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Occasional Paper #289 Myths and Mysticism: and Conflict in the North : A Longitudinal Perspective

Michael A. Reynolds The Kennan Institute The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

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Michael A. Reynolds

Myths and Mysticism: Islam and Conflict in the North Caucasus: A Longitudinal Perspective by Michael A. Reynolds The question of whether or not there is a time successfully, against the might of an causal relationship between Islam and violent expanding world empire. conflict is currently one of the most contro- Two factors further exaggerate the versial and hotly debated topics among salience of the Caucasian Wars in the region’s scholars, policymakers, and pundits alike image, namely, their place in Russian litera- throughout the world.1 It is a question of ture and their high international geopolitical particular relevance to contemporary Russia, profile. Before the first modern histories of where self-described mujahidun, or Muslim the North Caucasus were even written, “holy warriors,” and Russian government Russian writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov, forces are the primary combatants waging and Tolstoy had made the North Caucasus a war in .2 The theme of Islam and vivid and lasting fixture of the imaginations conflict is not a new one for scholars and of Russians and readers of Russian literature, observers of the North Caucasus.Among his- rendering the mountaineers bigger than life torians and contemporary analysts, there and romanticizing their love of freedom, exists a strong consensus that Islam has been seeming lawlessness, and passion.5 Second, and continues to be a fundamental factor the wars marked the southward expansion of driving conflict between the indigenous the and implicated, if per- of the North Caucasus and the haps only tangentially, the geopolitical preoc- Russian state.3 Both historians sympathetic cupations of several great powers. Pitting to indigenous resistance to Russian rule, such native mountaineers against the largest army as Alexandre Bennigsen, Marie Broxup, and in the world, their “David versus Goliath” Anna Zelkina, as well as pro-Russian histori- character and cast of truly colorful personali- ans, such as M. M. Bliev and V.V.Degoev, ties such as Shamil made compelling have pointed to Islam as a fundamental theater and attracted popular attention in motive for resistance.4 Europe and even America. In short, these Yet anyone interested in the relation- wars have exerted an inordinate influence ship between Islam and conflict in the North upon our understanding of the relationships Caucasus should recognize two potential among Islam, the North Caucasus, and sources of difficulty.The first is the general Russia. paucity of studies of North Caucasian histo- Whereas comparative historians have ry.The second is that, of the studies that do almost wholly ignored the North Caucasus, exist, a vastly disproportionate number some have placed the Caucasian Wars in the address one limited period of the region’s context of other more or less contemporary history, namely, the Caucasian Wars of the struggles of Muslims under the rubric of the 6 nineteenth century, in which the native “Revolt of Islam.” This cross-regional or mountaineers fought desperately, and for a “latitudinal” perspective identifies those wars as separate parts of a wider struggle of Islam Michael A. Reynolds is a Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. He thanks Mark Katz and the members of the Kennan Institute workshop on conflict in the former Soviet Union, John Colarusso,Victor Friedman,Thomas Grant, and Robert Ware, for their comments on this and earlier versions of this paper.The paper was prepared for the workshop “Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Conflict in the Former Soviet Union,” Kennan Institute,Washington, D.C.The author is responsible for all errors. 1 against European colonial powers, and it Sufi, aspects and its legal, or sharia-based notes certain similarities between the doc- aspect, a categorization often invoked to trines and forms of resistance adopted by explain the dynamics of contemporary con- indigenous Muslims.Thus it identifies the flict in the North Caucasus. teachings of the South Asian Ahmad Sirhindi and the Kurdish sheikh Mawlana RESISTING ISLAM: THE ARAB Khalid and the structure of the INVASION OF THE CAUCASUS 7 tariqat, or Sufi brotherhood as determinative The North Caucasus was among the earliest factors for explaining the course of events in lands that Islam touched. In 642–3, just ten the North Caucasus in the nineteenth centu- years after the death of Muhammad, Muslim ry. It accordingly portrays the Sufi brother- Arabs under the command of Suraqa bin hoods of the Caucasus as parts of transna- Amr reached the city of in southern tional networks that transmitted ideologies of .9 Sweeping up from the south, the resistance, personnel, and supplies between first generation of Muslims had conquered 8 disparate Muslim populations. Given the the whole of Persia in a mere ten years, and nature and extent of the involvement of for- they now stood ready to burst north into the eign and radical Islamic ideas and organiza- Eurasian interior. Reflecting Derbent’s strate- tions from the Indian subcontinent and else- gic location between the eastern slopes of where in the current Chechen conflict, the the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian parallels between this interpretation and con- Sea, the Arabs dubbed the city Bab al- temporary events appear striking. Abwab, or “the Gate of Gates.”10 Sayings To better evaluate the merits of such from the period that attribute the founding a latitudinal perspective, however, we need of the city to the angel Gabriel, declare its also to examine the relationship between liberation a divine dictate, and affirm that Islam and conflict in the North Caucasus anyone “who fights and struggles in the way across time, that is, through a longitudinal of God in that sacred place [Bab al-Abwab] perspective.Toward this end, this paper pro- will be forgiven all the sins he has committed vides a broad survey of Islam and violent in his life” all suggest the importance that the conflict in the North Caucasus in the period Arabs ascribed to Derbent.11 beginning with the introduction of Islam up Despite their fascination with through the current conflict in Chechnya. Derbent and the military prowess they dis- This paper does not, of course, attempt to played so impressively in Arabia, Persia, and cover such an extensive history in depth or elsewhere, the original Muslim warriors comprehensively. Rather, it questions some of failed to secure the Caspian city and its envi- the conventional historical assumptions about rons. Indeed, quite the opposite was true. the relationship between Islam and violent Suraqa lamented the ceaseless attacks on his conflict in the North Caucasus that observers forces in and around Derbent.The ferocity of commonly adopt in their analyses.Among the local tribesmen convinced Suraqa that it these assumptions are the decisive nature of would be best to forgo the conquest of Islam or Muslim identity as a source of con- Dagestan.And so with the Caliph Omar’s flict; the fundamental and intractable alien- approval, he sent his lieutenants to wage war ation of Muslim North Caucasians and in the region of Tiflis instead. Several years Russians from each other; and the binary later, Omar directed the Muslim armies again categorization of Islam into its mystical, or to attempt to subdue Dagestan. But this time 2 the mountaineers of Dagestan dealt the Muslims, as when the people of Sarir invading Muslims an even sharper defeat and (believed to be the forerunners of the slew the Arabs’ commander on the battlefield of today) inflicted a heavy losses upon in 652.12 Derbent’s Muslim garrison in 971.14 As a result, the Muslims never man- It would be wrong, however, to aged to establish firm control over Dagestan ascribe too much of a religious character to or any other part of the North Caucasus. these conflicts waged by local potentates. Although from time to time Arab armies did Knowledge of formalized religion was limit- manage to mount successful punitive expedi- ed, especially in the interior, and alliances tions into the region they called “language shifted often.The Muslim Amir of Derbent, mountain” in amazement at its astounding for example, would at times request assistance linguistic diversity, and to win some local from the pagan Slavs to the north of the rulers over to their faith, they remained inca- Caspian who had begun raiding the pable of guaranteeing the borders and exert- Dagestani coast in the tenth century.15 ed influence on the North Caucasus only From the records left by the Arabs, through surrogates. Indeed, tribesmen from we can already identify a number of factors time to time mounted devastating raids from that have distinguished the dynamics of con- Dagestan into the southern Caucasus. flict in the Caucasus ever since.The first is Dagestan, in short, proved to be a difficult the strategic nature of the region as a gate- place to rule: geographically isolated, topo- way between the Near East and the Eurasian graphically rugged, and hostile.The Arabs steppes.The second is the rugged nature of and their chroniclers repeatedly expressed its topography, which made the maneuver, exasperation with the warlike North command, and control of large fighting Caucasian infidels. Suraqa bin Amr described forces difficult.Third, and perhaps most sig- the torment of fighting the mountaineers in nificant, is the equally rugged and fierce verse, and al-Masudi’s angry description of a nature of the region’s inhabitants.These latter local Dagestani chieftain as a “host of rob- two factors combined to exact a forbidding bers, brigands, and malefactors” similarly cost upon any power that might attempt to highlights the Muslims’ frustration.13 subdue the North Caucasus.The Arabs, who Although they failed to impose their had overrun the Persian Empire in a mere rule over the North Caucasus or even alter ten years and would go on to phenomenal the region’s fundamental political structure, conquests elsewhere, were stunned by the the Arabs did leave an important legacy— truculence of the mountaineers.Their their Islamic faith.They had succeeded in propensity for raids and banditry further converting the people of Derbent to their infuriated the original Muslims. Finally, the faith, and they thereby made the city a linguistic and ethnic complexity of the northern outpost of Islam.The spread of region also impressed the Arabs.All these Islam from Derbent to the northern, central, traits would impress the later, non-Muslim and western parts of Dagestan and beyond, conquerors as well. however, took centuries, because the Caucasian mountaineers violently resisted THE MONGOLS, TIMUR, AND THE it—or, more precisely, those who espoused it. OPENING OF THE NORTHWEST The Muslims of Derbent thus found them- selves just as embattled as the original Arab The next great upheaval in the Caucasus

