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Occasional Paper #289Myths and Mysticism:Islam and Conflict in theNorth Caucasus: ALongitudinal Perspective

Michael A. Reynolds

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Occasional Paper #289Myths and Mysticism:Islam and Conflict in theNorth Caucasus: ALongitudinal Perspective

Michael A. Reynolds

The question of whether or not there is acausal relationship between Islam and violentconflict is currently one of the most contro-versial and hotly debated topics amongscholars, policymakers, and pundits alikethroughout the world.1 It is a question ofparticular relevance to contemporary Russia,where self-described mujahidun, or Muslim“holy warriors,” and Russian governmentforces are the primary combatants wagingwar in Chechnya.2 The theme of Islam andconflict is not a new one for scholars andobservers of the North Caucasus.Among his-torians and contemporary analysts, thereexists a strong consensus that Islam has beenand continues to be a fundamental factordriving conflict between the indigenousMuslims of the North Caucasus and theRussian state.3 Both historians sympatheticto indigenous resistance to Russian rule, suchas Alexandre Bennigsen, Marie Broxup, andAnna Zelkina, as well as pro-Russian histori-ans, such as M. M. Bliev and V.V. Degoev,have pointed to Islam as a fundamentalmotive for resistance.4

Yet anyone interested in the relation-ship between Islam and conflict in the NorthCaucasus should recognize two potentialsources of difficulty.The first is the generalpaucity of studies of North Caucasian histo-ry.The second is that, of the studies that doexist, a vastly disproportionate numberaddress one limited period of the region’shistory, namely, the Caucasian Wars of thenineteenth century, in which the nativemountaineers fought desperately, and for a

time successfully, against the might of anexpanding world empire.

Two factors further exaggerate thesalience of the Caucasian Wars in the region’simage, namely, their place in Russian litera-ture and their high international geopoliticalprofile. Before the first modern histories ofthe North Caucasus were even written,Russian writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov,and Tolstoy had made the North Caucasus avivid and lasting fixture of the imaginationsof Russians and readers of Russian literature,rendering the mountaineers bigger than lifeand romanticizing their love of freedom,seeming lawlessness, and passion.5 Second,the wars marked the southward expansion ofthe Russian Empire and implicated, if per-haps only tangentially, the geopolitical preoc-cupations of several great powers. Pittingnative mountaineers against the largest armyin the world, their “David versus Goliath”character and cast of truly colorful personali-ties such as Imam Shamil made compellingtheater and attracted popular attention inEurope and even America. In short, thesewars have exerted an inordinate influenceupon our understanding of the relationshipsamong Islam, the North Caucasus, andRussia.

Whereas comparative historians havealmost wholly ignored the North Caucasus,some have placed the Caucasian Wars in thecontext of other more or less contemporarystruggles of Muslims under the rubric of the“Revolt of Islam.”6 This cross-regional or“latitudinal” perspective identifies those warsas separate parts of a wider struggle of Islam

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Myths and Mysticism: Islam and Conflict in the North Caucasus:A Longitudinal Perspective

by Michael A. Reynolds

Michael A. Reynolds is a Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. He thanksMark Katz and the members of the Kennan Institute workshop on conflict in the former Soviet Union, JohnColarusso,Victor Friedman,Thomas Grant, and Robert Ware, for their comments on this and earlier versions ofthis paper.The paper was prepared for the workshop “Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Conflict inthe Former Soviet Union,” Kennan Institute,Washington, D.C.The author is responsible for all errors.

against European colonial powers, and itnotes certain similarities between the doc-trines and forms of resistance adopted byindigenous Muslims.Thus it identifies theteachings of the South Asian sheikh AhmadSirhindi and the Kurdish sheikh MawlanaKhalid and the structure of the Naqshbanditariqat,7 or Sufi brotherhood as determinativefactors for explaining the course of events inthe North Caucasus in the nineteenth centu-ry. It accordingly portrays the Sufi brother-hoods of the Caucasus as parts of transna-tional networks that transmitted ideologies ofresistance, personnel, and supplies betweendisparate Muslim populations.8 Given thenature and extent of the involvement of for-eign and radical Islamic ideas and organiza-tions from the Indian subcontinent and else-where in the current Chechen conflict, theparallels between this interpretation and con-temporary events appear striking.

To better evaluate the merits of sucha latitudinal perspective, however, we needalso to examine the relationship betweenIslam and conflict in the North Caucasusacross time, that is, through a longitudinalperspective.Toward this end, this paper pro-vides a broad survey of Islam and violentconflict in the North Caucasus in the periodbeginning with the introduction of Islam upthrough the current conflict in Chechnya.This paper does not, of course, attempt tocover such an extensive history in depth orcomprehensively. Rather, it questions some ofthe conventional historical assumptions aboutthe relationship between Islam and violentconflict in the North Caucasus that observerscommonly adopt in their analyses.Amongthese assumptions are the decisive nature ofIslam or Muslim identity as a source of con-flict; the fundamental and intractable alien-ation of Muslim North Caucasians andRussians from each other; and the binarycategorization of Islam into its mystical, or

Sufi, aspects and its legal, or sharia-basedaspect, a categorization often invoked toexplain the dynamics of contemporary con-flict in the North Caucasus.

RESISTING ISLAM:THE ARABINVASION OF THE CAUCASUS

The North Caucasus was among the earliestlands that Islam touched. In 642–3, just tenyears after the death of Muhammad, MuslimArabs under the command of Suraqa binAmr reached the city of Derbent in southernDagestan.9 Sweeping up from the south, thefirst generation of Muslims had conqueredthe whole of Persia in a mere ten years, andthey now stood ready to burst north into theEurasian interior. Reflecting Derbent’s strate-gic location between the eastern slopes ofthe Caucasus Mountains and the CaspianSea, the Arabs dubbed the city Bab al-Abwab, or “the Gate of Gates.”10 Sayingsfrom the period that attribute the foundingof the city to the angel Gabriel, declare itsliberation a divine dictate, and affirm thatanyone “who fights and struggles in the wayof God in that sacred place [Bab al-Abwab]will be forgiven all the sins he has committedin his life” all suggest the importance that theArabs ascribed to Derbent.11

Despite their fascination withDerbent and the military prowess they dis-played so impressively in Arabia, Persia, andelsewhere, the original Muslim warriorsfailed to secure the Caspian city and its envi-rons. Indeed, quite the opposite was true.Suraqa lamented the ceaseless attacks on hisforces in and around Derbent.The ferocity ofthe local tribesmen convinced Suraqa that itwould be best to forgo the conquest ofDagestan.And so with the Caliph Omar’sapproval, he sent his lieutenants to wage warin the region of Tiflis instead. Several yearslater, Omar directed the Muslim armies againto attempt to subdue Dagestan. But this time

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the mountaineers of Dagestan dealt theinvading Muslims an even sharper defeat andslew the Arabs’ commander on the battlefieldin 652.12

As a result, the Muslims never man-aged to establish firm control over Dagestanor any other part of the North Caucasus.Although from time to time Arab armies didmanage to mount successful punitive expedi-tions into the region they called “languagemountain” in amazement at its astoundinglinguistic diversity, and to win some localrulers over to their faith, they remained inca-pable of guaranteeing the borders and exert-ed influence on the North Caucasus onlythrough surrogates. Indeed, tribesmen fromtime to time mounted devastating raids fromDagestan into the southern Caucasus.Dagestan, in short, proved to be a difficultplace to rule: geographically isolated, topo-graphically rugged, and hostile.The Arabsand their chroniclers repeatedly expressedexasperation with the warlike NorthCaucasian infidels. Suraqa bin Amr describedthe torment of fighting the mountaineers inverse, and al-Masudi’s angry description of alocal Dagestani chieftain as a “host of rob-bers, brigands, and malefactors” similarlyhighlights the Muslims’ frustration.13

Although they failed to impose theirrule over the North Caucasus or even alterthe region’s fundamental political structure,the Arabs did leave an important legacy—their Islamic faith.They had succeeded inconverting the people of Derbent to theirfaith, and they thereby made the city anorthern outpost of Islam.The spread ofIslam from Derbent to the northern, central,and western parts of Dagestan and beyond,however, took centuries, because theCaucasian mountaineers violently resistedit—or, more precisely, those who espoused it.The Muslims of Derbent thus found them-selves just as embattled as the original Arab

Muslims, as when the people of Sarir(believed to be the forerunners of the Avarsof today) inflicted a heavy losses uponDerbent’s Muslim garrison in 971.14

It would be wrong, however, toascribe too much of a religious character tothese conflicts waged by local potentates.Knowledge of formalized religion was limit-ed, especially in the interior, and alliancesshifted often.The Muslim Amir of Derbent,for example, would at times request assistancefrom the pagan Slavs to the north of theCaspian who had begun raiding theDagestani coast in the tenth century.15

From the records left by the Arabs,we can already identify a number of factorsthat have distinguished the dynamics of con-flict in the Caucasus ever since.The first isthe strategic nature of the region as a gate-way between the Near East and the Eurasiansteppes.The second is the rugged nature ofits topography, which made the maneuver,command, and control of large fightingforces difficult.Third, and perhaps most sig-nificant, is the equally rugged and fiercenature of the region’s inhabitants.These lattertwo factors combined to exact a forbiddingcost upon any power that might attempt tosubdue the North Caucasus.The Arabs, whohad overrun the Persian Empire in a mereten years and would go on to phenomenalconquests elsewhere, were stunned by thetruculence of the mountaineers.Theirpropensity for raids and banditry furtherinfuriated the original Muslims. Finally, thelinguistic and ethnic complexity of theregion also impressed the Arabs.All thesetraits would impress the later, non-Muslimconquerors as well.

