Azerbaijanis in Iranian History

Azerbaijanis are Iran’s largest ethnic minority and its largest Turkic-speaking group, usually estimated at between a sixth and a quarter of the population. Living mainly in the north-west around Tabriz, Ardabil, Zanjan and Urmia, and in large numbers in Tehran, they have been at the centre of Iranian history rather than at its edge: the Safavid dynasty rose among them, Tabriz was the seat of Qajar crown princes, and the city led the Constitutional Revolution.

A land with an ancient Iranian name

The name Azerbaijan goes back to Atropates, a Persian general who held the region after Alexander’s conquest; Greek writers called it Atropatene, and in Middle Persian it was Adurbadagan. Long before that, the area around Lake Urmia was home to the Mannaeans and bordered the kingdom of Urartu (see the Mannaeans and Urartu). Under the Sasanians the province held one of the three great fire temples of Iran, Adur Gushnasp, at what is now Takht-e Soleyman. In the ninth century the mountains of Azerbaijan were the base of Babak Khorramdin’s revolt against the Abbasids.

At that time the people of the region spoke an Iranian language, which medieval writers called Azari. The historian Ahmad Kasravi argued in 1925 that this “old Azari” was the ancestor of the Iranian dialects still spoken in a few villages, and the term is still used in that sense by linguists.

The Turkic transformation

Turkic speech came with the Oghuz Turkmen tribes who followed the Seljuks into Iran in the eleventh century. Azerbaijan’s pastures attracted nomads, and under the Mongols, when Tabriz was the Ilkhanid capital, and the Turkmen dynasties of the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu, the region became mostly Turkic-speaking. The change was gradual, a language shift rather than the replacement of a population, and by the sixteenth century Turkish was the everyday language of most of the province. Persian remained the language of writing and government, as it was across the region.

Safavids and Qajars

The Safavid dynasty grew from a Sufi order at Ardabil, and its Turkmen followers, the Qizilbash, carried Shah Ismail I to power in Tabriz in 1501. Ismail wrote poetry in Turkish under the pen name Khata’i, and Turkish was spoken at the Safavid court alongside Persian. Tabriz, close to the Ottoman frontier, was the first Safavid capital until Ottoman attacks after Chaldiran pushed the capital to Qazvin.

The Qajars were also a Turkic tribe, and under them Tabriz became the residence of the crown prince and the gateway to Russia and Europe. Crown prince Abbas Mirza launched Iran’s first military and educational reforms from Tabriz. The wars with Russia ended with the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, which fixed the border on the Aras river. The Turkic-speaking lands north of the river became part of the Russian empire and, in 1918 and again in 1991, gave their name to the Republic of Azerbaijan; those south of it remained Iranian.

Tabriz and the Constitutional Revolution

Through its trade with the Caucasus and Istanbul, Tabriz received newspapers, ideas and political networks early, and it became the most radical centre of the Constitutional Revolution. When Mohammad Ali Shah shut down the Majlis in 1908, Tabriz resisted a months-long siege under the popular commanders Sattar Khan and Baqer Khan, a story told on the siege of Tabriz. Azerbaijanis are remembered as defenders of Iranian constitutional government, not as separatists, and Sattar Khan was hailed as Sardâr-e Melli, “national commander”. In 1920 Sheikh Mohammad Khiabani led a short-lived reformist movement in Tabriz, which was crushed by the central government.

Language, the state and the 1946 crisis

From the 1920s the Pahlavi state promoted Persian as the single national language, and Azerbaijani was kept out of schools and official life. During the Soviet occupation of the north after 1941, the Azerbaijan Democratic Party of Ja’far Pishevari set up an autonomous Azerbaijan People’s Government in late 1945, with Azerbaijani as its official language. It collapsed in December 1946 after Soviet troops withdrew, and Iranian forces retook Tabriz; see the Iran crisis of 1946. Views of the episode still divide: some see it as a Soviet puppet, others as an expression of genuine local grievances.

Azerbaijani literature continued regardless. The poet Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar (1906–1988), who wrote mostly in Persian, also wrote Heydar Babaya Salam (“Greetings to Heydar Baba”), the most loved poem in Iranian Azerbaijani Turkish.

Since 1979

Azerbaijanis are deeply integrated in Iranian life: they are prominent in the bazaar, the clergy, the army and politics, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s paternal family came from Khameneh near Tabriz. Article 15 of the 1979 constitution permits regional languages in the press and in teaching their literature alongside Persian, and activists have pressed for fuller education in Azerbaijani. Issues such as the shrinking of Lake Urmia and the fortunes of the Tabriz football club Tractor have become focal points of regional identity. Explore the cities of Tabriz, Ardabil and Zanjan, and see the people of Iran for today’s ethnic map.