SUMMARY:

The article reconstructs the dynamic appropriation of a historical personage as a national hero in a very distinct historical and territorial setting. The Persian-speaking head of an anti-Islam sect in Northern Iran in the ninth century and the leader of a powerful uprising against the Arab Caliphate, until the 1930s Babek had never been associated with the Turkic-speaking Muslim population of modern Azerbaijan. Yet, over the second half of the twentieth century, Babek became one of the key figures in the Azerbaijani national pantheon. In the late 1930s, Babek was praised by Soviet historians as a rebel of humble social origin. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he became even more important as a role model because of his leadership in the two decade-long fight with “Arab invaders.” During the last decades of the Soviet regime, Babek appeared as an embodiment of the national Azerbaijani character in professional historiography, belles-lettres, and even in the movies and on stage. In independent Azerbaijan, where Islam and Turkic nationalism are serving as major components of national identity, the image of Babek has held onto its official status as a key historical figure, while its reception by different groups of the population is more nuanced. Some are skeptical about the cult of Babek because of his sectarian, anti-Islam ideology and non-Turkic origins. Still others embrace him as a great national hero despite these grave faults. Furthermore, a few ethnic minority groups in Azerbaijan put forward claims for Babek as belonging to their ethnicity and their ethnic territoriality. The figure of Babek has played a decisive role in the shaping of Azerbaijan as a homeland for the nation. However, Babek is losing his symbolic status for supporters of a different (pan-Turkic) principle of national mobilization, one that goes beyond the region of Azerbaijan and Northern Iran.