even some Vikings.
The racialist delegitimizing of Zionism as "Khazar imperialism" is smack inside the same insane asylum with the "Jesus was a Palestinian" theory and the claim that all real Jews (from a racial point of view) converted to Islam after the Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century and so became Palestinian Arabs.

 

One can also find countless websites claiming those things.

 

 

Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press and the new Jewish Press Blog (www.thejewishpress.blogspot.com), is a professor at the University of Haifa. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.

March 31 - A century-long Day of Sorrow

Azerbaijan By Adil Baguirov, Ph.D.

In Azerbaijan, the March 31 is known as the Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis, referring to the tragic events that started on March 30, 1918, and continued until April 1.

It is widely recognized, that the 20th century is the most violent, vicious and turbulent 100 year period of history, indeed known as the Century of Genocides.

It has been estimated, that some 200 million people have died due to the inhumanity of men towards each other. The word “genocide”, coined only after the WWII, has forever entered our daily lexicon, to give the legal definition to the worst crimes against humanity, massacres, slaughters and ethnic cleansing. Certainly, genocide represents a policy, a campaign carried out against a group of people over a period of time and consisting of otherwise seemingly isolated massacres and bloodshed.

In Azerbaijan, the March 31 is known as the Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis, referring to the tragic events that started on March 30, 1918, and continued until April 1. A Yale University history professor F. Kazemzadeh, in one of the first comprehensive scholarly studies of the region in the US, wrote: “This three-day massacre by Armenians is recorded in history as the “March Events” and thousands of Muslims, old people, women and children lost their lives” (“The Struggle for Transcaucasia”, New York, 1951, p. 69).

Another distinguished professor of history at the University of Louisville, was even more blunt: “From 30 March to 1 April 1918, the Tatars [as Azerbaijanis were sometimes called] were attacked. Almost half of the Muslim population of Baku was compelled to flee the city.… Between 8,000 and 12,000 Muslims were killed in Baku alone.…” (Justin McCarthy, “Death and Exile. The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821-1922”, Darwin Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995, p. 214).

“The truth is that the Armenians, under the guise of Bolshevism, rushed on the Muslims and massacred during a few frightful days more than 12,000 people, many of whom were old men, women, and children,” – continues Kazemzadeh. “The March Events, as this episode became known to history, touched off a series of massacred all over Azerbaijan. Brutalities continued for weeks…. Every Azerbaijani whom the Dashnak bands could catch was killed. [T]he “civil war” degenerated into a massacre, the Armenians killing Muslims irrespective of their political affiliation or social and economic position.”

For more scholarly accounts of the events, one might turn to the books by Tadeusz Swietochowski, professor of history at Manmouth University (“Russia and a Divided Azerbaijan”, Columbia University Press, 1995), or Michael Smith, professor of history at Purdue University (“The Russian Revolution as National Revolution: Tragic Deaths and Rituals of Remembrance in Muslim Azerbaijan (1907–1920),” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 49, 2001).

However, some estimates put the number of massacred Azerbaijani victims in this particular event as high as 30,000. There are a multitude of other references, shocking us with the extent of the mass-murder of the days: from the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, where he briefly mentions the March 1918 events, by saying that the commissar S.Shaumyan, an ethnic Armenian leader of the Bolshevik and Dashnak forces, and the chief architect of the genocide throughout Azerbaijan, “turned Baku into an Armenian operated henhouse [slaughterhouse]”, to a letter from a British officer serving in Baku during the massacres of 1918 to his Whitehall superiors in which he refers to “river of blood” flowing down the streets and bodies dumped from ships into the Baku Bay by Armenians.

In his recent book, researcher R.Mustafayev writes that on August 31, 1918, for the first and last time the Armenian government itself has declared that only in one year Armenians killed 400 thousand Azerbaijanis, 120 thousand Georgians, 15 thousand Turks and others – all just in South Caucasus. In spite of the fact that government of Armenia has probably reduced the statistical data, this self-incriminating evidence bears a lot of weight (“Crimes of Armenian terrorist and bandit formations against the humanity {XIX-XXI centuries}”, Baku, 2002).

In reference to various attempts to downplay or even conceal the slaughter, Kazemzadeh notes, “No matter how obvious historical facts may be, there are always means of twisting them to suit a particular theory. The March Events are exactly such case. The facts are generally known, - there are enough of them to satisfy the most exacting historian, - and yet there is hardly a book which gives an impartial account or an objective evaluation of the great massacres.”

