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Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History

Online ISBN:
9780197605790
Print ISBN:
9780197605769
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History

Eileen Kane (ed.),
Eileen Kane
(ed.)
Professor of History, Connecticut College
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Masha Kirasirova (ed.),
Masha Kirasirova
(ed.)
Assistant Professor of History, New York University, Abu Dhabi
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Margaret Litvin (ed.)
Margaret Litvin
(ed.)
Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, Connecticut College
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Published online:
22 June 2023
Published in print:
7 June 2023
Online ISBN:
9780197605790
Print ISBN:
9780197605769
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, this book presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. These archival, autobiographical, and literary sources, introduced by specialists and in some cases by pairs of scholars with complementary language expertise, highlight connections long obscured by disciplinary cleavages between Slavic and Middle East studies. Taken together, the thirty-four chapters of this book show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They reveal the transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. Above all, they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have embodied and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars and spies. A set of new maps helps orient readers amid the expansion and collapse of empires, border changes, population transfers, and creation of new nation-states that occurred during the two centuries these sources cover.

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