Alexandre Bennigsen

Alexandre Bennigsen , also Alexandre de Bennigsen , Russian Александр Адамович Беннигсен - Alexander Adamowitsch Bennigsen (born March 20, 1913 in Saint Petersburg ; † June 3, 1988 in Paris ) was a Russian-French historian on the field of Islam in the former Soviet Union, especially Central Asia.

His father, Colonel Count Bennigsen, fought as a cavalry officer on the side of the whites in the Russian Civil War and his family left Russia in 1919 after the revolution and went to Paris via Estonia in 1924. There he studied at the Ecole des Langues Orientales a . a. with the Iranist Henri Massé . In the Second World War he fought in the French army in the cavalry and then he was in the Resistance . After the war he was in the Russian Documentation Center of the French government and deepened his knowledge of Iranian and Turkic languages, especially from Uzbekistan, and from the mid-1950s taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (sixth section), where he was professor of non- Arabic Islam became. He traveled extensively in the Middle East, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Afghanistan and Jordan and studied archives there, especially in those of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul . In particular, he dealt with documents on the Tatars , the Caucasus and Central Asia.

He has been visiting professor at the University of Rochester , Columbia University , the University of Chicago , Florida, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the University of Wisconsin – Madison .

He founded a school for minority studies of the former Soviet Union in Paris, both in France and in the USA, where he usually taught for one semester a year. This included S. Enders Wimbush , Chantal Lermercier-Quelquejay , with whom he also published a lot, and the founder of Window on Eurasia Paul A. Goble .

Bennigsen took the view that the Muslims in the Soviet Union had retained their cultural identity, despite a lack of contact with the rest of the Islamic world. This made him the object of attacks in the Soviet Union, where the Islamic peoples were officially promoted to join the state. The thesis was confirmed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Bennigsen did not live to see.

He was married to Hélène Baroness von Bildering, with whom he had four children. His daughter Marie Bennigsen-Broxup (1944–2012) was also a well-known specialist in Central Asia and director of the Central Asian Research Center in London.

Fonts

• Contribution to Gavin Hambly u. a. Central Asia , Fischer World History , Volume 16, 1966
• with Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay Islam in the Soviet Union , London 1967
• with Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay La presses et le mouvement national chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 , Paris, Mouton 1964
• with Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay Les mouvements nationaux chez le musulmans de Russie , Paris, The Hague, 1960.
• with Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay: Sultan Galiev, le père de la révolution tiers-mondiste, Fayard 1986
• with S. Enders-Wimbush: Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: a revolutionary strategy for the colonial world , Chicago, 1970
• with S. Enders-Wimbush: Muslims of the Soviet Empire: a guide , London 1985
• with S. Enders-Wimbush: Mystics and commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union , University of California Press 1985
• Russes et Chinois avant 1917 , Flammarion 1974
• Le khanat de Crimeé dans les archives du palais de Topkapi , Paris, The Hague, 1978.
• Les muslmans oubliés , Paris, 1981.
• The Soviet Union and Muslim guerrilla wars, 1920-1981: lessons for Afghanistan , Rand Corporation 1981
• The Evolution of the Muslim Nationalities in the USSR and their Linguistic Problems , London, 1961.
• with Marie Broxup: The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State , London, 1983.

Web links

• Michael Rywkin: Bennigsen, Alexandre in the Encyclopedia Iranica, 2002
• Literature by and about Alexandre Bennigsen in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)