Ali Bey Hüseyinzade and His Impact on National Thought in Turkey and the Caucasus

Abstract

Ali Bey Huseyinzade (1864-1940) was one of the most significant Azerbaijani Turkish intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, formulating Azerbaijani national identity around its Turkish, Islamic and territorial dimensions. His solution to the ambiguities of the identity crisis among the Turkic-Muslim people of Azerbaijan was Turkification, Islamization and Europeanization for the Turkic and Muslim peoples of the Caucasus and Ottoman Turkey. Ali Bey Huseyinzade1 was an influential Azerbaijani Turkish intellectual who had a direct impact on Turkish nationalists in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. Huseyinzade’s formulation of the triple processes of Turkification, Islamization and Europeanization spread among the Azerbaijani and Ottoman Turkish intellectuals in their respective countries. This article aims to discuss the ideas of Ali Bey Huseyinzade, especially regarding nationality, religion and Westernism and their impact on intellectuals and policy makers in the Caucasus and Turkey. His physical odyssey from Tsarist Russia into the Ottoman Empire is indicative of his ideological proclivities and his subsequent influence on the Turkish-speaking peoples in the two major empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.