The Sword of the Soul

In the previous article we followed the inner formation of Shamil ﵀ in his youth at Gimry and in his years of study at Chirkata, and we saw how, by the middle of the 1820s, he had grown into a murīd of the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya whose character, learning, and physical discipline had earned him a place of his own in the Avar world. What remained unspoken in that article was the manner in which this personal formation, in the years between 1823 and 1828, was absorbed into a larger spiritual and political movement that welled up out of southern Dagestan, and that at its provisional culmination in the mosque of Yarag would give rise to a declaration which, in the decades that followed, would be repeated across the whole of the northern Caucasus as the sealing word in which the inner jihad was for the first time openly bound to its outer form. To this movement, and to the place that Shamil ﵀ occupied within it as the quiet companion beside Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ and beside his friend Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, this article is devoted.

Yarag and its spiritual landscape

Yarag, in Lezgian Jaraagh, is a village in the far south of present-day Dagestan, some fifteen kilometres north of the modern Russian-Azerbaijani border, in a region that in the early nineteenth century was geographically and culturally more bound to Lezgistan and to Shirvan than to the Avar mountains of central Dagestan. The Gurigan-Chai river, which in its upper course flows between low mountain ranges and which in its middle course forms a fertile valley, was the lifeline of the village, and Lezgian was the language spoken there, although the scholars of Yarag, as everywhere in the Muslim world of that time, conducted their study and their correspondence in Arabic and in Persian and Turkish wherever they needed those languages for their trade or for their pilgrimages.

Over the first two decades of the nineteenth century the village of Yarag had become a spiritual centre through the presence and the preaching of Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀, a scholar from a free Lezgian family whose father had been a respected imam in the village and whose grandfather, according to tradition, belonged among the first pupils of the Naqshbandi in late seventeenth-century Dagestan. In his youth Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ had studied in Baghdad, where he had been drawn to the halqa of Mawlānā Khālid al-Baghdādī ﵀ and where he had spent many years in tarīqa exposition and fiqh study. When he returned to Yarag around 1810, he brought with him an ijaza that gave him the right to teach the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya in his region, and at the mosque of his village he founded a halqa that in the years afterward would draw an increasing number of pupils from across Dagestan and from northern Azerbaijan.

The preaching of Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀

The preaching with which Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ addressed his hearers from about 1820 onward was no new teaching in the sense of a break with the Naqshbandi tradition, for the elements he emphasised were all present in the works of Mawlānā Khālid ﵀ and in the older works of the Baghdadi branch of the tarīqa. What he did, however, was to apply these elements with a greater directness to the Dagestani situation, and he refused to soften their spiritual consequences for the community with the sort of rhetorical caution by which other scholars in the mountains sought to ward off the mortal danger of too open an exposition. He held that a Muslim whose land lies under an unbelieving rule has two duties that must not be interchanged: first the hijra, the emigration to a territory over which the Shariʿa still holds sway, and second, if the hijra proves for whatever reason unfeasible, the jihad in its full form, that is to say also in its outward and armed form against the occupier.

For the Lezgian villages around Yarag, and for the Avar villages to which his message was carried over the course of the 1820s by his pupils, this preaching was shocking in its implications, for it left no room for the half-hearted status quo in which many Dagestani communities lived in these years. Most villages acknowledged, for practical reasons, a nominal Russian suzerainty that expressed itself in the payment of a modest tax and in the acceptance of a no-war policy, and in return they had retained a de facto autonomy in which their jamaat managed its own affairs and the Shariʿa was applied in its mixed form together with the ʿadat. Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ rejected this status quo as an unacceptable compromise, and he called upon his hearers to make a choice for which they would have to answer in their own consciences before Allah ﷻ.

The covenant of Yarag in 1824

In the autumn of 1824, or possibly in the spring of 1825, Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ convened in his mosque a gathering of the foremost pupils he had formed over the preceding years and of the scholars from neighbouring villages who sympathised with his preaching. It was not a formal ulama assembly in the sense of a state administrative institution, for no such institution existed, but it was a halqa gathering of exceptional scope and weight in which the spiritual direction of the tarīqa in Dagestan for the coming years would be laid down. The sources differ on the exact number of those present, with figures ranging from forty to a hundred and fifty persons, and they differ too on the exact sequence of the events that unfolded during the gathering, but they agree on the main points.

