Daghestan is home to more than 30 distinct peoples. Each has their own language yet they share a surprisingly homogeneous culture that has both withstood and absorbed centuries of external influences. A fascinating account of change and adaptation in the villages of this area.

Daghestan is home to more than 30 distinct peoples. Each has their own language yet they share a surprisingly homogeneous culture that has both withstood and absorbed centuries of external influences. A fascinating account of change and adaptation in the villages of this area.

Known as the land of the mountains, Dagestan lies immediately north of the Caucasus Mountains, and stretches for approximately 250 miles along the west shore of the Caspian Sea. With its mountainous terrain making travel and communication difficult, Daghestan is still largely tribal. Despite over a century of Tsarist control followed by seventy years of repressive Soviet rule, there are still 32 distinct ethnic groups in Daghestan, each with its own language, making it unquestionably the most complex of the Caucasian republics. Shamanic practices are still prevalent in this country, where one of the ten lost tribes of Israel can be found. In Daghestan, as in the neighbouring countries of Georgia, Chechnya, and Azerbaijan, these roots lie in shamanism. This book, one of only a handful available in English on the country, contains the texts of some of these stories as well as commentaries on them.

This book explores how the Muslim scholars of Daghestan, an important Muslim region within Russia, experienced the 1917 Russian Revolution and how they attempted to gain religious and political authority in the new post-imperial environment. Covering the period between the February Revolution and the first massive repressions of the scholars of Islam, it provides new insights into the complexities of the relations between Muslim reformers and Bolsheviks. It challenges the prevailing view in Western scholarship that the relationship was antagonistic, revealing that relations were pragmatic rather than ideological. It argues that there was cooperation on issues of modern education and language policy, and alliances against assumed common threats, such as the British, Wahhābis and local Ṣūfīs, along with disagreements related to the Bolsheviks’ atheism and their concept of class struggle. Overall, it demonstrates that the Islamic reformist discourse in Daghestan, although influenced by the wider Islamic debate at the turn of the twentieth century, was an integral part of Soviet modernity.

First published in 2003. Much has been written about the Muslim Murid movement and its leader Shamil, who resisted the Tsarist Russian expansion into Chechan and Daghestan for more than quarter of a century. This study, based on research in multilingual archives, offers a fresh insight into this controversial subject.