On October 29, a congress dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) opened in Moscow. The Congress was opened by Vitaly Naumkin the Scientific Director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies of the RAS, and Dmitry Peskov, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation. Several high-ranked Russian officials also took part in the ivent.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Director General of the State Hermitage Museum, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dean of the Department of Asian and African Studies of St. Petersburg State University and Alexander Knysh, the head of the Scientific Laboratory for Analysis and Modeling of Social Processes of St. Petersburg State University participated in the congress as honored guests.

At the end of the congress, a number of related conferences took place, including the XIII Conference of Scholars of Arabic Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at which Alexander Knysh made a plenary report “How Orientalists studied Islam: the diversity of approaches to the study of Islam in Western Islamic studies.” The report caused a lively discussion among the participants in the plenary session of the Conference.