Statement

Response of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin to the False Statements of the Chairman of the Caucasus Muslims Office

At a recent session of the Qadi Council held in Baku, Sheikh-ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazadeh, Chairman of the Caucasus Muslims Office, once again assumed the role of propagator of Azerbaijani disinformation, targeting the Armenian people and the Armenian Church with hatred and hostility.

Surpassing even his previous fabrications, Pashazadeh declared that the centuries-old Armenian sanctuaries in Armenia and the region, including the 1,700-year-old Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin, supposedly stand on “historic Azerbaijani lands,” and that Armenians have allegedly “appropriated” these territories. He concluded his absurd assertions by portraying the Armenian Apostolic Church as a threat to the nations of the region.

It is both absurd and ironic that a religious leader of a people who received the ethnonym “Azerbaijani” only in the late 1930s through Soviet nation-building policies now attempts to challenge the historic presence of the Armenian people—a nation whose millennia-old creative, spiritual, and cultural heritage is a matter of universally acknowledged truth.

Even more astonishing is the fact that such accusations of appropriation come from a representative of a state whose very name was itself adopted from another land and people. This same disingenuous rhetoric underlies Pashazadeh’s manipulative references to the Diocese of Russia and New Nakhichevan. It must be noted that the settlements near Rostov-on-Don were named “New Nakhichevan” by the Russian Imperial authorities, in honor of the Armenians who were historically displaced from the Armenian region of Nakhichevan and resettled there.

The repeated expressions of animosity and falsehoods in the public statements of Azerbaijan’s religious leader are in themselves evidence that Azerbaijan—as Pashazadeh’s own words reveal—is, in fact, the true threat to the countries of the region.

Finally, it must once and for all be affirmed that lies and falsehoods, no matter how frequently or fervently repeated, can never become truth.