Mohammad Khiabani

Shaikh Mohammad Khiabani (1880 – 14 September 1920) was an Iranian Shia cleric, political leader and member of the Second Majles who led the 1920 Azadistan government in Azerbaijan. He had qualified for ijtihad and served as a prayer leader at Tabriz's Jameh mosque before becoming the leading figure of the Democrat Party of Azerbaijan. ^{1 2}

His birth year is given as about 1297 (1879-80) by the Encyclopaedia Iranica and as 1880 by the other sources; his birthplace is Khameneh near Tabriz — the Najaf given by Wikidata is an error against every text source. ^{2 3}

He was born in Khameneh, in the Shabestar district, to Haji Abdolhamid, a merchant of the town who had resided for thirty years in Petrovskoye (Makhachkala) in Russian Dagestan; the family moved to Tabriz when Mohammad was nine and settled in the Khiaban ward, from which his later surname came. After maktab he travelled with his father to Petrovskoye and Istanbul in his teens, then resumed his studies at the seminary in Tabriz, completing his religious studies under Hajj Mirza Abu'l-Hasan Angaji, with traditional astronomy and mathematics under Mirza Abd-al-Ali Monajjem-bashi. ²

Under the guidance of Hajji Sayyed Hosayn Khamena'i, prayer leader of Tabriz's Jameh mosque, he qualified for ijtihad, married his mentor's daughter, and after Khamena'i's death served as the mosque's noon prayer leader for nearly three years, leading morning and evening prayers at the Karim Khan mosque and teaching at the Talebiya school; the Persian article summarises his formation as jurisprudence and its principles studied "to near the level of ijtihad". He was reputed a popular preacher in the city. ^{2 4}

He was among the clerics of Tabriz who in 1908 joined the constitutionalist bloc against Mohammad Ali Shah's royalist camp; while many Shia clerics of the city denounced the insurgency, Khiabani followed the example of the leading pro-constitutionalist cleric Mirza Ali Aqa Seqat al-Eslam, took up arms at the barricades, and was admitted to the provincial anjoman that September. He sat in the Second Majles (1909-11), and after its closure lived through the suppression of the movement; the Ottomans exiled him in 1918. ^{2 1}

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he re-established the Democrat Party of Tabriz, banned for five years, and published its organ, the newspaper Tajaddod, edited by Taqi Rafat. ¹

In protest against the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement, which transferred decisions on Persia's military, financial and customs affairs exclusively to the British, he revolted on 7 April 1920, took Tabriz and its surroundings, formed a government in Azerbaijan and renamed the province Azadistan, "land of liberty" — a protest, the English article stresses, against the giving of the name "Azerbaijan" to the government centred on Baku, not a separatist move. ^{1 2}

His government lasted until 13 September 1920. The new prime minister sent Mehdi Qoli Hedayat (Mokhber al-Saltaneh) to Tabriz with full authority; caught unprepared, Khiabani was found on the morning of 14 September in a neighbour's basement, where he was killed; Hedayat claimed he had committed suicide. ^{2 1}

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