Yilmaz, Harun (2013). "The Soviet Union and the Construction of Azerbaijani National Identity in the 1930s". Iranian Studies. 46 (4): 513. doi:10.1080/00210862.2013.784521. S2CID144322861.
ĀḴŪNDZĀDA ĀḴŪNDZĀDA (in Soviet usage, AKHUNDOV), MĪRZĀ FATḤ-ʿALĪ (1812–78), Azerbaijani playwright and propagator of alphabet reform; also, one of the earliest and the most outspoken atheists to appear in the Islamic world. According to his own autobiographical account (first published in Kaškūl, Baku, 1887, nos. 43–45, and reprinted in M.F. Akhundov, Alefbā-ye ǰadīd va maktūbāt, ed. H. Moḥammadzāda and Ḥ. Ārāslī, Baku, 1963, pp. 349–55), Āḵūndzāda was born in 1812 (other documents give 1811 and 1814) in the town of Nūḵa, in the part of Azerbaijan that was annexed by Russia in 1828. His father, Mīrzā Moḥammad-Taqī, had been kadḵodā of Ḵāmena, a small town about 50 kilometers to the west of Tabrīz, but he later turned to trade and, crossing the Aras river, settled in Nūḵa, where in 1811, he took a second wife. One year later, she gave birth to Mīrzā Fatḥ-ʿAlī. Āḵūndzāda’s mother was descended from an African who had been in the service of Nāder Shah, and consciousness of this African element in his ancestry served to give Āḵūndzāda a feeling of affinity with his great Russian contemporary, Pushkin.
Yilmaz, Harun (2013). "The Soviet Union and the Construction of Azerbaijani National Identity in the 1930s". Iranian Studies. 46 (4): 513. doi:10.1080/00210862.2013.784521. S2CID144322861.
