FROM NONSENSE TO NATIONHOOD: A DANGEROUS TRAJECTORY OF AZERBAIJANI NATIONALISM

PART I. MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE: MODERN NATIONALISM AND ISLAMIC LAW

"... This culture was dominated by the Islamic conception of Holy War or ghaza. By God's command, the ghaza had to be fought against the infidels' dominions, dar al-harb (the abode of war), ceaselessly and relentlessly until they submitted. According to the Shari'a, the property of the infidels, captured in these raids, could be kept as booty, their country could be destroyed, and the population taken into captivity or killed ..."

(Halil Inalcik, "The Emergence of the Ottomans," Cambridge History of Islam)

" ... The Turk is the only master in his country. Those who are not pure Turks have one right in this country: the right to be servants, the right to be slaves ..."

(Turkish Minister of Justice. Newspaper Milliet, 30 September 1930) 

Another major difference between the two cases lies in the fact that Nagorno Karabakh was a Christian autonomy within Muslim Azerbaijan, while Kosovo is a mostly Muslim autonomy within Christian (Orthodox) Serbia-Montenegro. The religious convictions of ethnic groups in the Balkans and the Caucasus have always played a role that not only emotionally but also politically and legally colored relations between majority and minority groups of the population.

This is especially important with regard to the unique path that characterizes the origin and current stage of development of the young and unstable Azeri nationalism. It was that path that made the Azerbaijani state conceptually capable of committing the acts of genocide and convinced Nagorno Karabakh that, in order to avoid annihilation, it had no choice other than to revive its own state.[1] In this respect, Azerbaijan is different from Iran and most Arab states where traditional attitudes toward Christian minorities are not burdened with racist biases.

One of the most important things to know about the Karabakh conflict is that Nagorno Karabakh is a disputed territory not because its history or culture are "complex," "mixed" and therefore can be claimed by Armenians and Azeris alike. The essence of the dispute is that Armenians and Azeris apply different criteria in determining which ethnic group is the "legitimate owner" of Nagorno Karabakh. Christian Armenians push their point appealing to their demographic preponderance in the region, the history of Nagorno Karabakh's almost uninterrupted tradition of Armenian statehood, and thousands of monuments of Armenian material culture scattered across Nagorno Karabakh. In contrast, Muslim Azeris claim Nagorno Karabakh on the basis of an inexplicit religious prejudice hidden behind conventional nationalist rhetoric.

The early history of the Caucasus and Asia Minor demonstrates that the islamization of migrating Eastern Caspian Turkic colonists, ancestors of today's Azeris and Turks, transformed their permanent economic conflict with the more advanced civilizations of indigenous settled Christian cultivators into a religious conflict.[2] More specifically, the pre- and post-Soviet Azeri idea that the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh cannot form any territorial autonomy and, moreover, an independent state for their own is partly rooted in the earlier Muslim stereotype about the relations between Christian and Muslim communities within the parameters of traditional Islamic law.[3]  

The tradition of Islamic law, which has been shaping relations between different religious groups for centuries, was not fully eradicated with the establishment of a secular state in Azerbaijan. Detached from its religious roots by the tide of modernization, it survived in the form of secularized popular beliefs, while being de-formalized and pushed to the margins of the legal framework of the state. But most importantly, in Azerbaijan as well as in Turkey a renegade version of the European concept of the nation-state was fused with the residues of the Islamic political tradition into a single whole.

Islamic law stipulates that Christians within a Muslim state are endowed with protected religious freedom but are afforded only a limited set of political rights. Should the members of the Christian community transcend the specified frontiers of the Muslim-defined legitimate conduct, they automatically place themselves in internal opposition with the Islamic community (or communities), called ummah, and may come under the threat of "jihad" by the Islamic state structure. The jihad or "holy war" targets the whole non-Muslim community by the ummah-state, particularly in cases interpreted as the confessional minority’s questioning or challenging the Islamic state’s legitimacy and territorial integrity.

On the other hand, a version of the European concept of the nation-state, reinforced by the Soviet Union's "nativization" and ethnic homogenization policies, holds a nation-state as being "of" and "for" a particular ethnic group. Thus, Azeri nationalism is developing under the influence of two convergent paradigms: one, a traditional Muslim stereotype, the other, a modern and secular nationalist tendency. Both paradigms reflect assumptions that deny the political rights for ethno-religious minorities.

The Islamic image of non-Muslims, in its pure form, is devoid of violent implications. There are many examples when Christian and Jewish communities prospered in Islamic states, profitably coexisting with their Muslim countrymen. Azerbaijan, however, represents a special case.

The interfusion of religious and nationalistic political paradigms in Azerbaijan resulted in cataclysms and produced the acts of genocide against the Armenian population of the region, prompting Nagorno Karabakh to resort to its ultimate self-defense. The denial of political autonomy for the Christian ethnic community in this case, something that stems from the residual Islamic legal stereotype and is reinforced with the legitimization and justification of anti-minority violence in cases of Christian "misbehavior," in the Azeri model is intermarried with the modern nationalist idea of the righteousness of cultural and political domination of the ethnic majority over an ethnic minority (even in cases when an ethnic minority constitutes a demographic majority).

As time passed, Azeri anti-Christian hate culture mutated into a well-structured, self-sufficient, and self-perpetuating set of nationalist stereotypes. With the ascent of the era of ethnicity-centered nation-states, Azeri nationalism acquired racist overtones, and Islamic law was no longer needed for the sustainability of its ideological coherence. However, a washed-out spiritual link of this hate culture to the religion-derived legitimacy remained, and,  happily equipped with the God-undersigned mandate for violence, Azerbaijan turned its post-Soviet nation-state-building effort into a truly hell-raising experience, both for itself and, moreover, for its Christian natives.

