Ahmet Ağaoğlu

Ahmet Ağaoğlu

Ahmet Ağaoğlu also known as Ahmed-bey Aghayev ( Azerbaijani Əhməd-bəy Ağayev ; * 1869 in Şuşa / Russian Empire ; † May 19, 1939 in Istanbul ) was a prominent Azerbaijani - Turkish publicist , journalist , member of parliament and an ideologist of Panturkishism .

education

According to Shissler, Ahmet Ağaoğlu was born in Shusha in Nagorno-Karabakh . His father Mirza Hassan was a wealthy cotton grower from the Kurteli tribe, his mother Taze Khanim was a member of the semi-nomadic Sariji Ali tribe. Unlike the traditional Azerbaijanis, he did not visit a madrasa , but began his education in 1884 at the Russian school in Shuşa. Then he went to Tbilisi to graduate from high school , the first large and primarily Christian city in his life. In 1888 he traveled to France to study law at the University of Paris .

There came under the influence of the French orientalists like Ernest Renan and James Darmesteter and got to know Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani . In 1894 he returned to the Caucasus and worked as a French teacher. In Baku he wrote monographs on various subjects. During this time he distanced himself from the Iranian-heavy theses of the French orientalists and turned to Turkish identity.

Ahmet Ağaoğlu was of the opinion that cultural and educational progress should be seen as important for national liberation. The emancipation of women was also part of this process. He was the first Azerbaijani intellectual to advocate equal rights for women. In his 1901 work The Woman in the Islamic World , he claimed that there would be no national progress without free women.

Ahmet Ağaoğlu was elected one of the Muslim representatives of the Transcaucasus in Baku and played an important role in preventing ethnic clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in 1905. Together with Nasib-bey Yusifbeyli, Ahmet Ağaoğlu founded the Difai Committee in Gəncə . In 1917 the committee merged with the Turkish Federalist Party and the Müsavat Partiyası into one party.

Ağaoğlu in the Ottoman Empire

1908 fled because of a possible conviction to the Ottoman Empire , where the Young Turks had overthrown the Sultan and reintroduced the Ottoman constitution . There he played an important role in the pan -Turkish movement alongside other Turkish-Muslim refugees from Russia such as Yusuf Akçura and Hüseyinzade Ali. Ahmet Ağaoğlu became the author of the magazine Türk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland) and a member of the Türk Ocağı Association . In 1915 he became an Ottoman deputy on the Committee for Unity and Progress for Afyonkarahisar and advocated an expansionist Ottoman Empire that would unite all Turkish peoples. The Ottoman Empire went to side of the Central Powers in the First World War and lost the war.

When the Russians lost control of the Caucasus in 1918 after the October Revolution and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan was founded, Ahmet Ağaoğlu returned to his homeland. He accepted Azerbaijani citizenship and was elected to Parliament (Milli Məclis). Ağaoğlu was supposed to be one of the delegates at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 , but was arrested by the British and exiled to Malta as an Ottoman war criminal .

Working in Turkey

During his exile, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was taken over by the Soviets in 1920 and became part of the Soviet Union . Ahmet Ağaoğlu returned to the Ottoman Empire in May 1921, settled in Ankara , where he continued his literary and political activities. He became part of the Turkish resistance movement under Mustafa Kemal against the victorious powers. Because of his success in propaganda work for the resistance movement, Mustafa Kemal appointed him director of the press office ( Anadolu Ajansı ) in October 1921 . He was also the editor of the newspaper Hakimiyyeti-Milliyye (The Power of the People) and a close advisor to Turkish President Mustafa Kemal. After the victory of the resistance movement and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, he was twice a member of the Kars Province in the Turkish Parliament between 1923 and 1927 . As a legal scholar, Ahmet Ağaoğlu also worked on the Turkish constitution of 1924 .

In 1931 he left Ankara and went to Istanbul. There he was professor of history and law at the Darülfünun . On March 26, 1932 he was elected to the board of the Türk Tarih Kurumu (Society for Turkish History), but on August 6, 1933 he was dismissed from his office.

Ağaoğlu died in Turkey in 1939. He was an educated man who graduated from Saint Petersburg State University and University of Paris. He was also a well-known journalist who was fluent in five languages ​​(Azerbaijani, Ottoman, Persian, Russian and French) and had written articles on current affairs in several well-known newspapers in different countries.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ada Holly Shissler, p. 43
2. ^ Ada Holly Shissler, p. 44
3. ↑ ^{a b} Ada Holly Shissler, p. 3
4. ↑ Kemal Bozay : Exile Turkey: A Research Contribution to German-Speaking Emigration to Turkey (1933-19459) . Lit Verlag, Münster 2001, p. 55.

source

• Ada Holly Shissler: Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey , IBTauris, 2003 Limited preview on Googlebooks

literature

• James H. Meyer: Turks Across Empires. Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-872514-5 .