Welcome!

December 2009

Welcome to The Website of Razia Sultanova.

Dr Razia Sultanova is a Director of the Centre for Central Asian music at

University of Cambridge, and also a Fellow at Cambridge Central Asia
Forum, University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of the Uzbek State
Conservatoryand the Moscow State Conservatory, where she completed her PhD in
musicology. She has taught musicology and ethnomusicology at Uzbek
State Conservatory, Moscow State Conservatory, Goldsmiths College,
SOAS, University of London, and finally at Leeds and Cambridge Universities.
Her primary areas of research are Central Asian and Middle Eastern music,
Islam and music, and gender and music. For the last fifteen years she has
been conducting intensive fieldwork in Afghanistan, Turkey, Caucasus, and
Central Asian republics (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan), publishing articles in English, German,
French, Chinese, Russian and Uzbek. Her recent publications concern
the musical traditions of the Islamic world, at present produced by I.
B. Tauris as a monograph “From Shamanism to Sufism: Women and Islam in
Central Asian culture”. Razia has acted as a music consultant for
several international organizations including UNESCO (2005). She has
been awarded a large number of scholarships: in Germany (DFG in 1993,
the Ministry of Culture of the Land Brandenburg 1994, 1997); in France
(1996, 1997); in Japan (1998); and in the UK (1999 onwards). Whilst at
SOAS in 2006 Razia was the organizer of a new Study Group (Music of
the Turkic Speaking World) within the ICTM (International Council for
Traditional Music). She managed to set up the first Workshop and
Conference of that Study Group which attracted participants from
twelve countries to an event considering the place of music in the
huge area of the Turkic speaking world from an ethnomusicological and
anthropological perspective. On the basis of that Conference Razia
Sultanova has edited the book “Sacred Knowledge: Schools or
Revelations. Master-Apprentice Music Training in the Turkic Speaking
World” published in October 2009 by Lambert Academic Publishing,
Germany.