Arab Studies and Arab-Islamic Languages and Research in Imperial Russian Universities: Kazan and St. Petersburg Universities (1804 –1855)

Abstract

The authors of this article focus on issues related to history, factors, and trends in the development of Arab-Islamic studies in the Russian Empire. The article presents an overview and systematization of the main events, names, as well as some features of the formation of educational traditions of teaching Arab-Islamic languages, as well as key focus areas and results of historical and cultural studies of Muslim peoples of the Near and Middle East and the Russian Muslim East at Kazan and St. Petersburg Universities in the first half of the 19th century. Complex academic and university courses and subjects – Arab studies, Iranian studies and Turkology – in the Russian Empire in the first half of the 19th century became important components of the disciplinary and institutional development of modern Oriental studies and are presented as a certain historical, scientific, social and cultural phenomenon of humanitarian research of personas and societies of the Islamic East. These Orientalist fields of research contributed to the knowledge of the national history of Russian state and society, particularly the territories, peoples and cultures of the Empire that were organically connected with the Islamic world.