Before Islam, Azerbaijan was filled with Zoroastrian temples, their ever-burning “sacred fires” fueled by natural gas and oil vents. Today the Zoroastrians are gone but the vast oil and gas reserves remain. Alas, so do any number of long-simmering regional feuds between various cultures, ethnicities and religions. It remains to be seen whether President Heydar Aliev’s government will be able to survive economic and political challenges and take advantage of Azerbaijan’s abundant resources.

For most of its history Azerbaijan was part of Iran; even today 75% of the world’s Azeris live in Iran, where they make up some 40% of the population. This has led to close but stormy relationships with Azerbaijan’s neighbor to the south. Iran fears the consequences of rising Azeri nationalism among its own people. There are two schools of Azeri nationalism: one seeks re-unification with Iran, while another seeks a “Greater Azerbaijan” which would include territory presently controlled by the Islamic Republic. Neither of these options are particularly appealing to Iran, where there has been a history of conflict between Iran’s Persian population and Turkic groups like the Azeri. There are border disputes between the two countries; there is also bad feeling about Azerbaijan’s ties with Israel and Iran’s relations with Russia and Armenia.

Relations between Azeris and Armenians have never been good; the Soviets kept things from boiling over only by their infamous “iron hand in an iron glove” approach. Once they left, the feces hit the fan. When the smoke cleared Azerbaijan had lost 20% of its territory to ethnic Armenians living in the southwestern Nagorno-Karabakh region, and gained 750,000 refugees and displaced persons. Russia has tended to favor the Armenians in this conflict, while the Georgians (who, like the Armenians, are Orthodox Christians) have favored Azerbaijan. There are large enclaves of ethnic Armenians in the Republic of Georgia, and the Georgian government has reason to fear Armenian separatism and nationalism. At present an uneasy ceasefire exists between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but tensions and bad feelings persist. The Azeri refugees continue to strain an already fragile economic infrastructure, and provide a fertile breeding ground for Islamic radicalism.

Azerbaijan is presently seeking closer ties with Turkey and following the Turkish model of a “secular Moslem state.” If Turkey were to get caught up in Islamic fervor (or pan-Turkic fervor, whereby Turkey sought to unite all the Turkic people – i.e. most of Central Asia -- under the Turkish flag), Azerbaijan might very well get caught up in the ensuing whirlwind. The relationship between Azerbaijan and Turkey will be one to watch in the months to come, as Turkey tries to define its role in a post-September 11 Central Asia.

Could radical Islamists get the upper hand in Azerbaijan? It’s difficult to say. The Azeris are Shi’ites, regarded as heretics by the Sunni Wahhabis. While the Iranians are Shi’ites, they have not shown any particular interest in helping set up an Islamic Republic in Azerbaijan, or in annexing Azerbaijan and thereby creating a majority Turkic population in Iran. There are a lot of long-standing grudges in the area, however; anti-Armenian feelings could easily be fanned into anti-Christian and anti-Zionist feelings by clever demagogues.