Examining the History Books of the Republic of Azerbaijan (with emphasis on textbooks)

Edition of textbooks are the main plans of any government to form and manipulate the minds of its new generations of any country to reach to their long term goals. In this regard, history textbooks due to their socio political outputs are endowed with great importance. Following the separation of Caucasus from Iran, the Russians implemented many programs to breach any cultural relations between the nations of this region and Iran. The turning point of these actions, were the omission of Persian language and Arabic writing, and recognition of Cyrillic alphabet in Caucasus and the central Asia. Since the third decade of 20^th century, there began a new system of history writing based on undocumented contents. The main features of this method of history writing were to battle the intellectual potentiality of the region including the genuine inclinations of the people to Iran and Islam. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan, not only an independent way of history writing was not originated in this republic, but also the Soviet defined clichés were expanded and developed with much more energy. The lack of historical background for more than one hundred year, and as for the lack of enough practice of government administration are the main reasons for encouraging undocumented history writing in Azerbaijan
To describe this approach, the present article intends to examine the history textbooks of the fifth, ninth, eleventh grades further to a few university textbooks.