Announcements

5 ноября 2022 года

Session of the Seminar "Caucasus in the Past and Present", Topic: "Collective Memory and Significant Sites of Islamization: Islamizing Arabs in the North Caucasus"

 
The joint meeting of the seminar "Caucasus in the Past and Present", Topic: "Collective Memory and Significant Sites of Islamization: Islamizing Arabs in the North Caucasus"will be held in November, 2022 at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow, st. Rozhdestvenka, 12, room. 222.

The exact date will be announced closer to November. 

Speakers:

• V.O. Bobrovnikov, professor at the Higher School of Economics, the Head of Oriental Studies Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences;
• I.A. Chmilevskaya, laboratory assistant-researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies (the Russian Academy of Sciences).

The islamization process had stretched for more than a millennium in the Volga Region and the Eastern Caucasus. The spread of Islam is associated mainly with the Abbasid embassy of Ibn Fadlan in the years 921-922 after Christ and the other events in the early medieval Volga Bulgaria and in the Eastern Caucasus, where Islam had first penetrated even earlier, under the Umayyads.

The islamization earliest monuments are preserved in the local Arabic epigraphy of the 8th–10th centuries, manuscripts from the 11th century, architecture and archaeological finds of the pre-Mongolian period.

Our seminar is devoted to modern significant sites of re-Islamization and related plots of its collective memory among Dagestan Muslims, which we have studied in the field studies course in 2020–2022.

A comparative analysis of this heterogeneous materials set allows us to answer a number of controversial questions on the region’s long-term Islamization: about its periodization, actors and agents, links with Sufism, Shiite expansion in the 15th–18th centuries, the return of Islam to public space at the end of the 20th century.