Alexandre Bennigsen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alexandre Bennigsen (20 March 1913, St Petersburg - 3 June 1988) was a scholar of Islam in the Soviet Union.

Bennigsen was born in St Petersburg in 1913. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family settled in Paris in 1924. He received education at the Ecole des Langues Orientales.

He taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (en Sciences Sociales) and became the chair of history of non-Arab Islam. Bennigsen also taught at various American universities, including the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin.

Bennigsen is known as the founder of Bennigsen school or Sovietologist Islam, a particular approach to Islam in the Soviet Union that became influential in the 1980s and has been widely criticized since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Bennigsen believed that the Muslims of the Soviet Union effectively resisted Sovietization, maintaining a distinctive identity within the Union. He also attributed a political role to Islam, predicting that Muslims would play a significant role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Field studies among the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the 1990s largely discredited Bennigsen's earlier studies, documenting the large scale transformations Muslim communities had undergone under the Soviet rule.

Marie Broxup, his daughter, is a well-known scholar on Central Asia.

[edit] Works

The Evolution of the Muslim Nationalities in the USSR and their Linguistic Problems, London, 1961.
Islam in the Soviet Union, London, New York, 1967.
Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: a revolutionary strategy for the colonial world, Chicago, 1970, (coedited with S. Enders Wimbush).
Mystics and Commissars, Muslims of the Soviet Empire. A Guide, Bloomington, Ind., 1985, (coedited with S. Enders Wimbush).
The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State, London, 1983. (With Marie Broxup).