Nonetheless, revelations directly from Armenian sources abound, with the most typical self-confession being: “I killed Muslims by every means possible. Yet it is sometimes a pity to waste bullets for this. The best way is to gather all of these dogs and throw them into wells and then fill the wells with big and heavy stones, as I did. I gathered all of the women, men and children, threw big stones down on top of them. They must never live on this earth” (A. Laloyan, “Revolutsionniy Vostok” (Revolutionary East), No 2-3, Moscow, 1936. Quoted from Richard Hovannisian, “Armenia on the Road to Independence”, Berkeley, 1967, p. 41-42). Additional accounts could be found from Agop Zahoryan, Mikael Kaprilian, Ohanus Appressian, Sahak Melkonian, K. S. Papazian, and Leonard Ramsden Hartill, to name a few.

“As the Armenians found support among the Reds (who regarded the Tartars [Azerbaijanis] as a counter-revolutionary elements) the fighting soon became a massacre of the Tartar population” (W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, “Caucasian Battlefields”, Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 481).

Writes the Rear-Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner (Ambassador) in Istanbul, “While the Dashnaks [Armenian extremist party] were in power [1918-1920] they did everything in the world to keep the pot boiling by attacking Kurds, Turks and Tartars [Azerbaijanis]; by committing outrages against the Moslems; by massacring the Moslems; and robbing and destroying their homes. During the last two years the Armenians in Russian Caucasus have shown no ability to govern themselves and especially no ability to govern or handle other races under their power” (U.S. Library of Congress, “Bristol Papers,” General Correspondence Container #34). The Rear-Admiral continues, “I have it from absolute first-hand information that the Armenians in the Caucasus attacked Tartar (Muslim) villages that are utterly defenseless and bombarded these villages with artillery and they murder the inhabitants, pillage the village and often burn the village” (“Bristol Papers”, General Correspondence: Container #32: Bristol to Bradley Letter of September 14, 1920).

After the proclamation of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic (ADR) on 28 May 1918, the “March Massacre” was investigated into by the Government. In 1919 and 1920, the ADR observed 31 March as a national day of mourning. This was the first attempt to make a political assessment of the policy of genocide against Azerbaijanis and of the occupation of the Azerbaijani lands for over a century.

Being unable to commemorate the tragedy during the Soviet years, the March 31 has been re-established in 1998, exactly 80 years after the bloodbath, to commemorate not just that particular massacre, but the policy of genocide carried out since the 19th century and throughout the entire 20th century, with the final act being the Khojaly Massacre (see BT op-ed, http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=2945

The official position of Azerbaijan is that close to a million Azerbaijanis have been massacred in the 20th century as the result of Armenian genocidal campaign. This makes for a total of 2,5 million Azerbaijanis, Turks, Kurds, Georgians and other people who fell victim to the Armenian policies of cleansing the Caucasus for the creation of their state, which was supposed to stretch from the Black sea to the Caspian to the Mediterranean.

Today, Azerbaijan takes serious steps on the path of researching and preventing genocide, educating and outreaching about the history of extermination of its population. The basis is the March 26, 1998 presidential decree re-designating March 31 as the official day of commemoration, on the top of already separately commemorated recent tragedies, such as the Khojaly Massacre (February 25-26) and Black January (January 19-20). Next step has been the recently initiated process of collection of the relevant documents for pursuing the case in the court of The Hague. Moreover, a declaration has been circulated and signed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), entitled “Recognition of the genocide perpetrated against the Azeri population by the Armenians” (PACE Doc. 9066 2nd edition, Written Declaration No. 324, 14 May 2001).

Aside from the obligation by the Azerbaijani state to carry on the political assessment of the policy of genocide against Azerbaijanis and of the occupation of the lands, the genocidal campaign can stop only after the Armenian aggression is stopped and all the currently illegally occupied lands of Azerbaijan are liberated.

Adil Baguirov is the founder of Zerbaijan.com -- Virtual Azerbaijan Resources (VAR) website (since 1995), Come.to/Khojaly -- first Khojaly Commemoration Website (since 1997), Habarlar-L Caspian Distribution List, Yeni Dostlar Network, and a frequent contributor on Azerbaijan-related matters. Javid Huseynov, a co-administrator of Habarlar-L and Yeni Dostlar, as well as a Ph.D. candidate, also contributed to this article.

