Jalil Mammadguluzadeh

Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (1869–1932) was an Azerbaijani writer, satirist, and editor who founded the magazine Molla Nasraddin, the most influential satirical journal of the Muslim East in the early twentieth century. His stories and editorials attacked clerical hypocrisy, women's oppression, and colonial subordination in a vernacular Azerbaijani that broke decisively with elevated Persianate prose.

He was born on 22 February 1869 in Nakhchivan, then part of the Russian Empire's Erivan Governorate. His father Mammadgulu was a small trader of modest means, and his mother Salatin came from a local family. The household kept religious traditions but valued schooling.

He completed the Gori Teachers' Seminary in Georgia in 1887 and taught for a decade in Erivan Governorate village schools, where he saw the rural poverty that filled his later fiction. He moved to Tiflis in 1903, joined the newspaper Sharqi-Rus, and in April 1906 launched Molla Nasraddin with the cartoonist Oskar Schmerling.

The magazine ran for twenty-five years, relocating to Tabriz and then Baku as politics shifted, and reached readers from Morocco to India. He wrote the play The Dead Men, the novella The Events of Danabash Village, and dozens of stories. He died in Baku on 4 January 1932.

His name Jalil derives from the Arabic jalīl meaning "great" or "majestic," one of the names of God in Islamic tradition. Jalil is a masculine name used across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and South Asian Muslim communities.