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Azerbaijan Religion
The prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), who was born in the
seventh century B.C. in what is now Azerbaijan, established a
religion focused on the cosmic struggle between a supreme god and
an evil spirit. Islam arrived in Azerbaijan with Arab invaders in
the seventh century A.D., gradually supplanting Zoroastrianism
and Azerbaijani pagan cults. In the seventh and eighth centuries,
many Zoroastrians fled Muslim persecution and moved to India,
where they became known as Parsis. Until Soviet Bolsheviks ended
the practice, Zoroastrian pilgrims from India and Iran traveled
to Azerbaijan to worship at sacred sites, including the Surakhany
Temple on the Apsheron Peninsula near Baku.
In the sixteenth century, the first shah of the Safavid
Dynasty, Ismail I (r. 1486-1524), established Shia Islam as the
state religion, although large numbers of Azerbaijanis remained
followers of the other branch of Islam, Sunni. The Safavid court
was subject to both Turkic (Sunni) and Iranian (Shia) influences,
however, which reinforced the dual nature of Azerbaijani religion
and culture in that period. As elsewhere in the Muslim world, the
two branches of Islam came into conflict in Azerbaijan.
Enforcement of Shia Islam as the state religion brought
contention between the Safavid rulers of Azerbaijan and the
ruling Sunnis of the neighboring Ottoman Empire.
In the nineteenth century, many Sunni Muslims emigrated from
Russian-controlled Azerbaijan because of Russia's series of wars
with their coreligionists in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, by the
late nineteenth century, the Shia population was in the majority
in Russian Azerbaijan. Antagonism between the Sunnis and the Shia
diminished in the late nineteenth century as Azerbaijani
nationalism began to emphasize a common Turkic heritage and
opposition to Iranian religious influences. At present, about
three-quarters of Azerbaijani Muslims are at least nominally Shia
(and 87 percent of the population was Muslim in 1989).
Azerbaijan's next largest official religion is Christianity,
represented mainly by Russian Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic
groups. Some rural Azerbaijanis retain pre-Islamic shamanist or
animist beliefs, such as the sanctity of certain sites and the
veneration of certain trees and rocks.
Before Soviet power was established, about 2,000 mosques were
active in Azerbaijan. Most mosques were closed in the 1930s, then
some were allowed to reopen during World War II. In the 1980s,
however, only two large and five smaller mosques held services in
Baku, and only eleven others were operating in the rest of the
country. Supplementing the officially sanctioned mosques were
thousands of private houses of prayer and many secret Islamic
sects. Beginning in the late Gorbachev period, and especially
after independence, the number of mosques rose dramatically. Many
were built with the support of other Islamic countries, such as
Iran, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, which also contributed Qurans
(Korans) and religious instructors to the new Muslim states. A
Muslim seminary has also been established since 1991. As in the
other former Soviet Muslim republics, religious observances in
Azerbaijan do not follow all the traditional precepts of Islam.
For example, drinking wine is permitted, and women are not veiled
or segregated.
During World War II, Soviet authorities established the
Muslim Spiritual Board of Transcaucasia in Baku as the governing
body of Islam in the Caucasus, in effect reviving the nineteenthcentury tsarist Muslim Ecclesiastical Board. During the tenures
of Leonid I. Brezhnev and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Moscow encouraged
Muslim religious leaders in Azerbaijan to visit and host foreign
Muslim leaders, with the goal of advertising the freedom of
religion and superior living conditions reportedly enjoyed by
Muslims under Soviet communism.
In the early 1980s, Allashukur Humatogly Pashazade was
appointed sheikh ul-Islam, head of the Muslim board. With the
breakup of the Soviet Union, the Muslim board became known as the
Supreme Religious Council of the Caucasus Peoples. In late 1993,
the sheikh blessed Heydar Aliyev at his swearing-in ceremony as
president of Azerbaijan.
Data as of March 1994
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