Transformation into an Iron Will

In the previous article we saw how Shamil ﵀ was born in 1797 in the Avar village of Gimry, how in his earliest years he was a sickly child who was renamed from Ali to Shamil, how in his youth he displayed a fiery temperament that caused his mother Bahu-Misedu concern, and how in his thirteenth year he was sent to the scholar Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Husayni ﵀ in Chirkata for his formal education. What that article did not discuss was how this boy of a naturally ardent temperament, in the years between his thirteenth and twenty-fifth year, forged himself into the man who in 1832 would stand at the side of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in the watchtower of Gimry and who in 1834 would himself be proclaimed Imam of Dagestan and Chechnya. This forging was neither a gift of birth nor a self-evident consequence of his education, but the result of an inner labour that the sources have left to us and that is the central subject of this article.

Physical formation as spiritual discipline

Among the Avar mountain peoples there existed a tradition of bodily hardship by which young men tested and strengthened their character, a tradition that may remind the modern reader of chivalric initiation rites or of the ascetic exercises of the Eastern Christian monastic tradition, and one that was passed from father to son without much theoretical explanation as part of what an Avar man is expected to be able to endure. It included long endurance in cold rivers, the carrying of heavy loads over difficult mountain paths, sleeping in the open air in every season, and voluntary fasting outside of Ramadan, followed by labours that tested the hungry spirit. For an ordinary Avar boy these exercises were spread across his adolescent years and were not excessive in their severity. For Shamil ﵀, according to what the tradition of his fellow students and his later murīds has recorded, they became from his fourteenth or fifteenth year a daily discipline that his peers watched with astonishment and sometimes with concern.

He rose for the fajr with a regularity sustained throughout the entire year, he drank water from a metal bowl that in winter he first had to clear of ice, he walked barefoot in the first months of spring through the snow that still lay on the slopes, and he ate sparingly at a time when his body was still growing and boys of his age did not count their meals. His father Dengaw Muhammad, so the tradition tells, spoke to him about this one evening and asked whether his son was not needlessly inflicting torment upon himself, to which Shamil ﵀, in an answer that is preserved with admiration in the Avar tradition but that the modern historian must regard with the customary caution, is said to have replied that a man who cannot master his own body has no right to demand that another accept anything from him. Whether this answer has been transmitted word for word cannot be judged today, but the sentiment it expresses is written so plainly across all his later conduct that the saying undoubtedly belongs to him in spirit and in bearing.

The mastering of the temperament

More important than the physical hardships, and harder won in its results, was the mastering of the natural temperament. The boy who in his ninth or tenth year could still quickly resort to violence when a playmate wronged him in a wrestling match, and who in his twelfth year was still repeatedly admonished by his mother Bahu-Misedu over his hot-tempered reactions to small irritations, learned from his fourteenth or fifteenth year to recognize his anger in its very first stirring and to calm it through a breathing exercise, a silent dhikr formula, or a voluntary withdrawal from the situation before it could break out into a deed or a word. His fellow students in Chirkata later recounted that in these years they had repeatedly seen him fall silent in the middle of a discussion, keep silent for half a minute, and then continue in a calm voice with what he had presumably wished to say with vehemence in his first reaction.

The method he used in this was no secret of his own invention but the classical method known in the tasawwuf literature as muraqaba, the vigilant watch over one’s own soul in which the disciple observes his own inner movements as though he were an outsider and refuses to identify himself with the impulses that arise in him before he has weighed those impulses against the Shariʿa and the adab of the Prophet ﷺ. It was a method that stood at the centre of the Naqshbandi tarīqa and that was described with great precision in the works of Imam al-Ghazali ﵀ and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀, both widely available in Dagestan. What is striking about Shamil’s ﵀ application of this method is not that he had read it in a book, for many Avar students read the same books without comparable results, but that he applied it to himself with an unbending consistency, without giving up at disappointments and without growing content at first successes.

The three years in Chirkata

From roughly 1810 to 1813 Shamil ﵀ spent most of his time in Chirkata, an Avar village northwest of Gimry where Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Husayni ﵀ had his madrasa and where in these years Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ also studied, along with a number of other young men who would later play a role in the history of the imamate, among them Shaykh Yaragh, a distant relative of Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀ from the south. They were intensive years, in which the day from the morning prayer until the late evening prayer was filled by a fixed schedule of lessons, lectures, personal study, and physical labour, and in which the students, for the sake of their study, left their families and their villages behind for months at a time.

