Tatiana D. Cherkasova

The article describes the Department of Middle Eastern History at Moscow State University and its place in the development of Russian Oriental studies.

The article analyses the scientific and pedagogical activities of the teaching staff of the Department of the Near and Middle East History on the threshold of the 270th anniversary of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. The main goal of the authors was to make an objective assessment of the current state of the Department and its contribution to the development of Russian humanitarian knowledge, to determine its place in the structure of university science and education. Such a study makes it possible to characterize the specific nature of the training of Russian specialists in the Middle East and North Africa, the history and culture of Islam at Moscow University. At the same time, it allows us to get an adequate idea of the scientific schools formed in the Department, the level of academic research conducted by it, in order to assess the multifaceted work of the Department’s team within the framework of all-Russian and international Orientalist research projects. In the course of the work it was convincingly demonstrated that the Department of the Near and Middle East History has now firmly occupied its niche in the structure of Russian Oriental studies, becoming an important part of the Russian humanitarian community, a recognized center of education and training of qualified Orientalists for the needs of the country.

The article examines a historical retrospective of the administrative, cultural, and intellectual relationship between the post-Almohad dynasties of the Maghreb (the Marinids, Abdalwadids, and Hafsids) and the traditional Muslim educational institutions of North Africa. The reasons and characteristic features of the processes of reproduction of religious scholarship in the Maghreb are investigated in the light of the military and political events that accompanied the expansion of the Almohad state. The historical and cultural background of cooperation and rivalry between the major universities of the region and the Sultan’s/Emir’s court is shown. The author traces the dynamics of the geography of “sacred knowledge” in North Africa and proves that it correlates with the financial and economic activity of the states that arose on the ruins of the Almohad political project. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the multifaceted activities of madrasahs, which served as leading urban learning centers, had significant libraries and had highly professional teachers of Islamic spiritual disciplines. Tribal and intellectual ties between the military and political elite of the Maghreb and the teaching staff of new educational institutions have been studied.