Abdrahman Umerov was a scientist, educator, publisher, and journalist.
He was born in 1867 in Astrakhan, Astrakhan province of the Russian Empire. In 1881, he entered the Kazan madrasah of the famous scholar Shihabutdin Marjani.
In 1892, he returned to Astrakhan, where in the Tiyak settlement on the southern outskirts of the city he founded the newfangled madrasah Nizamiya, which became an important educational center for the Muslims of the Lower Volga region. Among Umerov’s students were the ethnographer and linguist A.K. Dzhanibekov, writer and playwright B. Abdullin and many others. Umerov wrote textbooks and research papers on Arabic philology and Islamic studies. in 1907, he started the Tatar sociopolitical and literary newspaper Idel. In early 1914, the newspaper was declared anti-government and shut down. In August 1906, Umerov was a delegate to the Third All-Russian Muslim Congress, in 1926, as secretary of the Soviet delegation, he participated in the World Islamic Congress in Mecca. In 1930, he was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and exiled to the village of Malye Karely, Arkhangelsk Region, where he died after a long illness in March 1933. He was rehabilitated in May 1989.