URL: http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=8480

The Political-Ideological Doctrine of the Musavat Party in the Early Twentieth Century

Aydin Balayev

The Musavat party was a leading force in the liberation struggle of the Azeri nation in the early twentieth century, and to a great extent determined the political course of the national movement. Musavat was distinguished from other parties by the mixed social character of its membership, which was a reflection of the common national character of the party. In addition to representatives of the intelligentsia and medium-level people, it also included a significant stratum of working people and peasants and petty and medium bourgeoisie. M.E. Rasulzade, the indisputable leader of the party, emphasized at its second congress Musavat’s common national character and added, “our party is a people’s, but not a class party.”
The party recognized the division of the society into different social classes and groups, but at the same time came out in favor of their partnership and cooperation. This tenet of the party’s philosophy was afterwards reflected in Musavat’s theory of national solidarity. According to this theory, “the harmony of the interests of society and the individual” and “universal welfare” must provide the basis for cooperation. Leaders of the party declared that only “a Government which protects the interests not only of one privileged class but also of the entire population can be regarded as an authentic national Government.” This idea was aimed at achieving the consolidation of diverse social groups in the struggle for national liberation.

The party opposed the nationalization of enterprises and believed that “the full abolition of property in modern society will inevitably lead to the loss of personal initiative among people. With the loss of this factor the world will be deprived of variety and wealth, the development of social life will fall behind, people will again acquire primitive qualities and the world movement will be broken. But at the same time the party leadership stated that property should be protected only to the extent that it benefits the entire society.”

The idea of federalism was one of the basic principles of the party’s political program. The party favored the independent existence of each nation but also demanded close ties between these independent units on the basis of the principle of world federation. The party’s adherence to the idea of federalism is confirmed by the fact that after proclaiming the independence of Azerbaijan, the Musavat leaders forwarded the proposal on the confederation of the Caucasian states. A special resolution of the party’s second congress to this effect pledged: “To recognize the consolidation of the Caucasian republics into a free union of the Caucasian Confederation as desirable and urge the entire Caucasian democracy as well as the Governments of neighboring republics to promote the realization of this idea.”

The ideology of the Musavat party was a synthesis of the ideas of national liberation of the East with the democratic concepts of the West. Reflecting common human values and taking into consideration the historical and cultural traditions of the Azeri nation, Musavat’s leaders worked out their own concept of national development, which in the end, as they planned, would have promoted Azerbaijan’s membership within the family of civilized and developed countries of the world.

The idea of the Turkic community was another basic element of Musavat’s ideology. The idea developed in the nineteenth century when virtually all Turkic nations were in a position of colonial dependence on the European powers. The idea of the Turkic community derived mostly from the commonality of language as well as the shared culture and historical fates of theTurkic nations. The existence of such an idea was a manifestation of the national awakening of the Turkic nations. In its initial formulation, which Rasulzade called a “romantic pan-turanism,” the ideology envisaged the creation of a unified state of Turkic nations. However, events soon showed that this plan was not to be.

Nevertheless “romantic pan-turanism,” challenging colonialism on one side and on the other, the religious-Islamic ideology which at that time dominated the Turkic world, played its progressive role. The masses of the Turkic nation were revolutionized and actively embraced the struggle for national determination and independence.

By the early twentieth century, the time of the emergence of the national movement in Azerbaijan, the period of “romantic pan-turanism” has been already passed. By the way, this movement, which never acquired the form of a concrete political program, did not attract Musavat’s leaders. Rasulzade wrote that it”...was easy to understand that a movement with very contradictory tendencies certainly could not be successful in building the democratic structure of the new Azeri society, which was rising from the ruins of the feudal Middle Ages.”

The process of forming the Azeri nation assured a place for the idea of the Turkic community in the national ideology. Relations of ethnic kinship also played a decisive role in the political life of the Azeri nation. The leaders of Musavat proposed establishing relations between the Turkic nations not on the basis of their tribal identities, but on the basis of the interests of each nation. They renounced a unified Turkic state but maintained that only common interests in the struggle for national liberation and the consolidation of the forces of separate Turkic nations in this struggle could lead to the establishment of active contacts among them. Therefore, this was not a manifestation of panturkism, but rather a joint struggle for real and concrete national ideas.

M.E. Rasulzade stated that, “the leaders of the Musavat party were opposed to romantic pan-turanism.” “Panturanism,” he said, “is a utopia like Lenin’s communism and Magomed’s paradise.” The party recognized a community of national and cultural interests among all Turkic nations, but it regarded their union in a single state as impossible. It above all sought to achieve the liberation of Turkic nations and their transformation into independent states.

Musavat’s ideologists recognized Turkism not as a political, but as a “scientific-philosophical-aesthetic movement” which is a method of struggling for the cultural unification of the Turkic nations. “We are Narodniks in policy and Turkists in Culture!” stated M.E. Rasulzade.

