Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

17 Appreciative Thoughts of a China Historian on the Contribution of Dr Igor V. Gerasimov It was my great pleasure to get to know Igor Gerasimov at a small conference held at the University of Munich in 2019. The topic of the conference was devoted to the use of archival sources in the Manchu language — seemingly lightyears away from the specialisation of Dr Gerasimov, which is Arabic literature as well as the role of Islam in Middle Eastern and African societies, in particular Sudan. However, in a turn of intellectual agility which will strike those who know Igor Gerasimov as all too typical, he managed to link his own research with the focal region of our conference in a paper titled “The Near East and Central Asia in Russian Scientific Orientalism”. Usually at home in Sufi brotherhoods or the interpretation of the Qur’an, Dr Gerasimov integrated the efforts of the Tsarist government in eastern Siberia, the Mongolian and Tungusic regions of Asia and the Muslim societies in the southern margins of Central Asia with the regions of the Middle East which he is so familiar with. The ability to integrate one’s own research into the subject matter of only distantly attingent regions revealed to me three aspects of his character. Firstly, we are dealing with a scholar who has accumulated a vast array of knowledge which he adeptly analyses in the discovery of new regions and phenomena. Secondly, Dr Gerasimov is part of a small family of European scholars who