The Kindling of the Jihad

In the previous article we saw how, in the mosque of Yarag in the autumn of 1824 or the spring of 1825, the sword of the soul was sharpened in the solemn declaration of Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaraghi ﵀, and how in the years that followed it was carried through Dagestan by his students until, in 1828 or early 1829, it took on its outward form through the proclamation of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ as the first imam of Dagestan and Chechnya. Our subject in this article is the years between that proclamation and the siege of Gimry in October 1832, years in which the armed jihad took its earliest shape in its first skirmishes along the Russian cordon line, in which the imamate-state acquired its first legal and administrative form, in which Shamil ﵀, at the side of his friend Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, learned the practice of the leadership that in 1834 he would himself have to assume, and in which the Russian high command under General Rosen came for the first time to the realization that the tarīqa movement in Dagestan was no passing impulse but a political and military threat that demanded the full attention of Saint Petersburg.

The Proclamation in Ghimrah

In the winter of 1828 into 1829, or possibly already in the summer of 1828 as some Avar sources hold, some forty Naqshbandi scholars who in the preceding years had been formed at Yarag, at Ghazi-Ghumuq, or in the other central halqas gathered in the village of Ghimrah for a formal assembly, to seal the transition from spiritual preparation to public imamate. The place was not chosen by chance, for Ghimrah was the village of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, and its choice as the location made clear that the imamate would have its true roots not in the Lezgian south but in the Avar center, in a geographical position that through its mountainous isolation was at once naturally defensible and that through its central situation could be reached easily from all the Avar villages.

In the assembly Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ was proclaimed the first imam of Dagestan and Chechnya, in a formal oath in which the scholars present pledged him their obedience in all worldly and spiritual matters, and in which he for his part promised to introduce the Shariʿa in the territories subject to him without concessions, to abolish the ʿadat as a source of law on every point where it clashed with the Shariʿa, and to continue the jihad against Russian rule and against the Avar khans bound to that rule until the fate of the imamate should be settled by the outcome of that struggle. Shamil ﵀ was among the first in this assembly to give his bayʿa to his friend, and he was appointed by Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ as naib, that is to say as deputy authority, for the Avar villages around Gimry and Untsukul, with which he maintained the most direct ties through his birth and his years of preaching.

The Content of the Imamate Program

The program established at Ghimrah was not merely a declaration of political and military intentions but a detailed legal and administrative elaboration of the Shariʿa as it was understood in a Shafiʿi-Dagestani reading of the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya. It included the appointment of qadis in every village that ranged itself under the imamate, with the duty to render judgment solely according to the Shariʿa and no longer according to the ʿadat; the introduction of the zakat tax according to the classical rules of fiqh, with the abolition of the khan tax customary until then and with the transfer of collection to the imamate administration; the prohibition of every form of araq and of all customs that, according to the tarīqa scholars, were incompatible with the Shariʿa, among them the obligation of blood vengeance under the ʿadat in cases where it exceeded the Shariʿa rules, and the toleration of certain festivities into which non-Islamic practices had crept; and finally the duty of every male Muslim in the territories under the imamate to appear when summoned to the jihad and to gather beneath the banner of the imam.

For the Avar villages that accepted these rules, it meant a profound restructuring of their legal life and of their political ordering, a restructuring that in many cases provoked resistance among older villagers who were attached to the ʿadat as a component of their identity and who reproached the younger generation of Naqshbandi students for going too far in their zeal. For the younger among the Naqshbandi students, on the other hand, and to a certain degree also for the poorer villagers who had been disadvantaged under the old legal order, the imamate program represented the long-awaited implementation of a legal order to which the Shariʿa gave them a claim, and they received it with approval and in many cases with heartfelt relief. The tension between these two attitudes, between the adherents of the old ʿadat and the adherents of the pure Shariʿa, was a tension that would persist throughout the whole span of the imamate under Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, Hamzat Bek ﵀, and Shamil ﵀, and that would have its effect in many decisive episodes of the war.