The curriculum in these years comprised the classical Arabic grammar according to Ibn Malik and al-Ajurrumi, the foundational text of Shafiʿi law in Imam al-Nawawi’s Minhaj al-Talibin, the simple works on the fundamentals of the faith by al-Sanusi and al-Iji, a first acquaintance with the fiqh commentaries of Imam Ibn Hajar al-Haytami ﵀ and the tasawwuf works of Imam al-Ghazali ﵀, in particular the Ihya ʿUlum al-Din to which, according to later testimonies, he devoted many winter nights. It was an education heavier than what was offered in most Avar village madrasas, and it required of the student a combination of memory, reasoning power, and discipline that was not present in equal measure in every student.

The reading regime of an Avar scholar

The books that Shamil ﵀ read in these years in Chirkata formed not only the subject of his formal lessons but also the material of his personal evening study, and the tradition of his fellow students records that in the late hours, when the other students were already asleep, he was often bent over his open manuscript with an oil lamp until well past midnight. This concerned not only the works his teacher Sayyid Jamal al-Din ﵀ had prescribed for him, for those were treated in the ordinary lesson hours, but also supplementary works that he sought out of his own interest in the library of the madrasa or that he had brought from Khunzakh and from Akusha further south. He read, among others, the Risala al-Qushayriyya of Imam al-Qushayri ﵀, the classical handbook on Sufi terminology and the lives of the early Sufis, and he made notes in it that have been preserved in a later copy by one of his students and in which the young Avar shows his first attempts at an independent interpretation of Sufi concepts. It was in these quiet nights in Chirkata that he learned to read the literature that in his later years as imam would form the spiritual ground on which he could fall back in the most difficult political and military decisions.

The shared silence with Ghazi Muhammad ﵀

In these years in Chirkata the friendship between Shamil ﵀ and Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ was transformed into a spiritual kinship that is recalled more than once in the hagiographic tradition. The two young men shared not only their teacher and their study books, but they developed a habit of communal silence after the evening lessons, spending hours in a corner of the madrasa courtyard or on a boulder at the edge of the village without exchanging a word, each absorbed in his own muraqaba and in his own struggle with his own soul. To outsiders this silence could seem strange, but to themselves it was the highest form of companionship they could offer each other, because it confirmed both their paths in the same direction without either of them needing to descend to words.

It is in these silent years in Chirkata, in the judgment of both Gammer and Zelkina, that the foundation was laid for the working relationship that later, from 1828, would bring forth the resistance against the Russian occupation in its definitive form. When Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ was proclaimed in that year as the first imam of Dagestan, and when Shamil ﵀ stood at his side as his closest counsellor, no further word was needed to reach an agreement about the division of responsibilities or about the general strategic line, for that agreement had not come about in a conversation but in a shared spiritual formation that over a period of fifteen years had gradually acquired its contours.

The meeting with Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀

In the year 1813 or 1814, in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, Shamil ﵀ was sent by his teacher Sayyid Jamal al-Din ﵀ to the south of Dagestan to meet the Sufi shaykh of whom by then the whole mountain region was speaking, namely Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀ from the Lezgin village of Yarag, not far from the present-day border with Azerbaijan. It was a journey of several days over difficult mountain passes, and the young Shamil undertook it in the company of several older students who knew the way and who could act as his protectors against any robbers or clan enemies.

The meeting with Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ was not, as the tradition records, a dramatic event with an immediate turnabout, but rather a gradual initiation extending over several weeks in which Shamil ﵀ attended the shaykh’s halqa, listened to his dhikr gatherings, and was initiated in personal conversations into the first levels of the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya. Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ received him not as an ordinary visitor but recognized, according to what his own students later related, in the young Avar the same spiritual aptitude he had earlier observed in Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, and he spoke with him about the strict demands of the path with a directness he would not have used for less serious visitors.

