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

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0026320042000322707

1743-7881

Michael A. Reynolds,

Islamic Studies and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The literature on this debate is now voluminous. To start, see Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003); and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), especially his thesis about 'Islam's bloody borders'. For a contrary view, see John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Thanks to several individuals of remarkable courage there exists in English a number of firsthand accounts of the recent wars in Chechnya. For the first war, see Khassan Baiev with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff, The Oath: A Surgeon under Fire (New York: Walker, 2003); Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in 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, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). For the second, and ongoing, war, see, in addition to Baiev's extraordinary narrative, Andrew Meier, The Black Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Anne Nivat, Chienne de Guerre (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); and Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). These accounts of the second war succeed in relating the complex and horrendously destructive nature of the current conflict in Chechnya. Analyses are lacking. An exception is Valerii Tishkov's extraordinarily rich study, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2001). The prominence that both partisans and opponents of Russian rule assign to Islam is often reflected in the very titles of their works. See, e.g., Alexandre Bennigsen, 'Muslim Guerrilla Warfare in the Caucasus (1918–1928)', Central Asian Survey 2, No.1 (July 1983): pp.45–56; Alexandre Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1985); Leslie Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Marie Broxup, 'The Last Ghazawat: The 1920–1921 Uprising', in Marie Broxup (ed.), The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World, (London: Hurst, 1992), pp.112–45; Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994); N.A. Smirnov, Miuridizm na Kavkaze (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1963); Paul Murphy, The Wolves of Islam: Russia and the Faces of Chechen Terror (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 for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (London: Hurst and Company, 2000). M.M. Bliev and V.V. Degoev, Kavkazskaia voina (Moscow: Roset, 1994). For a study of the special relationship between Russian literature, the Caucasus, and empire see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See, e.g., Bernard Lewis, 'The Revolt of Islam' in Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp.95–114. For the sake of reader accessibility, Arabic words in the text are transliterated without diacritics. Hamid Algar, 'A Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order', in Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone, Naqshbandis: Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1985), pp.34–6. See, in the same volume, Algar's 'Political Aspects of Naqshbandi History', pp.123–52. Also see Bliev and Degoev, Kavkazskaia voina, pp.186–7; Gammer, Muslim Resistance, pp.39–40; Albert Hourani, 'Sufism and Modern Islam: Maulana Khalid and the Naqshbandi Order', in Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp.75–90; Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, pp.75–99. The reader should be aware that the use of the term 'Dagestan' here is anachronistic. Composed of the Turkic word for mountain, Dagh, and the Persian word for country or land, stan, the word emerged in the fifteenth century to refer to the area occupied by the Republic of Dagestan. D.M. Dunlop, 'Bab al-Abwab', Encyclopedia of Islam, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954) Vol.1, p.835. Şeraffedin Erel, Dağistan ve Dağistanlılar (Istanbul: İstanbul Matbaası, 1961), pp.58–9. Erel, Dağistan, pp.60–61. Erel, Dağistan, pp.42, n.,103, 61. For a lively description of the Arab invasion of the North Caucasus, see D.M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp.41–88. Erel, Dağistan, p.71. The Slavs also raided the Muslim peoples; Dunlop, History of the Jewish Khazars, pp.210–12. Two other useful sources for the early history of the Northeast Caucasus are V.F. Minorskii, Istoriia Shirvana i Derbenda X-XI vekov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo vostochnoi literatury, 1963), and Mirza A. Kazem-Beg, Derbend-Nâmeh (Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1851). Erel, Dağistan, p.83. Chantal Lermercier-Quelquejay, 'Cooptation of the Elites of Kabarda and Daghestan in the Sixteenth Century', in North Caucasus Barrier, p.26. John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), pp.xxi–xxii. Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Kırım ve Kafkas Tarihçesi (Kostantiniye: Matbaa-yı Ebüzziya, 1305 [1897]), p.54. See also İsmail Berkok, Tarihte Kafkasya (Istanbul: n.p., 1958), pp.13–16. Indeed, so closely tied were the concepts of religion and state for the Ottomans that they employed the words for each together as a formula, 'din ü devlet'. Ahmed Cevdet picked up on the significance of the spread of Islamic education and norms in the Caucasus, observing, 'Until recent times most of these tribes did not know what religion and state are'. Cevdet Paşa, p.54. Şamil Mansur, Çeçenler (Ankara: Sam Yayınları, 1993), p.43. For details of such cooperation see Ali Arslan, 'Rusya'nın Kırım ve Gürcistan'ı İlhakkından Sonra Osmanlı Devleti'nin Çerkes Kabileleri ile Münasebetleri (1784–1829)', Kafkas Araştırmaları, Vol.1 (1988); Mirza Bala, 'Çerkesler', İslam Ansıklopedisi, p.383; Mustafa Budak, '1853–1856 Kırım Harbi Başlarında Doğu Anadolu-Kafkas Cephesi ve Şeyh Şamil', Kafkas Araştırmaları, Vol.1 (1988), p.53. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars, 8, p.32. Algar, 'Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order', p.35. Many currently practising Naqshbandis have assimilated the portrayal of the brotherhood as the vanguard of the North Caucasian resistance to Russia. See Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, The Naqshbandi Sufi Way: History and Guidebook of the Saints of the Golden Chain (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1995). Gammer, Muslim Resistance, p.34. For more on teips and tukhums, see Ian Chesnov, 'Byt' Chechentsem: lichnost i etnicheskie identifikatsii naroda', in D. Furman (ed.), Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva, (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, 1999), pp.69–71, 95–9. The wird, a religious congregation of sorts of which membership is largely but not entirely determined by blood, is another important social institution in Chechen life. It has not, however, been studied sufficiently. See also Anna Zelkina, 'Islam and Society in Chechnia: From the Late Eighteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century', Journal of Islamic Studies, 7, No.2 (1996), pp.240–2. Saidan Mohmadan Ibrahim, 'Meyx-Qiel' (translated from the Chechen to Turkish by Tarık Cemal Kutlu), Kafkasya yazıları 8 (2000), pp.32–4. The fact that Chechen settlements were made of wood also undermined the effectiveness of Yermolov's destructive forays. The Chechens could abandon and rebuild their villages with relative ease, in contrast to the Dagestanis, who tended to live in stone dwellings. Gammer, Muslim Resistance, p.35. Algar, 'Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order', pp.3–44. For more on Sirhindi and his thought, see Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi: An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hamid Algar cautions against attempts to link the two movements too closely, because their theological differences were unbridgeable. Algar, 'Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order', pp.30–1. Bernard Lewis writes that the Indian Muslim leader Ahmad Brelwi was both a Wahhabi and a Naqshbandi initiate. Lewis, 'Revolt of Islam', p.100. In English, the best accounts are Baddeley's and Gammer's. For details, see Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, pp.164–8. For an incisive critique of this approach, see Alexander Knysh, 'Sufism as an Explanatory Paradigm: The Issue of the Motivations of Sufi Movements in Russian and Western Historiography', in Die Welt des Islams, 42, No.2 (2002), pp.139–73. Knysh's general argument is persuasive, but he does not do justice to the real scholarly achievements of Moshe Gammer, whose work is more nuanced than Knysh presents, or those of Anna Zelkina, whose work on Islam in Chechnya before the Russian conquest is pioneering. Sufism, or tasawwuf, is a word used to describe the body of doctrines, practices, and organizations in Islam that related to the pursuit of mystical enlightenment. The precise etymology