His Birth

The story of the Russian advance into the Caucasus, sketched in the previous article from Mozdok in 1763 through the twenty-three years of resistance that still lay ahead for the mountain peoples, acquired in the autumn of 1797 a countervoice that was at that moment no more than the crying of a newborn child. In the Avar village of Gimry, high on the bank of the Andi Koysu, in a region where the mountains rise so steeply that the winter sun reaches the village mosque for only a few hours each day, a boy was born in the house of a free Avar smith. No one in that house suspected at the time that the child’s name, and in a later turn of fate not even the name his parents had given him, would one day cloak the whole northern Caucasus like a mantle.

The Village of Gimry and Its Setting

Gimry, pronounced in Avar as Ghimrah or Ghimry, is a settlement in the heartland of Dagestan, at roughly fourteen hundred metres altitude, in a valley enclosed by three ranges of mountains and reachable only by a single long and difficult mountain road. The river Andi Koysu, which has its source in the high mountains at the border with Chechnya, cuts itself here into a gorge so deep that, seen from above, the water is scarcely more than a white streak at the bottom of a green abyss. The houses of Gimry stood in 1797, and in part still stand today, on a natural terrace hewn from the rocks, their stone walls joined together so that the roof of one house forms the terrace of the next, and the village seen from afar resembles a stepped stack of flat stones.

For the inhabitants of such a village the outside world was, in a physical sense, not far away, for the mountain passes led to Khunzakh in the west, to Chirkata and Dargo in the north, and to Botlikh and Andi in the south, yet it was hard to reach, and the people of Gimry often spent weeks on end in their village during the winter without coming into contact with the outside world. The summer brought an entirely different measure, with traders from Tiflis and Shamakhi, with Sufi shaykhs who came from Yarag in the south to visit their disciples, with caliphate preachers from Khunzakh on their way to the mountain mosques of the Avar interior, and with the Hajj pilgrims who travelled to Sumkayt on the Caspian coast to sail from there to Baku and then overland to Baghdad and Damascus.

The economic foundation of the village was twofold and communal: on the one hand livestock, above all the sheep and goats that were driven to the higher pastures in summer and kept around the village in winter, and on the other hand the craft of smiths, tanners, weapon-makers and weavers, which the men of the village practised at the hearth during the winter months so that in spring they might bring their products to market in Khunzakh or Chirkata. Gimry was not a rich village, but neither was it a poor one, and whoever was born there belonged to a community that produced its own food, made its own clothing, administered its own justice and revered its own pious men, acknowledging no hierarchy above itself save that of Allah ﷻ and His Messenger ﷺ.

The Setting Within the Avar Khanate

Politically, Gimry lay within the sphere of influence of the Avar Khanate of Khunzakh, which had risen since the fifteenth century as a central power in Dagestan and which in the eighteenth century, through marriage ties, religious legitimation and military alliance, had gathered most of the Avar villages under its authority. The khans of Khunzakh, who traced their descent to the Arab governors appointed in Dagestan by the Umayyads in the eighth century, ruled from their citadel in Khunzakh with a mixed administration of secular law and Shariʿa, and as a rule they were not hostile toward the Shariʿa judges in the remote villages, although their actual influence in villages such as Gimry was limited to levies of livestock and of manpower in times of war.

For a boy born in Gimry in 1797, this meant that his immediate government was neither the Russian tsar in distant Saint Petersburg nor the Avar khan in the somewhat less distant Khunzakh, but the jamaʿat of his own village: the assembly of free men who gathered in the mosque to settle disputes, take decisions of war, and exercise the Shariʿa as law over their own community. It was a world that was hardly a state in the modern sense of the word, yet one whose internal coherence and spiritual discipline were the opposite of the wild disorder that later Russian publicists would make of it. The jamaʿat was a serious institution, and whoever called its decisions into question did so at peril of his life.

