A significant stage in the development of modern Azerbaijani oriental studies occurred during the Soviet decades, and during that period the conditions for studying all the necessary topics were unfavorable. In Soviet Oriental studies, a number of topics were either shelved for political reasons or approached from a perspective different from that adopted by international scholarship. Sufism as a movement, Sufi poetry, and Sufi poets were among the fields viewed unpositively by Soviet philological scholarship, and it became customary to label this body of literature, rich and profound in its philosophical content, as "reactionary". However, over the past four decades significant progress has been made in this area: numerous articles on Sufism and Sufi poetry have been written, books have been published, and a number of written texts have been translated. Nevertheless, much work remains. Aygun Alizada`s doctoral dissertation, "The Formation and Development of Persian-Language Sufi Literature (10th-13th Centuries)", has attracted global attention for both its breadth and the scope of its topics. This review analyzes this work in detail, emphasizing the importance of incorporating positive international practices into similar local studies of Sufism.