The covenant of Yarag

Toward the end of his stay in Yarag, Shamil ﵀ swore to Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ the oath by which he was received as a murīd into the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya, an oath known in the tarīqa as bayʿa and one that binds the disciple to obedience to his shaykh in matters of the soul, to the regular performance of the prescribed dhikr formulas, to a life according to the Shariʿa without concessions, and to a readiness to accept the shaykh as his direct reference in every spiritual trial. It was the oath that formed the true starting point of his path as a murīd, and the sources record that from that moment he continued his daily exercises with an even greater severity than in the years before, as though the outward sealing of his choice had imposed upon him an inner responsibility that in his earlier self-training he had indeed foreseen but had not named.

On the return journey to Chirkata, and in the years that followed, he deepened the exercises he had received from Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀, and he added to his nightly prayers the Naqshbandi dhikr he had learned in Yarag, a silent dhikr in which the names of Allah ﷻ are not spoken but directed within the heart, and in which the breathing is attuned with a steady pulsing rhythm to the inner recitation. It was a form of prayer that was invisible to the outsider, for it required no bodily movement except the silent breathing, and it could be performed while riding, while walking through the mountains, and while attending a conversation in which he himself was not expected to speak. For Shamil ﵀ it became in these years a second nature, and the continuous practice of it over a period of twenty years lay at the foundation of the inner steadfastness that his contemporaries observed with wonder in his later life.

Political Dagestan in these years

While Shamil ﵀ continued his studies in Chirkata and immersed himself in the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya, a development was unfolding in the outer world that would become of decisive importance for his later life. In 1816 General Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and a man whose reputation in Saint Petersburg stood on a level with that of the great statesmen of his time, had assumed supreme command over the Russian troops in the Caucasus. Yermolov was not an administrator but a conqueror in the old meaning of the word, and he regarded the pacification of the Caucasus as a task entrusted to him personally by the tsar and one that he would accomplish by the means of concentrated military force. His policy, documented with remarkable openness in his official correspondence with Saint Petersburg and in his orders to his subordinate commanders, amounted to the systematic destruction of the mountain villages whose inhabitants resisted, to the forced relocation of the survivors to the plains where they could be brought under Russian supervision, and to the installation of a chain of forts that would gradually cut the mountains off from the plains.

For the Avar mountain villages in the centre of Dagestan, among them Gimry and Chirkata, this meant that in the years between 1818 and 1822 they saw the Russian troops appear at a relatively short distance for the first time. It was not the main forces of Yermolov that operated in the Avar mountains proper in these years, for those concentrated above all on Chechnya and on the northern foot of the Caucasus, but rather reconnaissance detachments that pushed inland from Tarki and Tyazul-Aul, and their presence on the northern mountain passes was discussed in the Avar village mosques with growing concern. The young Shamil ﵀, who during his study breaks regularly returned from Chirkata to Gimry to visit his parents, heard these reports within the household circle and in the evening gatherings of the mosque, and he understood, as every serious Avar scholar of those years understood, that the time in which resistance could confine itself to inner formation would not continue indefinitely much longer.

The role of the scholars in a shifting politics

In the Avar villages the position of the scholars in these years was twofold and to a certain degree strained. On the one hand they were the legal advisers of the village jamaat, the expounders of the Shariʿa in matters of inheritance, marriage, and disputes between neighbours, and in this capacity they were fully embedded in the ordinary course of village life. On the other hand they developed, and in particular the scholars who had joined the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya, an increasing unease in these years with the mixed legal order that prevailed in many Avar villages, a legal order in which alongside the Shariʿa the ʿadat, or customary law, also held an important place, and in which on many points compromises were reached that according to the strict Shariʿa reading of the Naqshbandi students were not permissible. This was no matter of trifles, for the ʿadat maintained on a number of points a practice that clashed with the Shariʿa, among others in the law of blood vengeance, in the permitting of some use of araq at festive occasions, and in the treatment of women in the law of inheritance.