The Clan of the Himri

The clan into which the child was born bore the name Himri, a pronunciation variant of the place-name Gimry itself, and it belonged to the free Avar peasantry without noble title. The Himri were known in the village as skilled smiths and weapon-makers, and in the generations before 1797 they had built a reputation for forging the beloved Avar sabre, a lightly curved sword with a Damascus-steel blade that was traded throughout Dagestan and that in later years, in the hands of Imam Shamil’s ﵀ murīds, would become an unmistakable symbol. The craft was passed from father to son, and it was not regarded as a lesser occupation than herding or hunting, for a good smith was, in a community where every man carried his own weapon, an indispensable source of security.

The Father, Dengaw Muhammad

The child’s father was named Dengaw Muhammad, written in some Russian sources as Dengau Mahomet, and he was a man of middle age at the time of the birth, a respected member of the Himri clan and a smith whose work was sold in Khunzakh and Chirkata. He was, according to what tradition relates, a pious man in the moderate sense of the word, regular in his five prayers and his fasting in Ramadan, but not excessively pious in the manner of a Sufi disciple or a halqa follower, and he was not among the first in the village to join the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya in the 1820s and 1830s. His piety was the piety of the ordinary Avar peasant and craftsman, who lived his faith in the practice of his day and his week without wasting many words on it.

Dengaw Muhammad had one trait that was not unusual in Avar society but that nonetheless cast a shadow over domestic life, namely a leaning toward araq, the home-distilled brandy that was produced and consumed in the mountain villages of Dagestan in defiance of the Shariʿa prohibition. The sources record that the young Shamil, when he was about twelve or thirteen years old and already a serious student of Islamic law, confronted his father on this point, and that the conversation between father and son, in a rarely told scene from his youth, formed the turning point after which the father set aside araq for the rest of his life. It was the first, but not the last, example of a trait the boy would retain his whole life, namely an unyielding firmness where the Shariʿa was at stake, regardless of the authority of the one standing before him.

The Father’s Position in the Village

Dengaw Muhammad was not a rich man in the Avar sense, but he had income enough from his smithy to support his family, to send his son to school, and in the years of famine that struck Dagestan in 1810 and thereafter to aid his neighbours with some grain. He was not involved in the political intrigues of the Avar khans, and he was not among the delegations that were sent in these years by way of Khunzakh to the Russian administrators in Tiflis or Mozdok to negotiate over taxation, transit and military obligations. His world was Gimry, his craft, his mosque, his family, and the mountains that ringed his village, and he seems not to have had the ambition to leave that world or to rise above it.

For the boy who would later be called Shamil ﵀, this meant that he grew up in a house that combined earnestness with ordinary labour, that had not elevated faith into something to be admired apart from daily life, and that offered him from an early age the certainty that his father, despite the weakness that had troubled him on the matter of araq, was a man who allowed himself to be corrected where the Shariʿa corrected him. It was not a heroic house, but it was an honest house, and honesty is the ground on which extraordinary steadfastness may later be built.

The Mother, Bahu-Misedu

The child’s mother was named Bahu-Misedu, a name that in Avar betrays her origin in the village of Khunzakh and her kinship with the Avar nobility. She was the daughter of Pir Budach, a member of the more well-to-do Avar peasantry of Khunzakh, and she had married into Gimry in a union unusual for the time because it bridged the distance between the administrative centre of Khunzakh and the mountain village of Gimry. Her marriage to Dengaw Muhammad was not a marriage of political alliance, for she did not belong to the khanal house of Khunzakh, yet it was a marriage that gave the Himri clan in Gimry a certain rise in status and that later granted the young Shamil ﵀ access to family ties in Khunzakh which would serve him well in his later life.

Bahu-Misedu was, by what tradition has left us, a woman of deep inner piety and considerable intelligence. She read and wrote Avar in Arabic letters, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was exceptional for an Avar woman, and she had a thorough knowledge of the foundational texts of Islamic law and of the Sufi literature that circulated in Dagestan. She was her son’s first teacher in spiritual matters, and tradition attributes to her the first Qur’an lessons that the young Shamil ﵀ received in the parental home before he was sent to the maktab of the village mosque for his formal education. It was she who taught him to recite the first surahs, imparted to him the first requirements of prayer, and told him the first stories from the life of the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions ﵃.

