Hamida Javanshir

Hamida Ahmad bey qizi Javanshir (19 January 1873 – 6 February 1955), known after her second marriage as Hamida Mammadguluzadeh, was an Azerbaijani educator, activist and philanthropist, one of the first enlightened women of Azerbaijan and the wife and working partner of the satirist Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (1869–1932) on the magazine Molla Nasreddin, the most widely read Muslim satirical journal of its era. ^{1 2} She founded a coeducational school and a hospital in her home village of Kahrizli, co-founded the Caucasian Muslim Women's Benevolent Society, spent her fortune on enlightenment work and on her husband's writing, and left memoirs published after her death that became a principal source for the period. ^{2 3}

She was born at her family's ancestral estate in the village of Kahrizli, Shusha uyezd, Elizavetpol Governorate, the eldest child of Ahmad bey Javanshir (1828–1903), historian, translator and officer of the Russian Imperial army, and his wife Mulkijahan; she was a great-great-grandniece of Ibrahim Khalil Khan, the last ruling khan of Karabakh. ^{1 4} She and her younger brother were educated at home; when she was nine a family of Russian tutors came to live with them, and by fourteen she was familiar with European and Islamic literature and spoke Russian and French fluently. ^{1 5}

In 1889 she married Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim bey Davatdarov, a native of Barda; they settled in Brest-Litovsk, where their children Mina and Muzaffar were born, and she learned German and Polish and took ballroom dance lessons. ¹ In 1900 the family moved to Kars, where Davatdarov commanded a military fortress, and he died soon afterwards — the English article implies 1901, the Russian article gives 1902 — leaving her a widow whose hope of studying medicine in Moscow came to nothing. ^{1 3} She inherited the Kahrizli estate from her father and continued his successful cotton business. ¹

She took the manuscript of her father's historical work, On the Political Affairs of the Karabakh Khanate 1747–1805, to Tiflis to be printed at the Geyrat publishing house, and there, in October 1905, she met Jalil Mammadguluzadeh, then a columnist for the newspaper Sharg-i rus. They married in 1907 — the Russian article gives the exact date, 15 June 1907 — lived in Tiflis until 1920, and had two sons, Midhat (born 1908) and Anvar (born 1911). ^{1 3} She worked with her husband to publish Molla Nasreddin and spent her wealth on his work, standing by him, as the Azerbaijani article puts it, through the magazine's hardest days. ² It was at her suggestion that Jalil invited the gravely ill poet Mirza Alakbar Sabir to Tiflis for treatment; the couple housed him and bore his expenses, and Uzeyir Hajibeyov wrote an article praising her for it. ^{2 3}

During the Karabakh famine of 1907 she distributed flour and millet to starving villagers and mediated between local Armenians and Azeris after two years of reciprocal massacres. ¹ She founded a coeducational school at Kahrizli where boys and girls studied in the same classroom — the English article calls it the first Azerbaijani school of its kind — but the articles disagree on its year: the English article gives 1908, the Russian gives 1909 and says it held thirty boys and ten girls and was opened with her husband's participation, and the Azerbaijani gives 1912 and says she opened it at her own expense and taught in it herself; the museum records the split rather than merging it. ^{1 3 2} The Russian article also credits her with a hospital and a weaving factory in the village. ³ She was one of the founders of the Caucasian Muslim Women's Benevolent Society — the Russian article dates the society to 1906–1917, while the English article dates her founding role to 1910, together with female members of the city's Azeri nobility. ^{3 1} During a smallpox epidemic in the Soviet era she bought vaccines and gave shots to the people of Kahrizli herself. ¹

After a year in Tabriz the family moved to Baku in 1921; in the first Soviet years her lands were taken and she was deprived of voting rights for her noble origin, as the Russian article records, and she then lived at Baku for the rest of her life. ^{1 3} She wrote her memoirs, translated her husband's works after his death in 1932, was elected to the Azerbaijan Writers' Union, and collected Azerbaijani folklore. ^{2 3} Her memoirs of Jalil were published after her death (Baku, 1967; in Russian, 1970), and their English translation appeared as Awake: A Moslem Woman's Rare Memoir, translated by Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor (Washington DC, 2016). ^{2 1} Two of her children predeceased her, Mina (died 1923) and Midhat (died 1932); she died at Baku on 6 February 1955 and was buried in the Alley of Honours beside her husband's grave, and a house-museum of her life has stood at Kahrizli since 2005. ^{1 2}

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Her faith. No article in any language names a school for Hamida Javanshir. Wikidata carries a single religion value for her, Shia Islam, whose only reference is "imported from English Wikipedia" — and the English article itself says nothing about her religion at all — so it is a lone imported structured value with no text behind it, which under the museum's two-source rule cannot carry a faith segment. ^{6 1} What the articles record is context, not attestation: co-founding a Muslim women's benevolent society is organisational work, the English title of her memoir is her translators' wording, and her descent from the Javanshirs of Karabakh is family and milieu. ^{3 2} Her faith is therefore recorded as unknown, with the Wikidata value preserved in full in her data record: two independent sources naming a school for her personally would change it.

Contemporary criticism. The Azerbaijani article records that her second marriage was thought beneath her noble lineage and was opposed, and that she faced the opposition resolutely; the articles otherwise present her work as a landmark of women's enlightenment in Azerbaijan and record no religious controversy around her person. ²

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.