Ağaoğlu was born in December 1869 to a Shia Muslim family in the town of Shusha in the Elisabethpol Governorate, Russian Empire.[4][5] His father, Mirza Hassan, was a cotton farm owner of the Qurteli tribe, and his mother, Taze Khanum, was of the seminomadic Sariji Ali tribe.[6] Agaoglu assumed his fathers family migrated form Erzurum to the Karabakh region in the 18th century.[7] The head of the a larger household of about 40 people was the older brother of his father, a religious man.[7] His primary education included the reading the tales of Leyla and Mecnun, Bustan and Gülistan and Persian and Arabic literature.[8] In 1888, he arrived in Paris, where he studied until 1894 and came under the influence of French Orientalists like Ernest Renan and James Darmesteter on Persianocentricism. Ağaoğlu was enrolled at the École pratique des hautes études and studied the history, language and religion of ancient Iran under the supervision of James Darmesteter. He collaborated with Darmesteter on the French translation of the Letter of Tansar and presented the paper『Les Croyances Mazdéennes dans la religion Chiîte』at the ninth International congress of Orientalists (London, 5–12 September 1892).[9] He had the opportunity to work with some of the France's best-known periodicals e.g. writing a series of essays, entitled "The Persian Society" (La Société persane), in La Nouvelle Revue between 1891 and 1893. Ağaoğlu, who introduced himself as a Persian in the essays, defended the Iranian historical presence and importance in the Islamic world and blamed the Turkic peoples for the decline of the Islamic civilization.[10] In 1896 he returned to Shusha, where he was a teacher of the French language at the local school, a post he held for one year. After his departure to Baku the next year, he also taught French and wrote books on various subjects and also for a variety of magazines.[11] He also began embracing his Turkish identity. He spoke fluently a lot of languages (Azerbaijani, Persian, Russian, French and the Ottoman Turkish). From June 1905, together with Ali bey Huseynzadeh, he was the editor of the newspaper Həyat, which played an important role in the formation of nationalist thought in Azerbaijan. From December 19, 1905, he published the newspaper İrşad, and in 1907, at the same time, the newspaper Progress (Russian: Прогрессъ) in Russian. He started publishing the newspaper Tərəqqi in June 1908 and was its publisher until he left for Turkey (1909).[12]
In 1905, Ağaoğlu played an important role in the prevention of ethnic clashes between Armenians and Azeris. He was also elected as Duma representative for the Muslims of Trancaucasia. Along with Nasib bey Yusifbeyli, Ağaoğlu became a founder of the Difai (Defender) National Committee in Ganja, which in 1917 merged with the Turkic Party of Federalists and Musavat into a single party. Fleeing police persecution and possible imprisonment, in late 1908, Ağaoğlu moved to Constantinople during the Young Turk Revolution.[13] He joined the Iranian nationalist association (Anjoman-e Sa‘ādat) in Istanbul and collaborated with its press organ, Sorush, in 1909. Ağaoğlu wrote his essays in this Persian periodical from the standpoint of Iranian patriotism and criticized hardly the pro-Russian Shah of Persia, Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, and the Russian military intervention in Iran. He became an Ottoman citizen in 1910 and was appointed as a school inspector and then as an instructor at Istanbul University (Darülfünun).[14] In 1912 he joined the Central Committee of the Committee for Union and Progress and was elected to the Ottoman Parliament as an MP for Karahisar.[15] In the same years, along with other émigrés from the Russian Empire, like the pan-Turkist writers Yusuf Akçura and Ali bey Huseynzade, Ağaoğlu became a key figure in the Turkish movement led by Akçura's journal Türk Yurdu ("Turkish Homeland")[16] and became president of the Türk Ocağı ("Turkish Hearth") movement. Ağaoğlu was also among the contributors to İslam Mecmuası between 1914 and 1918 which was financed by the Committee for Union and Progress.[17]
Upon the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ARD) in May 1918, Ağaoğlu returned to Azerbaijan. He became an Azerbaijani citizen, was elected to Parliament (Milli Mejlis) and was chosen to represent the ADR at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. However, he was imprisoned by the British on Malta while on his way to the conference. He was set free only in 1921.[18][19]