The Pregnancy and the Dream

In Caucasian tradition, the birth of a figure such as Imam Shamil ﵀ comes with a birth legend, and the tradition set down in the first generation after his death by his murīds relates that Bahu-Misedu, during her pregnancy, had a dream in which a light shone from her belly and spread over the mountains of Dagestan and the Chechen plains as far as the distant horizon. The scholars in her family, to whom she presented this dream, interpreted it, according to tradition, as a sign that the child in her belly would become a pious man of wide spiritual radiance. Whether the dream is historical or a later addition of the hagiographic tradition can no longer be determined today with certainty, but what is certain is that such stories carry weight in Avar society, and that for the child so awaited they created an expectation he need not have voiced himself in order to know.

The birth took place in the summer of the year 1797 of the common Gregorian reckoning, or the year 1212 of the Hijra reckoning, on a date later fixed by the Russian biographers as the twenty-sixth of June, though that date is not confirmed by all the sources. It was a summer’s day on the bank of the Andi Koysu, and the mountains around Gimry were covered with the late green of the highland grasslands and the flowers of summer whose names have been handed down in Avar but which have received no mention in most Russian and European sources. The child was born in the house of Dengaw Muhammad, with the help of women from the neighbourhood and under the eye of his mother Bahu-Misedu, and, according to custom, in his first moment of breath the adhan was whispered into his right ear, so that the first sounds he would hear were the names of Allah ﷻ and of His Messenger ﷺ.

The First Name and the Change of Name

In his first years of life the child was given not the name Shamil but the name Ali, a choice that reflected his parents’ admiration for the fourth Rashidun caliph, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁, in a village of predominantly Sunni-Avar population, without their thereby falling into any Shiʿite sympathy. The name Ali was a common Muslim name in Dagestan, and Bahu-Misedu, who made this choice with her husband’s consent, chose it because in her view the boy ought to develop the qualities that tradition ascribes to Imam ʿAli ﵁: courage, knowledge of the law, and steadfastness in the truth. It was a name with a programme, and the mother who gave it knew that she had entrusted her son with a charge.

The boy named Ali was, however, a sickly child in his first years. He suffered from a succession of fevers that were not further diagnosed in the Avar terms of that time but that made his mother fear for his life, and the first two or three years of his existence brought more days spent in the sickbed than in the sunlight of the mountain pastures. Avar custom knows for such cases a ritual solution that appears in many Muslim societies and that was applied in Dagestan with considerable seriousness, namely the changing of the child’s name in the hope that the new name would leave behind the old weakness and that under the new name the child would receive a new health. The parents consulted, according to tradition, a local scholar, and the name proposed was Shamil, a name that, though unusual in Avar, has its origin in the Arabic name Shamuʾil, the Hebrew prophet Samuel ﵇.

The Meaning of the Name Shamil

The choice of the name Shamil was not arbitrary. In the Islamic naming tradition the prophet Samuel ﵇ is remembered as the prophet who, in the time before King Talut, that is Saul, led the people of Israel and who prepared the transition from the age of the judges to the age of kings, a figure therefore of spiritual authority in a time of political transition. For an Avar scholar consulted in 1799 or 1800 about the name of a sick child, this association was not far-fetched, and the name Shamil carried in its background the hope that the child, should he recover, might become a leader who in difficult times would show his people the way.

The parents accepted the name, and the old name Ali was no longer spoken in the house of Dengaw Muhammad. From that moment the boy was called Shamil, and tradition relates that his health did indeed improve soon after the change of name, that in his fourth and fifth years he stepped out of the shadow of illness, and that from his sixth year he developed a bodily strength that early won him, in the Avar mountains, the admiration of his peers. Whether the connection between the change of name and the recovery was causal or merely chronological cannot be settled today, and the modern historian will most likely regard it rather as a mere chronological coincidence. For the Avar society of that time, however, the matter was no question of mere chronology, and the thought that a change of name can effect a change of fate belonged to the basic stock of its spiritual vocabulary.

