Michael Kemper is Professor of Eastern European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.Stephan Conermann is Professor of Islamic Studies, and acting director of the Asia Center at the University of Bonn, Germany.

• Part I: Metropolitan Oriental Studies 1 .The Imperial Roots of Soviet Orientology 2. Profiles under Pressure: Orientalists in Petrograd/Leningrad, 1918-56 3. Between the ‘Language of Humanity’ and Latinizatsiia: Nikolai Marr and the Oriental Department of the State Public Library in Leningrad 4. The Contribution of Oriental Scholarship to the Soviet Anti-Islamic Discourse: From the Union of Militant Atheists to the Knowledge Society 5. Soviet Kurdology and Kurdish Orientalism 6. Evgenii M. Primakov: Arabist and KGB Middleman, Director and Statesman 7. The Leningrad/St. Petersburg School of Scientific Islamology 8. Hijacking Islam: The Search for a New Soviet Interpretation of Political Islam in 1980 9. Scholars, Advisers and State-Builders: Soviet Afghan Studies in the Light of Present-Day Afghan Development Part II: Oriental Studies and National Historiography in the Republics 10. The Struggle for the Reestablishment of Oriental Studies in Twentieth-Century Kazan 11. Arabic Historical Studies in Twentieth-Century Daghestan 12. The Politics of Scholarship and the Scholarship of Politics: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Scholars Studying Tajikistan 13. Conceiving a People’s History: The 1920-1936 Discourse on the Kazakh Past 14. Ahmad Yasavi and the Divan-i hikmat in Soviet Scholarship 15. Kyrgyz – Muslim - Central Asian? Recent Approaches to the Study of Kyrgyz Culture in Kyrgyzstan 16. The Transformation of Azerbaijani Orientalists into Islamic Thinkers after 1991

"These essays are particularly valuable for graduate students and scholars seeking to conduct research on Muslims in the former Soviet Union because of the insight they provide on the changing ideological interpretations of Muslims as well as the institutions and people involved in those changes." - M. Chakars, Saint Joseph's University"This volume offers a treasure trove of information concerning the topic and more than fulfils the editors’ stated goals of critically surveying Soviet Orientalism while problematizing many aspects of Said’s influential analysis with respect to the Muslim lands and peoples of the USSR. It constitutes a welcome and much-needed advance in the historiography of the Soviet Union." - Eren Tasar, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts; Central Asian Survey, 2013.