User:HistoryofIran/Azerbaijan (toponym)

Historically, the name "Azerbaijan" was used to refer to the region located south of the Aras River- today known as Iranian Azerbaijan, located in northwestern Iran. The region in the north of the Aras River, which is today called the Republic of Azerbaijan, had not been included within the geographical boundaries of Azerbaijan until 1918. Historians and geographers usually referred to the region north of the Aras River as Aran. On May 28, 1918, following the collapse of the Russian Empire, a group of political activists in Aran decided to change the name of their region to Azerbaijan by calling it Azerbaijan People’s Republic. Historians and scholars have argued that the Pan-Turkic agenda drove the name change.

Background
Historically, the name "Azerbaijan" was generally used to refer to the region located south of the Aras River, located in northwestern Iran. Prior to the Sovietization of the South Caucasus, its Turkish-speaking Muslim population were referred to as "Tatars" by Russian sources. Iranian sources labeled the people of the north of Aras by their location, such as Yerevanis, Ganjavis, etc.

The name is derived from Atropates, a Persian satrap of Media, who gained independence in 321 BC.

Adaption of the name by Baku
Azeri nationalists were encouraged by the Soviets to create a "Azeri" alphabet, which supplanted the Arabo-Persian script, in order to create an Azerbaijani national history and identity based on the territorial concept of a nation and to lessen the influence of Iran and Islam. In the 1930s, the Soviet government ordered a number of Soviet historians, including the well-known Russian Orientalist Ilya Pavlovich Petrushevsky, to accept the completely uncorroborated idea that the former khanates' territory—with the exception of Yerevan, which had become Soviet Armenia—was a part of an Azerbaijani nation. Consequently, Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis are used in Petrushevskii's two significant studies on the South Caucasus, which cover the period from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Reactions in Iran
The Iranian political and intellectual elites in Tehran and Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, swiftly objected against such name despite the fact that the weak Iranian state was in a transitional phase and fighting against foreign dominance. The written media in Tehran, Tabriz, and other major Iranian cities, on the one hand, and the media in Baku, the capital of the newly established Republic of Azerbaijan, on the other hand, presented their cases to support the correctness or incorrectness of such designation for about a year. Iranians generally viewed Baku's decision with suspicion and believed that the Ottoman Young Turks, who were then active in Baku, had conspired to take over the historical name of Iran's northwest province in order to establish a pan-Turk entity spanning Central Asia and Europe. The pan-Turkists were able to argue that the Republic of Azerbaijan and "southern Azerbaijan" must be united in their future "Turan" by referring to the historical Azerbaijan in Iran as "southern Azerbaijan." The head of the Democrat Party, Mohammad Khiabani, a well-liked member of Iranian Azerbaijan's political elite, changed the name of the province to Azadistan ("land of freedom") out of concern for such risks.