THE MONGOLS,TIMUR, AND THEOPENING OF THE NORTHWEST

The next great upheaval in the Caucasus

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came in the form of the Mongols in the thir-teenth century.As they did elsewhere, theMongols brought devastation to theCaucasus.They swiftly occupied the coastalsection of the northeastern Caucasus andcaptured Derbent in 1233.The residents ofthe Caspian city held out for ten desperatedays before despairing with grim valiantry,“no solution but the sword remains, it falls tous to die with honor.” Nonetheless, for alltheir awesome might, the Mongols proved asunsuccessful as the Muslim armies in pacify-ing or subduing the mountaineers in theinterior. Indeed, the mountaineers did notmerely resist the Mongols but also eventuallyturned to raiding them, and succeeded incompelling the scourges of Eurasia to sendgifts and delegations in exchange for haltingtheir attacks.16

At the end of the fourteenth century,the famed “Crusher of Kings”Timurlenk(Tamerlane) invaded the Caucasus, takingDagestan in 1395–6 and ravaging Georgia in1386–7 and again in 1403–4, but he alsofailed to establish any lasting presence in theNorth Caucasus.The Mongol and Timuridinvasions did, however, indirectly affect thepolitical culture of the northwest Caucasusby ending the isolation of the Circassiantribes. In an unusual form of exchange, theMongols and Tatar Khans of Crimea begansending their sons to be raised among theCircassians while taking a yearly tribute ofslaves and auxiliary forces.The Mongol influ-ence also facilitated the spread of Islamamong the Circassians, despite the latter’sregular rebellions. Islam spread slowly, how-ever, and knowledge of Islam among theCircassians remained superficial well into theseventeenth century. Like the northeastCaucasus, the northwest Caucasus lacked anyunifying political structure and remained “ina climate of permanent anarchy.”17

Although the Ottoman and Safavid

empires laid claim to parts of the northeastCaucasus during the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries, their authority was nomi-nal.The princes of Dagestan preserved theirindependence easily enough by playing theOttomans against the Safavids, who repre-sented a more proximate threat to the moun-taineers. Banding together in temporaryalliances proved sufficient and effective fordriving out any outsiders, and indeed in 1712the Ghazi-Kumuk of Dagestan even dared totake the city of Shamakhi from the SafavidPersians.

The Russians made their first sub-stantial foray into the North Caucasus in1722 when Peter the Great marched south-ward along the Caspian coast to Baku, takingDerbent,Tarku, and Kuba along the way.Pressures on the empire elsewhere, however,compelled Peter to withdraw his forces, andjust ten years later Russia ceded its claim toDagestan to Persia.The sovereign of Persia,Nadir Shah, was a brilliant ruler and com-mander who had rejuvenated his empire.Historians dubbed him the “Napoleon ofPersia” in recognition of his martial achieve-ments. Having vanquished Persia’s foes onseveral fronts, Nadir Shah resolved to assertPersia’s dominance over Dagestan in 1742. Itwas a mistake.The mountaineers refused tobend to the Persians, and they met force withforce. In just three years, they forced NadirShah to withdraw from the North Caucasusin defeat. Following his death later that sameyear, Dagestani mountaineers even began tomount raids into Safavid territory.

The patterns first observed during theArab invasions of the region thus repeatedthemselves in the period leading up to theRussian conquest.The mountaineers vigor-ously opposed all attempts by outsiders toimpose their rule and proved to beindomitable. Islam played little role in themountaineers’ resistance (given the still rela-tively weak knowledge of Islam among the

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majority of mountaineers beyond the littoralof Dagestan, this is not very surprising in anyevent).Although the Dagestanis’ Sunni affilia-tion may have facilitated their cooperationwith the Sunni Ottomans against the ShiiPersian Safavids, it was not determinative inany sense, for the Ottomans remained distant.

Instead, three interrelated factors—the difficult terrain, the mountaineers’ pug-nacity, and the lack of a central govern-ment—put a decisive stamp on the form ofconflict in the North Caucasus.The harshnature of the terrain tired and confoundedinvading armies even as it encouraged themountaineers to hold out against invaders.The multiplicity of tribes and the lack of anycentral authority denied would-be hegemonsthe option of defeating and subduing a localsovereign. Subjugating the tribes one by onewas the only option.At most, such outsiderscould achieve indirect control, and even thiswas nominal.

The geography, in addition to shelter-ing the mountaineers from outside rule byraising the costs and lowering the benefits ofintervention, also fostered the developmentof a culture that prized such attributes as ath-letic prowess, physical courage, and self-reliance; that is, martial virtues.As JohnBaddeley wrote when discussing the influ-ence of geography of the North Caucasus onits people,“The people of the Caucasus oweit not only their salient characteristics, buttheir very existence. It may be said withoutexaggeration that the mountains made themen.”18 The Ottoman historian AhmedCevdet Pasha noted the relationship betweenthe geography of the North Caucasus andthe mountaineers’ love of freedom,“Sincetheir land is steep and difficult, they do notsubmit to a government.”19

Hence, in addition to making theassertion of political control physically diffi-cult, the region’s topography also encouraged

the cultivation of the qualities of self-suffi-ciency and independence among the moun-taineer clans, thus adding a socioculturalobstacle to the geographic challenges.Thusthe mountaineers’ ethics, norms, and socialorganization rendered them allergic to cen-tral control.These same factors acted toblock local sovereigns as much as outsidehegemons from uniting and centralizing theregion. Because ad hoc coalitions of localleaders proved sufficient for withstandingoutside invasions, up until the nineteenthcentury there was neither much incentivenor a sociocultural basis for the formation ofa state or other political-administrative struc-ture that would embrace the North Caucasusas a whole.

ISLAM AS A CULTURAL ANDINTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION FORSTATEHOOD

A conceptual and intellectual foundation forstate building was at this time, however, grad-ually spreading across the North Caucasus inthe form of Sunni Islam.The classical Sunniunderstanding of Islam as a religion containsmuch more than a theological doctrine con-cerning God and the relationship of the indi-vidual to the divine.The divinely mandatedlaw, the sharia, regulates fundamental aspectsof the individual’s relationship to others inaddition to questions of the individual’s ritu-al obligations to God. Drawing upon theQuran and the hadiths (compilations of thesayings and deeds of Muhammad), as itssources, the sharia provides an extensive, cod-ified body of law to regulate human socialrelations. Moreover, inherent in the sharia isthe concept of dawlah, the state, as theenforcer of law.To study classical Islam meansto study and think about the law and thestate as well as about God.The flowering ofclassical Islamic scholarship that was takingplace in Dagestan thereby inevitably stimulat-

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ed the development of a legal culture.20

Thus, concurrent with the spread of Islamwas the diffusion of the notions of formal-ized law and the state.As we shall see, itwould be in this capacity that Islam wouldplay an important role in the mountaineers’confrontation with Russia.

THE RUSSIAN CONQUEST ANDTHE MOUNTAINEERS’ STRUGGLETO PRESERVE THEIRINDEPENDENCE

Cooperation, not conflict, motivated the firstdiplomatic contact between the NorthCaucasian mountaineers and the Muscovitestate. In 1555, a delegation of NorthCaucasians, including some allegedlyChristian Chechens, traveled to distantMoscow, where they asked Tsar Ivan IV (theTerrible) for protection against the depreda-tions and raids of the Crimean Tatars andOttomans.21 The growth of Russian powerand the advance of the Russian state south-ward to the Caucasus under Catherine theGreat, however, ensured a clash. In 1763, theRussians built the fort of Mozdok, and there-by initiated a fourteen-year war with theKabardians. In 1783, the famous GeneralSuvorov expelled the Noghais from theregion to the north of the Kuban.Two yearslater, St. Petersburg established the post ofgovernor general of the Caucasus. Pressed bygrowing population and scarcity of land, asteady stream of Cossacks, Slavs, and otherChristians began pushing southward lookingfor land to settle.

This latest Russian advance constitut-ed a qualitatively different threat to the peo-ples of the North Caucasus.This time, theoutside power was not looking merely toexact tribute from the local princes or toestablish nominal political hegemony overthe region but sought to subdue the regionand its inhabitants. It posed a demographic

threat in addition to the merely military one,as a flow of settlers southward drove thenatives of the Caucasus region into themountains, and upset the local economy.Saint Petersburg’s policies for underminingIslam and converting its subjects to RussianOrthodox Christianity added a cultural andspiritual dimension to the threat as well.

This new threat provoked new pat-terns of behavior among the NorthCaucasians.The Circassian tribes in thenorthwest began to cooperate more closelywith each other and with the Ottomans.22

The mountaineers in the northeast similarlybegan to stir. In 1783, the same year Russiaannexed the Crimea, a Chechen religiousleader known as Sheikh Mansur Ushurmaemerged. Preaching the need for the moun-taineers to unite against the Russian threat,Mansur called upon them to participate in aghazawat, or jihad, against the Russians.Mansur attracted a circle of political and reli-gious leaders from throughout the region asfar as Shirvan, and he managed to gather asufficiently large force to inflict severaldefeats upon the Russians before falling pris-oner to them during the storming of theOttoman fort at Anapa in 1791.

Mansur’s success was impressive, butthe breadth of his appeal should not be exag-gerated. Most Dagestanis, for example,refused to back him. Legend has it thatMansur belonged to the Naqshbandi sufibrotherhood. Making the most of this leg-end, some historians have depicted Mansur asthe first in a line of militant Naqshbandisheikhs who strove to awaken the Muslims ofthe North Caucasus.23 No substantial evi-dence, however, has ever been found to sup-port the legend.The attempt to draw such aconnection attaches an unwarranted impor-tance to Sufism as a militant force in its ownright, and it gives the false impression thatthe nearly four decades between the capture

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of Mansur and Ghazi Muhammad’s claim tothe title of imam of Dagestan saw a NorthCaucasus without religious leadership lan-guish passively like a rudderless ship.

In fact, those decades were hardlyquiet. In 1818, all the princes of Dagestanbut one rose in revolt against the infamousRussian commander in the Caucasus,General Yermolov.Yermolov’s ruthlessnessknew no bounds. He did not hesitate towage total war on whole populationsthrough deportation, scorched earth tactics,and starvation to compel them to submit toRussian rule. Even Yermolov’s own sover-eigns,Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I, feltthe need to criticize his methods. But thegeneral brushed criticism aside, asserting,“Gentleness in the eyes of Asiatics is a sign ofweakness, and out of pure humanity I aminexorably severe.”24

The decentralized nature of theNorth Caucasus in general, and of Chechensociety in particular, reduced the effectivenessof Yermolov’s methods, if not their painfuleffects. Because the North Caucasians’ lackeda common ruler,Yermolov had to contendwith multiple princes at once and force themto submit one by one.This difficulty of dis-persed leadership was especially acute in thecase of the Chechens, who lacked a sovereignthat could compel his subjects to obey hisword. Chechen society was organized on thebasis of clans (teips), which in turn composedlarger federations (tukhums).25 The only cen-tralized institution the Chechens had was theMekh Kel, an egalitarian assembly of clanheads, and its authority was limited in caseswhen unanimity was lacking.26 Indeed,Chechen society on the whole was strongly,even radically, egalitarian.The Chechens hadno aristocracy and did not recognize any dis-tinctions of social class. Every Chechen malewas an uzden, or “freeman.” It is only a slightexaggeration to say that every Chechen was

in effect free to act as he saw fit within thebounds of the Chechen code of behavior,which admired courage and resistance asmuch as it disdained weakness and submis-sion.Yermolov’s strategy of intimidation wasfar less effective against such a decentralizedand resilient society.27

In 1824, a Dagestani religious scholarknown as Mullah Muhammad emergedamong the Chechens. He declared himself adivinely chosen imam who would lead theCaucasians against the Russians.A prominentChechen known as Beibulat (Taimazov)acted as his military commander, and the twosucceeded in rallying a mixed group ofKabardians, Kumuks, Ossetians, Chechens,and some Dagestanis against the Russians.Alittle more than a year after it began, howev-er, the revolt fell apart from within.

