Notes on Contributors
Sergey Abashin
is Professor of Anthropology at the European University at Saint-Petersburg (Russia). His main research topics include imperial and Soviet transformations in Central Asia, and post-Soviet migrations. He has published two monographs (in Russian): Nationalisms in Central Asia: in search of identity (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2007), and Soviet kishlak: between colonialism and modernization (Moscow: NLO, 2015), as well as articles about Central Asian Islamic studies: “The Logic of Islamic Practice: A Religious Conflict in Central Asia,” Central Asian Survey, 25/3 (2006), pp. 267–286; “A Prayer for Rain: Practicing being Soviet and Muslim,” Journal of Islamic Studies, 25/2 (2014), pp. 178–200.
Ulfat (Ulfatbek) Abdurasulov
(Ph.D. 2009, History Institute, Tashkent) is a Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the history of Islamic Central Asia, the history of the Russian protectorates in Central Asia, early modern diplomatic history, as well as the history of early modern record-keeping and knowledge production in Central Eurasia. Dr. Abdurasulov’s publications appeared in academic journals, such as Der Islam, Ab Imperio, Islamic Law and Society, Itinerario, and JESHO. Together with Paolo Sartori, he co-authored the monograph Seeking Justice at the Court of the Khans of Khiva (19th–Early 20th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
Bakhtiyar Babajanov
is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, Tashkent. He is the author of Kokandskoe Khanstvo: politika, vlast’, religiia (Kyoto-Tashkent, 2010) and Epigrafika v arkhitekturnom landshafte Khivy: Mechety, pogrebal’nye kompleksy, medrese, dvortsy, vorota (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2020).
Devin DeWeese
is Professor Emeritus of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. His research has focused on issues of Islamization in Central and Inner Asia, the social and political roles of Sufi communities, and Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (1994) and (with Ashirbek Muminov) of Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia, vol. I: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (2013). His most recent article is “Encountering Saints in the Hallowed Ground of a Regional Landscape: The ‘Description of Khwārazm’ and the Experience of Pilgrimage in 19th-Century Central Asia,” in Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes, ed. Daphna Ephrat, Ethel Sara Wolper, and Paulo G. Pinto (Leiden, 2021).
Allen Frank
is an independent scholar in Takoma Park Maryland, USA. His focus of interest is the Islamic history of Russia and Central Asia. His recent publications include Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2022), Gulag Miracles: Sufis and Stalinist Repression in Kazakhstan (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2019), Saduaqas Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars of Our Times I–II, (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2018) (co-editor with Ashirbek Muminov and Aytzhan Nurmanova).
Benjamin Gatling
is Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Folklore Program at George Mason University. His research interests include oral narrative, performance, the ethnography of communication, and Persianate oral traditions. He is the author of Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).
Agnès Kefeli
is Clinical Full Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University and the author of Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia, which received the 2015 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She is especially interested in conversion, popular contestation of official identities, production of religious knowledge, collective memory, and women’s activities in the religious sphere, in the past as well as in the present. Her work draws on fieldwork observations, Russian-language archival documents, and Turkic literature, which has played and still plays an important role in the Islamization and re-Islamization of Eurasia and Central Asia. To support her current research on various forms of Tatar enchantment in Soviet and Post-Soviet Eurasia, she was awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship (Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation) and several summer fellowships from the Slavic and Eastern European Center of the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. Her latest articles include: “Noah’s Ark Landed in the Ural Mountains: Ethnic and Ecological Apocalypse in Tatarstan,” published by Russian Review, and “Varieties of Tatar Esotericism in Post-Soviet Russia,” which will be published by the same journal.
Paolo Sartori
is Senior Research Associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he also serves as the Chairman of the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia (1552–2000s). He has two main fields of interest in his current research: the social and intellectual history of Muslim communities living under Tsarist and Soviet rule; and practices of record-keeping and knowledge production in the Muslim world in the early modern and modern period. He is the author of Visions of Justice: Sharia and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2016), Eksperimenty imperii: Adat, shariat i proizvodstvo znanii v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow: NLO 2019), with Pavel Shabley, and Seeking Justice at the Court of the Khans of Khiva (19th–Early 20th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill 2020), with Ulfat Abdurasulov. He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and the Journal of Central Asian History (Brill).
Wendell Schwab
is an academic adviser in the Bellasario College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University. He writes about Islam, media, and nationalism in Kazakhstan. His publications have appeared in Central Asian Affairs, Central Asian Survey, and Contemporary Islam.
Ron Sela
is Associate Professor of Central Asian history in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also serves as Director of the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. He has been studying Central Asian history and historiography, and self-representation in Muslim literary traditions. Sela is the author of The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Pavel Shabley
is Associate Professor at the Kostanay branch of Chelyabinsk State University, Kazakhstan. His major research interest is the history of Islam in the Kazakh Steppe and the study of the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly. His recent publications include “Semia Iaushevikh i ee okruzhenie,” Acta Slavica Iaponica, 38 (2017), pp. 23–50; with Paolo Sartori, Eksperimenty imperii: Adat, shariat i proizvodstvo znanii v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow: NLO, 2019).
Shamil Shikhaliev
Ph.D. in History, is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow, and Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in Sufism, Islamic law, networks of Islamic education and Islamic written culture in Russia. He is co-author of The History of the Life and Work of Ali Kayayev and Sayfulla-kadi Bashlarov: Documents and Materials (with Amir R. Navruzov, in Russian); Fiqh and Muslim Customary Law in Russian Daghestan: Sources and Studies (with Vladimir O. Bobrovnikov and Magomed G. Shekhmagomedov, in Russian); “Downward Mobility and Spiritual Life: The Development of Sufism in the Context of Migrations in Daghestan, 1940s–2000s,” in Migration, De-Stalinisation, Privatisation and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s–2000s), eds. Stephane A. Dudoignon and Christian Noack (Klaus Schwarz Verlag: Berlin, 2014); “Muslim Reformism in Daghestan (1900–1930),” Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom 35/3 (2017).
William A. Wood
(Ph.D. 1999, Indiana University) is Professor of Islamic and Russian History at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. His doctoral dissertation explored the relationship of the Sariq Turkmens of Merv with the Khanate of Khiva in the early nineteenth century. His publications include A Collection of Tarkhan Yarlïqs from the Khanate of Khiva (Indiana University, 2005), and the entry on “Khorezm and the Khanate of Khiva” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press, 2019). His current research involves the activity of British missionaries in Central and South Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.