3 came in the form of the Mongols in the thir- empires laid claim to parts of the northeast teenth century.As they did elsewhere, the Caucasus during the sixteenth and seven- Mongols brought devastation to the teenth centuries, their authority was nomi- Caucasus.They swiftly occupied the coastal nal.The princes of Dagestan preserved their section of the northeastern Caucasus and independence easily enough by playing the captured Derbent in 1233.The residents of Ottomans against the Safavids, who repre- the Caspian city held out for ten desperate sented a more proximate threat to the moun- days before despairing with grim valiantry, taineers. Banding together in temporary “no solution but the sword remains, it falls to alliances proved sufficient and effective for us to die with honor.” Nonetheless, for all driving out any outsiders, and indeed in 1712 their awesome might, the Mongols proved as the -Kumuk of Dagestan even dared to unsuccessful as the Muslim armies in pacify- take the city of Shamakhi from the Safavid ing or subduing the mountaineers in the Persians. interior. Indeed, the mountaineers did not The Russians made their first sub- merely resist the Mongols but also eventually stantial foray into the North Caucasus in turned to raiding them, and succeeded in 1722 when Peter the Great marched south- compelling the scourges of Eurasia to send ward along the Caspian coast to Baku, taking gifts and delegations in exchange for halting Derbent,Tarku, and Kuba along the way. their attacks.16 Pressures on the empire elsewhere, however, At the end of the fourteenth century, compelled Peter to withdraw his forces, and the famed “Crusher of Kings”Timurlenk just ten years later Russia ceded its claim to (Tamerlane) invaded the Caucasus, taking Dagestan to Persia.The sovereign of Persia, Dagestan in 1395–6 and ravaging Georgia in Nadir Shah, was a brilliant ruler and com- 1386–7 and again in 1403–4, but he also mander who had rejuvenated his empire. failed to establish any lasting presence in the Historians dubbed him the “Napoleon of North Caucasus.The Mongol and Timurid Persia” in recognition of his martial achieve- invasions did, however, indirectly affect the ments. Having vanquished Persia’s foes on political culture of the northwest Caucasus several fronts, Nadir Shah resolved to assert by ending the isolation of the Circassian Persia’s dominance over Dagestan in 1742. It tribes. In an unusual form of exchange, the was a mistake.The mountaineers refused to Mongols and Tatar Khans of Crimea began bend to the Persians, and they met force with sending their sons to be raised among the force. In just three years, they forced Nadir while taking a yearly tribute of Shah to withdraw from the North Caucasus slaves and auxiliary forces.The Mongol influ- in defeat. Following his death later that same ence also facilitated the spread of Islam year, Dagestani mountaineers even began to among the Circassians, despite the latter’s mount raids into Safavid territory. regular rebellions. Islam spread slowly, how- The patterns first observed during the ever, and knowledge of Islam among the Arab invasions of the region thus repeated Circassians remained superficial well into the themselves in the period leading up to the seventeenth century. Like the northeast Russian conquest.The mountaineers vigor- Caucasus, the northwest Caucasus lacked any ously opposed all attempts by outsiders to unifying political structure and remained “in impose their rule and proved to be a climate of permanent anarchy.”17 indomitable. Islam played little role in the Although the Ottoman and Safavid mountaineers’ resistance (given the still rela- tively weak knowledge of Islam among the 4 majority of mountaineers beyond the littoral the cultivation of the qualities of self-suffi- of Dagestan, this is not very surprising in any ciency and independence among the moun- event).Although the Dagestanis’ Sunni affilia- taineer clans, thus adding a sociocultural tion may have facilitated their cooperation obstacle to the geographic challenges.Thus with the Sunni Ottomans against the Shii the mountaineers’ ethics, norms, and social Persian Safavids, it was not determinative in organization rendered them allergic to cen- any sense, for the Ottomans remained distant. tral control.These same factors acted to Instead, three interrelated factors— block local sovereigns as much as outside the difficult terrain, the mountaineers’ pug- hegemons from uniting and centralizing the nacity, and the lack of a central govern- region. Because ad hoc coalitions of local ment—put a decisive stamp on the form of leaders proved sufficient for withstanding conflict in the North Caucasus.The harsh outside invasions, up until the nineteenth nature of the terrain tired and confounded century there was neither much incentive invading armies even as it encouraged the nor a sociocultural basis for the formation of mountaineers to hold out against invaders. a state or other political-administrative struc- The multiplicity of tribes and the lack of any ture that would embrace the North Caucasus central authority denied would-be hegemons as a whole. the option of defeating and subduing a local sovereign. Subjugating the tribes one by one ISLAM AS A CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION FOR was the only option.At most, such outsiders STATEHOOD could achieve indirect control, and even this was nominal. A conceptual and intellectual foundation for The geography, in addition to shelter- state building was at this time, however, grad- ing the mountaineers from outside rule by ually spreading across the North Caucasus in raising the costs and lowering the benefits of the form of .The classical Sunni intervention, also fostered the development understanding of Islam as a religion contains of a culture that prized such attributes as ath- much more than a theological doctrine con- letic prowess, physical courage, and self- cerning God and the relationship of the indi- reliance; that is, martial virtues.As John vidual to the divine.The divinely mandated Baddeley wrote when discussing the influ- law, the sharia, regulates fundamental aspects ence of geography of the North Caucasus on of the individual’s relationship to others in its people,“The people of the Caucasus owe addition to questions of the individual’s ritu- it not only their salient characteristics, but al obligations to God. Drawing upon the their very existence. It may be said without Quran and the hadiths (compilations of the exaggeration that the mountains made the sayings and deeds of Muhammad), as its men.”18 The Ottoman historian Ahmed sources, the sharia provides an extensive, cod- Cevdet Pasha noted the relationship between ified body of law to regulate human social the geography of the North Caucasus and relations. Moreover, inherent in the sharia is the mountaineers’ love of freedom,“Since the concept of dawlah, the state, as the their land is steep and difficult, they do not enforcer of law.To study classical Islam means submit to a government.”19 to study and think about the law and the Hence, in addition to making the state as well as about God.The flowering of assertion of political control physically diffi- classical Islamic scholarship that was taking cult, the region’s topography also encouraged place in Dagestan thereby inevitably stimulat-

5 ed the development of a legal culture.20 threat in addition to the merely military one, Thus, concurrent with the spread of Islam as a flow of settlers southward drove the was the diffusion of the notions of formal- natives of the Caucasus region into the ized law and the state.As we shall see, it mountains, and upset the local economy. would be in this capacity that Islam would ’s policies for undermining play an important role in the mountaineers’ Islam and converting its subjects to Russian confrontation with Russia. Orthodox Christianity added a cultural and spiritual dimension to the threat as well. THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST AND This new threat provoked new pat- THE MOUNTAINEERS’ STRUGGLE terns of behavior among the North TO PRESERVE THEIR Caucasians.The Circassian tribes in the INDEPENDENCE northwest began to cooperate more closely Cooperation, not conflict, motivated the first with each other and with the Ottomans.22 diplomatic contact between the North The mountaineers in the northeast similarly Caucasian mountaineers and the Muscovite began to stir. In 1783, the same year Russia state. In 1555, a delegation of North annexed the Crimea, a Chechen religious Caucasians, including some allegedly leader known as Sheikh Mansur Ushurma Christian , traveled to distant emerged. Preaching the need for the moun- , where they asked Tsar Ivan IV (the taineers to unite against the Russian threat, Terrible) for protection against the depreda- Mansur called upon them to participate in a tions and raids of the Crimean Tatars and ghazawat, or , against the Russians. Ottomans.21 The growth of Russian power Mansur attracted a circle of political and reli- and the advance of the Russian state south- gious leaders from throughout the region as ward to the Caucasus under Catherine the far as , and he managed to gather a Great, however, ensured a clash. In 1763, the sufficiently large force to inflict several Russians built the fort of Mozdok, and there- defeats upon the Russians before falling pris- by initiated a fourteen-year war with the oner to them during the storming of the Kabardians. In 1783, the famous General Ottoman fort at Anapa in 1791. Suvorov expelled the Noghais from the Mansur’s success was impressive, but region to the north of the Kuban.Two years the breadth of his appeal should not be exag- later, St. Petersburg established the post of gerated. Most Dagestanis, for example, governor general of the Caucasus. Pressed by refused to back him. Legend has it that growing population and scarcity of land, a Mansur belonged to the Naqshbandi sufi steady stream of Cossacks, Slavs, and other brotherhood. Making the most of this leg- Christians began pushing southward looking end, some historians have depicted Mansur as for land to settle. the first in a line of militant Naqshbandi This latest Russian advance constitut- who strove to awaken the Muslims of ed a qualitatively different threat to the peo- the North Caucasus.23 No substantial evi- ples of the North Caucasus.This time, the dence, however, has ever been found to sup- outside power was not looking merely to port the legend.The attempt to draw such a exact tribute from the local princes or to connection attaches an unwarranted impor- establish nominal political hegemony over tance to as a militant force in its own the region but sought to subdue the region right, and it gives the false impression that and its inhabitants. It posed a demographic the nearly four decades between the capture 6 of Mansur and Ghazi Muhammad’s claim to in effect free to act as he saw fit within the the title of imam of Dagestan saw a North bounds of the Chechen code of behavior, Caucasus without religious leadership lan- which admired courage and resistance as guish passively like a rudderless ship. much as it disdained weakness and submis- In fact, those decades were hardly sion.Yermolov’s strategy of intimidation was quiet. In 1818, all the princes of Dagestan far less effective against such a decentralized but one rose in revolt against the infamous and resilient society.27 Russian commander in the Caucasus, In 1824, a Dagestani religious scholar General Yermolov.Yermolov’s ruthlessness known as Muhammad emerged knew no bounds. He did not hesitate to among the Chechens. He declared himself a wage total war on