Several years later, another Dagestanireligious scholar known as GhaziMuhammad came forth to announce himselfimam of Dagestan. Ghazi Muhammad was amurid (literally, one who wants or seeks, inthis case a seeker of esoteric knowledge), afollower of the Naqshbandi sheikh SayyidJamal al-Din al-Ghazi Ghumuqi.Among hisfirst acts was to declare a comprehensive holywar, that is, a struggle against not just theinfidel Russians but also against the un-Islamic practices and customs of the moun-taineers as well. Ghazi Muhammad’s declara-tion of cultural warfare against mountaineersociety conformed to the Naqshbandi Sufitradition, which is distinguished by its spiri-tual sobriety and its rigorous insistence uponthe fulfillment of the exoteric demands ofIslam as codified in the sharia. Mysticism isto be pursued only in addition to the sharia,not as a substitute or alternative to the holylaw and its strictures.28

Ghumuqi belonged to a subset of theNaqshbandi known as the Naqshbandi-Khalidiya after an Ottoman Kurdish sheikh,

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Mawlana Khalid.The weakness of Muslimpolitical structures and the consequentencroachment of the European powers hadtroubled Mawlana Khalid. In 1809–10 hetraveled to the Indian subcontinent.There hewas initiated into the Naqshbandi brother-hood and exposed to the teachings of AhmadSirhindi (1564–1624).

The things that concerned Sirhindiseem to have been the same that worriedMawlana Khalid.Theologically lax syn-cretism, the arrival of Christian colonialpowers, and a rebounding Hinduism—all inthe context of weakening Mughal politicalpower—threatened the position of Islam onthe subcontinent in Sirhindi’s time. Sirhindisought to reverse these trends and claimed tobe the mujaddid-i alf-ithani, the “renewer ofthe Second (Islamic) millennium.” Sirhindisaw the answer to this crisis in the combina-tion of a sober mysticism with an unbendinginsistence on the importance of sharia andSunni orthodoxy. Unlike those Sufis whocounseled detachment from the affairs of thisworld, Sirhindi believed in the efficacy andneed for political power, and he urged othersto do the same.29

During the time that elapsed betweenSirhindi and his intellectual heir MawlanaKhalid, another powerful Muslim revivalistmovement emerged. In 1744, an Arab reli-gious scholar named Muhammad ibn ‘Abdal-Wahhab initiated a revolt against what hedenounced as the corrupting rule of theOttomans. ‘Abd al-Wahhab advocated a“return” to what he claimed was the morepristine form of Islam that the ProphetMuhammad and his followers had practiced.Like Sirhindi, he held that theological laxityhad corrupted Islam and weakened it, andthat Islam needed to be cleansed to returnthe umma, or Muslim “nation,” to spiritualand political health.

Wahhabism and the revivalist

Naqshbandi differed sharply on a number offundamental theological questions. Mostobviously,Wahhabism categorically rejects thevery essence of Sufi brotherhoods, mysticismand spiritual sheikhs, as corrosive innovationsthat crept into Islam after the time of theProphet Muhammad. Nonetheless, the twomovements did share a common emphasis onthe need to complement more active resist-ance to non-Muslim powers with a moreexacting application of the sharia and itsnorms.Their similarities are too great for usto dismiss the timing of their emergence ascoincidence, or to regard them as whollyseparate phenomena.30 Sirhindi, ‘Abd al-Wahhab, Mawlana Khalid, and Ghumuqi alllived in Muslim societies that they perceivedas weakened and in danger, and all sought toreverse this condition through greater reli-gious zeal.

Khalid embraced Sirhindi’s teachings.After his return to the Ottoman lands, hisown disciples transmitted Sirhindi’s ideas tothe Caucasus and to the person of SheikhMuhammad al-Yaraghi, who initiatedGhumuqi. Ghumuqi in turn initiated GhaziMuhammad and Shamil as his murids in theNaqshbandi order, and al-Yaraghi would playan important role in legitimizing and super-vising the establishment of authority in themurids’ movement.Although it would be agross exaggeration to claim that an Indiansheikh who lived two centuries earlier servedas the intellectual architect of the NorthCaucasian resistance, the assertion thatSirhindi’s teachings did exert some influenceis plausible.

The story of the Caucasian Wars iswell enough known, and the details need norecounting here.31 As was mentioned above,the ghazawat upon which Ghazi Muhammadembarked aimed not merely at the liberationof the North Caucasus from Russian domi-nation but also at the transformation of

8

mountaineer society into a sharia-based soci-ety. Indeed, although Ghazi Muhammad andShamil favored a war against the Russians,their mentor Ghumuqi opposed it in favor ofconcentrating efforts on the reform ofmountaineer society from within.

In 1828, Russia went to war with theOttoman Empire and emerged victorious thefollowing year.The mountaineers sat out thatwar passively, but Russia’s further expansioninto the South Caucasus now spurred somemountaineers to act while their own landswere still free and before Dagestan’s Avarrulers reached an accommodation with theRussians.After being selected as imam ofDagestan, Ghazi Muhammad declared a jihadagainst the Russians in 1829.

Ghazi Muhammad led the moun-taineers for roughly three years before he fellin battle in 1832, abandoned by most of hissupporters. His successor as imam, HamzaBek, was assassinated just two years later byAvar notables opposed to the imam and hisnew anti-Russian Islamizing movement.32

The third imam of Dagestan was GhaziMuhammad’s friend and a fellow initiate ofGhazi Ghumuqi’s, Shamil. Shamil would leadthe impoverished mountaineers against thelargest empire and army in the world fortwenty-five years, from 1834 to 1859.

Historians and more contemporaryanalysts both sympathetic and antagonistic tothe mountaineers’ resistance routinelyemphasize the fundamental importance ofIslam in the Caucasian Wars, arguing (orassuming) that religion served as the primemotivation in the mountaineers’ resistanceagainst the Russian infidel. In effect, they castthe natives’ struggle against the RussianEmpire as a spiritual clash of civilizations.33

Moreover, these authors tend to assign apotent explanatory value to the specific formof Islam dominant in the North Caucasus,that is, Naqshbandi Sufism.34 In their inter-

pretations, the mountaineer metamorphosesinto a murid. He ceases to be a native fight-ing for his land and way of life and becomesa militant monk, striving in the way of Godagainst the Russian enemy in this world andthe spiritual foe of the next.The allegedlypopulist tendency of Sufism is also sometimesinvoked to explain the mountaineers’ fero-cious resistance and indomitable character.35

There is no doubt that Islam played amultifaceted role in Shamil’s struggle againstthe Russians and exerted profound effectupon the dynamics of the mountaineerresistance. But its significance lies less in itsability to motivate resistance than as a guidefor how the resisters should organize theircommunal lives. Islam may certainly haveprovided a gloss of divine sanction to themountaineers’ struggle against the Russiansand spurred some mountaineers to fightharder, but as we have seen from earlierepisodes, the mountaineers had no need forIslam as an incentive to fight outside forces.

Islam in its mainstream classical, asopposed to peculiarly Sufi, form performedtwo key functions in the North Caucasianresistance. First, it served as a marker of iden-tity that both differentiated the MuslimNorth Caucasians from the tsarist regime36

and linked the ethnically diverse and isolatedmountaineers together as a single communitywith a common identity facing a commonthreat.The shared identity thereby facilitatedShamil’s efforts to forge a united front fromthe disparate groups of mountaineers.

Second, Islam, and the sharia in par-ticular, provided the mountaineers with asource of concepts and ideas for building acentralized state.To hold out against one ofhistory’s greatest empires near its height, itwas imperative for the mountaineers to cre-ate a standing army and the requisite bureau-cratic apparatus to support it. But the estab-lishment of a bureaucracy demanded more

9

than the mobilization of resources and theapplication of sophisticated organizationalskills. It required above all a change in themindset of the mountaineers and the dis-placement of the norms of collective respon-sibility in favor of those of individual respon-sibility.

Accomplishing such a fundamentaltask could not be easy. Over the centuries,the mountaineers of the North Caucasus haddeveloped their own elaborate codes of cus-toms and traditions to regulate social interac-tion.37 Borrowing from Arabic the wordmeaning “customary law,” they called thesecodes adat to distinguish them from the doc-trinal law of Islam, sharia.Adat, unlike sharia,rested on the notion of collective responsibil-ity.The mountaineer’s code did not holdindividuals responsible for their transgres-sions, but rather their clans.38

Adat, therefore, had no place eitherfor the individual as a morally sovereign actoror for a state authority that would supplantthe clans as the locus of justice.TheCaucasian Naqshbandis’ believed that adathad to be overcome, not only because it wasun-Islamic but also because it obstructed theunification of the mountaineers and sappedtheir collective efforts by sanctioning thingslike blood feuds. Imam Mansur, thus, soughtto set an example of righteous Muslim con-duct by publicly forgiving the murderer of ablood relative of his.This pardon amountedto a flagrant violation of adat, and Mansur’sboldness impressed the mountaineers. Shamillikewise put a priority on banning bloodfeuds, seeing them as both contrary toIslamic morality and law, and as a divisivethreat to his efforts to build a unified state.

