Jakub Szynkiewicz

This paper presents the professional career of Jakub Szynkiewicz (Jakob Schinkewitsch), an Orientalist and Mufti. Szynkiewicz, born in a Lithuanian-Polish Tatar family in Lachowicze (formerly Poland, today Belorussia), was one the most renowned Tatar scholars and the chief spiritual Tatar leader in Poland before 1939. He received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1925. In the same year he was elected Mufti by the Polish Tatars. Szynkiewicz penned and published some books related to the teaching of Islam to Lithuanian-Polish Tatars and a few studies on religion and literature of his Tatar community, his best-known study being the one on Qısas al-Anbiyā. He also travelled to the countries of the Near East as an official representative of Polish authorities. Because of his close relations to the Nazi Germans, he fled from his homeland to Germany in 1944, then Egypt and lastly to the USA, where he died in 1966.