Ağaoğlu with Atatürk at the opening of the new building of the Hâkimiyet-i Milliye newspaper in Ankara, on 16 February 1926
After his liberation he moved to Ankara and continued his journalistic and political activities there, as editor-in-chief of the official newspaper Hâkimiyet-i Milliye ("National Sovereignty") and as a close adviser of Atatürk. He was so successful in his work that on the 29 October 1921, he got appointed General Director of Press and Information by Atatürk. From December on he was back in Ankara taking up his work which included the management of the Anadolu Ajansı.[20] Speaking in support of Westernization and secularization of Turkish society, he wrote in 1928:
If the West is superior in the material then it is due to its totality - its virtues and its vices. The Eastern system is permeated by religion at all levels and this brought decline, while secularization of the West brought superiority. If we want to survive we have to secularize our view of religion, morality, social relations, and law. This is possible only by accepting openly and unconditionally the mind as well as the behavior of the civilization which we are bound to imitate.[21]
In 1923 he was elected MP and later was involved in the Constitutional Committee.[22] In 1930 he founded the Free Republican Party, but as it became successful it was closed down in the same year, bringing an end to his political career.[23] In 1933 he published the newspaper Akın. Due to the critical views towards Inönüs Government published in Akin, it was closed in fall 1933.[24]
Ağaoğlu died in Istanbul in 1939.[25] He was laid to rest at the Feriköy Cemetery in Istanbul. He was married to Sitare Hanım, and had five children.[11] His son, Samet Ağaoğlu became an important figure in Democrat Party's administration. Samet's wife Neriman also became a politician and elected to the parliament from Justice Party. His other children include, Süreyya Ağaoğlu who became the first female lawyer in Turkey and Tezer Taşkıran, a Turkish writer and politician.
Liberal Kemalism emerged as a result of the liberal interpretation of Kemalist thought by Ahmet Ağaoğlu in the early years of the republic in Turkey. Ağaoğlu, on the one hand, defined himself as a "Reformist and Kemalist", on the other hand he tried to develop an idea of "Liberal Kemalism".
Ağaoğlu considered cultural and educational progress to be the major part for national liberation and viewed the emancipation of women as part of the struggle. Ağaoğlu was the first member of the Azeri national intelligentsia to raise his voice for the equal rights for women.
In his book Woman in the Islamic World, published in 1901, he claimed that "without women liberated, there can be no national progress".[26]
Tadeusz Swietotochwksi: Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920. The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community, New York 1985.
François Georgeon: "Les débuts d'un intellectuel azerbaidjanais: Ahmed Ağaoğlu en France (1888-1894)", in Passé turco-tatar, présent soviétique: études offertes à Alexandre Bennigsen, Paris 1986.
Audrey L. Altstadt: The Azerbaijani Turks. Power and Identity under Russian Rule, Stanford 1992.
Charles Kurzman: Modernist Islam, 1840-1940. A Sourcebook, New York 2002.
A. Holly Shissler: Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey, London 2002.
Ufuk Özcan. Ahmet Ağaoğlu ve Rol Değişikliği: Yüzyıl Dönümünde Batıcı Bir Aydın, İstanbul, 2010
Ali Kalirad: Az jāmʻe-ye Īrānī tā mīhan-e Turkī: zendegīnāme-ye fekrī va siyāsī-ye Aḥmad Āqāyef (1869-1939) [in Persian], Tehran 2013.
Ali Kalirad: "From Iranism to Pan-Turkism: A Less-known Page of Ahmet Ağaoğlu’s Biography", Iran and the Caucasus, Volume 22, Issue 1 (2018), pp. 80–95.
^A. Holly Shissler, "Excerpts from Ahmet Ağaoğlu's The Turkish World, 1912-1913", in Camron Michael Amin, Benjamin C. Fortna, Elizabeth Brown Frierson, The Modern Middle East: A Sourcebook for History, Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN978-0-19-926209-0, P. 344.
^Ada Holly Shissler. Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey, I.B.Tauris, 2003, p. 43
^Shissler, Ada Holland (2003). Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey. London: I.B.Tauris. pp. 43–45. ISBN978-1-86064-855-7.
^Georgeon, François (1986). Passé turco-tatar, présent soviétique : études offertes à Alexandre Bennigsen. Paris: Editions Peeters. pp. 373–387. ISBN978-90-6831-058-0.
^ abShissler, A. Holly (2002-11-21). Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey. I.B.Tauris. pp. 117–118. ISBN978-0-85771-084-0.
