Arabic had been spoken in the region since the Muslim conquest of the South Caucasus at the beginning of the eighth century.
It was brought there by Arab settlers consisting mostly of military staff, merchants and craftsmen from Iraq and Syria, and was used as an official language.
Groups of Arabs (mostly from Yemen) continued to immigrate to southern Dagestan influencing the culture and literary traditions of the local population who had already become Muslim by way of conversion.
[2] North Caucasian resentment of the Russians for robbing them of their national history is doubled for the Daghestanis by the forced loss of their Arabic patrimony.
Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, the main thrust of the anti-religious campaign, was to eradicate Arabic, a religious language, and replace it with Russian.