Azerbaijani nationalism
Azerbaijani nationalism is the political articulation of a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Shia Muslim national identity centred on the territory of the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan and on a wider claimed cultural geography that includes Iranian Azerbaijan. As a modern movement it is distinct from generic Turkism in being grounded in the specific historical experience of Russian-ruled Transcaucasia, and from generic Shia Islam in its strongly secular-civic foundational tradition.
Its intellectual roots lie in the Maarifçilik enlightenment of the late 19th century, with Mirza Fatali Akhundov (Akhundzade), Hasan bey Zardabi (founder of the first Azerbaijani Turkic-language newspaper Ekinçi, 1875), Ali bey Huseynzade and Ahmed bey Ağaoğlu producing a vernacular Turkic press, theatre, and educational network. The first explicitly political vehicle was the Müsavat Party (1911), whose civic-modernist programme governed the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918–20, the first secular parliamentary republic in the Muslim world (women's suffrage from 1918).
Soviet rule (1920–91) suppressed open Azerbaijani nationalism but, through the formation of the Azerbaijan SSR with NKAO inside it and through the deportations of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR (1948–53), institutionalised an ethnic-territorial frame that would shape post-Soviet politics. The late-Soviet revival in the Popular Front (1989) under Abulfaz Elchibey briefly fused the Müsavat heritage with Pan-Turkist nostalgia, before being displaced by Heydar Aliyev's 1993 return to power.
Under the Aliyev dynasty (Heydar 1993–2003, Ilham from 2003) Azerbaijani nationalism has been recoded as a state-driven Aliyevist orthodoxy organised around three central tropes: territorial integrity (the legal demand to recover Karabakh), the Khojaly framing of Armenian historical guilt (khojaly massacre 1992), and after 2022 the "Western Azerbaijan" doctrine claiming the territory of the present Republic of Armenia as historically Azerbaijani. (sourced opinion: Altstadt reads contemporary Azerbaijani nationalism as having displaced civic-modernist Müsavat content with personalist-authoritarian content while preserving its formal symbols.)