Among those present were Sheikh Jamaluddin al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, at that moment the most advanced Avar pupil of al-Yaraghi and the one who by then maintained his own halqa in his home village of Ghazi-Ghumuq, as well as Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ from Gimry, who in the preceding years had repeatedly travelled to Yarag and who was received by al-Yaraghi as the younger brother in the tarīqa, and Shamil ﵀, who had accompanied his friend Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ on this journey and who was accepted in the halqa as a younger but already recognised murīd. Beside them were scholars from Akusha, from Andi, from Chirkata, and from several Lezgian and Tabasaran villages, as well as a number of younger students who in the preceding years had studied under al-Yaraghi in Yarag and who now, as formed murīds, had returned to the gathering to share in its resolutions.

The declaration and the oath

At this gathering Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ spoke of a time that had already been prepared in his Friday sermons over the three preceding years, but which he now pronounced in its full reach before the company he had assembled around himself. He said, according to the tradition recorded with some fullness by Mukhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi ﵀ in his Bariqat al-suyuf al-Daghistaniyya, that the time had come when the inner jihad had to be carried through to its outward completion, that the Shariʿa in its full form had to be restored in the Dagestani villages, that the ʿadat as a source of law had to be abolished on every point where it collided with the Shariʿa, and that the community which took this completion upon itself thereby placed itself in a state of open resistance to the Russian occupation that it could no longer disavow without surrendering its very spiritual claims.

At the close of his address he asked those present for the bayʿa, that is to say the oath, by which they bound themselves to him and to his pupils in the chain of the tarīqa to carry out what he had formulated, and by which they accepted in particular the duty of defending the Shariʿa in their own villages against the ʿadat, of emigrating to a Shariʿa territory if their village proved unwilling to do so, and of taking part in the armed jihad as soon as it should be proclaimed by a competent imam. The oath was taken by those present, and it was pronounced by Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ as the first of the Avar scholars and by Shamil ﵀ as the second, in an order that, to later reading, already announced the hierarchy between the two friends that in 1828 would receive its formal confirmation in the proclamation of the first imamate.

Sheikh Jamaluddin al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀ as a bridge

A figure who played a key role in this development and who remains in the shadows of most popular accounts of Imam Shamil’s ﵀ time was Sheikh Jamaluddin al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, pupil of Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ and himself resident in Ghazi-Ghumuq in central Dagestan. He was the most advanced of the Avar second generation of the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya in Dagestan, and between 1820 and 1828 he fulfilled the indispensable bridging function between the Lezgian south of the tarīqa, where Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ held his halqa, and the Avar centre, where Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀ had their pupils. It was through Sheikh Jamaluddin ﵀, as a rule, that instructions and spiritual messages were carried from Yarag to Gimry, and through him too that the Avar pupils sent their questions and their reports of progress to Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀.

For Shamil ﵀ personally, Sheikh Jamaluddin ﵀ became in these years a second teacher beside Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀, and he received from him further instruction in the Naqshbandi discipline that was not always given in Yarag in the same degree of detail. The spiritual bond that arose in these years between the young Avar from Gimry and the scholar from Ghazi-Ghumuq would in later years take an unexpected further turn, for in 1841 Shamil ﵀ as imam would marry the daughter of Sheikh Jamaluddin ﵀, a marriage that would seal the spiritual kinship between the two men in a familial bond as well and that would assume an important political and spiritual form within the imamate. But in 1825 or 1826 those developments still lay far in the future, and it was to Sheikh Jamaluddin ﵀ in his role of teacher and of bridge that Shamil ﵀ was most indebted in these years.

The sword of the soul and the sword of the body

The term that later sources applied to this gathering, namely the sword of the soul, has its origin in a turn of phrase that Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ is said to have used during his address and that is preserved in the tradition of his pupils. He is said to have declared that up to that point the Naqshbandi pupil had sharpened only the sword of the soul, the inner sword with which one’s own desires are combated and with which the heart is purified of bidʿa and of worldly attachment, and that the time had come when this inner sword had to acquire its outward counterpart in the sword of the body, the visible sword with which the occupier would be driven from the land. The two swords, in his imagery, were not two different struggles but two forms of the same struggle, and they could not be separated from one another without both losing their real meaning.

