We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia…Professor Sanin was telling us in his flat and uninspired way…”Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia’s cultural evolution, part of Europe. It can there be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia.” …Then Mehmed Haidar, who sat on the back bench, raised his hand and said, “Please sir, we should rather stay in Asia”.
-Ali and Nino, an East-West romantic novel by Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum. Its authorship is contested by other competing claims between a German, an Azeri, and a Georgian
When Lev was allowed to go out [of his house in Baku], his favorite walks took him to the Asian quarter of town, with its mosques, its minarets, its narrow streets, and low houses…His identification with Islam and the Orient began there, when he was not yet ten years old. “To this day I still do not know whence this feeling came…I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of the Arabic edifices every night. And I do know that it was the most powerful, most formative feeling of my life”. (quoting from his memoirs)
“The ship was like an insane asylum,” Lev wrote in his memoirs. “We sailed starving, freezing, and semiconscious over the waves.” He tried to distract himself by reading the only book they had with them, a Russian edition of Don Quixote. (on returning to Baku after having fled as a child because of political unrest)
-The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, Tom Reiss, a biography of Lev Nussimbaum
Baku in 1999 was a bit like La Mancha- with bowing oil derricks instead of spinning windmills, Persian lamb hats instead of barber basins worn on the head, and Soviet-era clunkers crowding new Mercedes sedans instead of rocines (nags) jockeying by Rocinante. I stayed in the Old City, the Icheriseher, in a rented room belonging to a vintage carpet restorer, not far from the Shirvanshah Palace and Maiden’s Tower. The other rooms were occupied by refugee families of the Karabagh war. The bathroom was down two flights, across the courtyard, and behind a half door. No light bulb. Remember to knock.
It was coming up on the Miss Azerbaijan contest’s final rounds, and because my landlord moonlighted as a fashion stylist of historical costumes, the courtyard was jammed with aspiring Dulcineas dressed in traditional brocaded gowns, their heads covered with conical and pillbox hats tied with primary-colored silk scarves. There was also a swimsuit and talent contest, if I recall. In 1999, Fatima Abbasguliyeva was the winner. That I didn’t remember, because I only stayed for the first walk-around, when the contestants twirled out front before the judges in evening gowns and high heels.
I never did hear a call to prayer all the week I stayed there. Maybe it was heard across the border in Iran, but not here in Azerbaijan. The Ceyhan pipeline was almost finished, running from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Georgia and Turkey. A million barrels a day. That’s plenty of Allah Akbars for any country, whether in Europe or Asia.
