Becoming Azerbaijani through Language: On the Impact of Calil Məmmədquluzadə’s Anamin Kitabi

Abstract

As a unifying principle in nationalism, language has played a crucial role in the development of western European nations, foreign-dominated countries in Eastern Europe, as well as in the borderland regions of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. During the nineteenth century, linguistic nationalism spread from European megacities to these distant borderlands. In this dissemination, intellectuals, mostly Turcophone Muslims from the Russian Empire who circulated between St Petersburg, Crimea, Kazan, Baku, Istanbul, and Paris, played a key role. For one of the co-founders of modern Turkish nationalism, Yusuf Akcura, who was born in Simbirsk, studied in Istanbul, and spent years in exile in Paris, a language was “the most important cultural phenomenon” (Akcura 1998: 19). Turkish sociologist Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924), in his programmatic work Turkculugun esaslarl (The Principles of Turkism, 2006 [1923]), promoted the idea of establishing the Istanbul dialect of Turkish as the principal language of the Turks and pleaded for the purging of Arabic and Persian loanwords from Ottoman Turkish (Gokalp 2006: 93–100). The Azerbaijani-Turkish entangled intellectual Ali Bey Huseynzade stressed the linguistic bonds between the predominantly Muslim Turks and Christian Hungarians in his verse “Turan,”1 which significantly inspired Turanist and pan-Turkist circles among Turkish intellectuals during World War I and beyond.