Indeed, although Shamil broke withhis spiritual mentor by deciding to wage waragainst the Russians while simultaneouslypursuing the “shariatization” of mountaineersociety, he nonetheless prioritized the latter

struggle at the outset.Thus Shamil openedhis campaign not with violent defiance of St.Petersburg but instead with pleas of loyalty ashe sought first to concentrate his forces andeliminate sources of opposition withinmountaineer society to his program ofIslamization. Substantial segments of moun-taineer society, however, were hostile towardexpanding the influence of the sharia.TheRussians accordingly sought to exploitmountaineer antipathy to the sharia andundermine Shamil by promising to accom-modate adat in their administration.Theyenjoyed some success in exploiting this splitamong the mountaineers.39

As part of his efforts to reformmountaineer society and centralize it for thepurpose of fighting the Russians, Shamil usedthe structure of the tariqat to serve as a back-bone for a quasi-state.As imam, Shamil stoodat the top of the state structure, and he wasthe supreme authority on matters military,political, and spiritual. Shamil’s civil adminis-tration was geographically organized, with anaib, or deputy, in charge of each district.40

Each naib in turn was responsible for guard-ing the borders of the state that lay in his dis-trict.41 To protect the integrity of the centralstructure, Shamil preferred to appoint out-siders to a given district, rather than rely onlocal figures. In addition to a voluntary mili-tia, Shamil maintained a rudimentary regulararmy.42 In a pattern common to govern-ments dependent on a certain degree of pop-ular support for the maintenance of theirarmies, Shamil’s state also possessed a socialwelfare system to look after widows andorphans.

Shamil’s power, however, was notabsolute.The mountaineers’ predilection fordefying authority outside the clan remainedstrong, and resentment toward Shamil wasoften not far from the surface, among theChechens as well as others.When, for exam-

10

ple, Shamil replaced his Chechen naib,TashoHajji, the Chechens killed the replacementand compelled Shamil to reinstate TashoHajji.43

The nineteenth century thus wit-nessed not merely an extended violent con-frontation between the native mountaineersand the forces of the Russian Empire butalso a radical effort to transform and Islamizethe mountaineer societies of the Caucasus.This latter process impressed the moun-taineers of the time at least as much as, andperhaps even more than, the former.Theyreferred to Shamil’s era not as “the time ofthe Great War against the Russians” or as“the time of Shamil” but rather as “the timeof the sharia.”44 Although Shamil’s ghazawatultimately failed to defeat the Russians andcompletely displace adat with the sharia, hisefforts and those of his fellow Naqshbandisto inculcate and enforce the normative andlegal values of Islam did meet with success.Even contemporary Russian observers, theirdistaste for the faith of Islam notwithstand-ing, noted what they perceived as the sharia’spositive influence on the mountaineers’morality.45

The proliferation and growth of Islamas a source of norms could not preventShamil’s ultimate defeat, and in fact it mighthave contributed to it as alternative interpre-tations of Islam were introduced.After closeto a quarter-century of relentless warfareagainst the vastly wealthier, more numerous,and stronger Russians, the mountaineers’commitment to ghazawat began to waver. Inthe late 1850s, a Chechen shepherd namedKunta Hajji returned to the Caucasus aftercompleting the pilgrimage to Mecca andbecoming an initiate in the Qadiriya tariqatin Baghdad.46 In contrast to Shamil’s messageof ghazawat as a religious obligation, KuntaHajji preached a quietist form of Islam andadvocated nonresistance to the Russians. His

teachings found a receptive audience amongthe war-weary mountaineers, and began tosap the war effort. Shamil ultimately feltcompelled to expel the itinerant Chechenfrom the North Caucasus. Nonetheless, themountaineers’ exhaustion was all but com-plete, and in 1859 Shamil surrendered.Ironically, only a few years later the Russianswould imprison Kunta Hajii and theQadiriya would spearhead rebellions againstoppressive Russian control.

Although Shamil had been St.Petersburg’s greatest foe in the Caucasus, hiscapture did not end the war. It would takeanother five years before the Russians suc-ceeded in subduing the Circassian tribes inthe northwest Caucasus. Unlike the northeastCaucasus, where Dagestan had become amajor center of Islamic scholarship, thenorthwest Caucasus possessed no such centerof Islamic learning.The Circassians remainedMuslim largely in name only. Shamil hadattempted to integrate them into his pan-mountaineer war, but the Circassians’ tribalstructure impeded such efforts. Nonetheless,the Circassians carried on their own decen-tralized fight for against the Russians for fivemore years until the tsarist forces over-whelmed them with superior arms, technol-ogy, and numbers.47

The significance of Islam in theCaucasian Wars lies not in its being a firstcause of resistance nor in the concept ofghazawat. Many, if not most, of those moun-taineers who fought were “simple peasantswho had the barest conception” of whatSufism was.48 And among those who wereexpert on it were many who refused to joinin the fighting.As was noted above, GhaziMuhammed and Shamil’s own spiritual men-tor, Jemal al-Din al-Ghumuqi, opposed thewar effort. It should also not be forgottenthat during the wars, several NorthCaucasian religious leaders actually backed

11

the Russians, and that the aforementionedKunta Hajji’s espousal of spiritual indifferenceto politics in the name of Islam helpedundermine Shamil’s war effort.

Rather, Islam’s significance lies in itsrole as a source of conceptual architecture forthe creation of a centralized state. Islam pro-vided two critical elements for such a formof political organization. First, it furnished acommon identity that could unite themountaineers across ethnic and clan linesagainst the Russians. Second, in the form ofthe sharia, it provided the moral norms andlegal concepts necessary for a bureaucraticstate. No less important, the sharia’s divineorigins provided an imprimatur to whichShamil and his predecessors could appeal intheir struggle to supplant adat.Aside perhapsfrom the formal structure that the tariqatprovided, Sufism as a body of mystical teach-ings and practices seems to have had littleinfluence upon the political-military struggleagainst the Russians. In sum, theNaqshbandi-Khalidiya’s significance lay notin its esoteric doctrines but rather in precise-ly the opposite: its strict emphasis upon therigorous observance of the sharia.

THE UNION OF ALLIEDMOUNTAINEERS: NORTHCAUCASIAN REBELS OR RUSSIA’SLOYAL SONS?

With the exception of the years 1877–8 and1905, the North Caucasus was relativelyquiet and stable from 1864 until the RussianRevolution. Even during the cataclysm ofWorld War I, the North Caucasus failed toerupt in rebellion despite the hopes of theGermans and Ottomans.Western scholarshiphas paid little or no attention to the NorthCaucasus in the immediate wake of theRussian Revolution, preferring instead toskip from the time of Shamil to the moun-taineers’ struggles against first the counter-revolutionary forces of Denikin and then

against the Bolsheviks. It thereby leaves theerroneous impression that the mountaineersas a whole remained unbowed in their oppo-sition to Russian rule. Soviet scholarship,conversely, preferred to focus on the role ofBolshevik and pro-Bolshevik actors in theNorth Caucasus, and it gave short shrift toother movements and trends. It therebyimplicitly suggested that, beyond the selectrevolutionaries, there existed in the NorthCaucasus only obscurantist religious figuresand agents of foreign influence.

The reality appears to have beenquite different. Shortly after the fall of thetsar, a number of leading mountaineers fromthroughout the North Caucasus formed anorganization they called the Union of AlliedMountaineers of the North Caucasus (Soiuzob’edinennykh gortsev severnogo kavkaza, orUAM).The UAM was a pan-mountaineermovement that included representatives fromDagestan on the Caspian across the NorthCaucasus to Abkhazia on the Black Sea.Theleadership was composed of NorthCaucasians who primarily, but not exclusive-ly, had been educated in Russian institutionsof higher education or had served in theRussian civil or military bureaucracy. Despitethis profile, the leadership managed to recruitsignificant popular support at congresses heldat Vladikavkaz,Andi, and elsewhere.49

The UAM held as its goal not theseparation of the North Caucasus fromRussia so much as inclusion of the region asthe homeland of the mountaineers withinRussia.The UAM sought to unify themountaineers, but not on the basis of ethnic-ity or language (criteria that of course frac-tured the mountaineers), or even on the basisof religion. Rather, it sought to build upon ashared mountaineer culture that included allthe indigenous peoples of the NorthCaucasus. It reached out to the OrthodoxChristian Cossacks, typically portrayed as the

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Muslim mountaineers’ irreconcilable ene-mies.The UAM’s leadership was aware of theprofound challenge posed to their small peo-ples by the immigration and settlement ofoutsiders into the North Caucasus, and itexplicitly acknowledged the need for all towork together in the face of this commonthreat.

At the same time, the UAM believedthat the future of the North Caucasus laywith Russia. Contrary to the stereotype ofthe illiterate and religiously fanatical moun-taineer, the leaders and rank-and-file mem-bers of the UAM did not detest all that wasRussian. Like virtually all the regional move-ments in the Russian Empire in 1917, theUAM desired to remain part of a united anddemocratic Russia.Though UAM memberscondemned the excesses of the tsarist autoc-racy and paid homage to Shamil’s struggleagainst tsarism, they explicitly distinguishedbetween the old regime and Russia and theRussian people, and they expressed no ani-mosity toward the latter.50

The UAM leadership saw Russia notmerely as a source of oppression but also as awindow to the advanced societies of Europeand the wider world.They were products ofRussian education, and though fierce patriotsand partisans of the Caucasus, they believedthat their people stood to could gain throughinclusion in a single state with Russia.Integration with Russia offered access toeducation, technology, and other aspects ofmodernity that the mountaineers needed ifthey were to develop into a prosperous socie-ty.Although Robert Seely’s assessment thatthe “overwhelming impression of Russia’scolonial adventure in the northern Caucasusis one of failure”51 accurately summarizesthe conclusion of the existing secondary his-torical literature, it quite arguably does notreflect the history itself so accurately. Russia’scolonial adventure had not been a total fail-

ure, and it had even produced a class ofmountaineer patriots who identified the bestinterests of their people with remaining partof Russia.

