Shihabaddin Mardjani and the Muslim Archive in Russia

Abstract

Shihabaddin Mardjani (1818-1889) was one of the first Muslim scholars in the Russian empire to approach conceptually the challenge of Russian imperial scholarship (Kemper, 1998, pp. 462-465). Despite his readiness to speak to audiences beyond the circles of Muslim elites (for example, by participating in the scholarly proceedings at Kazan University), Mardjani largely remained in the confines of Islamic tradition with its specific approaches to the production of knowledge. As the library of Mardjani either have been lost in fire or dispersed in many private collections, his works in the manuscript and published form remain the main source of analysis for historians of today. Still, there are documents from the personal archive of Mardjani that allow us to judge about the nature of his approach to remnants of the past, i.e. his view on the Muslim concept of legacy.