Rafig Tagi - essay to the birthday

Today, on August 5, a doctor and writer Rafiq Tagi would mark his 66 years old. Relatives, friends and people close to him paid tribute to the author of various works of art, essays, journalistic articles, citing the turbulent motion of society, not only in Azerbaijan, but also outside it. Today, people brought flowers to his grave and spoke speech worthy of the memory of the poet. He was born on August 5, 1950 in the village Hoshchobanly in the Masalli region of Azerbaijan. He graduated from medical school, and worked as a doctor in the  village and  as an emergency doctor. He was a talented physician, loyal to the Hippocrates oath, a gifted and bright publicist true  to freedom given to him and all people by God.

Tagi began to publish his works since the late 1960s  as a student. He is the author of many poems, short stories, essays, and articles. In 1987 he became a member of Azerbaijan Writers Union. As an outstanding personality, he brilliantly  expressed free speech, taught to think freely,  caused  many people  to  debate  on various topics,  on which were imposed government, religious and traditional mental taboo. One can argue, or condemn  the thinking  by Tagi  expressed  in his essay "Europe and Us", and became the cause of his arrest in 2006, his release in  2007, and his death in 2011. But it should be admitted that now, a few years after his death,  his internal concerns about the future of the world, Islam, Azerbaijan, now that,  have became visible to the blind -  the emerge of LIH, systemic crisis  in Azerbaijan, and the world has become much more complicated and dramatic.

Rafig Tagi’s death was sacrificial. He sympathized Jesus, the recognized and revered in Islam the prophet Isa, and dreamed about the rise of the primordial, progressive Islam, approval in Azerbaijan of just and enlightened society. In this sense, his ideas were alien and unacceptable for both religious and public radicalism. When people ask whose victim he became - a radical mullahs or  thieving officials, the answer gives the course of recent events – he became a victim of  those and others. –0--