Aghuls (
Aghul: агулар/agular, lez, italic=yes, Агъулар) are a people in
Dagestan
Dagestan ( ; rus, Дагеста́н, , dəɡʲɪˈstan, links=yes), officially the Republic of Dagestan (russian: Респу́блика Дагеста́н, Respúblika Dagestán, links=no), is a republic of Russia situated in the North C ...
,
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
. According to the 2010
census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses incl ...
, there were 34,160 Aghuls in Russia (7,000 in 1959).
Russian Census 2010: Population by ethnicity
The Aghul language belongs to the Lezgian language family, a group of the Northeast Caucasian
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as ...
family. Ethnically, the Aghuls are close to the Lezgins
Lezgins or Leks ( lez, Лезгияр, Лекьер. lezgijar) are a Northeast Caucasian ethnic group native predominantly to southern Dagestan, a republic of Russia, and northeastern Azerbaijan. The Lezgin are predominantly Sunni Muslims and s ...
. There are four groups of the Aghul people, who live in four different gorge
A canyon (from ; archaic British English spelling: ''cañon''), or gorge, is a deep cleft between escarpments or cliffs resulting from weathering and the erosion, erosive activity of a river over geologic time scales. Rivers have a natural tenden ...
s: Aguldere, Kurakhdere, Khushandere, and Khpyukdere. Like their neighbors the Kaitaks, the Aghuls were converted to Islam at a fairly early date, subsequent to the Arab conquest of the eighth century. Their oral traditions claim Jewish descent.[Peoples, Nations and Cultures. Edited by John Mackenzie. Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2005.]
Culture
Each Aghul village had a village council, on which each of the three or four tukhums were represented. The council was headed by an elder. The village mullah and qadi also played an important role in local affairs. In some cases the wealthier tukhums exerted a disproportionate strong influence on village government. As elsewhere in Daghestan, the Aghuls were divided into tukhums (clans), comprising twenty to forty households. Each tukhum had its own cemetery, pastures, and hay fields, and the members were bound by obligations of mutual support and defense.
The Aghuls tended to practice endogamy within the tukhum—marriages with outsiders were very rare. In the past the Aghuls lived in extended family households, though not especially large ones (fifteen to twenty members, on average). A senior male, father or eldest brother, functioned as chief, with fairly broad authority over the affairs of the household and its members. Should the extended family split up, sisters—even those who had already married and left the household—received a portion of the land as well as the movable property. They were each apportioned one-half of the land share given to each of their brothers, a practice that was unusually generous by Daghestanian standards.
References
Further reading
* The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire ''The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire'' is a book about the small nations of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Russia and some other post-Soviet states of today. It was published in Estonian in 1991 and in English in 2001.
T ...
entry o
Aguls
Lezgins
Ethnic groups in Dagestan
Muslim communities of Russia
Peoples of the Caucasus
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