- Alexandre Bennigsen
Alexandre Bennigsen ( _ru. Александр Адамович Беннигсен) (20 March 1913,
St Petersburg -3 June 1988 ) was a scholar ofIslam in theSoviet Union .Bennigsen was born in
St Petersburg in 1913. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family left Russia forEstonia in 1919 and settled inParis in 1924, where he studied at the Ecole des Langues Orientales.He taught at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes (en Sciences Sociales) and became the chair of history of non-Arab Islam. Bennigsen also taught at various American universities, including theUniversity of Chicago and theUniversity of Wisconsin .Bennigsen is known as the founder of the "Bennigsen school" or "Sovietologist Islam," a particular approach to Islam in the Soviet Union that became influential in the 1980s and has been widely criticized since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Bennigsen believed that the Muslims of the Soviet Union effectively resisted Sovietization, maintaining a distinctive identity within the Union. He also attributed a political role to Islam, predicting that Muslims would play a significant role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Field studies among the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the 1990s largely discredited Bennigsen's earlier studies, documenting the large-scale transformations Muslim communities had undergone under the Soviet rule.
Marie Broxup , his daughter, is a well-known scholar on Central Asia.Works
* "The Evolution of the Muslim Nationalities in the USSR and their Linguistic Problems", London, 1961.
* "Islam in the Soviet Union", London, New York, 1967.
* "Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: a revolutionary strategy for the colonial world", Chicago, 1970, (coedited with S. Enders Wimbush).
* "Mystics and Commissars, Muslims of the Soviet Empire. A Guide", Bloomington, Ind., 1985, (coedited with S. Enders Wimbush).
* "The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State", London, 1983. (With Marie Broxup).Sources
* [http://www.iranica.com/articles/sup/Bennigsen.html Biography of Bennigsen at Iranica.com]
* [http://www.mochola.org/russiaabroad/encyclopaedia/data/02/020060140140090040180060140000101200601101800101400501700001005001013015003009024.html brief Russian biography]
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