The Bolshevik seizure of power inNovember 1917 from the ProvisionalGovernment radically changed the situationin the North Caucasus and elsewhere.TheUAM—opposed to Bolshevism but lackingthe ability to defend the North Caucasus ontheir own against the Red Army—began toreach out for allies.They first turned theirattention to Tiflis, the capital of theTranscaucasian Federation.Arguing that adivided Caucasus could not stand, they pro-posed the formation of one greater, inde-pendent Caucasian Federation.TheTranscaucasians, however, were too disorient-ed to act. Like the North Caucasians, theywished to remain part of a united and demo-cratic Russia and were hostile to theBolsheviks, but unlike the North Caucasiansthey refused to recognize that the Bolshevikshad already taken Russia.They were con-fused by the collapse of the democraticRussia to which they had pledged their alle-giance and were also under pressure from theOttoman Empire to declare their independ-ence from Russia and sign a peace treaty, andso simply did not know how to react.52

Left with little choice, the UAM thenapproached the Ottomans.A commongeopolitical interest united the two sides.TheUAM sought outside support to keep theNorth Caucasus free from Bolshevik rule,while the Ottomans were eager to exploitRussia’s temporary weakness and chaos toestablish one or more independent bufferstates in the Caucasus before the war’s immi-nent end.The existence of a relatively largenumber of Ottoman subjects of NorthCaucasian heritage in the Ottoman intelli-gence service facilitated the formation of analliance between the two.Thus, after recog-

13

nizing the existence of an independentMountaineer Republic on May 11, 1918, theOttomans sent a small force of several hun-dred volunteers into Dagestan that June.Aftera larger army succeeded in liberating Bakuand handing it over to the newly createdgovernment of the independent Republic ofAzerbaijan in September 1918, the Ottomanssent a detachment of Ottoman and indige-nous soldiers northward from Baku intoDagestan to dash up the Caspian to drive theBolsheviks out of Derbent and Petrovsk(today’s Makhachkala).53

One might expect that a commonIslamic identity would have served as a basisfor the Ottoman–North Caucasian alliance.Though it undoubtedly facilitated relations, itwas by no means a primary factor.TheNorth Caucasians first had repeatedlyappealed to the predominantly ChristianTranscaucasians to form a unified Caucasianstate. In their internal correspondence, theNorth Caucasian leaders expressed their pref-erence for a closer alliance with Germany,because Germany was more powerful andwealthier than the Ottomans.54 Moreover,true to their earlier declarations of intent toestablish an inclusive North Caucasian state,the North Caucasians secured the participa-tion of an Orthodox priest and a Jewishrabbi in the public ceremony establishing thereturn of their government to Derbent afterits liberation from the Bolsheviks.55

The same held even for those whoexplicitly advocated the establishment of animamate. Indeed, Nadzhmuddin Gotsinskii, awealthy and educated alim, or scholar ofIslam, who sought the title of imam of theNorth Caucasus, greeted the Ottomans withgunfire, not open arms. He acceptedOttoman leadership only after the better-armed Ottomans outgunned his men in afirefight.56

In November 1918, the victorious

Allied powers compelled the Ottomans andGermans to withdrew all their forces fromthe Caucasus.The mountaineer governmentinitiated contacts with British military per-sonnel in the Caspian in the hopes of obtain-ing support and diplomatic recognition.Although local British officers were sympa-thetic, London had committed to backingthe counterrevolutionary forces of GeneralDenikin against the Bolsheviks.The subse-quent British withdrawal from the region inany event left the mountaineers on theirown.

Whereas existing accounts tend toportray the mountaineers as more or lessunited in their successful struggle againstGeneral Denikin and their subsequent andfailed struggle against the Bolsheviks, the factis that at this point the mountaineer move-ment began to fragment.The Bolsheviks,playing to mountaineer opposition toDenikin’s program of restoring tight centralcontrol in a unitary Russian state, wooedseveral influential sheikhs with promises offull autonomy under Bolshevik rule. Loyaltyto Russia, however, remained strong amongsome sectors of the mountaineers. Severalformer tsarist army officers occupying keyposts in the Mountaineer Republic’s govern-ment decided to throw in their lot with theirformer comrades in arms, preferring thereestablishment of the old tsarist order to thepromises of Bolshevism.The anti-Denikinmountaineers, however, contributed greatlyto the defeat of the counterrevolutionaryVolunteer Army by mounting repeatedattacks on its rear, denying his army anysecurity or sanctuary.

The elimination of Denikin enabledthe Bolsheviks to concentrate their mightagainst the mountaineers in the spring of1920. In an influential article,AlexandreBennigsen has characterized this struggle asone waged by “conservative Sufi sheikhsfighting for the glory of God” and asserts

14

that it “was the Sufi leadership that gave theDaghestan-Chechen revolt its unique charac-ter.”57 Marie Broxup reiterated the sameemphasis on Islam and the Naqshbanditariqat as the key factors in the mountaineerresistance in a later article.58

This assessment, while making for anundeniably romantic and appealing portraitof implacable Caucasian resistance to Russiantyranny, gravely distorts the dynamics of thestruggle.To start with, the revolt was notwidespread. Rather, it was limited in its geo-graphic scope almost exactly to that of theterritory held by Shamil at the end of hisimamate: the central mountainous regions ofDagestan and the mountainous southeast ofChechnya. In other words, the revolt wascentered in the most mountainous and leastaccessible area of the North Caucasus, thehome of the most combative and proudmountaineers, the highland Avars andChechens. Moreover, the rebels had even lesssuccess than Shamil in spreading the revolt tothe Northwestern Caucasus.

Field reports from the Red Army andCheka (the forerunner to the KGB) depict avariegated resistance movement. Red Armyintelligence officers identified different ten-dencies among the mountaineers, and theydistinguished between that small numbercommitted to reviving the MountaineerRepublic, those seeking an Islamic state,those engaged in ordinary banditry, and thosegroups acting out of a mix of ideological andpragmatic motives.Although it would betempting to dismiss the charges of banditry asbiased or self-serving Bolshevik propaganda,this would be wrong. Combating abrechest-vo,59 the mountaineer tradition of brigandry,had been a priority of the UAM, and themufti, and later self-proclaimed imam, of theNorth Caucasus Gotsinskii emphasized theneed for sharia to suppress it.60 The RedArmy officers noted that the abreks’ looting

and pillaging alienated many mountaineersfrom the rebels.61 As even Bennigsen con-cedes, the Bolsheviks succeeded in pitting theKumuks, Lezghins, and Darghins against theAvars and the Ingush against the Chechens.62

Firsthand accounts in Turkish of themountaineer struggle also undermine thethesis that Sufism exerted a special influenceon the fight against the Bolsheviks. Indeed,one Ottoman Circassian who traveled in theNorth Caucasus in 1920 singled out theNaqshbandi sheikhs not for their steelydetermination to fight the Bolsheviks butinstead for their soporific teachings on theneed to forsake the affairs of this world andconcentrate on those of the next world.63

Sufism, in short, acted as a depressant, not asa stimulant, upon the mountaineer will tofight.

A more general description of thestruggle as a religious war cannot hold upeither.There were numerous religious figuresin the North Caucasus who opposed fightingthe Bolsheviks, or even actually supportedthem. For example, the Chechen Sheikh AliMitaev, Sheikh Ali of Akusha, and the Andisheikhs Hassan and Habibullah Hajjiremained on good terms with theBolsheviks.64 To be sure, some of these fig-ures, such as Ali of Akusha, whom theBolsheviks executed in 1926, must later haveregretted their decision not to have joinedthe revolt.And there is no denying theextraordinary courage and tenacity of theanti-Bolshevik rebels, many of whom,women included, preferred to kill themselvesthan fall into the hands of the Red Army.But to describe their struggle as popular andwidespread throughout the North Caucasusis mistaken, no matter how attractive animage it might create.

15

THE SOVIET AND POST-SOVIETPERIOD

Upon consolidating their rule over theCaucasus, the Bolsheviks reneged on theirpromises of autonomy and instead assertedtight control over the region, and instigated asevere crackdown on Islam.A campaign todisarm Chechnya and Dagestan in the mid-1920s led to another round of rebellion.Communist repression in the NorthCaucasus reached its apogee in February1944, when Joseph Stalin65 ordered the massdeportation of the Muslim Chechens andIngush to Central Asia and Siberia, less than ayear after the deportation of the BuddhistKalmyks from northern Dagestan to theVolga region.The deportations were brutal inthe extreme, killing from one-third to one-half of the Chechen population. Shortly afterthe death of Stalin in 1953 Chechens beganmaking their way back to their homeland,often bringing with them the bones of theirrelatives for burial. Finally, in 1957,Khrushchev officially permitted theChechens and Ingush to return. Nonetheless,the Soviet authorities persisted in maintain-ing tight control on the North Caucasus andin suppressing the practice and study ofIslam.

Although some Western scholarsspeculated about the existence of a vast andthriving underground Sufi network in theNorth Caucasus, the reality is that the antire-ligious policies of the Soviets, although theyfailed utterly to efface Islam as a source ofidentity, did in fact succeed in reducing boththe knowledge and practice of Islam.66

Whereas Muslim identity remained relativelystrong, knowledge of Islam grew weak.67

The spiritual and cultural vacuumcreated by Soviet policies opened up oppor-tunities in the post-Soviet period for outsideproselytizers to move in and introduce theirinterpretations of Islam with relatively little

intellectual resistance.Advocates of theSalafi68 version of Islam, commonly knownas Wahhabism,69 enjoyed a special advantagein this environment.A central tenet of SalafiIslam is that it is the proper, pure form ofIslam to the exclusion of all others.Thisclaim, especially when packaged with clearformulations of the practice and meaning ofIslam as a creed, found a special resonanceamong an uninformed audience eager to findprecisely such a straightforward exposition ofauthentic Islam.70 The common descriptionof a struggle between Salafi Islam and “tradi-tional” Sufi Islam was thus something of amisnomer, for the explosion of the numbersof mosques, mullahs, and madrasahs (Islamicschools) was on a truly revolutionary scale.71

Popular knowledge of Islamic practices, doc-trines, and texts was so thin that initiallythere simply was no coherent tradition of“indigenous” Islam capable of refuting ontheological grounds the Salafi claim to be thesole legitimate interpretation of Islam.

Salafi Islam found its first toehold inthe Caucasus in Dagestan, from whence itspread to Chechnya.72 Although the expo-nents of Salafi Islam failed to become amajor force in Dagestan or to gain any sig-nificant popular support in either Dagestanor Chechnya, they did manage to exert sig-nificant, even decisive, influence overChechen politics in the aftermath of the firstChechen War.There are three reasons worthmentioning in the context of this paper forthe success of the Salafis in gaining power inChechnya.