of tasawwuf is unknown. The most common theory is that it was derived from the Arabic word for wool, suf, in reference to the coarse undergarments that the early mystic ascetics of Islam wore as part of their effort to inure themselves to the blandishments of the material world in their quest for spiritual enlightenment and knowledge of the divine. According to this view, Sufi sheikhs are much closer to the people and far more capable of rousing the faithful masses to armed violence because, unlike the ulama, the formally trained scholars of the Quranic sciences, they do not rely upon their formal knowledge of the Quranic sciences but rely instead upon their spiritual charisma. It should not be assumed that the mountaineers' Muslim identity precluded their voluntary accession to the Russian Empire. Other Muslim communities had made their peace with the tsarist regime, and indeed the Russians dispatched a number of Tatar and other Muslim authorities to the North Caucasus to appeal to the mountaineers to cease their resistance to the tsar. Because these codes varied from mountaineer community to mountaineer community, it would perhaps be more proper to speak of adat in the plural. Zelkina, 'Islam and Society in Chechnia', pp.243–6. For a critical and nuanced treatment of the relationship between adat and sharia, see V.O. Bobrovnikov, Musul'mane Severnogo Kavkaza: obychai, pravo, nasilie (Moscow: Vostochnaia literature, 2002), pp.110–41. Beneath the naib was another layer of bureaucracy. The number of naibs and the complexity of the bureaucracy varied with time, and the geographical extent of Shamil's power, from four to thirty-three. For more on the structure of Shamil's quasi-state, see Gammer, Muslim Resistance, pp.225–47. This is outlined in article six of Shamil's nizam. Cafer Barlas, Dünü ve Bugünü ile Kafkasya Özgürlük Mücadelesi (Istanbul: İnsan Yayınları, 1999), p.199. Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom, pp.209–12. Gammer, Muslim Resistance, pp.244–5. 'Uchenie 'zikr' i ego posledovateli v Chechne i Argunskom okruge', in Sbornik svedenii kavkazskikh gortsakh, Vol.2 (Tiflis, 1869), p.4. Gammer, Muslim Resistance, p.235. For more on Kunta Hajji, see V. Kh. Akaev, Sheikh Kunta Khadzhi (Groznyi: NIIGN Chechenskoi respubliki, 1994). Paul Henze, 'Circassian Resistance to Russia', in Broxup, North Caucasus Barrier, pp.98–9. K.M. Khanbaev, 'Miuridizm v Dagestane v XIX – nachale XX vv', Islam v Dagestane (Makhachkala: Dagestanskii Ordena Druzhbyi Narodov Gosudarstvennyi Univesitet, 1994), p.35. For more on the UAM, see Michael A. Reynolds, 'The Ottoman–Russian Struggle for Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, 1908–1918: Identity, Ideology, and the Geopolitics of World Order', Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton University, 2003), pp.515–97. See, for example, 'Otkrytie 1ogo s'ezda gorskikh narodov Kavkaza', 1.5.1917, in M.D. Butaev (ed.), Soiuz ob'edinennykh gortsev Severnogo Kavkaza i Dagestana (1917–1918 gg.), Gorskaia Respublika (1918–1920 gg.), (Makhachkala: Institut istorii, arkheologii i etnografii DNTs RAN, 1994), p.26. Robert Seely, Russo-Chechen Conflict 1800–2000: A Deadly Embrace (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p.20. The single best treatment of the Transcaucasus in this period remains Firuz Kazemzadeh's The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917–1921 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951). For more on the Ottoman role in the North Caucasus in 1918, see İsmail Berkok, 'Büyük Harpte Şimalî Kafkasyadaki Faaliyetlerimiz ve 15. Fırkanın Harekâtı ve Muharabeleri', Askeri Mecmua, No.35 (Eylül, 1934); and Nâsır Yüceer, Birinci Dünya Savaşı'nda Osmanlı Ordusu'nun Azerbaycan ve Dağıstan Harekâtı (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basım Evi, 1996). 'Pis'mo diplomaticheskogo predstavitelia Gorskogo pravitel'stva G. Bammatova predsedateliu pravitel'stva A. Chermoevu o politike Germanii i Turtsii v otnoshenii Kavkaza i Rossii', 31.8.1918, in Soiuz ob'edinnennykh gortsev, p.152. Berkok, 'Büyük Harpte', p.73. Berkok, 'Büyük Harpte', p.31. Alexandre Bennigsen, 'Muslim Guerrilla Warfare in the Caucasus (1918–1928)', Central Asian Survey 2, No.1 (July 1983), pp.46, 48. Marie Broxup, 'The Last Ghazavat: The 1920–1921 Uprising', in Broxup, North Caucasus Barrier, pp.113–45. For a discussion of abrechestvo in historical context, see Bobrovnikov, Musul'mane, pp.79–97. 