From Tbilisi to Tabriz; Muslim Intellectuals in South Caucasus and Making the Constitutional Revolution in Iran 1906-1911

For many years relations between the Qajar state and the Russian Empire, has been discussed in national contexts where scholars have taken nation-states as units of their historical analysis. The result of decades of national narratives is a massive body of national histories in constant struggle to own or disown empires, intellectuals, language, music and even food. I am doing a research on Caucasian intellectuals who had major role in making the Constitutional Revolution in the Qajar state but because they are owned or disowned by national histories, we do not know much about them. In order to better study these intellectuals and overcome the limitations of national histories, I am replacing national context with an imperial space, and studying these individuals as trans-imperial subjects who acted as “brokers of ideas” through whom the ideas of change, reform, and revolution transmitted between the cities Tiflis and Tabriz.

I am a historian and I have graduated from Istanbul Şehir University with a double degree in history and political science. I have completed my masters at the Central European university in Budapest where I studied comparative history for two years. Currently, I am a doctoral fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Societies and Culture as well as Humboldt University.