The first is that, in addition to a sim-ple and clear-cut exegesis of “pure” Islam,Salafi Islam provided a moral framework thatpurported to make sense of the Russo-Chechen conflict by portraying it in morevivid, larger than life terms as one part of anepic struggle between Islam and its ene-mies.73 The Chechens have always taken

16

great pride in their martial nature, and SalafiIslam’s unabashed embrace of violence in thedefense of Islam held added appeal.And forChechens facing yet another Russian armyindifferent to and perhaps even supportive ofatrocities perpetrated by its personnel, themessage of militant struggle in defense ofIslam and Muslims could not but find areceptive audience.74

The second reason is that the Salafispossessed access to a transnational network oflikeminded proselytizers and missionaryorganizations backed by significant funds.Thesupply of volunteers and money from Islamicactivist organizations validated the Salafi mes-sage of Islamic solidarity.75 And at the sametime, the example of the Chechens provideda validating myth to the Salafi message, livingproof that a small but pious people coulddefeat great powers with little more thancourage and faith in God.The Chechenresistance became a celebrity cause amongIslamic activists, who saw it as an example ofMuslim battlefield success, not Chechen, andwere quick to take credit for Chechnya’s vic-tory.76

A third, and largely overlooked, rea-son for Salafi Islam’s appeal was that itoffered a means to overcome Chechen clanidentities and divisions and provide a sem-blance of order to the postwar chaos reigningin Chechnya.77 Whereas a more Sufi-influ-enced interpretation of Islam could accom-modate Chechen society with its multiplesocial divisions and its traditions, Salafi Islamradically opposes all distinctions except thatbetween Muslims and infidels.78 Thus someChechens, such as onetime Chechen presi-dent and intelligent Zelimkhan Yandarbiev,found Salafi Islam attractive in part becausethey saw it as the only practical way to tran-scend clan divisions in Chechen society andcreate a centralized Chechen state.79

The inability of Chechen president

Aslan Maskhadov to overcome such divisionscontributed substantially to the failure of hisgovernment to establish any effective orderbetween 1996 and the 1999.80 The Salafis,among whom many if not most were igno-rant about all but the rudiments of theirbelief and among whom were notoriouscriminals such as Arbi Baraev, fomented divi-sion by deliberately insisting on the uncondi-tional acceptance of their interpretation ofthe sharia, and they also contributed to chaosby participating in the rash of kidnappingsand crime that ravaged Chechnya and itsneighbors.81 To the extent that the Salafispointed to their version of the sharia as thesolution to the problem of clan cleavages andcrime in Chechnya, they resembled ImamsMansur, Shamil, and Nadzhmuddin from theeighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth cen-turies.Whether or not their divisive andcriminal activities were part of a consciousplan to seize power in Chechnya isunknown, but to some North Caucasians itlooked like that at the time.82

The views of another prominentChechen, Khozh Akhmed Nukhaev, sharplydiverge from the received view of Islam as aroute to the creation of a Chechen state andare worth noting. Nukhaev also identifies theinability of the Chechens to adapt their clanpolitics to the model of a centralized state asa fundamental problem. But rather than seek-ing to change Chechen political culture,Nukhaev advocates rejecting the modernstate as a form of organization.83 Given thatneither he nor the Chechens are capable ofeffecting the displacement of the state as thefundamental unit of international politics,Nukhaev’s proposal is impotent. Nonetheless,his diagnosis of the Chechen dilemma asbeing the difficulty of reconciling Chechenpolitical culture with the centralized struc-ture of the modern state is instructive as it isthe same diagnosis of those who, from

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Sheikhs Mansur and Shamil onward, havepointed to Islam as the remedy to theCaucasian mountaineers’ tendency to defi-ance of the law and forms of authority out-side the clan.

Nonetheless, as was noted above,Salafi Islam never acquired great popularityin Chechnya.The fractured nature ofChechen society following the 1994–6 war,however, enabled the Salafis to establish afoothold in Chechnya. Khattab opened atraining camp in Chechnya where maleyouths from throughout the Caucasus andelsewhere were indoctrinated in Salafi beliefsand trained to handle weapons.With a con-siderable number of armed followers,Chechen and foreign, and financing fromoutside, the Salafis and their Chechen alliessuch as Shamil Basaev were able not only tochallenge Maskhadov with impunity but alsoto compel him to attempt to enforce Islamiclaw.84 Ultimately, the Salafis under Khattab’sand Basaev’s leadership invaded Dagestan inAugust 1999 in a bid to drive the Russiansentirely out of the Caucasus and establish anIslamic state.85 That invasion triggered alarge-scale Russian response and thereby pre-cipitated the second Chechen War that con-tinues to this day.

CONCLUSION

The importance of Islam as a primary motivefor conflict in the North Caucasus shouldnot be overstated.An inordinate focus on theCaucasian Wars of the nineteenth century, alatitudinal perspective that attempts to con-nect the dynamics of those wars with otherlocal anti-imperial struggles of Muslims else-where, and a strong tendency to romanticizemountaineer resistance to Russia have allcontributed to an exaggerated emphasis uponIslam.The fact that both opponents and pro-ponents of Russian influence in the Caucasushave sought to use this interpretation does

not make it more convincing.A broader, longitudinal perspective

reveals that a more fundamental factor inconflict between Russia and the mountaineerpeoples of the North Caucasus has been thenature of mountaineer society—which, inpart due to the unique geography of theNorth Caucasus, has remained resistant tocentralized rule of any sort.The moun-taineers resisted Muslim armies as fiercely asRussian ones.The origins of the moun-taineers’ martial traditions are independent ofIslam.

Although Islam has not been the pri-mary cause of conflict, classical Sunni Islamshaped the contours of conflict in the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries by givingthe mountaineers a common identity thatwas tied to an ethical-legal basis for statebuilding found in the sharia.Yet at the sametime that Islam assisted in the organizationand consolidation of mountaineer resistance,shariatization also polarized mountaineersociety.The emergence of a quietist interpre-tation of Islam in the form of Kunta Hajjiand the Qadiriya tariqat indeed contributedto the collapse of the mountaineer resistance.The subsequent transformation of theQadiriya tariqat into a vehicle for rebellionagainst Russian rule and the periodically qui-escent behavior of Naqshbandi sheikhs onlyunderscores the futility of identifying Islamicdoctrines or brotherhoods as primary causesof violent conflict.

During the Russian Revolution andCivil War period from 1917 through 1921,the sharia was again invoked as the properantidote to crime and to the more centrifu-gal tendencies of the mountaineers.AlthoughImam Gotsinskii led the anti-Bolshevikresistance, other prominent sheikhs espousedeither neutrality or joined the Bolsheviks. Inthe post-communist North Caucasus, mili-tant Salafi Islam managed to become a domi-nant political force due to the peculiarities of

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war-ravaged Chechnya, where its crude butstraightforward exposition of the Muslimfaith, its message of militancy, and its suppliesof arms and funds found a receptive audienceamong young Chechens who were eager formore knowledge about their faith, bittertoward Russia, and without other prospects.The willingness of the Salafis to embracecriminals lent them a powerful dual capacityto intimidate opponents and strengthen theircase for the uncompromising application ofthe sharia as the only viable solution to socialdisorder and strife.

The same long-standing patterns ofsocial organization and attitudes towardpolitical authority that have supported themountaineers’ resistance against outside pow-ers for centuries have also served to inhibitthe consolidation of stable formal politicalinstitutions in Chechnya and elsewhere inthe North Caucasus.This dynamic, ratherthan Islam, will continue to be the funda-mental source of conflict and disorder in theNorth Caucasus under current conditions ofglobalization, wherein regions lacking reliableand predictable political institutions aredeprived of productive economic investmentyet nonetheless subjected to the vagaries ofthe global economy.

Moreover, the substantial opportuni-ties presented by the global economy in thegray and black markets are most easilyexploited by elements in societies withstrong, local cleavages of identity, such asthose in the North Caucasus, and therebyfurther undermine local governance.The factthat mountaineer norms and social patternsare experiencing rapid change—and nowheremore quickly than in today’s Chechnya—provides little cause for optimism.Thedestruction of older forms of social order andrelations does not necessarily bring in itstrain the creation of new ones more con-ducive to the construction of stable polities.Although the contemporary Russian state has

exhibited a substantial capacity in Chechnyafor destruction, there is, tragically, little evi-dence that it has any real capacity for sup-porting the emergence of social norms andrelations that might nurture the emergenceof a stable and productive society inChechnya. Given Chechnya’s location andthe size of its population, the absence of apeaceful and productive Chechnya will nec-essarily remain a substantial threat to thealready strained stability of the NorthCaucasus as a whole.86

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NOTES

1 The literature on this debate is now voluminous.Tostart, see Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy Warand Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003);and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizationsand the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996), especially his thesis about “Islam’sbloody borders.” For a contrary view, see John L.Esposito, Unholy War:Terror in the Name of Islam (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2002), and The IslamicThreat: Myth or Reality (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999).2 Thanks to several individuals of remarkable couragethere exists in English a number of firsthand accountsof the recent wars in Chechnya. For the first war, seeKhassan Baiev with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff, TheOath:A Surgeon under Fire (New York:Walker, 2003);Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamityin the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press,1998);Thomas Goltz, Chechnya Diary (New York:Thomas Dunne Books, 2003); and Anatol Lieven,Chechnya:Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven,Conn.:Yale University Press, 1998). For the second,and ongoing, war, see, in addition to Baiev’s extraordi-nary narrative,Andrew Meier, The Black Earth (NewYork:W.W. Norton, 2003);Anne Nivat, Chienne deGuerre (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); and AnnaPolitkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches fromChechnya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2003).These accounts of the second war succeed inrelating the complex and horrendously destructivenature of the current conflict in Chechnya.3 The prominence that both partisans and opponentsof Russian rule assign to Islam is often reflected in thevery titles of their works. See, e.g.,AlexandreBennigsen,“Muslim Guerrilla Warfare in the Caucasus(1918–1928),” Central Asian Survey 2, no. 1 (July 1983):45–56;Alexandre Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush,Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union(London: C. Hurst and Company, 1985); LeslieBlanch, The Sabres of Paradise (New York:Viking Press,1960); Marie Broxup,“The Last Ghazawat:The1920–1921 Uprising,” in The North Caucasus Barrier:The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World, ed.Marie Broxup (London: Hurst, 1992), 112–45; MosheGammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and theConquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: FrankCass, 1994); N.A. Smirnov, Miuridizm na Kavkaze(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1963); Paul Murphy,The Wolves of Islam: Russia and the Faces of ChechenTerror (New York: Brassey’s, 2004); Sebastian Smith,