'Poslanie Muftiia N. Gotsinskogo k mullam i prikhozhanam Severo-Kavkazskogo Muftiata', 4.11.1917, Soiuz ob'edinennykh gortsev, p.76. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv, fond 39247, opis 1, delo 1, list'180, 'Kratkaia Ob'iasnitelnaia Zapiska', 25.4.1921. Bennigsen, 'Muslim Guerilla Warfare', p.53. See, in particular, Mustafa Butbay, Kafkasya Hatıraları, Ahmet Cevdet Canbulat (ed.) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1990), pp.23, 56, 80, 101. Broxup, 'Last Ghazavat', p.123. As Anatol Lieven observes, it is worth remembering that neither Stalin nor Lavrentii Beriia, the NKVD chief who oversaw the operation, were Russian, and that the deportations were a Soviet rather than a particularly Russian act; Lieven, Chechnya, p.319. Numerous Chechens, at times with embarrassment, have explained to the author how in the Soviet era they were unaware of even such basic norms of Islam, such as the prohibition of alcohol. Parents capable of reading Arabic often refrained from passing such knowledge to their children out of fear for themselves or their children. Soviet nationality policies arguably did serve to dilute Muslim identity vis-à-vis ethno-national identities. This can be observed in Dagestan. For a concise analysis of Islam and ethnicity in Dagestan in the post-Soviet period, see Moshe Gammer, 'Walking the Tightrope between Nationalism(s) and Islam(s): The Case of Dagestan', Central Asian Survey, 21, No.2, (2002), pp.133–42. I am using the term 'Salafi' here because that is the term that many of those fighting in Chechnya apply to themselves and their beliefs. See also Vincenzo Olivetti's polemic, Terror's Source: The Ideology of Wahhabi-Salafism and its Consequences (Birmingham, U.K.: Amadeus Books, 2002). For a vigorous polemic in defence of Salafi Islam, see Haneef James Oliver, The 'Wahhabi' Myth: Dispelling Prevalent Fallacies and the Fictitious Link with Bin Laden (n.p. Trafford Publishing, 2003). For a critique of Wahhabism written from the perspective of a practising Sunni Muslim and historian, see Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International, 2002). See also the works cited in the preceding footnote. For more on 'Wahhabism' in the former Soviet Union, see Sanobar Shermatova, 'Tak nazyvemye vakhkhabity', in D.E. Furman (ed.), Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva,. (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, 1999), pp.399–425; and V.O. Bobrovnikov, 'Mif o 'Severokavkazskom Islame': Strakhi i nadezhdy', in V.A. Mikhailova (ed.), Kavkaz i Tsentral'naia Aziia na sovremennom etape, (Moscow: Sotsium, 2003), pp.115–123. Cf. Anna Matveeva, 'The Islamist Challenge in Post-Soviet Eurasia', in Lena Jonson and Murad Esenov (eds.), Political Islam and Conflicts in Russia and Central Asia,. (Stockholm: Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 1999), pp.37–8. Whereas in 1988 in Dagestan there were just 27 mosques and not even a single madrasah, a mere ten years later there were 1670 mosques, 670 schools attached to the mosques, 25 madrasahs, and 9 higher Muslim schools. Amri Shikhsaidov, 'Islam in Dagestan', in Jonson and Esenov, Political Islam, p.60. Even assuming that some mosques or jamaats, congregations, functioned underground in the Soviet period, there is no doubt that the increase in the number of Islamic institutions is nothing less than explosive. Mikhail Roshchin, 'Fundamentalizm v Dagestane i Chechne', Otechestvennye zapiski, No.5 (2003); Enver Kisriev, Werner J. Patzelt, Ute Roericht, and Robert Bruce Ware, 'Political Islam in Dagestan', Europe-Asia Studies 55, No.2 (March 2003); See also Georgi Derluguian, 'Che Guevaras in Turbans', PONARS Working Paper (Oct. 2003). The converse is also true. Many supporters of Russian actions in Chechnya have embraced the notion that the Russians are fighting one battle in a larger, common war against militant Islam. This theme gained greater currency in the international arena following the terrorist attacks of 11 Sept. 2001. Contrary to the assertions of some, this was not a mere by-product of U.S.