Azerbaijan’s religious board, the Religious Council of the Caucasus, has appointed a representative, the gazi, to Armenia.
Announcing the appointment on Thursday, Sheikh-ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazada, the chairman of the Religious Council of the Caucasus, said there was “an urgent need” to restore the activities of the Yerevan gazi. Pashazada said Bakhtiyar Najafov was appointed as one of the council’s deputy chairs in Armenia. Najafov will serve in Azerbaijan before being his relocation to Armenia “in the future”.
The newly-appointed “gazi” will oversee the affairs of Azerbaijanis living in ‘western Azerbaijan’, the term used by Baku to describe territories in Armenia where Azerbaijanis used to live before the start of the war in early 1990s.
‘We must revive the moral basis of our national existence in Western Azerbaijan. Historical justice demands this from us’, Pashazada said, adding that Yerevan was “one of the historical centres of Islamic civilizations” and that the position of gazi should be restored there “as it was traditionally done in Tbilisi, Batumi [in Georgia] and Derbent [In Russia’s Dagestan]”.
