Women in Azerbaijan in Historical and Contemporary Contexts

Please join us for a panel featuring experts on gender and female roles in both historical and contemporary contexts in Azerbaijan. Topics include contestations over gender in early 20th century Baku and women’s role in state formation in medieval Azerbaijan.

Panlists include: Amin Mahini, University of California, Santa Barbara and Kelsey Rice, Berry College, with moderation by Nayereh Tohidi, Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies Department and the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2011-2021), California State University, Northridge

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Presentation Abstracts:

Women and State Formation in Medieval Azerbaijan: Momine Khatun and the Rise of the Atabegs of Azerbaijan (Amin Mahini, UC Santa Barbara)
The establishment of the Seljuq Empire in the eleventh century introduced new political and social dynamics into the eastern Islamic world, including a more pronounced role for women in political and public life. Shaped by Turkic nomadic traditions, which afforded women a greater degree of participation in dynastic and social affairs than was common in many contemporary Islamic societies, Seljuq political culture created important avenues for female authority. These dynamics became particularly significant in the middle and late Seljuq periods, when they contributed to the emergence of regional powers. Among the most important of these were the Atabegs of Azerbaijan, whose emergence cannot be fully understood without reference to the political role of Seljuq women. In this presentation, Amin Mahini focuses on Momine Khatun as a central figure in the formation and consolidation of this state. Her marriage to Atabeg Shams al-Din Eldaniz (Eldiguz) linked the atabeg institution to the Seljuq ruling house and provided a crucial basis of dynastic legitimacy for the rule of Atabeg Eldaniz and his successors in parts of the Caucasus, Iran, and Anatolia. At the same time, Momine Khatun’s political influence contributed to the stabilization and consolidation of the new state.

Momine Khatun’s significance is also reflected in her mausoleum in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan, one of the most important architectural monuments associated with the Atabegs of Azerbaijan. More than a funerary structure, the mausoleum may be understood as a political and cultural symbol of the prominence of women in the making of medieval Azerbaijani statehood. By placing Momine Khatun at the center of this history, Mahini argues that elite women were not peripheral to the rise of the Atabegs of Azerbaijan, but were integral to their legitimacy, consolidation, and historical memory.

Contesting Gender in the Streets of Early 20th Century Baku (Kelsey Rice, Berry College)
In the late 19th century, Baku transformed from a small, ethnically and confessionally homogenous port town into a large, multiethnic, industrial city. Such rapid urbanization caused social ruptures while opening new opportunities for the accumulation of wealth and political power. This dynamic new world created a vibrant, often violent public life in which new classes competed for authority over Muslim cultural expression and sociality. In this presentation, Professor Kelsery Rice analyzes how these dynamics were particularly shaped by discourses on gender and how contestations over gender played out in the streets. Rice discusses women schoolteachers and girl students who carved out a new heterosocial public life for women, male theater practitioners whose cross-dressing and satirical performances often made them targets for violence, and the displaced rural men who transformed into a fearsome urban criminal class who tasked themselves with policing gender in Muslim neighborhoods. Through analyzing the experiences and interactions of such groups, Rice demonstrates the instrumental role gender played in transforming and defining the social values and cultural productions of Azerbaijan in the 20th century.

Presenter Bios:

Amin Mahini is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the history of the Seljuq world, with particular emphasis on the role and historical representation of women in the Seljuq period. His work adopts an interdisciplinary approach, examining how the history of women in the Seljuq era can be studied through a combination of historical sources, art and architectural history, and literary traditions. Through this approach, he explores the political, cultural, and social roles of women within the broader context of medieval Islamic societies.

Kelsey Rice is an assistant professor of history at Berry College where she teaches courses on Middle Eastern and Soviet history. Her current research focuses on urban transformations, changing gender norms, and new experimentations in culture and art among the Muslim populations of the southern Caucasus and northern Iran in the late 19th and early 20th century. She has published on specific facets of this history in Journal of Women's History, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Iranian Studies.

Nayereh Tohidi is a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies Department and the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2011-2021) at California State University, Northridge. She is also a Research Associate in the Program of Iranian Studies at UCLA coordinating its “Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran” since 2003. She has also joined the faculty board of the online Iran Academia of the Institute for Social Sciences based in the Hague, Netherlands (2015+). Tohidi received her BS, MA and Ph.D. from the Universities of Tehran and Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in Sociology and Ed Psych. She is a recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships and research awards, including a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; universities of Harvard and Stanford, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at UCLA. She also received an NEH grant to establish the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program at CSUN. Her teaching and research expertise include gender and sustainable development; women’s movements and feminisms; women and Islam; globalization, ethnicity, and democracy in Iran and the post-Soviet Caucasus. Tohidi’s extensive publications (written in Persian and English) include authorship or editorship of three books and numerous articles and interviews in peer-reviewed academic and policy-oriented journals. Some of her articles have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, German, and French. She has served as transcript reviewer for several academic journals and book publishers and has been on the advisory or editorial boards of journals such as Feminist Studies in Religion (Harvard), the bilingual Journal of Azadi Andisheh, and Ms. Magazine. Tohidi has integrated academic excellence with transnational human/women’s rights activism. She represented women NGOs at the UN-sponsored third and fourth World Conferences on Women in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995). She has also served as a consultant for the UN agencies (UNICEF and UNDP) on issues concerning children and women’s rights and status in Azerbaijan. In recognition of such human rights and civil society activism, she has been honored by receiving awards such the Eleanor Roosvelt (2017); the Phenomenal Woman (2018); and the Freedom Dance (2024) plaques.