–Russian cooperation. For example, French officials have repeatedly cited ties to Chechnya in their investigations of radical Islamists. See Marlise Simons, 'Europeans Warn of Terror Attacks in Event of War in Iraq', New York Times, 29 Jan. 2003; Jim Boulden, 'France Opened Moussaoui File in 94', 11 Dec. 2001, at http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/12/06/gen.moussaoui.background/. For an example, see Meier, Black Earth, pp.127–33. The number of volunteers from outside the Caucasus probably never exceeded more than a few hundred. The amount of money that indigenous and foreign jihadists raised through contributions and crime in and outside Russia was sufficient, however, to give them a clear superiority over other armed groups within Chechnya. The Chechen government of Aslan Maskhadov failed to suppress them and was effectively co-opted by them. For an insider's account of the role of volunteers in Chechnya, see Aukai Collins, My Jihad (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2002). The most famous of these volunteers was the charismatic and ruthless Khattab. He was poisoned in March 2002. Examples of such literature abound; for one, see al-Sayyid Muhammad Yūnus, al-Muslimūn fīJumhūriyat al-Shāshān wa Jihāduhum fī Muqāwamat al-Ghazw al-Rūsī (Mecca: 1415[1994]) (The Muslims in the Chechen Republic and their Jihad in Resistance to the Russian Invasion). Salafi internet sites gave prominent attention to Chechnya from the mid-1990s onward. For illustrative examples of the clash between state institutions and disintegrating clan and other loyalties, see Baiev, Oath, pp.224–30; Politkovskaya, Small Corner of Hell, pp.138, 180. Hence Chechen Salafis, in total disregard for even the most basic conventions of Chechen culture, refuse to stand when their elders enter a room. The metamorphosis of Yandarbiev from a nationalist poet with a profoundly Soviet outlook into an Islamist activist who travelled through the Middle East and South Asia to establish relations with radical Islamists is worthy of further study. For his earlier views, see Zelimkhan Iandarbiev, V preddverii nezavisimosti (Groznyi: Groznenskii rabochii, 1994) and Checheniia – bitva za svobodu (L'vov: n.p., 1996). For an overview of radical in Islam in the interwar period, see Vakhit Akaev, 'Religious–Political Conflict in the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria', in Jonson and Esenov, Political Islam, pp.47–57. The Avar Bagauddin Kebedov justified the taking of hostages by citing the example of the Prophet Muhammad at the Battle of Badr. Author's interviews with members of the Congress of Peoples of Dagestan and Chechnya, Istanbul, Dec. 1999. See also Vakhit Akaev, Sufizm i Vakhkhabizm na Severnom Kavkaze (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 1999), p.10. On the phenomenon of hostage taking in Chechnya in general, see Tishkov, pp.390–423. Magommedkhan Magommedkhanov, 'Current Trends and Tensions in Dagestan and Chechnya', paper presented to the conference, 'Conflict in the Caucasus: Yesterday and Today', Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 9 May 1998. Nukhaev cites, among other examples, the Chechens' refusal to submit to Shamil's 'state sharia' as historical evidence of the innate inability of Chechen society to conform to the demands of statehood. Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, Vozvrashchenie varvarov (Moscow: Mekhk Kkhell, 2002), pp.147–8. Although Nukhaev rose to prominence as an underworld figure and not as an intellectual, his critique of the modern state and its incompatibility with Chechen socio-cultural norms is provocative and filled with insight. See also Nukhaev, Vedeno ili Vashington? (Moscow: Arktogeia-tsentr, 2001) and P. Khlebnikov Razgovor s varvarom (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2003). To be sure, Maskhadov's resort to sharia courts was in part very likely motivated by the realization that only Islamic law had a chance of attaining effective, if not popular, legitimacy among the Chechens. Following the invasion's failure, its protagonists attempted to portray it as an act of self-defence on behalf of the Salafi communities on the Dagestani–Chechen border. Interview with Adollo Ali Muhammed in the Caucasian diaspora newspaper Abreklerin Günlüğü, (Nov. 1999). Given the publicly expressed intent to unify the North Caucasus as an Islamic state and the preparations for warfare undertaken by the Congress of the Peoples of Dagestan and Chechnia prior to the invasion, this claim is at best only technically correct. On the relative stability of Dagestan, see Edward W. Walker, 'Russia's Soft Underbelly: The Stability of Instability in Dagestan', Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series, winter 1999–2000. Cf. Enver Kisriev, Werner J. Patzelt, Ute Roericht, and Robert Bruce Ware, 'Stability in the Caucasus: The Perspective from Dagestan', Problems of Post-Communism 50, No.2 (March–April 2003).