Allah’s Mountains: Politics and War in Russia’s Caucasus(New York: I. B.Tauris, 1998); M. I. Qandour,Miuridizm: Istoriia Kavkazskikh voin, 1819–1859(Nal’chik: El-Fa, 1996); and Anna Zelkina, In Quest forGod and Freedom:The Sufi Response to the RussianAdvance in the North Caucasus (London: Hurst andCompany, 2000).4 M. M. Bliev and V.V. Degoev, Kavkazskaia voina(Moscow: Roset, 1994).5 For a study of the special relationship betweenRussian literature, the Caucasus, and empire see SusanLayton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of theCaucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994).6 See, e.g., Bernard Lewis,“The Revolt of Islam” inBernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1964), 95–114.7 For the sake of reader accessibility,Arabic words inthe text are transliterated in a simplified fashion.8 Hamid Algar,“A Brief History of the NaqshbandiOrder,” in Marc Gaborieau,Alexandre Popovic, andThierry Zarcone, Naqshbandis: Historical Developmentsand Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order(Istanbul: Isis Press, 1985), 34–6. See, in the same vol-ume,Algar’s “Political Aspects of Naqshbandi History,”123–2.Also see Bliev and Degoev, Kavkazskaia voina,186–7; Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 39–40;AlbertHourani,“Sufism and Modern Islam: Maulana Khalidand the Naqshbandi Order,” in Hourani, TheEmergence of the Modern Middle East (London:Macmillan, 1981), 75–90; Zelkina, In Quest for Godand Freedom, 75–99.9 The reader should be aware that the use of the term“Dagestan” here is anachronistic. Composed of theTurkic word for mountain, Dagh, and the Persianword for country or land, stan, the word emerged inthe fifteenth century to refer to the area occupied bythe Republic of Dagestan.10 D. M. Dunlop,“Bab al-Abwab,” Encyclopedia ofIslam, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954) vol. 1, 835.11 Seraffedin Erel, Dagistan ve Dagistanlilar (Istanbul:Istanbul Matbaasi, 1961), 58–9.12 Erel, Dagistan, 60–1.13 Erel, Dagistan, 42 n. 103, 61. For a lively descrip-tion of the Arab invasion of the North Caucasus, seeD. M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954),41–88.14 Erel, Dagistan, 71.15 The Slavs also raided the Muslim peoples; Dunlop,

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History of the Jewish Khazars, 210–12.Two other usefulsources for the early history of the NortheastCaucasus are V. F. Minorskii, Istoriia Shirvana i DerbendaX-XI vekov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoi literatury,1963), and Mirza A. Kazem-Beg, Derbend-Nâmeh(Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences,1851).16 Erel, Dagistan, 83.17 Chantal Lermercier-Quelquejay,“Cooptation ofthe Elites of Kabarda and Daghestan in the SixteenthCentury,” in North Caucasus Barrier, 26.18 John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of theCaucasus (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), xxi–xxii.19 Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Kirim ve Kafkas Tarihçesi(Kostantiniye: Matbaa-yi Ebüzziya, 1305 [1897]), 54.See also Ismail Berkok, Tarihte Kafkasya (Istanbul: n.p.,1958), 13–16.20 Indeed, so closely tied were the concepts of reli-gion and state for the Ottomans that they employedthe words for each together as a formula,“din üdevlet.”Ahmed Cevdet picked up on the significanceof the spread of Islamic education and norms in theCaucasus, observing,“Until recent times most of thesetribes did not know what religion and state are.”Cevdet Pasa, 54.21 Samil Mansur, Çeçenler (Ankara: Sam Yayinlari,1993), 43.22 For details of such cooperation see Ali Arslan,“Rusya’nin Kirim ve Gürcistan’i Ilhakkindan SonraOsmanli Devleti’nin Çerkes Kabileleri ileMünasebetleri (1784–1829),” Kafkas Araþtirmalari, vol.1 (1988); Mirza Bala,“Çerkesler,” Islam Ansiklopedisi,383; Mustafa Budak,“1853–1856 Kirim HarbiBaslarinda Dogu Anadolu-Kafkas Cephesi ve SeyhSamil,” Kafkas Arastirmalari, vol. 1 (1988), 53.23 Bennigsen and Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars, 8,32.Algar,“Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order,”35. Many currently practicing Naqshbandis haveassimilated the portrayal of the brotherhood as thevanguard of the North Caucasian resistance to Russia.See Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, TheNaqshbandi Sufi Way: History and Guidebook of the Saintsof the Golden Chain (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1995).24 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 34.25 For more on teips and tukhums, see Ian Chesnov,“Byt’ Chechentsem: lichnost i etnicheskie identifikatsiinaroda,” in Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva,ed. D. Furman (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, 1999),69–71, 95–9.The wird, a religious congregation ofsorts in which membership is largely but not entirelydetermined by blood, is another important social insti-

tution in Chechen life. It has not, however, been stud-ied sufficiently. See also Anna Zelkina,“Islam andSociety in Chechnia: From the Late Eighteenth to theFirst Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal ofIslamic Studies 7 no. 2 (1996): 240–2.26 Saidan Mohmadan Ibrahim,“Meyx-Qiel” (translat-ed from the Chechen to Turkish by Tarik CemalKutlu), Kafkasya yazilari 8 (2000): 32–4.27 The fact that Chechen settlements were made ofwood also undermined the effectiveness of Yermolov’sdestructive forays.The Chechens could abandon andrebuild their villages with relative ease, in contrast tothe Dagestanis, who tended to live in stone dwellings.Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 35.28 Algar,“Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order,”3–44.29 For more on Sirhindi and his thought, see YohananFriedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi:An Outline of HisThought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).30 Hamid Algar cautions against attempts to link thetwo movements too closely, because their theologicaldifferences were unbridgeable;Algar,“Brief History ofthe Naqshbandi Order,” 30–31. Bernard Lewis, how-ever, writes that the Indian Muslim leader AhmadBrelwi was both a Wahhabi and a Naqshbandi initiate;Lewis,“Revolt of Islam,” 100.31 In English, the best accounts are Baddeley’s andGammer’s.32 For details, see Zelkina, In Quest for God andFreedom, 164–8.33 For an incisive critique of this approach, seeAlexander Knysh,“Sufism as an ExplanatoryParadigm:The Issue of the Motivations of SufiMovements in Russian and Western Historiography,”in Die Welt des Islams 42, no. 2 (2002): 139–73. Knysh’sgeneral argument is persuasive, but he does not dojustice to the real scholarly achievements of MosheGammer, whose work is more nuanced than Knyshpresents, or even Anna Zelkina, whose work on Islamin Chechnya before the Russian conquest is pioneer-ing.34 Sufism, or tasawwuf, is a word used to describe thebody of doctrines, practices, and organizations in Islamthat related to the pursuit of mystical enlightenment.The precise etymology of tasawwuf is unknown.Themost common theory is that it was derived from theArabic word for wool, suf, in reference to the coarseundergarments that the early mystic ascetics of Islamwore as part of their effort to inure themselves to theblandishments of the material world in their quest for

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spiritual enlightenment and knowledge of the divine.35 According to this view, Sufi sheikhs are much clos-er to the people and far more capable of rousing thefaithful masses to armed violence because, unlike theulema, the formally trained scholars of the Quranicsciences, they do not rely upon their formal knowl-edge of the Quranic sciences but rely instead upontheir spiritual charisma.36 It should not be assumed that the mountaineers’Muslim identity precluded their voluntary accession tothe Russian Empire. Other Muslim communities hadmade their peace with the tsarist regime, and indeedthe Russians dispatched a number of Tatar and otherMuslim authorities to the North Caucasus to appealto the mountaineers to cease their resistance to thetsar.37 Because these codes varied from mountaineercommunity to mountaineer community, it would per-haps be more proper to speak of adat in the plural.38 Zelkina,“Islam and Society in Chechnia,” 243–6.39 For a critical and nuanced treatment of the rela-tionship between adat and sharia, see V.O.Bobrovnikov, Musul’mane Severnogo Kavkaza: obychai,pravo, nasilie (Moscow:Vostochnaia literatura, 2002),110–41.40 Beneath the naib was another layer of bureaucracy.The number of naibs and the complexity of thebureaucracy varied with time, and the geographicalextent of Shamil’s power, from four to thirty-three.For more on the structure of Shamil’s quasi-state, seeGammer, Muslim Resistance, 225–47.41 This is as outlined in article six of Shamil’s nizam.Cafer Barlas, Dünü ve Bugünü ile Kafkasya ÖzgürlükMücadelesi (Istanbul: Insan Yayinlari, 1999), 199.42 Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, 209–12.43 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 244.44 “Uchenie ‘zikr’ i ego posledovateli v Chechne iArgunskom okruge,” in Sbornik svedenii kavkazskikhgortsakh vol. 2 (Tiflis, 1869), 4.45 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 235.46 For more on Kunta Hajji, see V. Kh.Akaev, SheikhKunta Khadzhi (Groznyi: NIIGN Chechenskoirespubliki, 1994).47 Paul Henze,“Circassian Resistance to Russia,” inBroxup, North Caucasus Barrier, 98–9.48 K. M. Khanbaev,“Miuridizm v Dagestane vXIX—nachale XX vv,” Islam v Dagestane(Makhachkala: Dagestanskii Ordena DruzhbyiNarodov Gosudarstvennyi Univesitet, 1994), 35.

