Religion and History in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan sits on ground where fire was worshipped before it was fuel. Natural gas vents on the Absheron peninsula burn without a source, and the temple at Ateshgah outside Baku was built around one; its inscriptions are Sanskrit and Punjabi as well as Persian, because by the eighteenth century it was maintained by Hindu and Sikh merchants of the Indian trade as much as by Zoroastrians, and the site is one of the few places where those traditions demonstrably shared a sanctuary. Islam arrived in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the region became predominantly Shia under Safavid rule from 1501, when Shah Ismail, himself of Azerbaijani Turkic background, imposed Twelver Shiism across his empire.

The nineteenth century divided the Azerbaijani people between the Russian empire and Iran, a division that persists, so that more Azerbaijanis live in Iran than in Azerbaijan. The Baku oil boom made the city cosmopolitan, and Soviet rule then made the country strongly secular; the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918 to 1920 had already been notable as the first secular parliamentary republic in the Muslim world and the first to grant women the vote. The Shirvanshahs' palace complex in Baku, with its mosque, mausoleum and bathhouse, records the medieval Islamic court that preceded all of this, and stands beside the Maiden Tower whose original purpose is still unresolved.