Hüseyinzade Ali (Baku 1864 – Istanbul 1940), the son of a sheikh and grandson of a prominent Muslim religious leader, was schooled in Tbilisi and from 1885 studied mathematics in St Petersburg, where he became conscious of his Turkic ethnicity and pursued Orientalist studies. Following his graduation in 1889 he moved to Istanbul to study military medicine, graduating in 1894 with the rank of captain, and later becoming assistant professor of medicine; it was in these medical circles that the “Committee for Ottoman Union” (forerunner of the Committee for Union and Progress, CUP) was established in 1899. Ali himself returned to Baku in 1903, where until 1910 he edited the Hayat and Kasply newspapers, and joined a delegation participating in the Russian Pan-Muslim congress of 1906.

Returning to Istanbul in 1910, Ali was elected a presiding member of the CUP. The end of the war brought him back to what was now Azerbaijan, whose flag he designed. When the short-lived, Turkish-supported Azerbaijan Democratic Republic fell to the Bolsheviks in 1920, Ali once again moved to Turkey, where he became a citizen and took the surname Turan.