Born on 31 January 1884 to
Akhund Haji Molla Alakbar Rasulzadeh in
Novkhany, near
Baku, Mahammad Amin Rasulzade received his education at the Russian-Muslim Secondary School and then at the
Technical College in Baku. In his years of study he created
"Muslim Youth Organisation Musavat", the first secret organisation in Azerbaijan's contemporary history, and beginning from 1903 Rasulzade began writing articles in various opposition newspapers and magazines. At that time, his
anti-monarchist platform and his demands for the national autonomy of
Azerbaijan, aligned him with
Social Democrats and future
Communists. In 1904 he founded the first Muslim social-democrat organisation "
Hummet" and became editor-in-chief of its newspapers,
Takamul (1906–1907) and
Yoldash (1907). Rasulzade also published many articles in non-partisan newspapers such as
Hayat,
Irshad, and the journal
Fuyuzat. His dramatic play titled
The Lights in the Darkness was staged in
Baku in 1908. Rasulzade and his co-workers were representatives of the Azerbaijani intelligentsia. Most of them, including Rasulzade himself, had been members of the Baku organization of the
Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (
Bolsheviks) in 1905. A photograph is extant in Soviet archives, showing Rasulzade with
Prokopius Dzhaparidze and
Meshadi Azizbekov, Bolsheviks who later became famous as two of the
26 Baku Commissars shot during the civil war. During the
First Russian Revolution (1905–1907), Rasulzade actively participated in revolutionary developments. As the story goes, it was Rasulzade who saved young
Joseph Stalin in 1905 in
Baku, when police were searching for the latter as an active instigator of riots. In 1909, under the persecution from
Tsarist authorities, Rasulzade fled
Baku to participate in the
Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911. While in
Iran, Rasulzade edited
Iran-e Azad, or "Independent Iran", newspaper, became one of the founders of
Democrat Party of Persia and began publishing its newspaper
Iran-e Now which means "New Iran" and which has been described as "the greatest, most important and best known of the Persian newspapers, and the first to appear in the large size usual in Europe". In 1911, Rasulzade also published his book "
Saadet-e bashar" ("Happiness of Mankind") in defense of the revolution. Rasulzade was fluent in
Persian. After
Russian troops entered
Iran in 1911 and, in cooperation with
British, assisted Qajar Court to put an end to Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Rasulzade fled to
Istanbul, then capital of
Ottoman Empire. Here, in the wake of
Young Turk Revolution, Rasulzade founded a journal called
Türk Yurdu (
The Land of Turks), in which he published his famous article "İran Türkleri" about the
Iranian Turks. == The Musavat Party and Azerbaijan Democratic Republic ==