For the modern reader, who is inclined to pull the two swords apart and to see in them two different kinds of religion or religious experience, this equation is at first sight difficult to accept, for it runs against a long Western tradition in which spirituality and worldly power are precisely held to be kept apart. But for Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ and his pupils the equation was no philosophical thesis but an exposition of the way in which the Prophet ﷺ himself had lived out his message, for the transition from the Meccan phase, in which the believers were called to inner patience and outward patience, to the Medinan phase, in which the believers were called to inner patience and outward struggle alike, was in his reading a historical precedent that applied in the Dagestani situation of 1825 in exactly the same manner. Whoever rejected this exposition rejected, in al-Yaraghi’s ﵀ judgement, the prophetic exemplariness itself, and whoever accepted it had no other path left than to practise both swords within himself.

The compass of the murīd

For Shamil ﵀, who heard this address in the twenty-seventh year of his life and who summarised it in his notes with the sober clarity that already characterised his writing style in these years, the equation of the two swords was no surprise, for it was already present in his personal meditation of the preceding years, but it was nonetheless a formalisation of what until then had ripened silently within him. Through its public utterance in the mosque of Yarag it became a reference point by which he would be able to orient himself again and again in the years that followed, and in the difficult decisions he would have to take from 1828 onward as adviser to Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and from 1834 as imam himself, he would repeatedly seek out this reference point in order to determine whether his intended actions still fell within the compass that had been set at Yarag.

It is telling in this connection that Shamil ﵀ in his later letters and in his remarks to his closest associates, above all in the years when the imamate underwent its heaviest trials, regularly referred back to the covenant of Yarag as to the founding moment of the resistance. For him the proclamation of the imamate in 1828 and his own appointment in 1834 were not events standing on their own, but the practical workings-out of what had been established in its theoretical form in the mosque of Yarag in 1824 or 1825. It was thus not the armed struggle that legitimated itself, but the spiritual declaration that legitimated it, and the legitimate nature of the armed resistance depended, in his conception, entirely on its continuity with the covenant that had been concluded at Yarag.

The Russian reaction and the first persecutions

The gathering at Yarag did not go unnoticed by the Russian administrators in the Caucasus. In the years that followed, the generals in Tiflis and in Tarki received from their scouts and from their local informants reports of a spiritual movement in southern Dagestan that was rousing the population against Russian suzerainty, and they understood, although they did not fully see through the tarīqa structure itself, that the source of the movement lay in Yarag and that its chief propagator was the local sheikh. In 1827, on the order of General Yermolov’s successor General Paskevich, Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ was arrested by a Russian detachment and transferred to Tiflis, where he was held for a time in pre-trial detention pending a trial that the Russian administrators believed they could conduct against him for incitement and conspiracy against the tsar.

The arrest, however, proved a mistake of Russian strategy. During his interrogation Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ declared, with a directness that surprised the Russian interrogators, that he did indeed proclaim the teaching that was put to him, that he regarded that teaching as correct, that he had forced no one to it by violence, and that he accepted every consequence it might bring him in this life, because his real responsibility lay not with the Russian state but with the Lord Whose right he expounded to the best of his ability. The interrogators could catch him in no identifiable violation of Russian law, for he had wielded no weapons and organised no rebellion in the Russian legal sense of the word, and neither could they turn him from his teaching by confronting him with its consequences. After some months of detention he was released and sent back to his village, in a decision that Paskevich defended as a model of Russian clemency but that the mountain peoples interpreted as proof that Russian power had no answer to the spiritual claim that had been made.

