In memoriam. Amri Rzaevich Shikhsaidov (20 March 1928–21 September 2019)

Abstract

With great sadness we feel the loss of Professor Amri R. Shikhsaidov, the patron of Arabic studies in Russia’s North Caucasus. A native from the Lezgi areas around Derbent in southern Dagestan, in 1946 Shikhsaidov went to Leningrad State University to pursue Oriental Studies; there he belonged to the last student generation that had classes from the USSR’s foremost Arabist of the time, Ignatii Krachkovskii (1883–1951). While at Leningrad University, the young Shikhsaidov met his future wife, Reia Sergeevna (née Davydova, b. 1928), who had just experienced the horrors of the German blockade; Reia Sergeevna would be Shikhsaidov’s companion for the rest of his life. After graduation Shikhsaidov briefly worked as a school teacher in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, but then made a career at what is today the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography in the Dagestani Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the same city. In 1963 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the study of regional Islamization narratives (Islam in Medieval Dagestan, printed as a monograph in 1969), followed in 1976 by his habilitation thesis, Dagestan in the 10th to 14th Centuries: An Attempt at a Social and Economic Evaluation (published in book form already one year earlier). From 1973 to 1998 Shikhsaidov directed the Institute’s Department of Oriental Studies, known for its growing manuscript collection. He also taught throughout his career at Dagestan State University and other institutes of higher education. While the study of Islam and Muslim culture in the North Caucasus was a sensitive issue in Soviet times, Shikhsaidov managed to sideline some official taboos by focusing on medieval historiography in the Arabic language. Before him Krachkovskii had already emphasized Arabic’s role as a written lingua franca for the many small nations of Dagestan. Yet Arabic also linked the North Caucasus to the wider Muslim world. Shikhsaidov developed this research agenda considerably further by organizing yearly expeditions to Dagestani villages for the study of Arabic manuscripts in private collections that had survived Stalin’s terror and Soviet modernization. He discovered (and published in Russian translation) numerous historical narratives from the medieval period, including the famous Dagestani chronicle of Islamization (Ta’rikh Daghistan). Starting in the 1980s he also edited and translated Arabic manuscripts produced during the long nineteenth-century Caucasian War when Dagestan entered tsarist Russia (in particular the memoirs of Imam Shamil’s son-in-law, ‘Abdarrahman al-Ghazighumuqi, 1994), and even Arabic works from the early Soviet