Q.4) What makes it possible for us to know about what happened centuries ago?
Answers
Answer:
history, particularly of the beginning of the 20th century, was formed when I started my PhD at the European University in Saint Petersburg. There, we had a program for studying Islam in Russia. I did not visit Dagestan yet at this point of time, but I knew from the start that I was interested in 20th-century Dagestan in general. I have a BA and a MA degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies, and consequently Muslim-populated Dagestan became my field of interest. More and more, I was becoming excited by Dagestani manuscripts. Imagine a huge number of Arab-language Islamic manuscripts outside of the Arab world. However, one cannot decide to study such a narrow topic without spending some time with those manuscripts and archival documents. After my first visit to Dagestan I had a clearer picture about what exactly I was going to do. Based on these perceptions as well as the historiography of Dagestan, I ended up with the topic “Islamic Reformism and the Bolshevik Revolution in Dagestan, 1917-1928”. So, my thesis deals with a period of transition from imperial Russia to the Soviet Union. I am switching attention from the metropolis, which has been studied quite well, and propose to investigate the situation on the fringes of the former Russian Empire where major Muslim intellectuals experimented with combinations of Islamic and Socialist ideas. They thereby built on the local and international projects of Islamic reformism, and integrated Islamic ideas of ‘progress’ into the discourse of the Bolsheviks.
HISTORIANS AND ARCAELOGIST help us to do this