Lezgin clans

After Russian conquest of the Caucasus the Lezgin sykhyls or tukhums has all but vanished.^[4] While the aul was, like the Avar and Dargin auls, the basis of Lezgin society in pre-revolutionary times, the aul and the Jamaat have lost their role.^[4] The reasons for this range from their homeland being more open to external influence, culturally from neighbouring Azeris and politically from the USSR,^[4] as well as the loss of the Lezgin Tariqa (Мюридизм) to the USSR's state atheism and the more recent penetration of Salafism into Lezgin society.^[5]

Each sykhyl spoke a different dialect of the same Lezgic languages, a common spoken Lezgin dialect unintelligible to people outside the village. Despite the fact that during this period the Lezgin lived in relatively closed conditions of mountain gorges, which contributed to more demarcation in terms of territoriality than rallying around a single center, they retained the self-consciousness of a single ethnic group based on a common culture and a single language.