Evan Siegel
Mohammad Amin Rasulzadeh’s Journalism
Mohammad Amin Rasulzadeh (1884-1954) was a prominent journalist and political activist from the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan who would also become the first head of the Azerbaijani National Council. He apparently got his start in journalism, contributing to Hemmat, a magazine sponsored by Muslim socialists and other progressives. In the one surviving article from that period which illustrates his political outlook, he writes, in the floral and colorful style of his early years, about four people, a nationalist, a democrat, a reactionary, and a progressive, and how it is only by them joining hands and avoiding division that anything will be accomplished.
One of the first of his journalistic campaigns was healing the wounds opened by the Armenian-Muslim massacres of 1905, which he blamed on the Russian imperial bureaucracy. However, the Armenian left-nationalist Dashnaks did not escape reproach for betraying socialism by engaging in nationalist provocations. He also campaigned for European-style reading rooms to raise the level of culture among the Muslims.