The Mountain Side as a Center of Muslim Culture in the 18th-19th Centuries: Historical and Genealogical Analysis

The Mountain Side is a historical territory in the southwest of modern Tatarstan and adjacent regions. The article reconstructs the history of Muslim spiritual culture of this territory. The main method of the work is historical and genealogical analysis. For this purpose, narratives and a large array of documentary sources from state archives were studied. The authors presented the family and cultural ties between the different historical regions of Tatar residence, the active interaction between different dynasties of ulema and the traditions of mentoring. The publication contains an episode about one of the little-known branches of the genealogy of the Muslim theologian Shihab al-Din al-Marjani, as well as some other religious dynasties from the Mountain Side. They played a prominent role not only in their small homeland, but also beyond its borders.