On the Correlation of Religious, Civic, and Ethnocultural Foundations For Dagestani Self-Awareness

Abstract

ABSTRACT The author argues that in an age of politicized ethnicity and globalization, much pressure is on traditional ways of understanding self-identity. In Dagestan, conservative customary law-based Islam and community solidarity through jamaat have been preserved well enough to counter onslaughts of outsider-agitated Wahhabi activism in the 1990s. As they have been historically, polycultural, multiethnic Dagestanis are part of a conscious, broad-based loyalty to the wider concept of Rossiia—civic Russia.