Objective
This project aims to combine the expertise and skills of scholars from Daghestan, Russia, Finland and Israel, in a joint attempt to locate and identify collections of manuscripts in a variety of oriental languages and scripts in the area of Daghestan; to prepare and publish catalogues of these manuscripts; to publish studies of the texts contained in them as well as editions of the texts themselves; and to use knowledge of these manuscripts to lay the groundwork for the first serious scholarly study of the cultural and social history of Daghestan.
Some 2000 manuscripts are currently known to exist in the principal public collection, but even of these only a handful are catalogued. Apart from these, some five to ten thousand other manuscripts are estimated to exist in a large number of private collections, large and small. The conditions in which these are kept, and the current social and political climate in the region, mean that we have a "window of opportunity" which may not recur to perform what is in an important sense a rescue operation now. Daghestan was one of the earliest areas conquered by the Muslims, but scarcely anything is known of its history under Islam. Daghestan was a major centre of Islamic culture in the Middle Ages, with links as far afield even as Yemen. Our project will attempt to fill the historiographical gap. It will also contribute to our knowledge of the cultural history of Islam more broadly considered, through the likely rescue of manuscripts of texts, which have not otherwise survived. It will aim to train young scholars in Daghestan, to encourage them to establish and maintain links between Daghestani and western scholars, and to help bring the study of Daghestani history in all its phases and facets into the ambit of world historical scholarship.
Call for proposal
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69978 Tel Aviv
Israel