whole populations divinely chosen imam who would lead the through deportation, scorched earth tactics, Caucasians against the Russians.A prominent and starvation to compel them to submit to Chechen known as Beibulat (Taimazov) Russian rule. Even Yermolov’s own sover- acted as his military commander, and the two eigns,Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I, felt succeeded in rallying a mixed group of the need to criticize his methods. But the Kabardians, Kumuks, Ossetians, Chechens, general brushed criticism aside, asserting, and some Dagestanis against the Russians.A “Gentleness in the eyes of Asiatics is a sign of little more than a year after it began, howev- weakness, and out of pure humanity I am er, the revolt fell apart from within. inexorably severe.”24 Several years later, another Dagestani The decentralized nature of the religious scholar known as Ghazi North Caucasus in general, and of Chechen Muhammad came forth to announce himself society in particular, reduced the effectiveness imam of Dagestan. Ghazi Muhammad was a of Yermolov’s methods, if not their painful (literally, one who wants or seeks, in effects. Because the North Caucasians’ lacked this case a seeker of esoteric knowledge), a a common ruler,Yermolov had to contend follower of the Naqshbandi sheikh with multiple princes at once and force them Jamal al-Din al-Ghazi Ghumuqi.Among his to submit one by one.This difficulty of dis- first acts was to declare a comprehensive holy persed leadership was especially acute in the war, that is, a struggle against not just the case of the Chechens, who lacked a sovereign infidel Russians but also against the un- that could compel his subjects to obey his Islamic practices and customs of the moun- word. Chechen society was organized on the taineers as well. Ghazi Muhammad’s declara- basis of clans (teips), which in turn composed tion of cultural warfare against mountaineer larger federations (tukhums).25 The only cen- society conformed to the Naqshbandi Sufi tralized institution the Chechens had was the tradition, which is distinguished by its spiri- Mekh Kel, an egalitarian assembly of clan tual sobriety and its rigorous insistence upon heads, and its authority was limited in cases the fulfillment of the exoteric demands of when unanimity was lacking.26 Indeed, Islam as codified in the sharia. Mysticism is Chechen society on the whole was strongly, to be pursued only in addition to the sharia, even radically, egalitarian.The Chechens had not as a substitute or alternative to the holy no aristocracy and did not recognize any dis- law and its strictures.28 tinctions of social class. Every Chechen male Ghumuqi belonged to a subset of the was an uzden, or “freeman.” It is only a slight Naqshbandi known as the Naqshbandi- exaggeration to say that every Chechen was Khalidiya after an Ottoman Kurdish sheikh, 7 Mawlana Khalid.The weakness of Muslim Naqshbandi differed sharply on a number of political structures and the consequent fundamental theological questions. Most encroachment of the European powers had obviously,Wahhabism categorically rejects the troubled Mawlana Khalid. In 1809–10 he very essence of Sufi brotherhoods, mysticism traveled to the Indian subcontinent.There he and spiritual sheikhs, as corrosive innovations was initiated into the Naqshbandi brother- that crept into Islam after the time of the hood and exposed to the teachings of Ahmad Prophet Muhammad. Nonetheless, the two Sirhindi (1564–1624). movements did share a common emphasis on The things that concerned Sirhindi the need to complement more active resist- seem to have been the same that worried ance to non-Muslim powers with a more Mawlana Khalid.Theologically lax syn- exacting application of the sharia and its cretism, the arrival of Christian colonial norms.Their similarities are too great for us powers, and a rebounding Hinduism—all in to dismiss the timing of their emergence as the context of weakening Mughal political coincidence, or to regard them as wholly power—threatened the position of Islam on separate phenomena.30 Sirhindi,‘Abd al- the subcontinent in Sirhindi’s time. Sirhindi Wahhab, Mawlana Khalid, and Ghumuqi all sought to reverse these trends and claimed to lived in Muslim societies that they perceived be the -i alf-ithani, the “renewer of as weakened and in danger, and all sought to the Second (Islamic) millennium.” Sirhindi reverse this condition through greater reli- saw the answer to this crisis in the combina- gious zeal. tion of a sober mysticism with an unbending Khalid embraced Sirhindi’s teachings. insistence on the importance of sharia and After his return to the Ottoman lands, his Sunni orthodoxy. Unlike those Sufis who own disciples transmitted Sirhindi’s ideas to counseled detachment from the affairs of this the Caucasus and to the person of Sheikh world, Sirhindi believed in the efficacy and Muhammad al-Yaraghi, who initiated need for political power, and he urged others Ghumuqi. Ghumuqi in turn initiated Ghazi to do the same.29 Muhammad and Shamil as his in the During the time that elapsed between Naqshbandi order, and al-Yaraghi would play Sirhindi and his intellectual heir Mawlana an important role in legitimizing and super- Khalid, another powerful Muslim revivalist vising the establishment of authority in the movement emerged. In 1744, an Arab reli- murids’ movement.Although it would be a gious scholar named Muhammad ibn ‘Abd gross exaggeration to claim that an Indian al-Wahhab initiated a revolt against what he sheikh who lived two centuries earlier served denounced as the corrupting rule of the as the intellectual architect of the North Ottomans.‘Abd al-Wahhab advocated a Caucasian resistance, the assertion that “return” to what he claimed was the more Sirhindi’s teachings did exert some influence pristine form of Islam that the Prophet is plausible. Muhammad and his followers had practiced. The story of the Caucasian Wars is Like Sirhindi, he held that theological laxity well enough known, and the details need no had corrupted Islam and weakened it, and recounting here.31 As was mentioned above, that Islam needed to be cleansed to return the ghazawat upon which Ghazi Muhammad the umma, or Muslim “nation,” to spiritual embarked aimed not merely at the liberation and political health. of the North Caucasus from Russian domi- Wahhabism and the revivalist nation but also at the transformation of

8 mountaineer society into a sharia-based soci- pretations, the mountaineer metamorphoses ety. Indeed, although Ghazi Muhammad and into a murid. He ceases to be a native fight- Shamil favored a war against the Russians, ing for his land and way of life and becomes their mentor Ghumuqi opposed it in favor of a militant monk, striving in the way of God concentrating efforts on the reform of against the Russian enemy in this world and mountaineer society from within. the spiritual foe of the next.The allegedly In 1828, Russia went to war with the populist tendency of Sufism is also sometimes and emerged victorious the invoked to explain the mountaineers’ fero- following year.The mountaineers sat out that cious resistance and indomitable character.35 war passively, but Russia’s further expansion There is no doubt that Islam played a into the South Caucasus now spurred some multifaceted role in Shamil’s struggle against mountaineers to act while their own lands the Russians and exerted profound effect were still free and before Dagestan’s Avar upon the dynamics of the mountaineer rulers reached an accommodation with the resistance. But its significance lies less in its Russians.After being selected as imam of ability to motivate resistance than as a guide Dagestan, Ghazi Muhammad declared a jihad for how the resisters should organize their against the Russians in 1829. communal lives. Islam may certainly have Ghazi Muhammad led the moun- provided a gloss of divine sanction to the taineers for roughly three years before he fell mountaineers’ struggle against the Russians in battle in 1832, abandoned by most of his and spurred some mountaineers to fight supporters. His successor as imam, Hamza harder, but as we have seen from earlier Bek, was assassinated just two years later by episodes, the mountaineers had no need for Avar notables opposed to the imam and his Islam as an incentive to fight outside forces. new anti-Russian Islamizing movement.32 Islam in its mainstream classical, as The third imam of Dagestan was Ghazi opposed to peculiarly Sufi, form performed Muhammad’s friend and a fellow initiate of two key functions in the North Caucasian Ghazi Ghumuqi’s, Shamil. Shamil would lead resistance. First, it served as a marker of iden- the impoverished mountaineers against the tity that both differentiated the Muslim largest empire and army in the world for North Caucasians from the tsarist regime36 twenty-five years, from 1834 to 1859. and linked the ethnically diverse and isolated Historians and more contemporary mountaineers together as a single community analysts both sympathetic and antagonistic to with a common identity facing a common the mountaineers’ resistance routinely threat.The shared identity thereby facilitated emphasize the fundamental importance of Shamil’s efforts to forge a united front from Islam in the Caucasian Wars, arguing (or the disparate groups of mountaineers. assuming) that religion served as the prime Second, Islam, and the sharia in par- motivation in the mountaineers’ resistance ticular, provided the mountaineers with a against the Russian infidel. In effect, they cast source of concepts and ideas for building a the natives’ struggle against the Russian centralized state.To hold out against one of Empire as a spiritual clash of civilizations.33 history’s greatest empires near its height, it Moreover, these authors tend to assign a was imperative for the mountaineers to cre- potent explanatory value to the specific form ate a standing army and the requisite bureau- of Islam dominant in the North Caucasus, cratic apparatus to support it. But the estab- that is, Naqshbandi Sufism.34 In their inter- lishment of a bureaucracy demanded more 9 than the mobilization of resources and the struggle at the outset.Thus Shamil opened application of sophisticated organizational his campaign not with violent defiance of St. skills. It required above all a change in the Petersburg but instead with pleas of loyalty as mindset of the mountaineers and the dis- he sought first to concentrate his forces and placement of the norms of collective respon- eliminate sources of opposition within sibility in favor of those of individual respon- mountaineer society to his program of sibility. Islamization. Substantial segments of moun- Accomplishing such a fundamental taineer society, however, were hostile toward task could not be easy. Over the centuries, expanding the influence of the sharia.The the mountaineers of the North Caucasus had Russians accordingly sought to exploit developed their own elaborate codes of cus- mountaineer antipathy to the sharia and toms and traditions to regulate social interac- undermine Shamil by promising to accom- tion.37 Borrowing from the word modate adat in their administration.They meaning “customary law,” they called these enjoyed some success in exploiting this split codes adat to distinguish them from the doc- among the mountaineers.39 trinal law of Islam, sharia.Adat, unlike sharia, As part of his efforts to reform rested