Our Students

Egor Babanchikov: Internship at Ca’ Foscari University

Students of the School of Asian and African Studies, Ilya Savvin and Anton Klyuev on their first impressions of an internship in Qatar

Since 2012, students of the Middle Eastern Studies track have regularly won prizes at all-Russian competitions in Arabic language and research paper contests held by HSE University. They also present papers at student and international academic conferences.

Current students and graduates of the Middle Eastern studies track always number among the winners of the Doha Prize national Arabic language competition, which has been held since 2018. Winners receive a grant for a year-long Arabic language study programme in Qatar.

In the Middle Eastern studies track, students defend their research projects and translations of written sources in Arabic and other languages of the Middle East, works on the history and culture of the Muslim and Christian East, the political and social development of Arab countries, and specific aspects of life within ethno-confessional communities in the region. Student research often has an interdisciplinary nature, drawing upon methodologies of historical, sociological, religious, philological, art-historical, and other disciplines.

Graduation Project Topics (Recent Years)

On contemporary issues

• Advertising communication of Qatari and Emirati airlines and tour operators towards Western consumers
• The role of Islamic banking in the development of Malaysia’s economic cooperation with Middle Eastern countries
• Memory of the pre-Islamic past in the discourse of modern Yemeni nationalists
• Legal status of foreign workers in the Persian Gulf countries
• Shiite Arabs in Russia: the problem of identity formation
• The reforms of King Faisal and their impact on the development of the Saudi state in the second half of the 20th–early 21st century
• The Qatar diplomatic crisis: perspectives of Arab analysts
• State policy on slavery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
• A-pop as a phenomenon of mass culture in the Arab East: tradition vs modernity
• Key features and factors of the evolution of the Islamic State's media strategy through online publications
• Muslim diaspora in Europe (2000–2013): value evolution in comparative perspective (UK, France, Germany)

Graduation Project Topics (Historical, Cultural, Traditional Aspects)

• Magic squares and their use in Arab-Muslim and Syriac-Christian traditions
• Evolution of views on the Moon in Islamic cosmology
• Defending against the ‘Precursor of Antichrist’: St Sabbas Lavra in Palestine and Arab Christian apologetics in the 8th–9th centuries
• Sufi Arabic-Turkic literature of the Volga region: the case of Ali Chukuri
• The image of the angel Jibril (Gabriel) in medieval Sunni and Shia sources
• Intersections between Eastern Christian and Jewish apocalyptic texts after the Islamic conquest: the theme of salvation in Pseudo-Athanasius and Pirke Ma'asiyah
• Perception of ancient Egyptian heritage in works of Arab historians of the 19th–20th centuries
• Marvelous people, animals, and demonic beings in the works of Islamic cosmographers: the example of Zakariya al-Qazwini’s treatise ‘Aja’ib al-makhluqat
• The discussion of women’s social rights in the writings of Egyptian publicists and prose writers of the 1890s–1920s