January 18, 1995 Contact: Barbara McKenna (408/459-2495)

TALK BY LEADING RUSSIAN EXPERT ON ISLAMIC CULTURE IN FORMER SOVIET UNION WILL SHED LIGHT ON RECENT ETHNIC CONFLICTS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Recent stories and photos of Russian soldiers battling in the country's southeastern borderlands are nothing unusual. Preceding the bloody conflict now raging in Grozny, Chechnya, was the war in neighboring Azerbaijan. In both cases, native Islamic populations have fought against more than 100 years of domination imposed by a country with drastically different cultural and religious practices.

Dmitri Mikulsky, a leading expert on Islam and Islamic culture in the former Soviet Union, will explore the roots of such conflicts in a talk titled "Islam in the Social and Cultural Context of the Former Soviet Union." The talk takes place from 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursday, January 26, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Merrill Baobab Lounge. A discussion will follow.

Mikulsky is a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Religion at the Academy of Social Science in Moscow. He has made a lifelong study of the ethnic, cultural, and religious history of Islamic people living on the borderlands of the Russian Federation. Among his publications are several books on Islamic and Muslim thought and culture as well as more than 30 articles on Islam, Arab-Islamic history, and Arabic literature.

His talk is sponsored by UCSC's Humanities Division. For more information, call (408) 459-2696.

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