Alexandre Bennigsen was a scholar of Islam in the Soviet Union. Bennigsen was born in St Petersburg in 1913. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family left Russia for Estonia in 1919 and settled in Paris in 1924, where he studied at the Ecole des Langues Orientales.

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  • Alexandre Bennigsen was a scholar of Islam in the Soviet Union. Bennigsen was born in St Petersburg in 1913. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family left Russia for Estonia in 1919 and settled in Paris in 1924, where he studied 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 the "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. (en)
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  • Alexandre Bennigsen was a scholar of Islam in the Soviet Union. Bennigsen was born in St Petersburg in 1913. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family left Russia for Estonia in 1919 and settled in Paris in 1924, where he studied at the Ecole des Langues Orientales. (en)
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  • Alexandre Bennigsen (en)
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