Rizaeddin Fakhreddin and his Biographical Book “Mashkhur Khatynnar” (“Famous Women”)

Khasavnekh A.A.

306-317 p.


doi.org: 10.22378/he.2020-5-2.306-317


The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze a prominent 19th century Tatar scholar Rizaeddin Fakhreddin’s two voluminous biographic works – the printed book “Mashkhur Khatynnar” (“Famous Women”), published in 1904 in Orenburg, as well as a manuscript version of the same book written in 1934. The second book is more extensive in its content than the first version; it has extended due to Tatar women’s added biographies, mainly contemporaries of the author. The study examines the printed book structure and reveals the features and remarkable aspects of one or another of its sections. “Mashkhur Khatynnar” (“Famous Women”) is a serious and multifaceted biographic composition of encyclopedic format. In compiling it, the author used materials from Ibn al-Jawzi, at-Tabari, Aristotle, A. Schopenhauer, and other famous luminaries of world science of a diverse thematic spectrum, including history, geography, natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, etc. In the book, especially in the preface part, the female question is sharply discussed. The author focuses on the issue of providing women with full education and upbringing in the best Muslim traditions. This work is unique because neither before Fakhreddin nor after him, similar works on biographies of women known in the Islamic world has not written in the Tatar world.


Keywords: Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, biographic essay, women’s issue, famous women, genealogy, personal comments, personalities

For citation: Khasavnekh A.A. Rizaeddin Fakhreddin i ego biograficheskiy trud «Mäshһür khatynnar» («Znamenitye zhenshchiny») [Rizaeddin Fakhreddin and his Biographical Book “Mashkhur Khatynnar” (“Famous Women”)]. Istoricheskaya etnologiya, 2020, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 306–317. https://doi.org/10.22378/he.2020-5-2.306-317


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About the author: Alsu A. Khasavnekh is a Cand. Sc. (Philology), Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Rear Books and Musical Heritage, G. Ibragimov Institute of Language, Literature and Art of the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences (12 Karl Marks St., Kazan 420111, Russian Federation); alise_12345@mail.ru


Received August 5, 2020   Accepted for publication November 02, 2020

Published Online November 27, 2020