A Poetic Portrait of Baku

Azerbaijan’s Nasimi Festival brings out the beauty of the Eurasian capital as scholars and poetry lovers across the globe descend upon this artistic epicentre

- SHAIK HAYAZ

Last September, I joined a group of academics from the Arab world and Europe on their way to celebrate the life and work of a 14th-century Azerbaijani poet. Held in Baku, the Nasimi Festival was a lavishly mounted series of cultural programmes devoted to Imadaddin Nasimi’s 650th birth anniversary. President Ilham Aliyev had earlier declared 2019 as the ‘Year of Nasimi.’ Known for his revolutionary poetry in the Turkic, Arabic, and Persian languages and staunch advocacy of Hurufi philosophy that emphasised on the spiritual powers of letters and numbers, Nasimi was a bit of a misfit in his time. As he himself once remarked in a famous verse, “Both worlds can fit within me, but in this world, I cannot fit / I am the placeless essence, but into existence, I cannot fit.”

In 1417, Nasimi was accused of heresy. He was duly produced before a shariah court and ultimately executed in Aleppo by religious fundamentalists, sending shock waves across the region. Today, six centuries later, in what can be described as ‘poetic justice’, Nasimi has become one of modern Azerbaijan’s spiritual and moral guardians. “He laid the foundation of our literary and philosophical imagination,” said our host Emin Mammadov, as we whizzed past Baku’s cloud-bursting skyline with gleaming glass towers and skyscrapers interrupted at regular intervals by Soviet remnants, most starkly evident in the Brutalist architecture and ageing, Russian-made Ladas vying for space with Lamborghinis on the highway. If Nasimi were alive today he would have found it hard to recognise the new Baku, fuelled in recent years by oil riches that has made it a byword for both modernity and luxury. But here’s the one thing the Sufi mystic would be proud of—Azerbaijan’s exemplary secularism, a cause for which he had laid down his life.