Many Azeris see Iranian hand behind wave of unrest

The article blamed Islam for Azerbaijan's meager development and likened the Prophet Muhammad to a used handkerchief. The ensuing furor echoes the case of the Danish cartoons published in September 2005 that mocked Islam and that, months later, generated protests throughout the Muslim world.

Here, the thunderous rhetoric from village imams and other religious conservatives has sent tremors through the Azeri government and the secular elite of the nation.

"I am for freedom of speech but not the freedom to insult," said Haji Ilgar, an imam at the Jama Old City Mosque in Baku who is often critical of the government of the secular president, Ilham Aliyev. "The only solution is to take this to the courts."

Many Azeris see the roots of the trouble in what they consider Iran's shadowy influence here. The two countries have had an often prickly relationship since Azerbaijan's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Iran is the regional power, and Azerbaijan is an up- and-coming oil state, tucked between Iran and Russia on the Caspian Sea.

Both Iran and Azerbaijan are Shiite

but Azeris fear that Iran wants to destabilize the country by spreading its brand of militant Islam across the border. Iran is struggling to deal with a large minority — upwards of a third — of Iran's 66 million people who are ethnic Azeri, a beleaguered minority that frequently agitates for more rights and cultural autonomy. Iran does not want them to get any ideas from a secular and prospering Azerbaijan, in this view.

There may be cause for Iran to worry. A cartoon published in a Tehran newspaper that ridiculed ethnic Azeris sparked protests in northern Iran earlier in the year.

The reaction to the recent article "is crazy and if such an article had been published a couple of years ago there would have been no reaction to it," said Elchin Shikhlinsky, editor in chief of Zerkalo, or The Mirror, one of the largest Baku dailies. "But step by step, day by day, people are becoming more religious. Iran is spending a lot of money along the border to produce these kinds of fanatics."

Ilgar Mammadov, a political analyst at the Baku Political Research and Advocacy Institute, said, "Azeri success is not in Iran's national interest."

Like many Azeri intellectuals, Mammadov worries that Iran wants to infect Azerbaijan with a militant brand of political Islam. "Iranians want mullahs to be the reference point for any intellectual thought in this country," he said. "They are trying to stimulate a fundamentalist agenda and the quality of soil is getting richer here."

Shikhlinsky, the editor of the Mirror, said that "now Iran is a real threat to us: They are stronger, bigger, richer," and added, "But if Azerbaijan could only become a good example, become a democratic republic, then suddenly it is us who is threatening them."

As it does in Lebanon, Iran has lavished well-funded social assistance programs on Azerbaijan, especially in the bleak countryside. A new Iranian friendship center in Baku bestows gifts of money, books and even furniture to young couples moving into their first homes.

The two authors of the article, Rafiq Tagi and Samir Sadagatoglu, who are Muslim, are to face criminal charges of inciting religious enmity; a court ruled Nov. 15 that the pair could be held in pretrial detention for two months. On Dec. 20, the journalists were given legal representation for the first time. In detention they could not be interviewed to discuss their reasons for writing the article.

In the six weeks since the publication of the anti-Islam article, Iran's interventions in Azerbaijan have become the focus of public debate among civic and religious leaders in Baku. A group of 40 leading public intellectuals issued an open letter calling for Iran to stop encouraging religious extremism in Azerbaijan and for Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani of Iran to rescind his fatwa against the authors of the offending article.

With this controversy, Mammadov said, "the Islamicists within Azerbaijan have been able to consolidate and better promote their agenda."

A string of rallies protesting the article have been staged in small towns across Azerbaijan, many centered on the village of Nardaran, home to a holy site famous for its religious conservatism. In a demonstration in Nardaran on Nov. 17, many protesters called for life sentences for the two journalists; others demanded their deaths as well as that of their families.

In Baku, towns like Nardaran are often seen as proxies for Iran, an allegation rejected within the villages.

"It's not like the Iranians give us an order and we follow. But we have the same concerns on our minds," said Haji Namik, editor of Kamilik Journal, an Islamic newspaper published in Mashtaqi, which is a few kilometers from Nardaran.

In response, free speech advocates came together Nov. 20 to denounce the demonstrations against Sanat, the little- known biweekly newspaper that published the article. "This incident has had a terrible chilling effect on journalists in the country," said Shikhlinsky.

The journalist advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders called the fatwa against the Sanat newspaper writers "deeply shocking and completely unacceptable," but the current controversy darkens an already difficult journalistic environment in Azerbaijan.

Earlier this month, the government effectively closed down several media outlets associated with opposition parties, including a newspaper and a news agency, by closing their offices, and the government carefully monitors and censors all local media. On occasion, journalists who get into trouble with the government manage to win asylum outside the country.

"These crises will go on for years," said Ilgar, the imam who wanted to sue the article's authors. "It is the cost of living in a globalized world."

By Ilan Greenberg

/The International Herald Tribune/