While Islamic law restricts the political rights of Christians and Jews, it does not prevent them from practicing their religions. The nationalist deviation from this principle in Azerbaijan could be explicated by the fact that official Baku has been suppressing religious freedom on the territory of Nagorno Karabakh from the first days of its arbitrary incorporation in the newly-invented republic of "Azerbaijan." In this respect, the contrast with Kosovo is striking: even before the collapse of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia there were hundreds of mosques operating in the Autonomous Region of Kosovo, which enabled Kosovar Albanians to practice Islam freely. With respect to the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, it was the only territory in the USSR without a single functioning church; this at a time when Nagorno Karabakh's population was 95% Christian (by 1989 reduced to 77% in the course of Azeri demographic manipulations).[4] Azerbaijan conveniently exploited Soviet atheistic bias and, with Nagorno Karabakh's 186 standing churches and monasteries remaining idle from 1931 to 1989, its Armenian population was effectively barred from practicing Christianity.[5] At the same time, Nagorno Karabakh's Azeri colonists had at their disposal at least one of two ever-built Persian mosques in the city of Shushi.

As Azerbaijan adopted a secular tradition, posing as a country orienting itself towards Western-derived models of the nation-state, Azeri efforts to "historicize" their nationalism stem from a desire to hide its Islamic component from the eyes of international public opinion, while showing off its leftover quasi-Western elements. This is why Azeris try to coat the core Islamic biases of their nationalism into ideological rhetoric that distinguishes the modern European nationalist movements. Such rhetoric embraces an array of emblematic topics, which range from a preoccupation with folk culture to calls for ethnic cleansing to territorial claims from neighbors on historical grounds. Not surprising, as long as the true historical facts barely support myths invented by Azeri nationalists, the latter try to re-write history and fabricate facts of the past.

Modern nationalist rhetoric is also conveniently employed by Azeris to disguise the Islamic and nomadic origins of their specific attitude towards ethnic territoriality, an approach indicative for those Turkic and Muslim nomadic formations that migrated in the Middle Ages from the Central Asia and Eastern Caspian to the Caucasus and Asia Minor. This position fuses a nomadic stereotype of ethnic or tribal "ownership" of a certain territory with an Islamic bias, which bestows political legitimacy of such "ownership" only to Muslims.[6] In other words, once Azeri pastoral tribesmen — no matter how long — bring their sheep to a certain terrain, initially owned by a non-Muslim, it effectively becomes an "Azeri land" from that point on and for centuries to come.  From that perspective, Azeri claims to Artsakh/Karabakh as to "an Azeri land" are comparable to the claims of some Turkish ultranationalists that Serbia, Iraq, Western China, or even Greece — once parts of Ottoman Empire or sites of Turkic pastoral activities — are, in fact, "Turkish lands."

Contemporary Turkey presents an example of a nation-state where European and Islamic nationalist traditions are explosively mixed together. In the Turkish state model all Turkey's citizens are declared as "Turks" not only from the citizenship-related point of view but also from the ethno-cultural perspective. Cultivating non-Turkic ethnic cultures in Turkey is restricted or simply prohibited, and those citizens or groups who openly question their cultural "Turkishness" can be denied political rights and harassed by law enforcement agencies. As long as the young and rapidly unfolding Azerbaijani nationalism increasingly comes under the influence of the conflict-breeding Turkish model of the nation-state, it holds little promise to promote peace between Azerbaijan's Turkic Muslim majority and its Christian natives in the longer run.

The teleology of the Turko-Azeri model of the nation-state presupposes either forcible assimilation of ethnic minorities or their expulsion from the territory of the state, in the event when minorities resist assimilation and, moreover, favor territorial self-government. The Armenian Genocide that peaked during World War I, massacres of the Assyro-Chaldeans and the later expulsion of the Greeks, during the drive to transform the plural Ottoman Empire into a monoethnic Turkey, removed entire peoples from their ancestral homelands and erased most evidence of their material and spiritual culture.[7] However, in contrast to the collapsed ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, Turkish genocidal campaigns in the 19th-20th centuries in Western Armenia, Balkans and Asia Minor as well as Azeri massacres of the Caspian Christians in 1905 and 1918-1920 were tremendous "success stories," examples of unpunished crimes against humanity. In 1939, instructing his officers to kill Polish woman and children, "relentlessly and without compassion," Adolf Hitler assured them that history would not judge them harshly; after all, he said, "who remembers now the annihilation of the Armenians?"[8]  

The almost complete destruction of Christian communities on the territory of today's Turkey is a grim reminder to the Christians of Azerbaijan that a similar fate awaits them by the rising tide of Azerbaijani nationalism, which officially models itself on Turkish nationalism.[9]

Predictably enough, as soon as it became possible, Azerbaijan hastily disbanded the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region and issued a decree which partitioned its constituent Armenian-populated districts, gerrymandering and reformulating their constituent parts to the larger adjacent regions of Azerbaijan proper, located beyond Nagorno Karabakh's borders. The partition and redistricting of Nagorno Karabakh's territory was aimed to alter the demographic balance of the region, whereby the native Armenian population would become reduced to a demographic minority in these newly created, larger administrative entities. Fortunately, these designs never materialized, since the Azeri attempt of launching genocide against the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh was decisively defeated. This ended the 70-year-long parasitic practices of the Azerbaijani state in the land of Artsakh - Nagorno Karabakh.

The troubled existence and tragic fate of aboriginal Christians — Armenians, Udins and Christian Tats — in both pre-Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan is the example of how, in some particular cases, the otherwise benign and non-violent Islamic image of non-Muslims not only successfully survived the challenge of modernity, but was twisted around and destructively exploited by nationalist politicians.[10]