 Complete the following phrase:  Born in Batum, then part of the Russian Empire, of a Muslim Georgian noble family of the beys of Adjara, Abashidze studied at a local Georgian school and then at a college in Ottoman Turkey. In 1913 he began teaching at schools in Adjara and published in the local press, championing the pro-Georgian orientation among the Muslim Adjarains. He further sympathized with the social-democratic revolutionaries and was persecuted by the Russian government. Between 1918 and 1920, together with Mehmed Abashidze, he was a driving force behind the Liberation Committee of Muslim Georgia, an organization that was active during the Turkish and then British occupation of Batum, advocating incorporation of the region into a newly independent Georgia. After the 