Caucasian Imamate

The law before the war

Drafted from Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (1994)formation

The mountains of Daghestan and Chechnya were not governed by anybody in the 1820s, and had not been for as long as there were records. What they had instead was adat: customary law, varying by valley, administered by village assemblies and elders, regulating land, marriage, injury and — centrally — the blood feud, which was the mechanism by which a society with no state kept order and also the mechanism by which it stayed at war with itself.

The movement that eventually fought Russia for twenty-five years began as an argument about that, and the argument came first.

The Naqshbandi-Khalidi Sufi order had spread into Daghestan in the 1810s and 1820s through a network of scholars — Muhammad al-Yaraghi, Jamal al-Din al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi — teaching that a Muslim community governed by adat was not governed by Islam, and that the sharia had to replace it. Russian writers called the result Muridism, after the murids, the disciples of a Sufi shaykh, and the name stuck in a literature that treated it as fanaticism.

It was a social programme. Replacing adat with sharia meant abolishing the blood feud, ending the authority of the village elders in favour of qadis, changing inheritance and property law, banning tobacco, wine, music and dancing, and transferring the settlement of disputes from the community to a court. It attacked the khans and the beks of the Daghestani principalities as directly as it attacked Russia, and a good deal of the imamate's fighting for its first decade was against other Muslims.

In 1828 Ghazi Muhammad was proclaimed imam and declared jihad. He was killed in 1832 defending Gimry. His successor Hamzat Bek massacred the Avar khans' family at Khunzakh and was assassinated in a mosque two years later.

The third imam was an Avar from Gimry named Shamil, who had been at Ghazi Muhammad's side and had escaped the same battle with several wounds. He held the office for twenty-five years.

Akhulgo

Drafted from Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (1908)expansion

The imamate's largest decade began with its complete destruction, and the connection between the two is not a paradox.

Akhulgo is a double promontory above the Andi Koysu, cut in two by a chasm and surrounded on three sides by cliffs that are in places perpendicular or overhanging. Baddeley, who reconstructed the siege from the Russian staff histories, describes the approach to the upper half as a razor-edged path, and the only other way in as a plank bridge across the chasm seventy feet above the stream. Shamil fortified it and the Russians came for it in the summer of 1839 with nine battalions.

The siege took eighty days. The tower dominating the rock was held by about a hundred men picked for desperate courage out of a garrison not lacking in it, and some of them went down to the river every night under the fire of Russian sharpshooters to fetch water for the rest. Three assaults on the upper position failed. By August the rock was covered with dead and wounded and the survivors were encumbered with a crowd of half-starved women and children, and Shamil put out a white flag and sent his twelve-year-old son Jamal al-Din into the Russian camp as a hostage. Baddeley's measure of what that cost him is the persistence with which he negotiated, many years later, for the return of a young man who had by then become a stranger to him and his country and a uniformed servant of the Tsar.

The negotiations failed on terms — Shamil wanted to go on living in his own mountains — and the assault resumed on the 21st and failed again. At dawn on the 22nd the Russians went forward and found the outwork empty.

What happened in the next hours is described in the Russian accounts Baddeley is translating and he does not soften it. The people who had not got across the chasm fought where they stood; the women defended themselves with fury and threw themselves unarmed against whole rows of bayonets. Guns were brought up and trained on the far half while crowds were still climbing the opposite cliff, and a Russian column got to the plank bridge before the garrison knew it was there. Women flung their children off the cliffs and jumped after them, and Baddeley puts a footnote at that sentence pointing out that Xenophon describes the same scene in the same mountains two thousand three hundred years earlier.

More than a thousand bodies were counted and large numbers went down the river; the stench in the chasm was such that the men clearing it had to be relieved every few hours. Nine hundred prisoners were taken, mostly women, children and old men, and some of those, Baddeley writes, gathered up their last strength, snatched the bayonets from their guards and attacked them, preferring death to a degrading captivity. The Russians lost about three thousand killed, wounded and contused. By the 29th of August there was not a single mountaineer left on Akhulgo.

And they could not find Shamil. Every hole and cavern and corner was ransacked again and again and every body examined, and there was no information to be got from the survivors. On the night of the 21st, seeing that it was over, he had taken one wife and one child and a few followers into a cavern in the cliff above the river, and gone out the following night.

The Russian command treated the campaign as the end of the war and reduced its commitment accordingly. Within two years Shamil had rebuilt the imamate across Avaria and Chechnya on a scale it had never reached before 1839, and it was the state built after Akhulgo — not the one destroyed there — that took the Russians another twenty years to finish.