on the notion of collective responsibil- mountaineer society and centralize it for the ity.The mountaineer’s code did not hold purpose of fighting the Russians, Shamil used individuals responsible for their transgres- the structure of the tariqat to serve as a back- sions, but rather their clans.38 bone for a quasi-state.As imam, Shamil stood Adat, therefore, had no place either at the top of the state structure, and he was for the individual as a morally sovereign actor the supreme authority on matters military, or for a state authority that would supplant political, and spiritual. Shamil’s civil adminis- the clans as the locus of justice.The tration was geographically organized, with a Caucasian ’ believed that adat naib, or deputy, in charge of each district.40 had to be overcome, not only because it was Each naib in turn was responsible for guard- un-Islamic but also because it obstructed the ing the borders of the state that lay in his dis- unification of the mountaineers and sapped trict.41 To protect the integrity of the central their collective efforts by sanctioning things structure, Shamil preferred to appoint out- like blood feuds. Imam Mansur, thus, sought siders to a given district, rather than rely on to set an example of righteous Muslim con- local figures. In addition to a voluntary mili- duct by publicly forgiving the murderer of a tia, Shamil maintained a rudimentary regular blood relative of his.This pardon amounted army.42 In a pattern common to govern- to a flagrant violation of adat, and Mansur’s ments dependent on a certain degree of pop- boldness impressed the mountaineers. Shamil ular support for the maintenance of their likewise put a priority on banning blood armies, Shamil’s state also possessed a social feuds, seeing them as both contrary to welfare system to look after widows and Islamic morality and law, and as a divisive orphans. threat to his efforts to build a unified state. Shamil’s power, however, was not Indeed, although Shamil broke with absolute.The mountaineers’ predilection for his spiritual mentor by deciding to wage war defying authority outside the clan remained against the Russians while simultaneously strong, and resentment toward Shamil was pursuing the “shariatization” of mountaineer often not far from the surface, among the society, he nonetheless prioritized the latter Chechens as well as others.When, for exam- 10 ple, Shamil replaced his Chechen naib,Tasho teachings found a receptive audience among Hajji, the Chechens killed the replacement the war-weary mountaineers, and began to and compelled Shamil to reinstate Tasho sap the war effort. Shamil ultimately felt Hajji.43 compelled to expel the itinerant Chechen The nineteenth century thus wit- from the North Caucasus. Nonetheless, the nessed not merely an extended violent con- mountaineers’ exhaustion was all but com- frontation between the native mountaineers plete, and in 1859 Shamil surrendered. and the forces of the Russian Empire but Ironically, only a few years later the Russians also a radical effort to transform and Islamize would imprison Kunta Hajii and the the mountaineer societies of the Caucasus. Qadiriya would spearhead rebellions against This latter process impressed the moun- oppressive Russian control. taineers of the time at least as much as, and Although Shamil had been St. perhaps even more than, the former.They Petersburg’s greatest foe in the Caucasus, his referred to Shamil’s era not as “the time of capture did not end the war. It would take the Great War against the Russians” or as another five years before the Russians suc- “the time of Shamil” but rather as “the time ceeded in subduing the Circassian tribes in of the sharia.”44 Although Shamil’s ghazawat the northwest Caucasus. Unlike the northeast ultimately failed to defeat the Russians and Caucasus, where Dagestan had become a completely displace adat with the sharia, his major center of Islamic scholarship, the efforts and those of his fellow Naqshbandis northwest Caucasus possessed no such center to inculcate and enforce the normative and of Islamic learning.The Circassians remained legal values of Islam did meet with success. Muslim largely in name only. Shamil had Even contemporary Russian observers, their attempted to integrate them into his pan- distaste for the faith of Islam notwithstand- mountaineer war, but the Circassians’ tribal ing, noted what they perceived as the sharia’s structure impeded such efforts. Nonetheless, positive influence on the mountaineers’ the Circassians carried on their own decen- morality.45 tralized fight for against the Russians for five The proliferation and growth of Islam more years until the tsarist forces over- as a source of norms could not prevent whelmed them with superior arms, technol- 47 Shamil’s ultimate defeat, and in fact it might ogy, and numbers. have contributed to it as alternative interpre- The significance of Islam in the tations of Islam were introduced.After close Caucasian Wars lies not in its being a first to a quarter-century of relentless warfare cause of resistance nor in the concept of against the vastly wealthier, more numerous, ghazawat. Many, if not most, of those moun- and stronger Russians, the mountaineers’ taineers who fought were “simple peasants commitment to ghazawat began to waver. In who had the barest conception” of what the late 1850s, a Chechen shepherd named Sufism was.48 And among those who were Kunta Hajji returned to the Caucasus after expert on it were many who refused to join completing the pilgrimage to and in the fighting.As was noted above, Ghazi becoming an initiate in the Qadiriya tariqat Muhammed and Shamil’s own spiritual men- in Baghdad.46 In contrast to Shamil’s message tor, Jemal al-Din al-Ghumuqi, opposed the of ghazawat as a religious obligation, Kunta war effort. It should also not be forgotten Hajji preached a quietist form of Islam and that during the wars, several North advocated nonresistance to the Russians. His Caucasian religious leaders actually backed 11 the Russians, and that the aforementioned against the Bolsheviks. It thereby leaves the Kunta Hajji’s espousal of spiritual indifference erroneous impression that the mountaineers to politics in the name of Islam helped as a whole remained unbowed in their oppo- undermine Shamil’s war effort. sition to Russian rule. Soviet scholarship, Rather, Islam’s significance lies in its conversely, preferred to focus on the role of role as a source of conceptual architecture for Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik actors in the the creation of a centralized state. Islam pro- North Caucasus, and it gave short shrift to vided two critical elements for such a form other movements and trends. It thereby of political organization. First, it furnished a implicitly suggested that, beyond the select common identity that could unite the revolutionaries, there existed in the North mountaineers across ethnic and clan lines Caucasus only obscurantist religious figures against the Russians. Second, in the form of and agents of foreign influence. the sharia, it provided the moral norms and The reality appears to have been legal concepts necessary for a bureaucratic quite different. Shortly after the fall of the state. No less important, the sharia’s divine tsar, a number of leading mountaineers from origins provided an imprimatur to which throughout the North Caucasus formed an Shamil and his predecessors could appeal in organization they called the Union of Allied their struggle to supplant adat.Aside perhaps Mountaineers of the North Caucasus (Soiuz from the formal structure that the tariqat ob’edinennykh gortsev severnogo kavkaza, or provided, Sufism as a body of mystical teach- UAM).The UAM was a pan-mountaineer ings and practices seems to have had little movement that included representatives from influence upon the political-military struggle Dagestan on the Caspian across the North against the Russians. In sum, the Caucasus to Abkhazia on the Black Sea.The Naqshbandi-Khalidiya’s significance lay not leadership was composed of North in its esoteric doctrines but rather in precise- Caucasians who primarily, but not exclusive- ly the opposite: its strict emphasis upon the ly, had been educated in Russian institutions rigorous observance of the sharia. of higher education or had served in the Russian civil or military bureaucracy. Despite THE UNION OF ALLIED this profile, the leadership managed to recruit MOUNTAINEERS: NORTH significant popular support at congresses held CAUCASIAN REBELS OR RUSSIA’S LOYAL SONS? at Vladikavkaz,Andi, and elsewhere.49 The UAM held as its goal not the With the exception of the years 1877–8 and separation of the North Caucasus from 1905, the North Caucasus was relatively Russia so much as inclusion of the region as quiet and stable from 1864 until the Russian the homeland of the mountaineers within Revolution. Even during the cataclysm of Russia.The UAM sought to unify the World War I, the North Caucasus failed to mountaineers, but not on the basis of ethnic- erupt in rebellion despite the hopes of the ity or language (criteria that of course frac- Germans and Ottomans.Western scholarship tured the mountaineers), or even on the basis has paid little or no attention to the North of religion. Rather, it sought to build upon a Caucasus in the immediate wake of the shared mountaineer culture that included all Russian Revolution, preferring instead to the indigenous peoples of the North skip from the time of Shamil to the moun- Caucasus. It reached out to the Orthodox taineers’ struggles against first the counter- Christian Cossacks, typically portrayed as the revolutionary forces of Denikin and then 12 Muslim mountaineers’ irreconcilable ene- ure, and it had even produced a class of mies.The UAM’s leadership was aware of the mountaineer patriots who identified the best profound challenge posed to their small peo- interests of their people with remaining part ples by the immigration and settlement of of Russia. outsiders into the North Caucasus, and it The Bolshevik seizure of power in explicitly acknowledged the need for all to November 1917 from the Provisional work together in the face of this common Government radically changed the situation threat. in the North Caucasus and elsewhere.The At the same time, the UAM believed UAM—opposed to Bolshevism but lacking that the future of the North Caucasus lay the ability to defend the North Caucasus on with Russia. Contrary to the stereotype of their own against the Red Army—began to the illiterate and religiously fanatical moun- reach out for allies.They first turned their taineer, the leaders and rank-and-file mem- attention to Tiflis, the capital of the bers of the UAM did not detest all that was Transcaucasian Federation.Arguing that a Russian. Like virtually all the regional move- divided Caucasus could not stand, they pro- ments in the Russian Empire in 1917, the posed the formation of one greater, inde- UAM desired to remain part of a united and pendent Caucasian Federation.The democratic Russia.Though UAM members Transcaucasians, however, were too disorient- condemned the excesses of the tsarist autoc- ed to act. Like the North Caucasians, they racy and paid homage to Shamil’s struggle wished to remain part of a united and demo- against tsarism, they explicitly distinguished cratic Russia and were hostile to the between the old regime and Russia and the Bolsheviks, but