Azerbaijan

AZERBAIJAN

Province in northwestern Iran; also, a republic (fully independent since 1991) along the western coast of the Caspian Sea, with Baku as capital.

An Iranian province with documented history going back to the Achaemenian period (700 to 330 b.c.e.), Azerbaijan was gradually Turkified by the end of the twelfth century through the migration of Turkic tribes from central Asia. Its spoken language, Azeri, is a Turkic language strongly influenced by Persian. Alongside the Turkish-speaking population, Azerbaijan is also home to a substantial Kurdish minority. Most Turkish-speaking Azerbaijanis are Shiʿa Muslims, and the Kurds are mostly Sunni.

Iranian Azerbaijan is divided into three provinces: Western Azerbaijan, with its provincial seat in Urumia; Eastern Azerbaijan, the capital of which is Tabriz; and Ardebil, with its provincial capital at Ardebil. The independent Republic of Azerbaijan, formerly a republic within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, also had been a part of Iranian territory but was ceded to Czarist Russia under the provisions of the Treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkamanchai (1828).

In 1945 a Soviet-backed autonomous republic, led by local Marxist leaders Jaʿfar Pishevari and Gholam Yahya, was declared in Iranian Azerbaijan. Opposition from the United States, combined with the shrewd diplomacy of Azerbaijan's prime minister, Ahmad Qavam, secured the withdrawal of the Soviet troops and led to the demise of the short-lived and self-styled Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan.

Iranian Azerbaijan has varied climatic conditions. It includes some of Iran's richest agricultural lands, producing barley, wheat, rice, and potatoes. Tabriz is the region's industrial center, where tractors, factory machinery, electrical equipment and turbines, motorcycles, clocks and watches, cement, textiles, processed foods, and agricultural implements are produced. In other parts of Azerbaijan sugar and textile mills and food-processing plants are in operation. There are copper, arsenic, coal, and salt mines in the province. According to the 1996 census, the total population of East Azerbaijan was 3,369,000, of which 64.8 percent lived in urban areas. West Azerbaijan's population was 2,496,320, of which 57.39 percent were urban dwellers. Of Ardebil's 1,197,364 inhabitants, 647,154 live in urban areas. According to the Statistical Center of Iran, in East Azerbaijan 75.4 percent of the population is literate; in West Azerbaijan, 69 percent; and in Ardebil, 73.3 percent.

see also azeri language and literature; iran; tabriz; turkmanchai, treaty of (1828).

Bibliography

Atabaki, Touraj. Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Iran. London and New York: British Academic Press, 1993.

Chehabi, H. E. "Ardabil Becomes a Province: Center-Periphery Relations in Iran." International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 2 (1997): 235–253.

Fawcett, Louise L'Estrange. Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Neguin Yavari