Zal is the supreme sky-god of the Laks, whose name is one with the everyday Lak word zallu, 'master' or 'owner', so that the deity is quite literally 'the Lord'. He presides over the heavens, over rain, and over the fate of the highland communities of the Kazikumukh uplands. When the Laks, reputedly the first people of Daghestan to receive Islam, adopted the new faith, the old name attached without friction to the God of monotheism, which is one reason the pre-Islamic figure is thinly attested in narrative and survives chiefly in vocabulary, oaths, and the agrarian rites that petition him for rain over the barley terraces.