News

Tuesday 7 December 2021

Conference “The Islamic Path of the Volga Region and the Arab World. Intersection of Fates”

 
The Institute of Oriental Studies hosted the international conference “The Islamic Path of the Volga Region and the Arab World. Intersection of Fates” on the 6th-7th of October, 2021.

The event was dedicated to the 1100th anniversary of Islam conversion by the Volga Bulgaria and the Golden Jubilee of the United Arab Emirates.

The main topic of discussion at the conference was the history of the Volga Bulgaria. The participants' reports raised the most important issues of international relations in the Arab-Muslim world in the Middle Ages, as well as issues of the interaction history among the peoples of the Volga region and the Arab world.

The event brought together specialists in both material culture and written sources, and an interesting discussion aroused in which the issues posed were considered from different angles. The experts' on the countries and peoples adjacent to Bulgaria were present at the conference. They made it possible to consider its history in the evolution context of the Volga region as a whole. The participation of arabists at the conference was also important, as the written sources on the history of the Volga Bulgaria, including the earliest of them, are in Arabic.

27 scientists from Moscow, Kazan, and St. Petersburg, from Tajikistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, France, Great Britain, Hungary, the USA, and Brazil took part in the conference with reports in Farsi, Arabic, Russian, and English. The researchers from the Institute of Oriental Studies, as well as other Russian and foreign research institutes also joined the conference.

The ideas expressed at the conference will be shown in the publications of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies of the Institute of Oriental Studies.