Probing the Horizons of a Daghestani Polymath

Wider research context Over the last years, scholars in Europe, North America, and Russia have begun to reconsider the meaning of Islamic reformism (henceforth Jadidism) in Russian and Soviet history. Such an effort has yielded significant insights into the vast and hitherto unexplored constellation of Islamic intellectual practices, which overlapped with modernist sensibilities. This move carries a significant interpretive baggage for it allows to go beyond artificial, and unhelpful, interpretive binaries. However, the study of Jadidism has so far privileged sources from the Middle Volga and Central Asia, while comparatively little has been done to explore said phenomenon in the North Caucasus. To remedy such a state of affairs, this project focuses in on the legacy of the most representative and influential among Daghestani Muslim reformist scholars: Ali ibn Abd al-amid al-Ghumuqi (1878-1943). Approach This project proposes to study holistically what once was the library of Ali al-Ghumuqi. This body of manuscript sources includes more than 500 codices and 1200 single records in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kumyk, and Lak. While most of the surviving manuscript collections from the North Caucasus reflect the local madrasa curriculum, al-Ghumuqis library stands out for its specific thematic range: Islamic jurisprudence, polemical tracts against Sufism, studies on Daghestani history, folklore, and local languages. Hypotheses We posit that al-Ghumuqis translated Western-style rationalism and the European discourse on civilizational progress into an original conceptualization of Islamic reform. His contribution to the Islamic reformist discourse should be distinguished from other manifestations of modernization, which one finds in other regions of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Furthermore, we hypothesize that, after 1927, al-Ghumuqi refashioned himself as a folklorist and modern historiographer and thus contributed meaningfully to the making of Daghestani national culture. Level of Originality To date not a single study of Jadidism has addressed comprehensively the output of a major Muslim reformist intellectual. Objectives The proposed project sets out to produce a full catalogue of said collection as well as a monograph, which will contextualize the oeuvre of al-Ghumuqi in the history of Islamic knowledge production in Daghestan after the Russian invasion in the 18th century. By doing so, this project seeks: (i) to situate the legacy of Jadidism in the Islamic intellectual landscape of 20th-century Daghestan; (ii) to bring into greater relief the trans-regional character of Islamic reformism in the North Caucasus; ; (iii) to take full stock of the political changes and institutional environments which informed his writings on the cusp between the collapse of the tsarist empire and the formation of the USSR. Primary researchers involved Dr. Paolo Sartori will serve as principal investigator of the project and Dr. Shamil Shikhaliev will be employed as researcher at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.