For the younger scholars of the Naqshbandi tarīqa, among them Shamil ﵀ and Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, this mixed legal order was a problem that aggravated the Russian threat at a deeper level, for they held that a community inwardly divided between the Shariʿa and the ʿadat would be unable to offer resistance to an outer enemy pursuing its goal in unity. The call for the purification of the legal order, and for the abolition of the ʿadat in favour of an unmixed Shariʿa, became in these years ever more explicit in the halqa of Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ and in the derived teaching circles of Shaykh Jamaluddin al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀. It would culminate in 1825 or 1826 in a first attempt at practical application, and over the course of the 1820s it would form the spiritual preparation for the imamate that would be proclaimed in 1828 under Ghazi Muhammad ﵀.

The return to Gimry and the first years as a scholar

By 1816 or 1817 Shamil ﵀ returned definitively to Gimry, not because his education was completed in the strict sense of the word, for no serious scholar ever considers his education completed, but because he was called in his village to serve alongside the imam of the village mosque as a junior scholar, and because his mother Bahu-Misedu, after three years of absence, wished to have him near her. He settled in his father’s house, he took over in part his share of the family’s smithing work, and in the mosque of Gimry he gave the first lessons to younger students who had already mastered the Quran and who now took their first steps in Arabic grammar and in Islamic law.

In these years, between 1817 and about 1825, Shamil ﵀ led a double life that outwardly was the life of a young Avar scholar from a free family serving his village with his knowledge and his handiwork, but that inwardly was the life of a murīd in the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya who continued his daily exercises undiminished and who gradually gathered around himself a group of students who let themselves be initiated into the same tarīqa. The group was small, according to the tradition no more than eight to twelve young men from Gimry and the neighbouring villages, and it gathered in the evening hours in a secluded chamber of the mosque for the communal dhikr, for the discussion of difficult passages from the tasawwuf works, and for the regular correspondence they maintained with Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ in the south.

Shamil ﵀ as a legal adviser

In the years between 1818 and 1825 Shamil ﵀ gradually acquired in Gimry and in the neighbouring villages a reputation as a legal adviser, and he was increasingly consulted by villagers in matters that had to be settled according to the Shariʿa. These involved diverse issues: a dispute between brothers over the division of a paternal inheritance in which the ʿadat prescribed a different outcome than the Shariʿa, a marriage in which the bridal gift had been reduced to a minimum by the in-laws in deviation from the fiqh rules, an alleged injustice between two neighbours over the boundaries of a hay field, and in a number of cases also more serious matters in which a blood-vengeance obligation was invoked according to the ʿadat in a manner that had no legal ground according to the Shariʿa. In all these cases Shamil ﵀ gave judgment as the Shariʿa prescribed it to him, and he refused, regardless of the social weight of those involved, to render a ruling that could not be justified by the Shafiʿi jurisprudence.

The consequences of this stance were twofold. On the one hand it made Shamil ﵀ in the village of Gimry and in the wider Avar region an unmistakable authority in matters of Islamic law, and it granted him in the wider scholarly circle of Dagestan a name that far surpassed his years. On the other hand it made him unpopular among the adherents of the ʿadat, for by his rulings he disturbed the balance of a legal order that despite its mixed character possessed its own workable logic and within which many Avar families had regulated their disputes for generations. Some village elders, in particular those who came from older lineages in which the ʿadat was regarded as a component of identity, resented that in his youthful idealism he cut across the established practice of the village. He answered their criticism not with rhetoric or with polemic but with a quiet perseverance in which he continued to give his rulings according to the Shariʿa, and he left the acceptance or the rejection of them to the conscientious choice of the parties.

The marriage to Patimat

Around 1820, at the age of twenty-three, Shamil ﵀ entered into marriage with Patimat, a woman from the neighbouring village of Untsukul who had been introduced to him by his mother Bahu-Misedu and who herself came from a pious Avar family. Patimat was his first wife, and she would bear him sons who would play a role in his later imamate, among them Jamaluddin who in 1839 at the age of three would be carried off by the Russians as a hostage in the fall of Akhulgo, and Ghazi Muhammad, named after his father’s boyhood friend, who later in the 1850s would take upon himself the leadership of Chechen districts. The Avar tradition describes Patimat as a woman of quiet devotion, who followed the austere regime of her husband in domestic life without complaint and who in the difficult years of the imamate would offer the moral foundation on which he could lean in times of outward trial.

