Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin Responds to the False Statements of Head of the Caucasus Muslims Board

ETCHMIADZIN — During a recent session of the Council of Qadis held in Baku, Sheikh ul-Islam and Head of the Caucasus Muslims Board, Allahshukur Pashazade, once again assumed the role of disseminator of Azerbaijani disinformation and lies, targeting the Armenian people and the Armenian Church with hatred and hostility.

Surpassing even his previous fabrications, Pashazade claimed that the centuries-old Armenian sanctuaries in Armenia and the region — including the 1700-year-old Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin —   allegedly lie on “historical Azerbaijani lands,” and that Armenians have purportedly “appropriated” these territories. He concluded this series of absurd assertions by portraying the Armenian Apostolic Church as a threat to the countries of the region.

It is profoundly absurd that the spiritual leader of a people who received the ethnonym “Azerbaijani” only in the latter half of the 1930s as a result of Soviet nation-building policies, would attempt to challenge the historicity of the Armenian people, whose historical presence marked by millennia of creative life and spiritual-cultural heritage that is universally recognized and respected around the world. Even more astonishing is that such accusations of appropriation are voiced by a representative of a state whose very name was itself appropriated from another people and land.

These same cheap tactics underlie Pashazade’s recent manipulations concerning the Diocese of Russia and New Nakhijevan. It should be noted that the settlements near Rostov-on-Don were named “New Nakhijevan” by decree of the Tsarist Russian authorities, in honor of the Armenians who had resettled there from the historically Armenian region of Nakhijevan.

Such reprehensible expressions of enmity and falsification, consistently present in the public rhetoric of Azerbaijan’s religious leadership, are themselves testimony to the very reality that — to borrow Pashazade’s phrasing — Azerbaijan poses a threat to the neighboring countries of the region.

In conclusion, it must be unequivocally affirmed that lies and falsehoods can never become truth, no matter how frequently or fervently repeated.