Muslim Reformers in Tbilisi – the Case of the Magazine ‘Mollā Nasreddin’

Abstract

In the early 20th century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted a Middle Eastern folklore figure to construct a reformist and anti-colonial Muslim discourse with a strong emphasis on social and political reform. Their periodical Mollā Nasreddin touched tens of thousands of individuals in the Muslim world through folklore, visual art, and satire, changing the mindset of an entire generation.

The newly founded journal soon assembled the most advanced team of Azerbaijani intellectuals. Along with the editor, Jalil Memedqolizādeh, famous writers and poets such as Alakbar Sabir, Abdulrahimbey Hakverdiyev, Ali Nazmi, Aligulu Gamkusari, Mamed Said Ordubadi, Omar Faik Nemanzadeh, Salman Mumtaz and others were published on the pages of the magazine under different pseudonyms.

Mollā Nasreddin was not the organ of any particular political party, though the editor and nearly all its staff were partial towards social democracy. Most of the writers and poets belonged to the Shi’i Muslim community, which was also the journal’s primary audience. However, the co-founder Ömar Fāeq was a Sunni Muslim, and the two principal artists, Schmerling and Rotter, were Christian and Jewish, respectively.

From 1906 to 1912, around 370 issues of Mollā Nasreddin were published in Tiflis. The paper began with a modest weekly printing of 1,000 copies on 7 April 1906, but in a month, was printing 25,000 copies per week. In this most radical stage of the paper, Mollā Nasreddin lambasted politicians, landowners, and clerics of the South Caucasus and revealed the heartrending lives of women and children who suffered from the indignities of a highly patriarchal culture.

These articles were followed by periodic attacks on the editor from both the tsarist authorities and Iranian and Transcaucasian Shi’i clerics, leading to censorship, occasional closures, and even confiscation of the paper on the Iranian border.