unlike the North Caucasians Russian people, and they expressed no ani- they refused to recognize that the Bolsheviks mosity toward the latter.50 had already taken Russia.They were con- The UAM leadership saw Russia not fused by the collapse of the democratic merely as a source of oppression but also as a Russia to which they had pledged their alle- window to the advanced societies of Europe giance and were also under pressure from the and the wider world.They were products of Ottoman Empire to declare their independ- Russian education, and though fierce patriots ence from Russia and sign a peace treaty, and and partisans of the Caucasus, they believed so simply did not know how to react.52 that their people stood to could gain through Left with little choice, the UAM then inclusion in a single state with Russia. approached the Ottomans.A common Integration with Russia offered access to geopolitical interest united the two sides.The education, technology, and other aspects of UAM sought outside support to keep the modernity that the mountaineers needed if North Caucasus free from Bolshevik rule, they were to develop into a prosperous socie- while the Ottomans were eager to exploit ty.Although Robert Seely’s assessment that Russia’s temporary weakness and chaos to the “overwhelming impression of Russia’s establish one or more independent buffer colonial adventure in the northern Caucasus states in the Caucasus before the war’s immi- is one of failure”51 accurately summarizes nent end.The existence of a relatively large the conclusion of the existing secondary his- number of Ottoman subjects of North torical literature, it quite arguably does not Caucasian heritage in the Ottoman intelli- reflect the history itself so accurately. Russia’s gence service facilitated the formation of an colonial adventure had not been a total fail- alliance between the two.Thus, after recog-

13 nizing the existence of an independent Allied powers compelled the Ottomans and Mountaineer Republic on May 11, 1918, the Germans to withdrew all their forces from Ottomans sent a small force of several hun- the Caucasus.The mountaineer government dred volunteers into Dagestan that June.After initiated contacts with British military per- a larger army succeeded in liberating Baku sonnel in the Caspian in the hopes of obtain- and handing it over to the newly created ing support and diplomatic recognition. government of the independent Republic of Although local British officers were sympa- Azerbaijan in September 1918, the Ottomans thetic, London had committed to backing sent a detachment of Ottoman and indige- the counterrevolutionary forces of General nous soldiers northward from Baku into Denikin against the Bolsheviks.The subse- Dagestan to dash up the Caspian to drive the quent British withdrawal from the region in Bolsheviks out of Derbent and Petrovsk any event left the mountaineers on their (today’s Makhachkala).53 own. One might expect that a common Whereas existing accounts tend to Islamic identity would have served as a basis portray the mountaineers as more or less for the Ottoman–North Caucasian alliance. united in their successful struggle against Though it undoubtedly facilitated relations, it General Denikin and their subsequent and was by no means a primary factor.The failed struggle against the Bolsheviks, the fact North Caucasians first had repeatedly is that at this point the mountaineer move- appealed to the predominantly Christian ment began to fragment.The Bolsheviks, Transcaucasians to form a unified Caucasian playing to mountaineer opposition to state. In their internal correspondence, the Denikin’s program of restoring tight central North Caucasian leaders expressed their pref- control in a unitary Russian state, wooed erence for a closer alliance with , several influential sheikhs with promises of because Germany was more powerful and full autonomy under Bolshevik rule. Loyalty wealthier than the Ottomans.54 Moreover, to Russia, however, remained strong among true to their earlier declarations of intent to some sectors of the mountaineers. Several establish an inclusive North Caucasian state, former tsarist army officers occupying key the North Caucasians secured the participa- posts in the Mountaineer Republic’s govern- tion of an Orthodox priest and a Jewish ment decided to throw in their lot with their rabbi in the public ceremony establishing the former comrades in arms, preferring the return of their government to Derbent after reestablishment of the old tsarist order to the its liberation from the Bolsheviks.55 promises of Bolshevism.The anti-Denikin The same held even for those who mountaineers, however, contributed greatly explicitly advocated the establishment of an to the defeat of the counterrevolutionary imamate. Indeed, Nadzhmuddin Gotsinskii, a Volunteer Army by mounting repeated wealthy and educated alim, or scholar of attacks on its rear, denying his army any Islam, who sought the title of imam of the security or sanctuary. North Caucasus, greeted the Ottomans with The elimination of Denikin enabled gunfire, not open arms. He accepted the Bolsheviks to concentrate their might Ottoman leadership only after the better- against the mountaineers in the spring of armed Ottomans outgunned his men in a 1920. In an influential article,Alexandre Bennigsen has characterized this struggle as firefight.56 one waged by “conservative Sufi sheikhs In November 1918, the victorious fighting for the glory of God” and asserts 14 that it “was the Sufi leadership that gave the and pillaging alienated many mountaineers Daghestan-Chechen revolt its unique charac- from the rebels.61 As even Bennigsen con- ter.”57 Marie Broxup reiterated the same cedes, the Bolsheviks succeeded in pitting the emphasis on Islam and the Naqshbandi Kumuks, Lezghins, and Darghins against the tariqat as the key factors in the mountaineer Avars and the Ingush against the Chechens.62 resistance in a later article.58 Firsthand accounts in Turkish of the This assessment, while making for an mountaineer struggle also undermine the undeniably romantic and appealing portrait thesis that Sufism exerted a special influence of implacable Caucasian resistance to Russian on the fight against the Bolsheviks. Indeed, tyranny, gravely distorts the dynamics of the one Ottoman Circassian who traveled in the struggle.To start with, the revolt was not North Caucasus in 1920 singled out the widespread. Rather, it was limited in its geo- Naqshbandi sheikhs not for their steely graphic scope almost exactly to that of the determination to fight the Bolsheviks but territory held by Shamil at the end of his instead for their soporific teachings on the imamate: the central mountainous regions of need to forsake the affairs of this world and Dagestan and the mountainous southeast of concentrate on those of the next world.63 Chechnya. In other words, the revolt was Sufism, in short, acted as a depressant, not as centered in the most mountainous and least a stimulant, upon the mountaineer will to accessible area of the North Caucasus, the fight. home of the most combative and proud A more general description of the mountaineers, the highland Avars and struggle as a religious war cannot hold up Chechens. Moreover, the rebels had even less either.There were numerous religious figures success than Shamil in spreading the revolt to in the North Caucasus who opposed fighting the Northwestern Caucasus. the Bolsheviks, or even actually supported Field reports from the Red Army and them. For example, the Chechen Sheikh Ali Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB) depict a Mitaev, Sheikh Ali of Akusha, and the Andi variegated resistance movement. Red Army sheikhs Hassan and Habibullah Hajji intelligence officers identified different ten- remained on good terms with the dencies among the mountaineers, and they Bolsheviks.64 To be sure, some of these fig- distinguished between that small number ures, such as Ali of Akusha, whom the committed to reviving the Mountaineer Bolsheviks executed in 1926, must later have Republic, those seeking an Islamic state, regretted their decision not to have joined those engaged in ordinary banditry, and those the revolt.And there is no denying the groups acting out of a mix of ideological and extraordinary courage and tenacity of the pragmatic motives.Although it would be anti-Bolshevik rebels, many of whom, tempting to dismiss the charges of banditry as women included, preferred to kill themselves biased or self-serving Bolshevik propaganda, than fall into the hands of the Red Army. this would be wrong. Combating abrechest- But to describe their struggle as popular and vo,59 the mountaineer tradition of brigandry, widespread throughout the North Caucasus had been a priority of the UAM, and the is mistaken, no matter how attractive an , and later self-proclaimed imam, of the image it might create. North Caucasus Gotsinskii emphasized the need for sharia to suppress it.60 The Red Army officers noted that the abreks’ looting 15 THE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET intellectual resistance.Advocates of the PERIOD Salafi68 version of Islam, commonly known 69 Upon consolidating their rule over the as Wahhabism, enjoyed a special advantage Caucasus, the Bolsheviks reneged on their in this environment.A central tenet of Salafi promises of autonomy and instead asserted Islam is that it is the proper, pure form of tight control over the region, and instigated a Islam to the exclusion of all others.This severe crackdown on Islam.A campaign to claim, especially when packaged with clear disarm Chechnya and Dagestan in the mid- formulations of the practice and meaning of 1920s led to another round of rebellion. Islam as a creed, found a special resonance Communist repression in the North among an uninformed audience eager to find Caucasus reached its apogee in February precisely such a straightforward exposition of 70 1944, when Joseph Stalin65 ordered the mass authentic Islam. The common description deportation of the Muslim Chechens and of a struggle between Salafi Islam and “tradi- Ingush to Central Asia and Siberia, less than a tional” Sufi Islam was thus something of a year after the deportation of the Buddhist misnomer, for the explosion of the numbers Kalmyks from northern Dagestan to the of mosques, , and madrasahs (Islamic Volga region.The deportations were brutal in schools) was on a truly revolutionary scale.71 the extreme, killing from one-third to one- Popular knowledge of Islamic practices, doc- half of the Chechen population. Shortly after trines, and texts was so thin that initially the death of Stalin in 1953 Chechens began there simply was no coherent tradition of making their way back to their homeland, “indigenous” Islam capable of refuting on often bringing with them the bones of their theological grounds the Salafi claim to be the relatives for burial. Finally, in 1957, sole legitimate interpretation of Islam. Khrushchev officially permitted the Salafi Islam found its first toehold in Chechens and Ingush to return. Nonetheless, the Caucasus in Dagestan, from whence it the Soviet authorities persisted in maintain- spread to Chechnya.72 Although the expo- ing tight control on the North Caucasus and nents of Salafi Islam failed to become a in suppressing the practice and study of major force in Dagestan or to gain any sig- Islam. nificant popular support in either Dagestan