Eurasian Studies Library

The world as seen by a Qur’an specialist in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. Our book tells a dramatic story of ’Abd al-Majid al-Qadiri, a Muslim individual born in the Kazakh lands and brought up in the Sufi environment of the South Urals, who memorized the entire Qur’an at the Mosque of the Prophet. In Russia he travelled widely, performing the Qur'an recitations. The Stalinist terror was merciless to him: in total, he spent fifteen years of his life in labour camps in Solovki, in the North, and Tashkent, in the south. At the end of his life, al-Qadiri wrote the fascinating memoirs that we analysed and translated in this book for the first time. Al-Qadiri’s life account allows us to look at the history of Islam in Russia from a new angle. His lively language provides access to everyday concerns of Russia’s Muslims, their personal interactions, their emotions, and the material world that surrounded them. Al-Qadiri’s book is a book of memory, full of personal drama and hope.

The book systematically explores the history of the Buddhist community in the Russian Empire. It offers an advanced overview of the relations that existed between the Buriat Buddhists and the Russian imperial authorities.
Various institutions and actors represented Russian power: foreign and interior ministries, the Irkutsk general-governorship, the Orthodox Christian mission of East Siberia, local journalists and academic scholars. The book is focussing especially on the evolution of imperial legislation and specific administrative mechanisms aiming at the regulation of Buddhist affairs. The author demonstrates how these actors responded to conflicting situations and collisions of interests. Thus the history of relations between Russia and her Buddhist subjects is shown as a complex process with participation of a number of actors with their own interests and motivations.

In Christ Came Forth From India, Timothy Paul Grove offers a survey and contextualiztion of early modern Georgian writings on astrology, astronomy, and cosmology.
These texts include the widely distributed translations of the Almanacco Perpetuo of Ottavio Beltrano (1653), a text brought to the Caucasus by Roman Catholic missionaries, several texts attributed to King Vakht’ang VI of Kartli (1675–1737), and two 19th century manuscripts which incorporate much older material. The numerous Georgian texts are described and examined in terms of their chronology and interrelated content, their literary relationship to texts from outside the Caucasus, and their context within the astrological literature of Europe, the Near East, and the Far East.