As soon as Baku is taken by Turkish troops and put under British protectorate Ali and Nino return. Ali on the other hand feels in his cultural element, but after a moment of religious ecstasy he realizes how much he misses Azerbaijan and her multi-ethnic life. In Persian exile Nino depresses in the conservative Islamic environment which confines her to the harem and the company of women with whom she has nothing in common. Ali and Nino can finally return to Baku, but after a short fight for the countryвЂ™s independence in which Ali too takes up arms they have to flee. After several months Nino visits Ali in his refuge in Daghestan where they get married and lead a happy life in poverty until the Russian imperial authorities quit Azerbaijan following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Now Ali has to hide from the Nachararyan clan to escape the vendetta and from the Russian police. He chases after them, but he only kills Nachararyan and spares Nino. Tradition of honour requires that Ali finds the fugitives and kills them. The wedding day is already close, when Ali is informed one night that Nachararyan kidnapped Nino.

Some months later he asks NinoвЂ™s father for her hand, but he refuses at first and changes his mind only after the mediation of AliвЂ™s older Armenian friend Melik Nachararyan. World War I breaks out and plunges Europe into chaos, but Ali doesnвЂ™t intend to fight for the Russian Empire.

During the summer holidays after AliвЂ™s graduation from high school the two get secretly engaged. He is the son of a notable Muslim family and Nino is the seventeen-year-old daughter of a newly rich Christian Georgian family. Five years later Ali is a young man of nineteen and in love with beautiful Nino Kipiani whom he knows since childhood. A teacher of the Russian high school in Baku, Azerbaijan (then part of the Russian Empire) talks about the dispute of scholars regarding the dividing line between Europe and Asia in Transcaucasia. The novel Ali and Nino begins with Ali Khan ShirvanshirвЂ™s memory of a geography class in 1909. The case of Kurban Said is investigated in the Dutch documentary Alias Kurban Said by Jos de Putter released in 2004 and in the bestselling biography of Essad Bey by Tom Reiss titled The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life which came out in 2005. In the early 1970s claims were made that the Azeri writer Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli (Yusif VЙ™zir Г‡Й™mЙ™nzЙ™minli: 1887-1942) collaborated with Essad Bey on Ali and Nino which is supported by some scholars. In 1944, however, rumour spread that Lev Nussimbaum (1905-1942), better known under his pen name Essad Bey, was the true author of the novels and today itвЂ™s widely accepted that the German-language writer originating from Baku in Azerbaijan must have been their co-author at least. First of all there is the Austrian Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof (1894-1982) who signed the publishing contract and registered the copyright. Up to this day nobody knows for certain who was the real person hiding behind it, but three possible authors have been made out. In the 1950s, however, Jenia Graman, a German who had settled in England during the war, found a copy on a Berlin bookstall, translated it into English, and had it published for a second time.Kurban Said is a pseudonym under which two German-language novels have been published, namely Ali and Nino ( Ali und Nino: 1937) and The Girl from the Golden Horn ( Das MГ¤dchen vom Goldenen Horn: 1938). The outbreak of the Second World War could easily have meant that Ali and Nino was never discovered by an English-speaking audience. Having then gone on to Italy, he ended up under house arrest in Positano, where he died of a rare blood disease in 1942. A flamboyant in the literary world of 1920s Berlin, he fled from Nazi Germany to Austria.

Born in Baku in 1905, Nussimbaum had a passion for the Orient, and in his youth, converted to Islam. Was it possible that the Austrian countess who signed the original publishing contract, Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, could have written a novel that displays such extraordinary insight into the atmosphere of pre-First World War Baku and intimate knowledge of Muslim culture? Recent research seems to prove, once and for all, that her friend Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who had escaped Azerbaijan during the Russian Revolution and settled in Berlin, was the real 'Kurban Said'.

For a long time the identity of the author who used the pseudonym 'Kurban Said' to write Ali and Nino, published in Vienna in 1937, has been surrounded by controversy.

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