Another important component of the party’s ideology was the idea of the solidarity of Muslim nations and countries. Musavat’s leaders interpreted Islamic solidarity as interaction and mutual assistance in a joint struggle for a common goal: the national liberation of Muslim nations from the colonial yoke of European powers. All this shared nothing in common with panislamism, of which Musavat’s leaders were traditionally accused in Soviet historiography.

Musavat consistently adhered to secular ideas. The party favored the exclusion (or at least the limitation of the activities) of clerics from fields having no direct relation to the performance of religious rites. On the other hand, the party was prepared to use and did use religion as a method of political struggle for national independence. Knowing that the centuries-old religious prejudices of the nation could not disappear within one day, party leaders used Islamic phraseology in their public speeches as a means to promote the struggle for independence and appeal to the most backward segments of the population. The leaders of Musavat understood that the top ranks of the Muslim clergy were being absorbed within the apparatus of the tsarist autocracy, and that top religious leaders were being used by the regime as accomplices in suppressing even moderate manifestations of the ideas of national liberation.

The top clergy disdained the spiritual agencies that were concentrated in its hands, openly interfering in religious politics on the side of the most reactionary forces. Statements by clerics denouncing Musavat as an enemy of Islam testify to the fact. In this connection M.E. Rasulzade said at the Musavat’s first party Congress in October 1917, “When a person enters the mosque, he must forget policy, party and ideology and pray only to God. The clergy must not be engaged in politics at all and the mosque should be neutral in the political struggle.” The principle of separation of church and state in the Azerbaijan Republic, which was initiated by Musavat, confirms the party’s position. Religion was deemed a private affair, thus enabling Azerbaijan to become the first secular state in the Muslim East.

Characterizing the party’s attitude to pan-islamism, M.E. Rasulzade wrote in his work “About Panturanism”: “Historical experience has showed that by giving birth to the theocratic-clerical-reactionary movement on the one hand, and blocking the appearance of national ideology in the Muslim world on the other, panislamism has hindered the awakening of national self-consciousness in these nations, delays their progress and prevents them from becoming independent. Therefore, the process of awakening of national self-consciousness should be strengthened, because it a primary source of any progress, and only the presence of a realized national “I” can be the basis of national independence.”

Thus, based on Turkic and Islamic solidarity, the Musavat party consistently came out in favor of the national independence of Azerbaijan. Musavat was the first Azerbaijani political organization to forward this idea, and for that it incurred the merciless criticism of the right as well as the left forces. The right accused the party of undermining the fundamentals and independence of Islam by “slogans of Azerbaijanism.” The left parties reproached Musavat for demanding the independence of Azerbaijan which “promotes the creation of the Khan-bek Government” and a breakdown between the leaders of the party and a unified revolutionary front of the working people.

The leadership of Musavat was very well aware of the fact that a strong and independent state can be created in Azerbaijan only on the basis of democratic values. It is not accidental that the main slogans of the party were “freedom, independence and democracy.”

Musavat’s leaders believed that a necessary element of democracy is the principle of national equality. The pivotal principle of the national policy was that Azerbaijan is the common motherland of all citizens living on its territory irrespective of their nationality. Musavat’s parliamentary declaration stated: “...freedom of press, speech, conscience, assemblies, unions and all other civil and national rights should be ensured by the law. Azerbaijan must be a free country... There should not be sons and stepsons in Azerbaijan - Armenian, Russian, Jewish, Georgian, German, Polish and other nations must enjoy the rights of cultural -national autonomy pertaining to all citizens of the Azerbaijan Republic.”

The party leader M.E. Rasulzade stressed that “we are approaching our national aspirations, but our desire is not domination over other nations or suppression of other nations. Our ideal is to work quietly and happily and jointly with other nations, to be an equal member of the world community and to try to be a cultural and progressive nation.”

Accusations against Musavat’s leaders, who often stated that “the Russian revolution brought freedom to the Turks of Russia,” of harboring anti-Russian sentiments are also groundless. The core of the party’s policy with regard to Russia is well-reflected in the following words of M.E. Rasulzade: “We do not have hostility toward the Russian nation, on the contrary, we wish only the best. But at the same time we are enemies of Russian imperialism, which took us into its chariot using violence and prevents us from regulating of our life and developing our culture as we would like.” The above-mentioned facts testify to the fact that Musavat was a reformist, national-democratic party occupying a left-centrist position in the national movement.

(http://ourworld.compuserve.com)