Abstract
The 4-year project analyses the history of Oriental and Islamic Studies in Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia and its consequences for the discipline today. Our first goal is to study the research agendas and ideological approaches of the Oriental Studies institutions that emerged in the course of 20th century in various republics of the USSR, the changing Soviet discourses on Islam and Muslim societies, the involvement of scholars in party and state agencies, and their role in anti-religious propaganda. Our second goal is to assess the legacy of the heavily politicised history of Soviet Oriental Studies in today's Russia and the newly-independent Muslim-majority states of the Former Soviet Union. This will lead us to an assessment of the character of 'Soviet Orientalism' and its implications for present-day scholarship in these regions. The systematic project design allows us to study the Russian centre as well as several Muslim-majority republics: 1)Early Soviet Oriental Studies in Moscow and Leningrad (main applicant); 2)Academic Oriental Studies in post-WWII Moscow and Leningrad (PhD-Project 1); 3)Oriental Studies in Uzbekistan/Tajikistan, as a regional (Central Asian) centre of Islamic/Orientalist learning (co-applicant); 4)Oriental Studies in Kazakhstan/Kyrgyzstan (or, alternatively, Turkmenistan), as areas formerly characterized by tribal/nomadic societies (PhD-Project 2); 5)Oriental Studies in Azerbaijan with its urban Muslim elites (PhD-Project 3). Discourse and network analysis will be used to analyze a variety of published, unpublished and oral sources in Russian and the national languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus.