Azerbaijan naming controversy

The name of the region north of the Aras River known today as the Republic of Azerbaijan was previously an unrelated entity called Caucasian Albania by ancient Greek geographers and historians.

For instance, Ibn Hawqal, a 10th-century Muslim geographer, draws a map of Azerbaijan and Aran with the Aras River as the natural boundary between these two regions.

In his book, Borhan-e Qati, Borhan Khalaf-e Tabrizi, an author of the 17th century, writes that “Aras is the name of a famous river” that “separates Aran from Azerbaijan.”[12] In the accounts of the 13th-century scholar Yaqut al-Hamawi (which Xavier de Planhol refers to "imprecise and sometimes contradictory information"), Azerbaijan stretched as far as Erzincan in the west.

[2] In Safavi times, the name "Azerbaijan" was applied to all the Muslim-ruled khanates of the eastern Caucasus, alongside the area south of the Aras River.

It resulted in the establishment of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1889 which called for the preservation of all peoples under the Ottoman Empire around the three pillars of Islam, Turkishness, and Caliphate.

The local populace was frequently included under terms such as Türk milleti and Qafqaziya müsalman Xalqi ("the Muslim people of the Caucasus").

After the October Revolution in 1917, when Musavat leaders failed to reach an agreement with Caucasian Bolsheviks, they decided to establish their own government and declare independence.

[20] Some scholars argue that the reason behind choosing the name Azerbaijan over Aran was because of the demands of the Turks (Ottomans who had a profound influence on Musavat leaders).

In a number of seminars at Baku State University in November and December 1924, the distinguished Soviet orientalist Vasily Bartold talked about the purpose suggested by this designation; "however, the term Azerbaijan was chosen, because when the Azerbaijani republic was established, it was supposed that the Persian and this Azerbaijan would form one entity, since they have a very large similarity in the composition of their populations.

According to Ahmad Kasravi, Khiabani’s deputy at the time, the main reason for such a change was to prevent any future claim by the pan-Turkist Ottomans to Iranian Azerbaijan on the basis of the similarity of the names.According to Tadeusz Swietochowski:[28] Although the proclamation restricted its claim to the territory north of the Araz River, the use of the name Azerbaijan would soon bring objections from Iran.

In Teheran, suspicions were aroused that the Republic of Azerbaijan served as an Ottoman device for detaching the Tabriz province from Iran.

Likewise, the national revolutionary Jangali movement in Gilan, while welcoming the independence of every Muslim land as a "source of joy," asked in its newspaper if the choice of the name Azerbaijan implied the new republic's desire to join Iran.

Consequently, to allay Iranian fears, the Azerbaijani government would accommodatingly use the term Caucasian Azerbaijan in its documents for circulation abroad.

[31][33] Official history thought at schools and universities tends to rediscover the separation of the nation when Russo-Persian Wars took place in the early 19th century, and a revisionist interpretation of events to show "constant struggle of the Azerbaijanis for their unity".