Introduction

With its strong and resilient tradition of Arabic, multi-ethnic and multilingual Dagestan (today a republic in the Russian Federation) assumes a special place not only in the Caucasus but also among all other Muslim areas of the former Soviet Union. For more than a thousand years Arabic served as the main medium for interethnic communication. Introduced in the South of Dagestan during the first Islamization wave by the Arabs in the late seventh century, Arabic literature in Dagestan flourished during the medieval period when all Khanates and mountain village communities became Muslim. Arabic language and literature, in manuscript form, went through a new period of blossoming during the anti-colonial jihad movement (c. 1828-1859), and even after the defeat of the jihad it continued to be in official use in the Russian colonial times.

In the early twentieth century, Dagestani modernizers started debates on how to reform the teaching of Arabic, and whether Arabic should be replaced by Turkic or Russian as the medium of interethnic communication in the North Caucasus. At the same time, these Jadid reformers started the mass publication of books in the Turkic and Caucasian vernacular languages of the region, especially Kumyk, Avar, Dargi, and Lak. In the 1920s the Soviets continued and even enforced this support of the Dagestani national languages for literature, and strongly promoted the spread of Russian for official and interethnic communication instead of Arabic. The 1930s saw the full-blown attack on Islam in the Caucasus, and everything connected to the language of the Qur’an was to be eradicated. Still, Arabic continued to be studied in private, and some Dagestani authors made huge efforts to save the Dagestani Muslim literature in Arabic from extinction. Paradoxically, after World War II these attempts at rescuing the rich Arabic and Islamic manuscript heritage of Dagestan were continued by Soviet academic institutions in the country. With the Islamic boom of the late 1980s and 1990s, Arabic regained its high pres tige, and resurfaced as the language for religious instruction; but the Soviet traditions were so strong that Russian has become the main language of Islam in Dagestan.