Mirza Alakbar Sabir

Mirza Alakbar Sabir (30 May 1862 – 12 July 1911), born Mirza Ali-Akbar Tahirzada (Tahirzadeh), was an Azerbaijani satirical poet. ^{1 2} Writing in Molla Nasraddin and other Caucasus journals in the everyday language of the South Caucasus Turks, he mocked clerical hypocrisy, corrupt officials and superstition, and he is counted the founder of modern satirical verse in Azerbaijani literature. ^{1 2} His poems were collected as the Hophopname, after one of his pen names, Hop-hop. ²

He was born at Shamakhi on 30 May 1862, into a religious, middle-class household; his fuller birth name, given in the Azerbaijani and Arabic articles, is Alakbar Zeynalabdin oglu Tahirzadeh. ^{1 2 3} He became a pupil of the poet Seyid Azim Shirvani at the latter's modern school in Shamakhi, began translating Persian poetry and writing his own Azerbaijani verse, and held to his literary ambitions against his father's wish that he work in the family grocery store. ¹ In 1885 he travelled in Iran and Central Asia; on his return he married and became the father of nine children. ¹ For fifteen years he made soap for a living, joking: "I make soap to wash away the external dirt of my countrymen." ¹ An attempt to found a school in the European tradition failed. ¹

His first published poem appeared in the Tbilisi newspaper Sharq-e Rus in 1903, and in 1909 he became a writer for the satirical magazine Molla Nasraddin, also based in Tbilisi. ¹ His criticism of conservatism drew anonymous and hostile letters, and both he and the magazine were labelled heretical by some of the mullahs in Tabriz. ¹ In 1910 he moved to Baku and worked as a teacher; nearly all his short satirical pieces known as Taziyanalar ("The Whips") were written there. ¹ Ill with a liver condition, he returned to Shamakhi for treatment, and he died on 12 July 1911. ^{1 2} The place of his death is split in the sources — the English article gives Baku, while the Azerbaijani, Russian and Arabic articles and Wikidata give Shamakhi, where the Russian article records his burial at the Yeddi Gümbəz cemetery — and his data record follows Shamakhi and discloses the split. ^{1 2 4 5}

Sabir wrote in classical forms — qasida, ghazal, mathnawi, ruba'i and bahr-e tavil — and reworked famous poems by taking their first line and adding his own twist; he also translated portions of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh into Azerbaijani verse. ¹ His satire ranged over the shah Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, the German emperor Wilhelm II, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, unintelligent mullahs and corrupt low-ranking officials, and in 1905 he wrote the formal poem "To our Muslim and Armenian Compatriots" for the journal Hayat. ¹ His collected poems circulated as the Hophopname ("The Book of Hop-hop"). ²

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

The single attestation. The English article's biography, citing Rezvani (2015, p. 154) — a passage otherwise about the Turkic language of South Caucasus Muslims — states that Sabir "was an adherent of Shia Islam". ¹ No other consulted article (Azerbaijani, Russian, Persian or Arabic) names any affiliation for him, and Wikidata carries no religion value. ^{2 4 5} A single attestation cannot carry a shia-twelver value under the Shia-mapping rule and the doubt rule, so his faith is recorded as unknown, with this wording preserved here and in his data record. ¹

His own verse. Sabir answered his clerical critics in verse, in lines quoted in the English article: "I am a Shi'ite, but not in the ways you desire; I am a Sunni, but not like the examples you like; I am a Sufi, but not like the ones you describe; I am a lover of truth, O people of Shirvan." ¹ The museum records the verse as what it is — a rhetorical profession of every label and of none, aimed at the definitions of his opponents — not as an attestation of Twelver affiliation; his religious household is upbringing, and the Shamakhi milieu is context. ¹

• 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.