The state he built

Drafted from Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (1994)peak

Shamil's reputation is as a guerrilla leader, and Gammer's book is largely an argument that this understates him. What held out against the Russian empire for a quarter of a century was not a resistance movement. It was a state, built deliberately, in country that had never had one.

He divided the imamate into districts under naibs — deputies he appointed and removed, drawn from men who owed their position to him rather than to a lineage — with mudirs over groups of them. He established sharia courts under qadis and put them above the village assemblies. He built a treasury with a defined revenue: zakat under the law he had imposed, and the imam's fifth of the booty taken raiding across the Russian lines.

And he built an army that was not a levy. The murtaziqa were mounted men maintained permanently under arms at community expense — each group of households required to equip and support one — answering to the imam rather than to their village. So there was a permanent force and a general obligation at the same time, in country that had never previously supported either. He organised units by hundreds and thousands, issued orders in writing, kept a chancery in Arabic, and had cannon cast locally by deserters and prisoners.

The shape is not unique to the Caucasus. The Emirate of Diriyah in the Najd was also a doctrine and a family in country nobody had ever governed, living on the same two sources of money for the same reasons. The difference is that Diriyah expanded across Arabia and this never held anything but mountains: the imamate's entire institutional effort went into making mountains defensible, and that is all it ever attempted.

The cost of all of it was borne by the population it governed, and Gammer does not soften that. Naibs were resented, the taxation was heavy, the enforcement of the law was severe, and by the 1850s a good deal of the imamate's difficulty was that the communities it was defending had stopped wanting to pay for the defence.

The fourth elected imamate

Drafted from Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (1994)aside?What aside means

Shamil did not inherit his office. He was elected to it, as his two predecessors had been, and that puts the Caucasian imamate in a small and strange company: the Rustamids at Tahert in the Maghreb from 776, the Ibadi imamate of Oman from 750, and the Ya'ariba imamate of Oman from 1624.

Setting the four beside each other is worth doing, because they are separated by a thousand years, four thousand kilometres and two entirely different theologies, and they have the same shape.

All four are mountain or desert polities in country an imperial army can reach and cannot hold. All four constitute an office rather than a dynasty: the imam is chosen by those competent to judge, on qualifications that have to be demonstrated, and is not the son of the last one. All four are governed by law in a strong sense — the imam is a judge before he is a commander, and the scholars who elect him are the same men who interpret what he is enforcing. And in all four the office proved more durable than any state built under it. Oman reconstituted its imamate at least six times across eleven hundred years, and the Zaydi imams of Yemen did the same thing in a different idiom.

The theologies have nothing in common. Ibadism is the surviving moderate wing of the Kharijite movement and holds that leadership belongs to the most qualified Muslim regardless of descent. Zaydism requires descent from Ali and a rising. The Caucasian imamate came out of a Naqshbandi Sufi network and a programme of replacing customary law with the sharia. What they share is not doctrine but a problem: how a society with no hereditary sovereign, and no capacity to sustain one, produces an authority it will obey.

The answer all four arrived at is an elected office held by a scholar. The recurring cost is the same too. An elective office invites disputes about procedure that cannot be settled by force, and both Omani imamates ended in exactly that — a quarrel over whether a deposition was lawful in 886, and over whether an election was valid in 1719 — with the losing side inviting a foreign army in each time.

This one ended differently, because the foreign army did not need inviting.

Why it took twenty-five years

Drafted from Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (1994)contraction

Russia in 1839 had a professional army of enormous size, artillery, and the resources of an empire. The imamate had mountains, forests and perhaps a few tens of thousands of fighting men. The war lasted until 1859, and the reason is worth setting out, because it is the reason mountain wars generally last.

In 1839 the Russians besieged Akhulgo, Shamil's stronghold, for eighty days and took it at heavy cost. It was reported in St Petersburg as the end of the war. Shamil escaped through the cordon with a handful of men, and his son Jamaluddin was handed over as a hostage and raised as a Russian officer. Within a year Chechnya had risen and the imamate was larger than it had ever been.

In 1845 the viceroy Vorontsov marched on Dargo, Shamil's capital, with a large force and reached it. It was empty and burning. The retreat through the forests is one of the notorious episodes of Russian military history — the column harassed continuously, its supply train destroyed, and something approaching a third of it lost.

The lesson both sides drew was the same and the Russians acted on it. An army that marches at a mountain polity arrives at an empty village and is destroyed on the way home; the polity is not a place and cannot be captured. So from the late 1840s Russia stopped invading and started building — clearing the beech forests of Chechnya that made ambush possible, cutting roads through the cleared ground, planting forts at the ends of the roads, and moving the line forward a few kilometres a year.

