International Scientific Conference "Ismail Gasprinsky--Oriental Enlightener"

The international scientific conference "Ismail Gasprinsky--Oriental Enlightener" opened at the Russian Academy of Arts on Thursday. It is devoted to the 150th birth anniversary of the outstanding enlightener of the Crimean Tatars, writer and reformer of school education Ismail Gasprinsky. The forum was organised by the Research Institute of the Theory and History of Fine Arts, the Russian Institute of Culturology, the State Museum of Oriental Arts, the International Human Rights Assembly, as well as Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars (the historical homeland is the Crimean peninsula, Ukraine). Taking part in the conference will be scientists of various specialities -- representatives of various countries and national schools, as well as public and religious figures, whose "political priorities are concentrated in the sphere of the modern Islamic civilisation". A large part of reports is on discoveries being approved for the first time and made on the basis of field and archive research. The spiritual legacy of Gasprinsky is especially topical today, the forum's organisers believe. The ideas of the writer and journalist, who was born in the small Black Sea town of Gaspra and who established Russia's first Turkic paper Terjiman, are very fruitful in the light of the modern approach to the destinies of Islamic civilisation and to the problems of national movements in the Turkic-Islamic world.