Vadim Staklo, associate professor of history, has released a beta version of Russian/Soviet Perspectives on Islam, with the help of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The project, which has the support of the Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, "documents the encounter and evolving relationship between the secular/Orthodox state and the Islamic regions, groups, individuals, and ideologies on the territory of the former Soviet Union and neighboring countries." At the Russian History blog, Professor Steven Barnes shares the announcement of the project:
George Mason University is launching a major new international multidisciplinary scholarly program, the Russian/Soviet Perspectives on Islam Project (RPI). The project, with primary support from the Luce Foundation and the NEH, documents the encounter and evolving relationship between the Orthodox/secular state and the Islamic regions, groups, individuals, and ideologies on the territory of the former Soviet Union and neighboring countries. This set of unique materials illuminates the strategies implemented by the Soviet and Russian state to establish authority and legitimacy among predominantly Muslim populations in Central Asia, the Northern Caucasus and Siberia and to enhance Moscow’s influence internationally with nearby Muslim countries, including Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey. The digital archive is designed to disseminate these documents to the widest possible scholarly community and general readership.
...
The project will digitize and translate a large number of primary sources pertaining to these topics. Besides presenting the documents from a number of Russian and international archives, we also work with institutional partners and individual scholars to assist in their search, management, and publication of primary sources related to their forthcoming or published books and articles. These synergetic themes will allow us to broaden the reach of traditional publications by introducing a virtually unlimited number of well-organized relevant primary sources to scholars and the general public.
At the core of this knowledge base is a collection of digitized primary sources. Most of these documents have never been published before, although we do include some important materials that have been known to and used by scholars.
December 05, 2016