Suchergebnisse

AbstractIt is known that the Qajars had their supporters in Dagestan during the Russo-Persian Wars in the early 19th century. This fact is well documented in Persian chronicles and royal decrees (firmāns), as well as in the materials from the Russian archives. However, the number of historical documents originating from the region itself is drastically few. This paper presents three letters in Arabic, without dates, but definitely from the same period, illustrating the political situation of the time in the mountains of Dagestan and the geographical extent of the Qajar influence in the area. The letters were discovered recently in the Archives of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Dagestan Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences in Makhachkala. The English translation is accompanied by the facsimile reproduction of the original texts, and commentaries.

The personality of an outstanding medieval Daghestan scholar Muhammad al-Quduqi, ar-Rugzhi ad-Dagistani (1652-1717), evokes the interest of historians since the very XIX century. Despite this, there are a lot of blank spaces in his biography. In the XIX - early XX centuries, Daghestan ulama and biographical researchers highly appreciated the contribution of this scientist to the formation of Islamic culture in Daghestan. The life and work of Alim al-Quduqi is remarkable, mainly due to the fact that they give us examples of the life of the Daghestan society of the second half of the XVII - early XVIII century. Among those are an internal political struggle in Daghestan (moving from Khindalal to Andalal); the ratio of adat and sharia laws within the legal framework (moving from Daghestan to Sham); educational practice (getting education from different ulama of Daghestan and the Arab world; teaching foreigners), academic life (correspondence with scholars, answers to legal issues, development of the system of signs, writing academic papers), etc. The article provides commentaries on the translation of a new source of the biography of al-Quduqi. This is a brief biography of the scholar, written in Arabic in the early XX century. The author of this biography is Kudiyav Said al-Quduqi (1842-1919). Later on, it came into possession of his disciple Mas'ud al-Muguhi (1893-1941), who edited it and sent it to his son Abdulatip al-Hutsuvi (1851-1891). The biography contains a number of new facts about Muhammad al-Quduqi, which have not been previously introduced to scientific circulation and which, in our opinion, allow us to understand the scale of the scholar's personality and reveal a number of previously unknown names of Daghestan scholars of the XVII - XVIII centuries.