The judgement of the Russian administrators

In the Russian archives that became accessible to the Western historian in the Soviet period and afterward, in particular in the holdings of the Military-Historical Archive in Moscow and in the published correspondence of the Caucasian commands, a considerable deposit of this episode has been preserved that allows the reaction of the Russian administrators to be reconstructed with some precision. What is striking in these reports is that the Russian generals did not understand the tarīqa structure of the movement and tried again and again to frame it in the terms with which they had analysed the familiar forms of political conspiracy in Poland, in Ukraine, and in the Crimea. They saw Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ as the instigator of a rebellion and searched for his accomplices and his financiers, whereas the real structure of the movement was not conspiratorial but pedagogical and spiritual, and its real channels of dissemination were not the secretive messengers of an underground organisation but the ordinary pupil-teacher relations of a Sufi tarīqa that took place in the open space of the mountain mosques. This conceptual mismatch between Russian analysis and Dagestani reality would continue to mark Russian strategy throughout the whole war that followed, and it is part of the reason why the Russian administrators needed so long to devise an effective counter-strategy.

The effect on the tarīqa

For the tarīqa the arrest and release of its sheikh was an event with paradoxical consequences. On the one hand it revealed the attention the Russian administrators paid to the movement, and it made clear that the time in which the movement could do its preparatory work in silence was drawing to a close. On the other hand it strengthened the authority of Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀ immeasurably throughout Dagestan, for his refusal to abjure his teaching under Russian pressure was discussed and admired at length in every mountain mosque, and it cast a spiritual aureole over him that only strengthened his direct pupils, among them Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀, in their conviction that the path they had chosen in 1824 or 1825 was the right path.

In the two years between 1826 and 1828 the movement spread, despite the Russian pressure, at a pace the Russian administrators themselves had not foreseen. Halqas after the model of Yarag were founded in Ghazi-Ghumuq under Sheikh Jamaluddin ﵀, in Gimry under Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, in Akusha under a group of younger scholars who had studied in Yarag, and in many smaller villages by means of pupils who had been sent out in twos and threes from the central halqas to establish the movement in new communities. By the time the first imamate in the Ghimrah style was proclaimed in 1828, the movement had at its disposal a network of several hundred formed murīds and a far larger circle of sympathising villagers who in their hearts already stood on the side of the tarīqa without necessarily having taken the formal bayʿa.

The role of Shamil ﵀ in these years

Throughout all these developments, from the covenant of Yarag in 1824 to the arrest of al-Yaraghi ﵀ in 1827 to the spread of the tarīqa in 1826 and 1827, Shamil ﵀, unlike his friend Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, kept himself remarkably in the background of public life. He travelled to Yarag and he took part in the halqa gatherings, he gave his lessons in Gimry to his own small circle of pupils, he administered justice in legal matters according to the Shariʿa as he had already done in the preceding years, and in his personal life he continued his daily exercises undiminished, but he did not step to the fore in the way that Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ grew in these years into a recognisable public figure in the Avar region.

The reason for this background role was twofold. On the one hand Shamil ﵀ acknowledged in Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ his superior in eloquence and in public presence, and he held it more fitting that his friend should take precedence in public action while he himself confined himself to the role of close adviser and quiet companion. On the other hand he regarded, according to what his later remarks to his murīds suggest, these years as a phase in which his own formation still required further deepening, and he was not prepared to take public responsibility upon himself so long as, in his own judgement, he was not yet fully prepared inwardly for it. It was, in short, no evasion of responsibility but a sober self-assessment that kept him in these years beside Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in a quiet second place.

The Avar khans in the difficult triangle

At the same time a tension developed in these years between the tarīqa and the Avar khans of Khunzakh that would grow into an open conflict over the course of the 1830s. The khans of Khunzakh, in these years under the leadership of Khan Sultan-Ahmed and later of his widow Bahu-Bika, who acted as regent for her under-age son Abu-Sultan, found themselves in a politically precarious position. On the one hand their title was formally bound to an oath of loyalty to the Russian tsar, an oath their forefathers had taken in exchange for recognition of their hereditary rule and for the provision of Russian protection against Persian and local Lezgian claims. On the other hand they were rulers of a predominantly Muslim population that in the 1820s was increasingly touched by the preaching of Yarag, and they could maintain their position in their own villages only by taking some account of the spiritual aspirations of their subjects.