Although some Western scholars or Chechnya, they did manage to exert sig- speculated about the existence of a vast and nificant, even decisive, influence over thriving underground Sufi network in the Chechen politics in the aftermath of the first North Caucasus, the reality is that the antire- Chechen War.There are three reasons worth ligious policies of the Soviets, although they mentioning in the context of this paper for failed utterly to efface Islam as a source of the success of the Salafis in gaining power in identity, did in fact succeed in reducing both Chechnya. the knowledge and practice of Islam.66 The first is that, in addition to a sim- Whereas Muslim identity remained relatively ple and clear-cut exegesis of “pure” Islam, strong, knowledge of Islam grew weak.67 Salafi Islam provided a moral framework that The spiritual and cultural vacuum purported to make sense of the Russo- created by Soviet policies opened up oppor- Chechen conflict by portraying it in more tunities in the post-Soviet period for outside vivid, larger than life terms as one part of an proselytizers to move in and introduce their epic struggle between Islam and its ene- interpretations of Islam with relatively little mies.73 The Chechens have always taken 16 great pride in their martial nature, and Salafi Aslan Maskhadov to overcome such divisions Islam’s unabashed embrace of violence in the contributed substantially to the failure of his defense of Islam held added appeal.And for government to establish any effective order Chechens facing yet another Russian army between 1996 and the 1999.80 The Salafis, indifferent to and perhaps even supportive of among whom many if not most were igno- atrocities perpetrated by its personnel, the rant about all but the rudiments of their message of militant struggle in defense of belief and among whom were notorious Islam and Muslims could not but find a criminals such as Arbi Baraev, fomented divi- receptive audience.74 sion by deliberately insisting on the uncondi- The second reason is that the Salafis tional acceptance of their interpretation of possessed access to a transnational network of the sharia, and they also contributed to chaos likeminded proselytizers and missionary by participating in the rash of kidnappings organizations backed by significant funds.The and crime that ravaged Chechnya and its supply of volunteers and money from Islamic neighbors.81 To the extent that the Salafis activist organizations validated the Salafi mes- pointed to their version of the sharia as the sage of Islamic solidarity.75 And at the same solution to the problem of clan cleavages and time, the example of the Chechens provided crime in Chechnya, they resembled a validating myth to the Salafi message, living Mansur, Shamil, and Nadzhmuddin from the proof that a small but pious people could eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth cen- defeat great powers with little more than turies.Whether or not their divisive and courage and faith in God.The Chechen criminal activities were part of a conscious resistance became a celebrity cause among plan to seize power in Chechnya is Islamic activists, who saw it as an example of unknown, but to some North Caucasians it Muslim battlefield success, not Chechen, and looked like that at the time.82 were quick to take credit for Chechnya’s vic- The views of another prominent tory.76 Chechen, Khozh Akhmed Nukhaev, sharply A third, and largely overlooked, rea- diverge from the received view of Islam as a son for Salafi Islam’s appeal was that it route to the creation of a Chechen state and offered a means to overcome Chechen clan are worth noting. Nukhaev also identifies the identities and divisions and provide a sem- inability of the Chechens to adapt their clan blance of order to the postwar chaos reigning politics to the model of a centralized state as in Chechnya.77 Whereas a more Sufi-influ- a fundamental problem. But rather than seek- enced interpretation of Islam could accom- ing to change Chechen political culture, modate Chechen society with its multiple Nukhaev advocates rejecting the modern social divisions and its traditions, Salafi Islam state as a form of organization.83 Given that radically opposes all distinctions except that neither he nor the Chechens are capable of between Muslims and infidels.78 Thus some effecting the displacement of the state as the Chechens, such as onetime Chechen presi- fundamental unit of international politics, dent and intelligent Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Nukhaev’s proposal is impotent. Nonetheless, found Salafi Islam attractive in part because his diagnosis of the Chechen dilemma as they saw it as the only practical way to tran- being the difficulty of reconciling Chechen scend clan divisions in Chechen society and political culture with the centralized struc- create a centralized Chechen state.79 ture of the modern state is instructive as it is The inability of Chechen president the same diagnosis of those who, from 17 Sheikhs Mansur and Shamil onward, have not make it more convincing. pointed to Islam as the remedy to the A broader, longitudinal perspective Caucasian mountaineers’ tendency to defi- reveals that a more fundamental factor in ance of the law and forms of authority out- conflict between Russia and the mountaineer side the clan. peoples of the North Caucasus has been the Nonetheless, as was noted above, nature of mountaineer society—which, in Salafi Islam never acquired great popularity part due to the unique geography of the in Chechnya.The fractured nature of North Caucasus, has remained resistant to Chechen society following the 1994–6 war, centralized rule of any sort.The moun- however, enabled the Salafis to establish a taineers resisted Muslim armies as fiercely as foothold in Chechnya. Khattab opened a Russian ones.The origins of the moun- training camp in Chechnya where male taineers’ martial traditions are independent of youths from throughout the Caucasus and Islam. elsewhere were indoctrinated in Salafi beliefs Although Islam has not been the pri- and trained to handle weapons.With a con- mary cause of conflict, classical Sunni Islam siderable number of armed followers, shaped the contours of conflict in the eigh- Chechen and foreign, and financing from teenth and nineteenth centuries by giving outside, the Salafis and their Chechen allies the mountaineers a common identity that such as Shamil Basaev were able not only to was tied to an ethical-legal basis for state challenge Maskhadov with impunity but also building found in the sharia.Yet at the same to compel him to attempt to enforce Islamic time that Islam assisted in the organization law.84 Ultimately, the Salafis under Khattab’s and consolidation of mountaineer resistance, and Basaev’s leadership invaded Dagestan in shariatization also polarized mountaineer August 1999 in a bid to drive the Russians society.The emergence of a quietist interpre- entirely out of the Caucasus and establish an tation of Islam in the form of Kunta Hajji Islamic state.85 That invasion triggered a and the Qadiriya tariqat indeed contributed large-scale Russian response and thereby pre- to the collapse of the mountaineer resistance. cipitated the second Chechen War that con- The subsequent transformation of the tinues to this day. Qadiriya tariqat into a vehicle for rebellion against Russian rule and the periodically qui- CONCLUSION escent behavior of Naqshbandi sheikhs only underscores the futility of identifying Islamic The importance of Islam as a primary motive doctrines or brotherhoods as primary causes for conflict in the North Caucasus should of violent conflict. not be overstated.An inordinate focus on the During the Russian Revolution and Caucasian Wars of the nineteenth century, a Civil War period from 1917 through 1921, latitudinal perspective that attempts to con- the sharia was again invoked as the proper nect the dynamics of those wars with other antidote to crime and to the more centrifu- local anti-imperial struggles of Muslims else- gal tendencies of the mountaineers.Although where, and a strong tendency to romanticize Imam Gotsinskii led the anti-Bolshevik mountaineer resistance to Russia have all resistance, other prominent sheikhs espoused contributed to an exaggerated emphasis upon either neutrality or joined the Bolsheviks. In Islam.The fact that both opponents and pro- the post-communist North Caucasus, mili- ponents of Russian influence in the Caucasus tant Salafi Islam managed to become a domi- have sought to use this interpretation does nant political force due to the peculiarities of 18 war-ravaged Chechnya, where its crude but exhibited a substantial capacity in Chechnya straightforward exposition of the Muslim for destruction, there is, tragically, little evi- faith, its message of militancy, and its supplies dence that it has any real capacity for sup- of arms and funds found a receptive audience porting the emergence of social norms and among young Chechens who were eager for relations that might nurture the emergence more knowledge about their faith, bitter of a stable and productive society in toward Russia, and without other prospects. Chechnya. Given Chechnya’s location and The willingness of the Salafis to embrace the size of its population, the absence of a criminals lent them a powerful dual capacity peaceful and productive Chechnya will nec- to intimidate opponents and strengthen their essarily remain a substantial threat to the case for the uncompromising application of already strained stability of the North the sharia as the only viable solution to social Caucasus as a whole.86 disorder and strife. The same long-standing patterns of social organization and attitudes toward political authority that have supported the mountaineers’ resistance against outside pow- ers for centuries have also served to inhibit the consolidation of stable formal political institutions in Chechnya and elsewhere in the North Caucasus.This dynamic, rather than Islam, will continue to be the funda- mental source of conflict and disorder in the North Caucasus under current conditions of globalization, wherein regions lacking reliable and predictable political institutions are deprived of productive economic investment yet nonetheless subjected to the vagaries of the global economy. Moreover, the substantial opportuni- ties presented by the global economy in the gray and black markets are most easily exploited by elements in societies with strong, local cleavages of identity, such as those in the North Caucasus, and thereby further undermine local governance.The fact that mountaineer norms and social patterns are experiencing rapid change—and nowhere more quickly than in today’s Chechnya— provides little cause for optimism.The destruction of older forms of social order and relations does not necessarily bring in its train the creation of new ones more con- ducive to the construction of stable polities. Although the contemporary Russian state has 19 NOTES Allah’s Mountains: Politics and War in Russia’s Caucasus (New York:I. B.Tauris, 1998); M. I. Qandour, 1 Miuridizm: Istoriia Kavkazskikh voin, 1819–1859 The literature on this debate is now voluminous.To (Nal’chik: El-Fa, 1996); and Anna Zelkina, In Quest for start, see Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War God and Freedom:The Sufi Response to the Russian and Unholy Terror (New York:Modern Library, 2003); Advance in the North Caucasus (London: Hurst and and Samuel P.Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations Company, 2000). and the Remaking of World Order (New York:Simon & 4 Schuster, 1996), especially his thesis about “Islam’s M. M. Bliev and V.V.Degoev, Kavkazskaia voina bloody borders.” For a contrary view, see John L. (Moscow: Roset, 1994). Esposito, Unholy War:Terror in the Name of Islam (New 5 For a study of the special relationship between York:Oxford University Press, 2002), and The Islamic Russian literature, the Caucasus, and empire see Susan Threat: Myth or Reality (New York:Oxford University Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Press, 1999). Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York:Cambridge 2 Thanks to several individuals of remarkable courage University Press, 1994). there exists in English a number of firsthand accounts 6 See, e.g., Bernard Lewis,“The Revolt of Islam” in of the recent wars in Chechnya. For the first war, see Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New Khassan Baiev with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff, The York:Harper & Row, 1964), 95–114. Oath:A Surgeon under Fire (New York:Walker, 2003); 7 For the sake of reader accessibility,Arabic words in Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity the text are transliterated in a simplified fashion. in the Caucasus (New York:New York University Press, 8 Hamid Algar,“A Brief History of the Naqshbandi 1998);Thomas Goltz, Chechnya Diary (New York: Order,” in Marc Gaborieau,Alexandre Popovic, and Thomas Dunne Books, 2003); and Anatol Lieven, Thierry Zarcone, Naqshbandis: Historical Developments Chechnya:Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order Conn.:Yale University Press, 1998). For the second, (: Isis Press, 1985), 34–6. See, in the same vol- and ongoing, war, see, in addition to Baiev’s extraordi- ume,Algar’s “Political Aspects of Naqshbandi History,” nary narrative,Andrew Meier, The Black Earth (New 123–2.Also see Bliev and Degoev, Kavkazskaia voina, York:W.W.Norton, 2003);Anne Nivat, Chienne de 186–7; Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 39–40;Albert Guerre (New York:Public Affairs, 2001); and Anna Hourani,“Sufism and Modern Islam: Maulana Khalid Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from and the Naqshbandi Order,” in Hourani, The Chechnya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London: 2003).These accounts of the second war succeed in Macmillan, 1981), 75–90; Zelkina, In Quest for God relating the complex and horrendously destructive and Freedom, 75–99. nature of the current conflict in Chechnya. 9 The reader should be aware that the use of the term 3 The prominence that both partisans and opponents “Dagestan” here is anachronistic. Composed of the of Russian rule assign to Islam is often reflected in the Turkic word for mountain, Dagh, and the Persian very titles of their works. See, e.g.,Alexandre word for country or land, stan, the word emerged in Bennigsen,“Muslim Guerrilla Warfare in the Caucasus the fifteenth century to refer to the area occupied by (1918–1928),” Central Asian Survey 2, no. 1 (July 1983): the Republic of Dagestan. 45–56;Alexandre Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush, 10 Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union D. M. Dunlop,“Bab al-Abwab,” Encyclopedia of (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1985); Leslie Islam, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954) vol. 1, 835. Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (New York:Viking Press, 11 Seraffedin Erel, Dagistan ve Dagistanlilar (Istanbul: 1960); Marie Broxup,“The Last Ghazawat:The Istanbul Matbaasi, 1961), 58–9. 1920–1921 Uprising,” in The North Caucasus Barrier: 12 Erel, Dagistan, 60–1. The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World, ed. 13 Erel, Dagistan, 42 n. 103, 61. For a lively descrip- Marie Broxup (London: Hurst, 1992), 112–45; Moshe tion of the Arab invasion of the North Caucasus, see Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar:Shamil and the D. M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Frank (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), Cass, 1994); N.A. Smirnov, Miuridizm na Kavkaze 41–88. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1963); Paul Murphy, 14 The Wolves of Islam: Russia and the Faces of Chechen Erel, Dagistan, 71. Terror (New York:Brassey’s, 2004); Sebastian Smith, 15 The Slavs also raided the Muslim peoples; Dunlop, 20 History of the Jewish Khazars, 210–12.Two other useful tution in Chechen life. It has not, however, been stud- sources for the early history of the Northeast ied sufficiently. See also Anna Zelkina,“Islam and Caucasus are V.F.Minorskii, Istoriia Shirvana i Derbenda Society in Chechnia: From the Late Eighteenth to the X-XI vekov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoi literatury, First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of 1963), and Mirza A. Kazem-Beg, Derbend-Nâmeh Islamic Studies 7 no. 2 (1996): 240–2. (Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 26 Saidan Mohmadan Ibrahim,“Meyx-Qiel” (translat- 1851). ed from the Chechen to Turkish by Tarik Cemal 16 Erel, Dagistan, 83. Kutlu), Kafkasya yazilari 8 (2000): 32–4. 17 Chantal Lermercier-Quelquejay,“Cooptation of 27 The fact that Chechen settlements were made of the Elites of Kabarda and Daghestan in the Sixteenth wood also undermined the effectiveness of Yermolov’s Century,” in North Caucasus Barrier, 26. destructive forays.The Chechens could abandon and 18 John F.Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the rebuild their villages with relative ease, in contrast to Caucasus (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), xxi–xxii. the Dagestanis, who tended to live in stone dwellings. Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 35. 19 Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Kirim ve Kafkas Tarihçesi 28 (Kostantiniye: Matbaa-yi Ebüzziya, 1305 [1897]), 54. Algar,“Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order,” See also Ismail Berkok, Tarihte Kafkasya (Istanbul: n.p., 3–44. 1958), 13–16. 29 For more on Sirhindi and his thought, see Yohanan 20 Indeed, so closely tied were the concepts of reli- Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi:An Outline of His gion and state for the Ottomans that they employed Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity the words for each together as a formula,“din ü (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). devlet.”Ahmed Cevdet picked up on the significance 30 Hamid Algar cautions against attempts to link the of the spread of Islamic education and norms in the two movements too closely, because their theological Caucasus, observing,“Until recent times most of these differences were unbridgeable;Algar,“Brief History of tribes did not know what religion and state are.” the Naqshbandi Order,” 30–31. Bernard Lewis, how- Cevdet Pasa, 54. ever, writes that the Indian Muslim leader Ahmad 21 Samil Mansur, Çeçenler (Ankara: Sam Yayinlari, Brelwi was both a Wahhabi and a Naqshbandi initiate; 1993), 43. Lewis,“Revolt of Islam,” 100. 31 22 For details of such cooperation see Ali Arslan, In English, the best accounts are Baddeley’s and “Rusya’nin Kirim ve Gürcistan’i Ilhakkindan Sonra Gammer’s. Osmanli Devleti’nin Çerkes Kabileleri ile 32 For details, see Zelkina, In Quest for God and Münasebetleri (1784–1829),” Kafkas Araþtirmalari, vol. Freedom, 164–8. 1 (1988); Mirza Bala,“Çerkesler,” Islam Ansiklopedisi, 33 For an incisive critique of this approach, see 383; Mustafa Budak,“1853–1856 Kirim Harbi Alexander Knysh,“Sufism as an Explanatory Baslarinda Dogu Anadolu-Kafkas Cephesi ve Seyh Paradigm:The Issue of the Motivations of Sufi Samil,” Kafkas Arastirmalari, vol. 1 (1988), 53. Movements in Russian and Western Historiography,” 23 Bennigsen and Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars,8, in Die Welt des 42, no. 2 (2002): 139–73. Knysh’s 32.Algar,“Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order,” general argument is persuasive, but he does not do 35. Many currently practicing Naqshbandis have justice to the real scholarly achievements of Moshe assimilated the portrayal of the brotherhood as the Gammer, whose work is more nuanced than Knysh vanguard of the North Caucasian resistance to Russia. presents, or even Anna Zelkina, whose work on Islam See Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, The in Chechnya before the Russian conquest is pioneer- Naqshbandi Sufi Way: History and Guidebook of the Saints ing. of the Golden Chain (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1995). 34 Sufism, or tasawwuf, is a word used to describe the 24 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 34. body of doctrines, practices, and organizations in Islam 25 For more on teips and tukhums, see Ian Chesnov, that related to the pursuit of mystical enlightenment. “Byt’ Chechentsem: lichnost i etnicheskie identifikatsii The precise etymology of tasawwuf is unknown.The naroda,” in Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva, most common theory is that it was derived from the ed. D. Furman (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, 1999), Arabic word for wool, suf, in reference to the coarse 69–71, 95–9.The wird, a religious congregation of undergarments that the early mystic ascetics of Islam sorts in which membership is largely but not entirely wore as part of their effort to inure themselves to the determined by blood, is another important social insti- blandishments of the material world in their quest for 21 spiritual enlightenment and knowledge of the divine. 49 For more on the UAM, see Michael A. Reynolds, 35 According to this view, Sufi sheikhs are much clos- “The Ottoman-Russian Struggle for Eastern Anatolia er to the people and far more capable of rousing the and the Caucasus, 1908-1918: Identity, Ideology, and faithful masses to armed violence because, unlike the the Geopolitics of World Order,” Ph.D. dissertation ulema, the formally trained scholars of the Quranic (Princeton University, 2003), 515-97. sciences, they do not rely upon their formal knowl- 50 See, for example,“Otkrytie 1ogo s’ezda gorskikh edge of the Quranic sciences but rely instead upon narodov Kavkaza” 1.5.1917, in Soiuz ob’edinennykh their spiritual charisma. gortsev Severnogo Kavkaza i Dagestana (1917–1918 gg.), 36 It should not be assumed that the mountaineers’ Gorskaia Respublika (1918–1920 gg.), ed. M. D. Butaev Muslim identity precluded their voluntary accession to (Makhachkala: Institut istorii, arkheologii i etnografii the Russian Empire. Other Muslim communities had DNTs RAN, 1994), 26. made their peace with the tsarist regime, and indeed 51 Robert Seely, Russo-Chechen Conflict 1800–2000:A the Russians dispatched a number of Tatar and other Deadly Embrace (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 20. Muslim authorities to the North Caucasus to appeal 52 The single best treatment of the Transcaucasus in to the mountaineers to cease their resistance to the this period remains Firuz Kazemzadeh’s The Struggle tsar. for Transcaucasia, 1917–1921 (New York:Philosophical 37 Because these codes varied from mountaineer Library, 1951). community to mountaineer community, it would per- 53 For more on the Ottoman role in the North haps be more proper to speak of adat in the plural. Caucasus in 1918, see Ismail Berkok,“Büyük Harpte 38 Zelkina,“Islam and Society in Chechnia,” 243–6. Simalî Kafkasyadaki Faaliyetlerimiz ve 15. Firkanin 39 For a critical and nuanced treatment of the rela- Harekâti ve Muharabeleri,” Askeri Mecmua,no.35 tionship between adat and sharia, see V.O. (Eylül, 1934); and Nâsir Yüceer, Birinci Dünya Bobrovnikov, Musul’mane Severnogo Kavkaza: obychai, Savasi’nda Osmanli Ordusu’nun Azerbaycan ve Dagistan pravo, nasilie (Moscow:Vostochnaia literatura, 2002), Harekâti (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basim Evi, 1996). 