In collaboration with scholars at UvA and abroad, this project studies Muslim cultural and religious reformers from the former Russian Empire/Soviet Union and South Eastern Europe. How did Muslim scholars and intellectuals express local, regional and religious identities, as well as political interests, under non-Muslim rule? How did they adapt existing and explore new literary genres?

The project encompasses the study of texts in Turkish, Tatar and Arabic as well as in Russian, Ukrainian and Bosnian. One focus is on the published and unpublished work of Rizaeddin b. Fakhraddin (1858-1936), who worked in the Urals region of Russia; as educator and qadi, then as journalist and eventually as mufti of Stalin’s Russia, Fakhraddin was one of the most prolific protagonists of religious reform in the late Russian Empire and the early USSR. Fakhraddin’s biographical work Athar is a fantastic source for studying the Muslim elites of Central Eurasia; and his literary and historical journal Shura (Orenburg, 1908-1917) reveals his huge networks also into the Arab world. Equally prominent in this research line is the educational reformist and journalist Ismail Gasprinskii (1841-1914), whose bilingual newspaper Perevodchik/Terjeman (edited in Crimea from 1883 to 1918) was the first, and for decades the only, Muslim-owned newspaper in European Russia.

Together with Ozan Karabulak (Marmara University) Michael Kemper has been studying the origins of Gasprinskii’s “new method” of teaching, which quickly expanded into a broader movement for curriculum reform in various regions of Russia; here of particular interest are connections with Muslim intellectuals in the South Caucasus. Kemper is furthermore investigating the interrelation between Crimean and Kazan Tatar Muslim reformers and their counterparts in Bosnia and Bulgaria. More broadly, the project also encompasses studies on the heritage of these modernizers, for instance as expressed in fatwas from contemporary Russia. Special attention is also paid to the reception of Gasprinskii in independent Ukraine.

Within ARTES, Kemper is involved in the supervision of several PhD thesis projects related to the modern Muslim world, in particular on Tatar Muslim sources from Russia (Galiia Muratova, Mansur Gazimzianov), on Kurdish saintly tribes (Erdal Gezik), on Iraq under Saddam Husein (Amir Taha), and on the province of Gilan before and during the Iranian Revolution (Misagh Javadpour), in collaboration with Sudha Rajagopalan, Christian Noack, Gulnaz Sibgatullina, Ugur Ungör, and Touraj Atabaki.

Recent publications

• Michael Kemper, “From Regional Islamic Reform to Global Anti-colonialism? Jamaladdin al-Afghani and Russia’s Muslims”, Journal for Central Asian History 2 (2024), 296-326.
• Leila Almazova & Michael Kemper, “A Requiem for “Jadidism”? Debates on Islamic Education in Contemporary Tatarstan”, Journal for Central Asian History 2 (2024), 199-231.
• Ozan Karabulak & Michael Kemper, “Where Did Gasprinskii’s Jadid Teaching Method Come from? Exchange and Competition between Bakhchesaray, Istanbul and the Caucasus”, submitted in July 2024.
• Makka S.-G. Albogachieva & Michael Kemper, “After Deportation: Chechen and Ingush Sufi Groups and Their Zikr Rituals in Soviet Kazakhstan”, Asiatische Studien/Études asiatiques 78.2 (2024), 247-266.
• Michael Kemper, “Denunciation and Revenge: Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov on Ishmi Ishan”, Wissenskulturen muslimischer Gesellschaften. Philosophische und islamwissenschaftliche Zugänge. Festschrift für Anke von Kügelgen, hgg. von Kata Moser und Serena Tolino (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter: Welten des Islams, 2023), 287-301.
• Michael Kemper, “The Nation as a Network: Rizaeddin Fakhretdinov’s Islamic Biographies“, in: Networks, Narratives and Nations: Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond, ed. by Marjet Brolsma et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 85-95.
• “Ijtihad in Putin’s Russia? Signature Fatwas from Moscow and Kazan”, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 65.7 (2022), 935-960.
• Michael Kemper & Gulnaz Sibgatullina, “Liberal Islamic Theology in Conservative Russia: Taufik Ibragim’s 'Quranic Humanism'”, Die Welt des Islams 61.3 (2021), 279-307 (online per 15 March 2021).

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