The marriage changed Shamil’s ﵀ outward life only to a limited extent. He continued to give his lessons in the mosque, to attend to his family’s smithing work, to sustain his daily exercises in dhikr and muraqaba, and to undertake his yearly or biennial journey to Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ in the south to have his spiritual progress tested. But in his inner experience the marriage was no small matter, for it brought him the responsibility for a household, and with it the necessity of applying, in the governance of the smallest conceivable political domain, one’s own family, the Shariʿa without concessions. Whoever cannot govern the smallest cannot govern the greatest, and it was in the quiet trial of his domestic leadership that Shamil ﵀ learned the first form of the governance that he would later have to exercise on a far greater scale.

The formation completed

By the middle of the 1820s the transformation of the young Shamil was complete, in the sense that the character with which he would step in 1828 into the public arena of the resistance against the Russians was already formed on all essential points. He was twenty-five or twenty-six years old, he was physically in his full strength and exceptionally hardened, he was spiritually shaped through by a fifteen-year application of the Naqshbandi discipline, he was learned in Islamic law and in the tasawwuf literature to a level that placed him among the topmost circle of his contemporaries in Dagestan, and he was married, a father, and settled in a household in which the Shariʿa was observed without exception.

What was lacking was the outward occasion for public action, and that occasion would appear in 1828 in the form of Ghazi Muhammad’s ﵀ proclamation as first imam of Dagestan and in the ensuing war waged against the Russian Empire. To that proclamation and to the earliest stages of that war the next article will devote its attention, and to the question of how the inner formation described here was translated into its public shape without losing its original spiritual core. For whoever wishes to understand the imamate of the Caucasus from within, it is however indispensable to realize that the man who in 1834 came to stand at the forefront of the resistance was not a military improviser who learned the work in practice, but a murīd who had already conquered his inner land before he would ever raise a finger against the occupier of his outer land.

The quiet lesson of his youth

When we write about a figure such as Imam Shamil ﵀ and linger over his youth, we run the risk of passing over the years of his preparation as though they were merely a prelude to the true work that would begin in 1832 or in 1834. But the tradition of his own murīds, and the sayings he would make about his youth in his later life, suggest that he himself did not regard the years between his thirteenth and twenty-fifth year as a prelude but as the work itself, and that in the twenty-three years of his imamate that followed he only carried out in the outward what he had already acquired in the inward in the years of his youth. It is a thought that for the modern reader, accustomed to a reversed ordering in which outward achievement is valued above inner formation, can be as refreshing as it is bewildering, and it asks of the reader a brief pause to take in its full weight.

What a scholar becomes, and what a leader becomes, is in the Naqshbandi tradition not a question of talent or of opportunity alone, but above all a question of the quiet years in which no one is watching, in which the disciple is alone with himself, with his shaykh through correspondence and the spiritual bond, and with his Creator to whose names his breathing is devoted. In these quiet years the disciple builds the inner self that in the loud years of public responsibility will prove to be his only bedrock. Whoever has not built the inner self will in the loud years be shaped by the loud years instead of giving them shape himself. Whoever has built the inner self will in the loud years be able to give direction to what comes to him, however loudly it comes to him.

With this observation we close the account of Shamil’s ﵀ formation, and we turn in the next article to the first public shape that the inner formation from Yarag to Gimry to Chirkata would assume, namely the solemn oath in which Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ in 1824 or 1825 formally initiated his best student of those years as bearer of the spiritual and social authority that in the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya tarīqa was designated as the sword of the soul.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 18–32.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 162–180.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 254–270.
• Mukhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi ﵀, Bariqat al-suyuf al-Daghistaniyya fi baʿd ghazawat al-Shamiliyya, Arabic manuscript from circa 1856; Russian translation by A. M. Barabanov, Moscow (1941), pp. 23–48.
• ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, Khulasat al-tafsil ʿan ahwal al-Imam Shamil, Arabic manuscript from 1869; published by Said Shihaliev, Makhachkala (1992).
• Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan: Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum jihad-Staat, Reichert Verlag (2005), pp. 199–238.
• Said Shihaliev, “Naqshbandiyya and Murīdism in Daghestan”, in Sufism in the Caucasus (Brill, ed. M. Kemper, 2011), pp. 75–96.