Frederic P Miller

Muhajir (Caucasus) Frederic P Miller

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Several indigenous peoples of the northwest of the Caucasus were forced into exodus at the end of the Caucasian War by victorious Russia. The exodus was launched even before the end of the war in 1864 and it continued into the 1870s, although it was mostly completed by 1867. The peoples involved, mainly the Circassians (Adyghe in their own language), Ubykhs, Abkhaz, and Abaza, were majority or even predominantly Muslim; hence the use in some Russian language historiography of the word mukhadzhirstvo(or makhadzhirstvo), deriving from the Arabic term muhajir, meaning literally "departee" and by extension "emigrant," to describe this exodus. This exodus involved an unknown number of people, perhaps numbering hundreds of thousands. The Russians had come to refer to them as mountaineers (gortsy) (meaning, not "mountain climbers," but "mountain dwellers"). The Russian army rounded up people, driving them from their villages to ports on the Black Sea, where they awaited ships provided by the neighboring Ottoman Empire. The explicit Russian goal was to expel the groups in question from their lands.