The position was, in short, a triangle in which it became impossible for the khans to serve its three corners at once. Loyalty to the tsar meant enmity with the tarīqa. Loyalty to the tarīqa meant rebellion against the tsar. A neutral middle course, in which the khans tried both to retain Russian protection and not to frustrate fully the spiritual aspirations of their subjects, proved in practice untenable, because neither of the two sides was prepared to accept the other side in the triangle. When Khan Sultan-Ahmed died in 1823 and his widow Bahu-Bika took over the regency, she chose the first option and confirmed her loyalty to Saint Petersburg, a choice that in the proclamation of the imamate in 1828 would immediately bring her into enmity with Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and that in 1834 would give rise to the violent episode in Khunzakh in which she and her two sons would be killed by followers of Hamzat Bek ﵀. We shall give these events detailed attention in a later article, but it is already of importance here to establish that the triangle in which the Avar khans found themselves already carried in 1825 a tension that the younger scholars in the tarīqa had foreseen and to which they had attuned their strategic thinking.

The quiet apprenticeship for the public arena

It is in these years that the quiet habits Shamil ﵀ had developed in his youth began to bear fruit in a form that remained invisible to the outside world but that was of inestimable value to his own formation. He observed Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in his public action, he saw where his friend succeeded with his eloquence and where his eloquence led him in difficult political situations to hasty speech, he saw how his friend won hearts through his directness but also how his directness brought him into tension with village elders who had wished for more caution. From these observations Shamil ﵀ silently drew the lessons that he would apply in his later imamate, namely that the imam of a community under continual trial must temper his eloquence with patience, must moderate his directness with diplomacy, and must arm his courage with the deliberation that weighs the consequences of every utterance before it is spoken.

He learned, in short, in the years between 1824 and 1828, not only from the works of Imam al-Ghazali ﵀ and from the instructions of Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀, but above all from the practice of his friend Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, what it means to be a spiritual leader of a community under siege, and what form of self-mastery such a leader had to show in all circumstances so as not to take rash decisions that could cost the community its members. When in 1834 the fate of the imamate would be laid in his hands after the death of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in Gimry and the murder of Hamzat Bek ﵀ in Khunzakh, Shamil ﵀ would not begin his task as a novice but as a man who in ten years of observation and silence had already prepared his office in all its essential traits.

Toward the first proclamation

By the end of the year 1828 the spiritual and political preparation that had begun at Yarag had come to its inner ripeness. Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀, back in his village after his Russian detention, gave in that year or in the early spring of 1829 his formal assent to the plans that his pupils in Ghazi-Ghumuq and in Gimry had prepared, and, with the agreement of his closest fellow sheikhs, he designated Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ as the man who would act as the first imam of Dagestan and Chechnya. The proclamation itself would take place in Ghimrah, that is Gimry, in the village therefore of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ himself and of his closest companion Shamil ﵀, and it would mark the passage from the sword of the soul to the sword that was taken up in its outward form as well.

This proclamation, and the years in which it was worked out in the first skirmishes with the Russian troops, are the subject of the following article. In this article we have seen how the sword of the soul was sharpened at Yarag, how it was laid before a circle of some dozens of scholars in the mosque of Sheikh al-Yaraghi ﵀, and how in the years that followed it was carried through the Dagestani mountains by his pupils, among them Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀, until in 1828 or 1829 it issued in its outward counterpart. What was declared at Yarag was not the content of a new doctrine but the ultimate pronouncement of an old doctrine that in its practical application would now assume the form in which the world would come to know it.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 32–52.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 180–219.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 270–286.
• Mukhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi ﵀, Bariqat al-suyuf al-Daghistaniyya fi baʿd ghazawat al-Shamiliyya, Arabic manuscript from around 1856; Russian translation by A. M. Barabanov, Moscow (1941), pp. 49–84.
• Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan: Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum jihad-Staat, Reichert Verlag (2005), pp. 239–294.
• Clemens P. Sidorko, Dschihad im Kaukasus: Antikolonialer Widerstand der Dagestaner und Tschetschenen gegen das Zarenreich (18. Jahrhundert bis 1859), Reichert Verlag (2007), pp. 168–204.
• Said Shihaliev, “Sjeik Muhammad al-Yaraghi en de Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya”, in Sufism in the Caucasus (Brill, ed. M. Kemper, 2011), pp. 97–122.