[13] American historian Yuri Slezkine also mentions that in 1934 on the First Congress of Soviet Writers the representative of the Azerbaijani delegation called Nizami a Turk from Gyanja.
According to encyclopedic dictionaries published in Russia[15][16][17][18] ,[19] Nizami was a Persian poet and a descendant of city of Qom in central Iran (this fact was subsequently questioned and the contemporary scientists tend to consider Gyanja as his birthplace) .
[22] According to Faik Goulamov after the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in 1936 the newly formed Azerbaijani SSR needed a special history which would on one hand allow distancing the republic from Shiite Iran for avoid suspicions in the counterrevolutionary pan-Islamism and on the other hand to separate the Azerbaijanis from other Turkic people (in the light of the official struggle against pan-Turkism).
[1] Analyzing the sequence of events Tamazishvili comes to a conclusion that the initial idea of recognizing Nizami as an Azerbaijani poet occurred to the First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party M. D. A. Bagirov.
Besides, the attempt to label Nizami as an Azerbaijani could be assessed by the Soviet authorities as a nationalistic act; also objections could be expected on the part of scientists and first of all those from the prominent Leningrad school of Orientalism.
[10] In the same year, the Institute of History of Language and Literature of the Azerbaijani affiliate of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR also started publishing Nizami's works.
[29] On the opening day of the decade the editorial article of Pravda said: Early in the epoch of feudal lawlessness the Azerbaijani nation gave birth to greatest artists.
This was an instruction to all the directive organizations, all the authorities of republican, district and regional levels and in this regard the Academy of Sciences was to say its word without challenging its high scientific standing on this matter.
This was the part quoted by comrade Stalin who managed to grasp with genius scale of his mind and erudition all the outstanding creations in the history of mankind.
[34]Walter Kolarz emphasizes that the final verdict supporting the stance that Nizami was a great Azerbaijani poet, who spoke against the oppressors but was forced to write in a foreign language, was made by Joseph Stalin.
[5] On 16 April, Pravda published a poem on behalf of Baku intelligentsia (Samad Vurgun, Rasul Rza, Suleyman Rustam) expressing gratitude for 'returning' Nizami to Azerbaijan.
Foreigners possessed our Nizami, having ascribed him to themselves,But the nests woven by the poet in the hearts of the faithful are strong.You returned his poems to us, returned his magnitude to usAnd have enlightened the pages of the world with his immortal word (translation from Russian)[35]However, as noted by Tamazishvili, Bertels never mentioned Stalin's role in the question of the 'repatriation' of Nizami; there is no word about Stalin in Russian publications either, including the publications of Azerbaijani authors.
Thus in 1947 the Deputy Chairman of State Planning Committee of Azerbaijan SSR (from 1970 the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Azerbaijan SSR) Ali Ibragimov characterised Stalin's role in promoting the studies of Nizami's literary heritage in the following way: The question of studying Nizami's work at a larger scale in terms of studying his multifaceted and rich heritage was launched by the Soviet scholars in 1939 after our great leader comrade Stalin, an expert in history in general and in the history of the nations of the Soviet Union and in national issues in particular, at his meeting with writers spoke about Nizami and quoted his writings.
[43][44] In May 1939 a special ad hoc committee of the Council of People's Commissars of Azerbaijan SSR was established for preparing and holding the 800th jubilee anniversary of the "great Azerbaijani poet Nizami" which was to take place in 1941.
[10] According to the 'territoriality principle' Nizami, as a native of future Azerbaijan SSR, was to a certain extent a 'poet of Soviet Union' and his image was exploited for ideological purposes in this very sense.
[63] This announcement by Bertels immediately made him an object of politicised criticism which accused him in adopting "false standpoints of Western-European orientalists" and bourgeois cosmopolitanism and for diverging from Marxist–Leninist views on the literature of nations of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
[70] Beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union in the biggest national and biographical encyclopaedias of the world Nizami is recognized as a Persian poet while the Azerbaijani version is not even considered.
[77] According to Shireen Hunter by ascribing Nizami to Azerbaijani literature Altstadt continues the policies of Soviet falsifications of the history of Azerbaijani-Iranian relations.
[78] Reviewing the concept of the synthesis of Turkish and Iranian cultures in Nizami's works Lornejad and Doostzadeh conclude that there are no grounds to consider that this kind of correlation actually exists.
The book provided a detailed examination of the question of Nizami's identity and the process of his politicization which received a positive criticism from a number of famous Orientalists.
[86][87] The head of the Iranian Philology Department and the dean of the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University I. M. Steblin-Kamensky, speaking of this monument characterises the description of Nizami as an Azerbaijani poet as a fruit of nationalist tendencies and as an "outright falsification".
[10] According to Sergei Rumyantsev and Ilham Abbasov in modern Azerbaijan Nizami has occupied a firm place along with many other heroes and cultural figures from Dede Korkut to Haydar Aliyev, serving as an example for today's youth.
[94][95][96][97] In 2011 making a speech on the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliev declared that no one in the world doubts about Nizami being an Azerbaijani poet and that this can easily be proved.
The territorial principle was extended to all aspects of national histories, not only in space but also in time: 'Urartu was the oldest manifestation of a state not only on Armenian soil but throughout the whole Union (and, therefore, implicitly the earliest forerunner of the Soviet state)', 'Nezami from Ganja is an Azerbaijani Poet', and so on.The attempt to 'annex'an important part of Persian literature and to transform it into 'Azerbaidzhani literature' can be best exemplified by the way in which the memory of the great Persian poet Nizami (1141—1203) is exploited in the Soviet Union.
In a talk with the Ukrainian writer, Mikola Bazhan, Stalin referred to Nizami as 'the great poet of our brotherly Azerbaidzhani people'who must not be surrendered to Iranian literature, despite having written most of his poems in Persian.«The partisans of classical oriental studies were also made to take refuge in the hoary past.
But this did not prevent the introduction of such limitations into the blueprint for research.So in studying oriental literature, scholars looked above all for indications of the transformation apparently experienced by the peoples of the East within the socialist context.
And as analysis of literary works did not yield sufficiently convincing proof, recourse was made to fortuitous facts of history like the birth place or residence of an author.
// However, Siavash Lornejad and Ali Doostzadeh, in their book entitled On the Modern Politicization of the Persian Poet Nezami Ganjavi, have noticed the vulgarity of the claim and have traced it back to the ideologically inspired writings on Nezami Ganjavi done by some scholars of the Soviet era.This was done to distance the Turkic groups from Islam, as well as to instill in them the pride in a glorious, albeit fictional, national identity by claiming the Persian or Byzantine heritage as their own.
Although an authentic portrait of the poet did not exist, in accordance with Muslim norms, the portrait in question met Baghirov's requirements, and has ever since been reproduced in all Azeri textbooksThe fact that numerous quatrains of some poets (e.g. Amir Šams-al-Din Asʿad of Ganja, ʿAziz Šarvāni, Šams Sojāsi, Amir Najib-al-Din ʿOmar of Ganja, Badr Teflisi, Kamāl Marāḡi, Šaraf Ṣāleḥ Baylaqāni, Borhān Ganjaʾi, Elyās Ganjaʾi, Baḵtiār Šarvāni) are mentioned together like a series tends to suggest the author was in possession of their collected works.
Nozhat al-mājales is thus a mirror of the social conditions at the time, reflecting the full spread of Persian language and the culture of Iran throughout that region, clearly evidenced by the common use of spoken idioms in poems as well as the professions of some of the poets.