French and African Letters

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Gasprali's fictional travelogue was first serialised in his newspaper Terhuman between 1887 to 1891. Azade-Ayse Rorlich's translation was published by Isis Press in 2008.

Travelogue

The 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.