The Early Childhood Years in Gimry

After his recovery, Shamil ﵀ grew into a boy whose bodily strength far exceeded his age. The Avar sources, based partly on his own later stories to his murīds and partly on the testimonies of peers who had known him in his youth, describe a child who from his seventh or eighth year climbed the mountains around Gimry with a swiftness that astonished even the old goatherds of the village, who crossed the river Andi Koysu in its coldest months to train his physical discipline, and who in the playful wrestling matches with which the Avar boys filled their afternoons not seldom defeated opponents two or three years older. He was a child not shaped first and foremost by others, but one who shaped himself through an inner will that his mother recognised as the fulfilment of the dream she had received during her pregnancy.

He was not, as some hagiographic texts would later suggest, a solemn and calm boy from birth. Tradition records, on the contrary, that in his youth he had a hot temperament, that in conflicts with other boys he could quickly reach for violence, and that he was repeatedly admonished by his mother over his tendency to impatience. It is precisely against this background of a naturally fiery character that the later self-discipline of Shamil ﵀ becomes so remarkable, for it was not the simple continuation of an innate equanimity but the arduous victory of a will over an innate leaning to vehemence, a victory that had to be won for him day after day and year after year, and whose outcome in his youth was by no means certain.

The Friendship with Ghazi Muhammad

In the village of Gimry there had been born in 1795, two years before Shamil ﵀, another boy who along his life’s path would become his closest companion, and whose early death in 1832 on the watchtower of that same village of Gimry would determine the course of Shamil’s ﵀ own life. This boy was named Ghazi Muhammad, he too from a free Avar family, he too from an early age a student of the Qur’an and Arabic, and he too of an extraordinarily serious character. The two boys became friends in their sixth or seventh year, and they spent a great part of their youth in each other’s company, whether in the maktab of the village mosque where they had the same teacher, in the mountains where they trained their bodily strength, or in the evening hours in which they went through together the texts their teachers had assigned them.

The friendship between Shamil ﵀ and Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ was, from the first day, of a spiritual nature, not of the kind usually formed in the Avar mountains between boys of twelve or thirteen through shared hunting parties or through rivalry in horsemanship, though these elements too were not absent. What bound them was their earnestness in their studies, their dissatisfaction with the lack of religious discipline that they observed in their own village, and their shared fascination with the reports that reached them from Yarag in southern Dagestan concerning Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀ and his preaching of a renewed application of the Shariʿa. This fascination would, many years later, both of them grown, both learned, both initiated into the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya, bring them together upon the path on which resistance to the Russian Empire would take its definitive shape.

The First Teachers

The first formal teacher of Shamil ﵀, apart from his mother, was the imam of the village mosque of Gimry, a scholar whose name is not mentioned in most sources but who in Shamil’s own later testimony is remembered with gratitude. Under his guidance the young Shamil completed, in his ninth or tenth year, the memorisation of the Qur’an, an achievement that in the Avar mountains was not unusual for a child of that age but that nonetheless demonstrated the child’s ability and discipline. It was the custom that a child who had completed the Qur’an received a small celebration in the village, with gifts from the neighbours and a simple meal in the parental home, and the sources record that the celebration of Shamil’s ﵀ completion of the Qur’an was held in Gimry with no more pomp than for the other children of the village.

After his Qur’an instruction followed the study of Arabic grammar, of the foundational texts of Hanafi and Shafiʿi law (both schools of law circulated in Dagestan, though most Avar villages were Shafiʿi), and of the simple works on tasawwuf that were available in the mountain mosques. For this he was sent, in his thirteenth or fourteenth year, to the scholar Shaykh Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Husayni ﵀ in the neighbouring village of Chirkata, a scholar regarded in these years as one of the foremost Islamic authorities of Dagestan and with whom Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ likewise continued his education. The friendship between the two boys was strengthened and deepened by this shared period of study, and it developed in these years from a simple boyhood friendship into a spiritual kinship that would form the basis of their later collaboration.

The Milieu of the Dagestani Scholars

The community of scholars into which Shamil ﵀ was received in his youth was no loose assembly of mosque imams but a dense network of teachers and students that stretched across the Avar mountains, the Andi region, Chechnya and the more southerly Lezgistan, and that was held together by chains of transmission of ijazas and by regular correspondence. A student in Chirkata could, on the authority of his teacher, be given a letter of recommendation to a scholar in Karabudaghkent or in Akhty, and in turn be sent on by that scholar to a shaykh in Yarag, in a chain of spiritual and juridical transfer of authority that the modern historian would recognise as a functional university without buildings. It was a university that issued no diplomas but did issue ijazas, that knew no rectors but did know shaykhs, and whose curriculum was laid down not in an administrative regulation but in an age-old consensus about which works a serious student ought to master and in what order.