49 For more on the UAM, see Michael A. Reynolds,“The Ottoman-Russian Struggle for Eastern Anatoliaand the Caucasus, 1908-1918: Identity, Ideology, andthe Geopolitics of World Order,” Ph.D. dissertation(Princeton University, 2003), 515-97.50 See, for example,“Otkrytie 1ogo s’ezda gorskikhnarodov Kavkaza” 1.5.1917, in Soiuz ob’edinennykhgortsev Severnogo Kavkaza i Dagestana (1917–1918 gg.),Gorskaia Respublika (1918–1920 gg.), ed. M. D. Butaev(Makhachkala: Institut istorii, arkheologii i etnografiiDNTs RAN, 1994), 26.51 Robert Seely, Russo-Chechen Conflict 1800–2000:ADeadly Embrace (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 20.52 The single best treatment of the Transcaucasus inthis period remains Firuz Kazemzadeh’s The Strugglefor Transcaucasia, 1917–1921 (New York: PhilosophicalLibrary, 1951).53 For more on the Ottoman role in the NorthCaucasus in 1918, see Ismail Berkok,“Büyük HarpteSimalî Kafkasyadaki Faaliyetlerimiz ve 15. FirkaninHarekâti ve Muharabeleri,” Askeri Mecmua, no. 35(Eylül, 1934); and Nâsir Yüceer, Birinci DünyaSavasi’nda Osmanli Ordusu’nun Azerbaycan ve DagistanHarekâti (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basim Evi, 1996).54 “Pis’mo diplomaticheskogo predstavitelia Gorskogopravitel’stva G. Bammatova predsedateliu pravitel’stvaA. Chermoevu o politike Germanii i Turtsii votnoshenii Kavkaza i Rossii,” 31.8.1918, in Soiuzob’edinnennykh gortsev, 152.55 Berkok,“Büyük Harpte,” 73.56 Berkok,“Büyük Harpte,” 31.57 Alexandre Bennigsen,“Muslim Guerrilla Warfare inthe Caucasus (1918–1928),” Central Asian Survey 2, no.1 (July 1983): 46, 48.58 Marie Broxup,“The Last Ghazavat:The 1920–1921Uprising,” in Broxup, North Caucasus Barrier, 113–45.59 For a discussion of abrechestvo in historical context,see Bobrovnikov, Musul’mane, 79–97.60 “Poslanie Muftiia N. Gotsinskogo k mullam iprikhozhanam Severo-Kavkazskogo Muftiata,”4.11.1917, Soiuz ob’edinennykh gortsev, 76.61 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv, fond39247, opis 1, delo 1, list’180,“KratkaiaOb’iasnitelnaia Zapiska,” 25.4.1921.62 Bennigsen,“Muslim Guerilla Warfare,” 53.63 See, in particular, Mustafa Butbay, KafkasyaHatiralari, ed.Ahmet Cevdet Canbulat (Ankara:TürkTarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1990), 23, 56, 80, 101.64 Broxup,“Last Ghazavat,” 123.

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65 As Anatol Lieven observes, it is worth remember-ing that neither Stalin nor Lavrentii Beriia, the NKVDchief who oversaw the operation, were Russian, andthat the deportations were a Soviet rather than partic-ularly Russian act; Lieven, Chechnya, 319.66 Numerous Chechens, at times in sense of embar-rassment, have explained to the author how in theSoviet era they were unaware of even such basicnorms of Islam, such as the prohibition of alcohol.Parents capable of reading Arabic often refrained frompassing such knowledge to their children out of fearfor themselves or their children.67 Soviet nationality policies arguably did serve todilute Muslim identity vis-à-vis ethnonational identi-ties.This can be observed in Dagestan. For a conciseanalysis of Islam and ethnicity in Dagestan in the post-Soviet period, see Moshe Gammer,“Walking theTightrope between Nationalism(s) and Islam(s):TheCase of Dagestan,” Central Asian Survey 21, no. 2(2002): 133–42.68 I am using the term “Salafi” here because that isthe term that many of those fighting in Chechnyaapply to themselves and their beliefs. See alsoVincenzo Olivetti’s polemic, Terror’s Source:The Ideologyof Wahhabi-Salafism and its Consequences (Birmingham,U.K.:Amadeus Books, 2002). For a vigorous polemicin defense of Salafi Islam, see Haneef James Oliver,The ‘Wahhabi’ Myth: Dispelling Prevalent Fallacies and theFictitious Link with Bin Laden (n.p.:Trafford Publishing,2003).69 For a critique of Wahhabism written from the per-spective of a practicing Sunni Muslim and historian,see Hamid Algar, Wahhabism:A Critical Essay(Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International,2002). See also the works cited in the preceding foot-note. For more on “Wahhabism” in the former SovietUnion, see Sanobar Shermatova,“Tak nazyvaemyevakhkhabity,” in Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosu-darstva, ed. D. E. Furman (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi,1999), 399–425; and V. O. Bobrovnikov,“Mif o‘Severokavkazskom Islame’: Strakhi i nadezhdy,’ inKavkaz i Tsentral’naia Aziia na sovremennom etape, ed.V.A. Mikhailova (Moscow: Sotsium, 2003), 115–23.70 Cf.Anna Matveeva,“The Islamist Challenge inPost-Soviet Eurasia,” in Political Islam and Conflicts inRussia and Central Asia, ed. Lena Jonson and MuradEsenov (Stockholm: Swedish Institute of InternationalAffairs, 1999), 37–8.71 Whereas in 1988 in Dagestan there were just twen-ty seven mosques and not even a single madrasah, amere ten years later there were 1,670 mosques, 670schools attached to the mosques, twenty five

madrasahs, and nine higher Muslim schools.AmriShikhsaidov,“Islam in Dagestan,” in Jonson andEsenov, Political Islam, 60. Even assuming that somemosques or jamaats, congregations, functioned under-ground in the Soviet period, there is no doubt thatthe increase in the number of Islamic institutions isnothing less than explosive.72 Mikhail Roshchin,“Fundamentalizm v Dagestane iChechne,” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 5 (2003); EnverKisriev,Werner J. Patzelt, Ute Roericht, and RobertBruce Ware,“Political Islam in Dagestan,” Europe-AsiaStudies 55, no. 2 (March 2003); See also GeorgiDerluguian,“Che Guevaras in Turbans,” PONARSWorking Paper (October 2003).73 The converse is also true. Many supporters ofRussian actions in Chechnya have embraced thenotion that the Russians are fighting one battle in alarger, common war against militant Islam.This themegained greater currency in the international arena fol-lowing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.Contrary to the assertions of some, this was not amere by-product of U.S.–Russian cooperation. Forexample, French officials have repeatedly cited ties toChechnya in their investigations of radical Islamists.See Marlise Simons,“Europeans Warn of TerrorAttacks in Event of War in Iraq, New York Times,January 29, 2003; Jim Boulden,“France OpenedMoussaoui File in ’94,” December 11, 2001, athttp://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/12/06/gen.moussaoui.background/.74 For an example, see Meier, Black Earth, 127–33.75 The number of volunteers from outside theCaucasus likely never exceeded more than a few hun-dred.The amount of money that indigenous and for-eign jihadists raised through contributions and crimewithin and without Russia was sufficient, however, togive them a clear superiority over other armed groupswithin Chechnya. E.g., the Chechen government ofAslan Maskhadov failed to suppress them and waseffectively co-opted by them. For an insider’s accountof the role of volunteers in Chechnya, see AukaiCollins, My Jihad (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002).The most famous of these volunteers was the charis-matic and ruthless Khattab. He was poisoned in March2002.76 Examples of such literature abound; for one, see al-Sayyid Muhammad Yûnus, al-Muslimûn fîJumhûriyat al-Shâshân wa Jihâduhum fî Muqâwamat al-Ghazw al-Rûsî(Mecca: 14:15[1994]) (The Muslims in the ChechenRepublic and their Jihad in the Resistance to the RussianInvasion). Salafi internet sites gave prominent attentionto Chechnya from the mid-1990s onward.

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77 For illustrative examples of the clash between stateinstitutions and disintegrating clan and other loyalties,see Baiev, Oath, 224–30; Politkovskaya, Small Corner ofHell, 138, 180.78 Hence Chechen Salafis, in total disregard for eventhe most basic conventions of Chechen culture, refuseto stand when their elders enter a room.79 The metamorphosis of Yandarbiev from a national-ist poet with a profoundly Soviet outlook into anIslamist activist who traveled through the Middle Eastand South Asia to establish relations with radicalIslamists is worthy of further study. For his earlierviews, see Zelimkhan Iandarbiev, V preddverii nezavisi-mosti (Groznyi: Groznenskii rabochii, 1994) andChecheniia—bitva za svobodu (L’vov: n.p., 1996).80 For an overview of radical in Islam in the interwarperiod, see Vakhit Akaev,“Religious-Political Conflictin the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” in Jonson andEsenov, Political Islam, 47–57.81 The Avar Bagauddin Kebedov justified the takingof hostages by citing the example of the ProphetMuhammad at the Battle of Badr.Author’s interviewswith members of the Congress of Peoples of Dagestanand Chechnia, Istanbul, December 1999. See alsoVakhit Akaev, Sufizm i Vakhkhabizm na SevernomKavkaze (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologiiRAN, 1999), 10.82 Magommedkhan Magommedkhanov,“CurrentTrends and Tensions in Dagestan and Chechnya,”paper presented to the conference,“Conflict in theCaucasus:Yesterday and Today,” Princeton University,Princeton, N.J., May 9, 1998.83 Nukhaev cites, among other examples, theChechens refusal to submit to Shamil’s “state sharia” ashistorical evidence of the innate inability of Chechensociety to conform to the demands of statehood.Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, Vozvrashchenie varvarov(Moscow: Mekhk Kkhell, 2002), 147–8.AlthoughNukhaev rose to prominence as an underworld figureand not as an intellectual, his critique of the modernstate and its incompatibility with Chechen sociocultu-ral norms is provocative and filled with insight. Seealso Nukhaev, Vedeno ili Vashington? (Moscow:Arktogeia-tsentr, 2001).84 To be sure, Maskhadov’s resort to sharia courts wasin part very likely motivated by the realization thatonly Islamic law had a chance of attaining effective, ifnot popular, legitimacy among the Chechens.85 Following the invasion’s failure, its protagonistsattempted to portray it as an act of self-defense onbehalf of the Salafi communities on the

Dagestani–Chechen border. Interview with Adollo AliMuhammed in Abreklerin Günlügü, (November 1999).Given the publicly expressed intent to unify theNorth Caucasus as an Islamic state and the prepara-tions for warfare undertaken by the Congress of thePeoples of Dagestan and Chechnia prior to the inva-sion, this claim is at best only technically correct.86 On the relative stability of Dagestan, see EdwardW.Walker,“Russia’s Soft Underbelly:The Stability ofInstability in Dagestan,” Berkeley Program in Soviet andPost-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series, winter1999–2000. Cf. Enver Kisriev,Werner J. Patzelt, UteRoericht, and Robert Bruce Ware,“Stability in theCaucasus:The Perspective from Dagestan,” Problems ofPost-Communism 50, no. 2 (March–April 2003).

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