Biographical dictionaries, an old genre of Islamic literature, became popular among Muslim intellectuals in the Eastern Caucasus since the beginning of the eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth century, when interest in the history of Islamization of their fatherland grew. In the late imperial and early Soviet Russia a wider Muslim public enjoyed reading of historical accounts about Islamization in the Caucasus. The scholar Nadhir (1891–1935) from the Kumyk village of Durgeli in Daghestan compiled a biographical dictionary with the traditional rhymed title “The Delight of Minds in the Biographies of Daghestani Scholars (Nuzhat al-adhhan fi tarajim ‘ulama’ Daghistan). He included in it about 230 biographies of Muslim scholars who studied and taught in the Caucasus and the Arab lands from the end of the ninth century to the early 1930s. He relied in part on medieval Arabic historical and geographical literature from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries. But his principal sources were local chronicles, historical notes (tawarikh), and the works of Muslim scholars from modern Daghestan whose biographies he also included in the dictionary. This chapter of the Reader “Russian-Arab Worlds” presents extracts of this Arabic treatise that were translated into English and commented by the editor. This piece of reformist Muslim scholarship, which remains poorly known outside Russia’s Caucasus, sheds light on the late period of pre-modern cultural contacts between the Arab Middle East and the borderlands of the Muslim world in East Caucasus under the Russian rule.
Translated title of the contributionАрабский язык на раннем советском Кавказе: : "Услада умов в биографиях дагестанских улемов" Назира ад-Дургили, 1920-е - 1930-е гг.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRussian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History
EditorsEileen Kane, Masha Kirasirova, Margaret Litvin
Place of PublicationNew York; Oxford
PublisherOxford University Press
Chapter16
Pages161-175
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9780197605790
ISBN (Print)9780197605769
DOIs
StatePublished - 21 Sep 2023

    Scopus subject areas

  • Arts and Humanities(all)

    Research areas

  • Global history, Islam and Modernity, Arabic, network analysis, Dagestan, Middle East

ID: 107039937