It is a strategy of engineering rather than of battle, and it keeps being arrived at independently by anybody serious about this problem. Ibrahim Pasha took the Najd in 1818 by reducing the walled towns and the wells one at a time instead of chasing the tribes across the desert, and the Ottoman reconquests of Yemen ran on the same principle. You cannot catch the enemy, so you take away the ground he is using.

The imamate could not answer it. Every kilometre of cleared forest removed a piece of the ground its method depended on, and the population that had to be taxed to fight was the same population being progressively enclosed.

Gunib

Drafted from Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (1994)end

The Crimean War gave Shamil his last opportunity and it did not amount to anything: Ottoman and allied assistance was discussed, an allied landing was hoped for, and what arrived was correspondence. When the war ended in 1856 Russia was free to concentrate, and Prince Baryatinsky was appointed viceroy with resources the Caucasus command had never had.

The last three years are a contraction. Chechnya was taken district by district as the roads reached it, naibs defected, and the communities that had paid for the imamate stopped. Vedeno fell in April 1859. Shamil withdrew to the mountain of Gunib with a few hundred men, was surrounded, and surrendered on 25 August.

What happened to him afterwards is unusual enough to record. He was taken to St Petersburg and presented to Alexander II, who embraced him; he was settled at Kaluga and later Kiev with a pension and his family, received visitors, and was by all accounts treated as a defeated sovereign rather than as a rebel. In 1869 he was permitted to make the pilgrimage. He died at Medina in 1871 and is buried in the Baqi cemetery — the burial ground the Wahhabis had levelled sixty-five years earlier, in the name of a purification not unlike the one Shamil had imposed on Daghestan.

One thing more belongs here, because a reader who stops at 1859 will come away with the wrong impression of how the Caucasus was conquered.

The imamate's fall is not the end of the Caucasian wars. The western Caucasus — Circassia, which the imamate never governed — fought on until 1864, and its defeat was followed by the expulsion of the great majority of the Circassian population to the Ottoman empire, with mortality in the crossings and the camps that is not seriously disputed and is the subject of a live argument about how it should be named. That is a different war on the other side of the range from the one Shamil fought on, and it happened five years after he surrendered.

The instrument

Drafted from Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (1908)afterlife

Half a century after the surrender, John Baddeley wrote the standard English account of the war from the Russian archives, and the two things he says at the end of it are worth having together, because one of them is a defence and the other is a demolition.

The defence

Russian writers had explained the whole movement as fanaticism and licence. Baddeley does not accept it, and he refuses the corresponding move of denying that the mountaineers were patriots, though he notes that their idea of a country was mostly limited to the community they came from.

His account of what happened to the doctrine is the sharpest thing in the book. Muridism began as religious reform, on the mystical teaching of the tariqat. But mysticism, he says, is for individuals, and can never shape the faith or control the destinies of nations — so as the movement spread its leaders had to restrict their teaching to the practical rules of the sharia. And from the moment they aimed at political independence, it was inevitable that the worldly element would come to dominate the spiritual.

That is not an accusation of hypocrisy, and Baddeley says so explicitly. It is a description of what happens to any religious movement that acquires a frontier to defend.

His verdict on Shamil is that he failed because success was impossible: he was fighting Russia and internal division at once and could not defeat either, and that had the whole Caucasus been one people it would probably, under such a leader, have held out against anything sent at it. The one charge Baddeley does press is cruelty — the apostle of liberty becoming the most despotic of tyrants, and the power delegated to his son and his favourite naibs abused past what even that population would bear.

The demolition

And then the observation that turns the whole record over, which Baddeley credits to Shamil himself.

In captivity at Kaluga, the imam claimed a particular merit. By his administrative measures and their merciless enforcement, he said, he had made it easy for his conquerors to hold in peace what it had cost them so much to win. He had accustomed the tribes to habits of discipline. He had taught them to fight together in a common cause. He had rigorously repressed their feuding with one another.

All of which was true, and all of which Russia inherited.

Baddeley draws the conclusion in one sentence: in the long run, paradoxical as it sounds, Muridism was the instrument and not the enemy of Russian domination.

What that means

A state was built in mountains that had never had one, for the specific purpose of resisting an empire. It replaced customary law with a written one, put appointed officials over hereditary elders, taxed, kept a chancery and stopped the blood feud. It failed, and the empire took the country.

And the country the empire took was governable in a way it had not been in 1828, because somebody had spent twenty-five years making it so.

That is the imamate's afterlife, and Shamil worked it out himself, in a house in Kaluga, before anybody else did.