For the boy from Gimry this meant that in his education he learned not merely to read the texts but at the same time discovered the place he occupied within a far greater spiritual whole, and that in every lesson he felt the presence of a ten-century-old line that reached back to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ. It was a feeling that need not be exaggerated by any hagiographic instinct in order to remain recognisable in its historical reality, for it was experienced by every serious student in every Avar maktab of that time, and it was the cornerstone upon which the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya had built its entire pedagogy.

The Character of the Student

The teachers in Chirkata recognised in Shamil ﵀ from the first year a student of exceptional gifts, not merely in the easy aspects of memory and eloquence, though these qualities too were present in him, but above all in the aspects most important for spiritual formation, namely a capacity for self-observation and a readiness to submit to correction where his teachers commanded it of him. He asked questions his fellow students did not ask, he brought into a discussion arguments drawn from the lesser-known commentaries, and he was willing, on a misconception, to admit his error publicly without feeling his dignity thereby diminished.

His teacher Sayyid Jamal al-Din ﵀ wrote in a later letter to a fellow scholar that in his long life he had had many students but that the student from Gimry was the first in whom he suspected that the spiritual destiny was greater than the subject matter the teacher could impart to him. It was a statement repeated in the Avar scholarly circles, and one that helped bring it about that the young Shamil ﵀, in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, was introduced to the Sufi shaykh whose preaching in Yarag had by then become known throughout Dagestan, and whose name will occupy a central place in the following article.

What Lies Contained in a Birth

When a child is born into a house, the parents seldom know what fate they are entrusting to the world at that same moment. For Dengaw Muhammad and Bahu-Misedu in Gimry in 1797, their newborn son at the moment of his first cry was a sickly child named Ali, presumably pitied by the neighbours for the trouble this frail health would give the mother, and certainly not regarded by anyone in the village as fit for the role he would later play. The world into which he was born was small in its geography, for it numbered scarcely more than seven hundred households in the whole Gimry valley, but large in its spiritual reach, for it was connected with the chains of transmission of the Naqshbandi as far as Damascus, with the Hajj routes as far as Mecca, and with the juridical tradition that reached back to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ and thereby to the revelation itself.

In that small, geographically enclosed but spiritually widely connected world, in the Avar village of Gimry, on a summer’s day in 1797 that the Russian biographers would later try to fix as precisely as possible, a child was born whose life in the years that followed would be shaped by three forces: the inner force of his own will, the spiritual force of the teachers who would instruct him, and the outer force of the Russian Empire, which on the far side of the Terek was drawing up its cordon and which, in the years in which he came of age, would inexorably let its ring finger descend upon the mountains in which he was born.

The forming of his will in his youthful years, and the specific manner in which he forged his natural vehemence into the purified steadfastness with which he would later hold off the Russian war machine for twenty-three years, is the subject of the following article. There we shall follow the boy who was born in Gimry along the difficult path on which he found himself, and on which the name Shamil, chosen by his mother as a hope for leadership, began to take its first real shape.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 9–18.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 144–162.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 254–262.
• Mukhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi ﵀, Bariqat al-suyuf al-Daghistaniyya fi baʿd ghazawat al-Shamiliyya (The Flash of the Dagestani Swords in Some of Shamil’s Campaigns), Arabic manuscript from around 1856; published in Russian translation by A. M. Barabanov, Moscow (1941).
• ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, Khulasat al-tafsil ʿan ahwal al-Imam Shamil (Summary of the Account Concerning Imam Shamil), Arabic manuscript from 1869; published by Said Shihaliev, Makhachkala (1992).
• Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press (2008), pp. 76–91.
• Said Shihaliev, “Naqshbandiyya and Murīdism in Daghestan”, in Sufism in the Caucasus (Brill, ed. M. Kemper, 2011).