PUBL.- Ismail Gasprali, French and African Letters, Edition by A.-A. Rorlich
Posted by: Azade-Ayse Rorlich <arorlich@college.usc.edu>
Ismail Gasprali
French and African Letters
Azade-Ayse Rorlich, transl., ed., and Introduction
Isis Press, Istanbul, 2008
For information: isis@tnn.net
The present book provides scholars as well as students access to
primary sources critical to understanding the intellectual life of
Russia’s Muslims in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Through Ismail Gasprali’s French and African Letters Professor Rorlich
offers evidence regarding the scope of Muslim modernism in late
imperial Russia contributing at the same time to a better
understanding of the debates on gender issues that shaped the
modernist discourse.
This volume represents the first annotated English translation of
Ismail Gasprali’s fictional travelogue, first serialized in his
newspaper Terjuman between 1887 and 1891. Providing a window into the
diversity of the issues that shaped the Muslim modernist discourse in
Russia, this publication offers one of the few opportunities to
examine primary source material in a field still marked by the paucity
of such materials available in English translation. This annotated
translation makes an important contribution to the field of Eurasian
scholarship not only for bringing to the students of Muslim modernism
and gender studies an important work of Ismail Gasprali — one of the
leading Muslim reformers of the Russian empire, but also for offering
an Introduction that places the French and African Letters in the
broader context of his work.