Ziya Bunyadov - Critics

Critics

Bunyadov researched ancient and medieval Azerbaijani historiography, specializing in Caucasian Albania and Azerbaijan during the Arab caliphate rule, concentrating on events from the 7th-19th centuries AD. In different areas, Bunyadov's work has met severe criticism. According to journalist Thomas de Waal:

"Buniatov's academy reissued thirty thousand copies of a forgotten racist tract by the turn of the century Russian polemicist Vasil Velichko; later Buniatov began a poisonous quarrel for which Caucasian Albanians themselves should take none of them blame. Buniatov’s scholarly credentials were dubious. It later transpired that the two articles he published in 1960 and 1965 on Caucasian Albania were direct plagiarism. Under his own name, he had simply published, unattributed, translations of two articles, originally written in English by Western scholars C.F.J. Dowsett and Robert Hewsen."

Bunyadov is also known for his article, "Why Sumgait?", on the 1988 ethnic riots in the town of Sumgait. Thomas de Waal calls Bunyadov "Azerbaijan’s foremost Armenophobe," and says, "Buniatov concluded that the Sumgait pogroms had been planned by the Armenians themselves in order to discredit Azerbaijan and boost the Armenian nationalist cause." (see Sumgait pogrom#Conspiracy theories).

According to Russian historian V. Shnirelman, Bunyadov "purposefully tried "to clear" the territories of modern Azerbaijan from the presence of Armenian history". "Another way is to underestimate the presence of Armenians in ancient and medieval Transcaucasia and to belittle their role by reprinting antique and medieval sources with denominations and replacements of the "Armenian state" term to "the Albanian state" or with other distortions of original texts. In the 1960s to 1990s there were many such reprintings of primary sources in Baku, where academician Z.M. Bunyadov was actively engaged".

Soviet academic Igor Diakonov wrote that Bunyadov become infamous for a scientific edition of "a historical source from where all mentions on Armenians have been carefully eliminated".

Historians Willem Floor and Hasan Javadi charged Bunyatov for making "an incomplete and defective Russian translation of Bakikhanov's text. Not only has he not translated any of the poems in the text, but he does not even mention that he has not done so, while he does not translate certain other prose parts of the text without indicating this and why. This is in particular disturbing because he suppresses, for example, the mention of territory inhabited by Armenians, thus not only falsifying history, but also not respecting Bakikhanov's dictum that a historian should write without prejudice, whether religious, ethnic, political or otherwise".

Some of Bunyadov's research is discussed by Western journalist and author Yo'av Karny.