110–41. 54 “Pis’mo diplomaticheskogo predstavitelia Gorskogo 40 Beneath the naib was another layer of bureaucracy. pravitel’stva G. Bammatova predsedateliu pravitel’stva The number of naibs and the complexity of the A. Chermoevu o politike Germanii i Turtsii v bureaucracy varied with time, and the geographical otnoshenii Kavkaza i Rossii,” 31.8.1918, in Soiuz extent of Shamil’s power, from four to thirty-three. ob’edinnennykh gortsev, 152. For more on the structure of Shamil’s quasi-state, see 55 Berkok,“Büyük Harpte,” 73. Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 225–47. 56 Berkok,“Büyük Harpte,” 31. 41 This is as outlined in article six of Shamil’s nizam. 57 Alexandre Bennigsen,“Muslim Guerrilla Warfare in Cafer Barlas, Dünü ve Bugünü ile Kafkasya Özgürlük the Caucasus (1918–1928),” Central Asian Survey 2, no. Mücadelesi (Istanbul: Insan Yayinlari, 1999), 199. 1 (July 1983): 46, 48. 42 Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, 209–12. 58 Marie Broxup,“The Last Ghazavat:The 1920–1921 43 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 244. Uprising,” in Broxup, North Caucasus Barrier, 113–45. 44 “Uchenie ‘zikr’ i ego posledovateli v Chechne i 59 For a discussion of abrechestvo in historical context, Argunskom okruge,” in Sbornik svedenii kavkazskikh see Bobrovnikov, Musul’mane, 79–97. gortsakh vol. 2 (Tiflis, 1869), 4. 60 “Poslanie Muftiia N. Gotsinskogo k mullam i 45 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 235. prikhozhanam Severo-Kavkazskogo Muftiata,” 46 For more on Kunta Hajji, see V.Kh.Akaev, Sheikh 4.11.1917, Soiuz ob’edinennykh gortsev, 76. Kunta Khadzhi (Groznyi: NIIGN Chechenskoi 61 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv, fond respubliki, 1994). 39247, opis 1, delo 1, list’180,“Kratkaia 47 Paul Henze,“Circassian Resistance to Russia,” in Ob’iasnitelnaia Zapiska,” 25.4.1921. Broxup, North Caucasus Barrier, 98–9. 62 Bennigsen,“Muslim Guerilla Warfare,” 53. 48 K. M. Khanbaev,“Miuridizm v Dagestane v 63 See, in particular, Mustafa Butbay, Kafkasya XIX—nachale XX vv,” Islam v Dagestane Hatiralari, ed.Ahmet Cevdet Canbulat (Ankara:Türk (Makhachkala: Dagestanskii Ordena Druzhbyi Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1990), 23, 56, 80, 101. Narodov Gosudarstvennyi Univesitet, 1994), 35. 64 Broxup,“Last Ghazavat,” 123. 22 65 As Anatol Lieven observes, it is worth remember- madrasahs, and nine higher Muslim schools.Amri ing that neither Stalin nor Lavrentii Beriia, the NKVD Shikhsaidov,“Islam in Dagestan,” in Jonson and chief who oversaw the operation, were Russian, and Esenov, Political Islam, 60. Even assuming that some that the deportations were a Soviet rather than partic- mosques or jamaats, congregations, functioned under- ularly Russian act; Lieven, Chechnya, 319. ground in the Soviet period, there is no doubt that the increase in the number of Islamic institutions is 66 Numerous Chechens, at times in sense of embar- nothing less than explosive. rassment, have explained to the author how in the 72 Soviet era they were unaware of even such basic Mikhail Roshchin,“Fundamentalizm v Dagestane i norms of Islam, such as the prohibition of alcohol. Chechne,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 5 (2003); Enver Parents capable of reading Arabic often refrained from Kisriev,Werner J. Patzelt, Ute Roericht, and Robert passing such knowledge to their children out of fear Bruce Ware,“Political Islam in Dagestan,” Europe-Asia for themselves or their children. Studies 55, no. 2 (March 2003); See also Georgi Derluguian,“Che Guevaras in Turbans,” PONARS 67 Soviet nationality policies arguably did serve to Working Paper (October 2003). dilute Muslim identity vis-à-vis ethnonational identi- 73 ties.This can be observed in Dagestan. For a concise The converse is also true. Many supporters of analysis of Islam and ethnicity in Dagestan in the post- Russian actions in Chechnya have embraced the Soviet period, see Moshe Gammer,“Walking the notion that the Russians are fighting one battle in a Tightrope between Nationalism(s) and Islam(s):The larger, common war against militant Islam.This theme Case of Dagestan,” Central Asian Survey 21, no. 2 gained greater currency in the international arena fol- (2002): 133–42. lowing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Contrary to the assertions of some, this was not a 68 I am using the term “Salafi” here because that is mere by-product of U.S.–Russian cooperation. For the term that many of those fighting in Chechnya example, French officials have repeatedly cited ties to apply to themselves and their beliefs. See also Chechnya in their investigations of radical Islamists. Vincenzo Olivetti’s polemic, Terror’s Source:The Ideology See Marlise Simons,“Europeans Warn of Terror of Wahhabi-Salafism and its Consequences (Birmingham, Attacks in Event of War in Iraq, New York Times, U.K.:Amadeus Books, 2002). For a vigorous polemic January 29, 2003; Jim Boulden,“France Opened in defense of Salafi Islam, see Haneef James Oliver, Moussaoui File in ’94,” December 11, 2001, at The ‘Wahhabi’ Myth: Dispelling Prevalent Fallacies and the http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/12/0 Fictitious Link with Bin Laden (n.p.:Trafford Publishing, 6/gen.moussaoui.background/. 2003). 74 For an example, see Meier, Black Earth, 127–33. 69 For a critique of Wahhabism written from the per- 75 spective of a practicing Sunni Muslim and historian, The number of volunteers from outside the see Hamid Algar, Wahhabism:A Critical Essay Caucasus likely never exceeded more than a few hun- (Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International, dred.The amount of money that indigenous and for- 2002). See also the works cited in the preceding foot- eign jihadists raised through contributions and crime note. For more on “Wahhabism” in the former Soviet within and without Russia was sufficient, however, to Union, see Sanobar Shermatova,“Tak nazyvaemye give them a clear superiority over other armed groups vakhkhabity,” in Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosu- within Chechnya. E.g., the Chechen government of darstva, ed. D. E. Furman (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, Aslan Maskhadov failed to suppress them and was 1999), 399–425; and V.O. Bobrovnikov,“Mif o effectively co-opted by them. For an insider’s account ‘Severokavkazskom Islame’: Strakhi i nadezhdy,’ in of the role of volunteers in Chechnya, see Aukai Kavkaz i Tsentral’naia Aziia na sovremennom etape, ed.V. Collins, My Jihad (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002). A. Mikhailova (Moscow: Sotsium, 2003), 115–23. The most famous of these volunteers was the charis- matic and ruthless Khattab. He was poisoned in March 70 Cf.Anna Matveeva,“The Islamist Challenge in 2002. Post-Soviet Eurasia,” in Political Islam and Conflicts in 76 Russia and Central Asia, ed. Lena Jonson and Murad Examples of such literature abound; for one, see al- Esenov (Stockholm: Swedish Institute of International Sayyid Muhammad Yûnus, al-Muslimûn fîJumhûriyat al- Affairs, 1999), 37–8. Shâshân wa Jihâduhum fî Muqâwamat al-Ghazw al-Rûsî (Mecca: 14:15[1994]) (The Muslims in the Chechen 71 Whereas in 1988 in Dagestan there were just twen- Republic and their Jihad in the Resistance to the Russian ty seven mosques and not even a single madrasah, a Invasion). Salafi internet sites gave prominent attention mere ten years later there were 1,670 mosques, 670 to Chechnya from the mid-1990s onward. schools attached to the mosques, twenty five 23 77 For illustrative examples of the clash between state Dagestani–Chechen border. Interview with Adollo Ali institutions and disintegrating clan and other loyalties, Muhammed in Abreklerin Günlügü, (November 1999). see Baiev, Oath, 224–30; Politkovskaya, Small Corner of Given the publicly expressed intent to unify the Hell, 138, 180. North Caucasus as an Islamic state and the prepara- tions for warfare undertaken by the Congress of the 78 Hence Chechen Salafis, in total disregard for even Peoples of Dagestan and Chechnia prior to the inva- the most basic conventions of Chechen culture, refuse sion, this claim is at best only technically correct. to stand when their elders enter a room. 86 On the relative stability of Dagestan, see Edward 79 The metamorphosis of Yandarbiev from a national- W.Walker,“Russia’s Soft Underbelly:The Stability of ist poet with a profoundly Soviet outlook into an Instability in Dagestan,” Berkeley Program in Soviet and Islamist activist who traveled through the Middle East Post-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series, winter and South Asia to establish relations with radical 1999–2000. Cf. Enver Kisriev,Werner J. Patzelt, Ute Islamists is worthy of further study. For his earlier Roericht, and Robert Bruce Ware,“Stability in the views, see Zelimkhan Iandarbiev, V preddverii nezavisi- Caucasus:The Perspective from Dagestan,” Problems of mosti (Groznyi: Groznenskii rabochii, 1994) and Post-Communism 50, no. 2 (March–April 2003). Checheniia—bitva za svobodu (L’vov: n.p., 1996). 80 For an overview of radical in Islam in the interwar period, see Vakhit Akaev,“Religious-Political Conflict in the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” in Jonson and Esenov, Political Islam, 47–57. 81 The Avar Bagauddin Kebedov justified the taking of hostages by citing the example of the Prophet Muhammad at the Battle of Badr.Author’s interviews with members of the Congress of Peoples of Dagestan and Chechnia, Istanbul, December 1999. See also Vakhit Akaev, Sufizm i Vakhkhabizm na Severnom Kavkaze (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 1999), 10. 82 Magommedkhan Magommedkhanov,“Current Trends and Tensions in Dagestan and Chechnya,” paper presented to the conference,“Conflict in the Caucasus:Yesterday and Today,” Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., May 9, 1998. 83 Nukhaev cites, among other examples, the Chechens refusal to submit to Shamil’s “state sharia” as historical evidence of the innate inability of Chechen society to conform to the demands of statehood. Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, Vozvrashchenie varvarov (Moscow: Mekhk Kkhell, 2002), 147–8.Although Nukhaev rose to prominence as an underworld figure and not as an intellectual, his critique of the modern state and its incompatibility with Chechen sociocultu- ral norms is provocative and filled with insight. See also Nukhaev, Vedeno ili Vashington? (Moscow: Arktogeia-tsentr, 2001). 84 To be sure, Maskhadov’s resort to sharia courts was in part very likely motivated by the realization that only Islamic law had a chance of attaining effective, if not popular, legitimacy among the Chechens. 85 Following the invasion’s failure, its protagonists attempted to portray it as an act of self-defense on behalf of the Salafi communities on the 24