The Administration of Shamil ﵀ in Gimry and Untsukul

For Shamil ﵀ personally, his appointment as naib for Gimry, Untsukul, and the neighboring Avar villages meant a considerable expansion of his daily responsibilities, and it placed him in a kind of administrative apprenticeship that his previous years as an individual scholar and legal adviser had not yet offered. In this new role he had to organize the collection of zakat across some dozens of villages that each had their own demographic composition and their own relationship to the imamate cause, he had to appoint qadis in villages that as yet had no Shariʿa judge and whom he therefore had to select from the local circle of scholars, and he had to coordinate the summons to jihad mobilization in his region whenever Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ resolved upon a joint action.

In Untsukul, the village of his wife Patimat and the village that in the future would repeatedly become significant for Shamil’s ﵀ personal history, he organized in 1830 or early 1831 a jamaʿat assembly in which the inhabitants formally joined the imamate and in which a local qadi was appointed who would work in close coordination with Shamil ﵀ as naib. The assembly did not pass without discussion, for several older inhabitants of Untsukul opposed what they regarded as too swift a transition from the ʿadat to the Shariʿa, but Shamil ﵀ managed, through patient explanation and through a few specific concessions in matters of lesser weight, to bring them to an acceptance that in its final form bound the jamaʿat as a whole to the imamate. The style he employed in this assembly, namely a combination of strict enforcement of the fundamental Shariʿa requirements and flexibility in matters that in his legal judgment fell under the fiqh category of permissible differences of interpretation, was the style he would develop in his later imamate into a general practice of governance.

The First Military Ventures

The armed struggle that took its earliest forms in 1829 or 1830 was, in the opening years, not a regular war against the Russian army as it would be waged in later years, but rather a succession of local skirmishes in which the imamate forces directed themselves against specific targets: against Avar khanates that had confirmed their loyalty to Russia and were now regarded by the imamate as apostates, against Russian cordon forts on the edge of the Avar mountains where the garrison was in a not yet fully reinforced state, and against specific caravans or tax collectors that supported the Russian administration in its operation. It was a kind of intensified raiding war, in which the imamate systematically strengthened its grip on the interior of Dagestan without yet daring to enter into a direct engagement with the main forces of the Russian army.

An early and characteristic episode was the Avar khanate attack at the end of 1830, in which Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, with a force of several hundred murīds and sympathetic village militias, advanced against Khunzakh to force the regent Bahu-Bika into submission to the imamate. The attack failed against the heavily fortified walls of Khunzakh and against the loyal Avar troops the regent had gathered around herself, and after several days the imamate fighters had to withdraw without having achieved the intended result. Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ regarded this failure not as a defeat but as a lesson that he would carry into his later planning, and in a speech he delivered in Gimry after the retreat he is said, according to tradition, to have declared that Allah ﷻ had deferred the victory because the imamate fighters were not yet prepared for it in every respect and because their purification required some further trial before it would be granted definitively.

The Attack on Chirka and the Russian Reaction

In the course of 1831 and the early spring of 1832 Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ broadened the operational range of his military operations as far as the Russian cordon line itself, and in these months he undertook several striking attacks on Russian posts and garrisons that disturbed the strategic balance in Dagestan and that in Saint Petersburg drew the attention of the central high command for the first time. The most sensational attack was that on the city of Kizlyar in the spring of 1831, in which an imamate detachment under Ghazi Muhammad’s ﵀ personal command entered the city in a nocturnal surprise, briefly overwhelmed the Russian garrison, plundered a number of storehouses, and then withdrew in an orderly retreat toward the mountains without the Russian troops being able to mount an effective pursuit.

The Kizlyar attack was, militarily speaking, a relatively small incident, but its psychological effect in both camps was disproportionately great. For the imamate fighters it proved that Russian power along the cordon line was not inviolable and that the imamate was capable of attacks far beyond its own core territory. For the Russian administrators it proved that the movement in Dagestan had taken on a military dimension that could no longer be pacified by purely political means, and it gave the impetus in Saint Petersburg to a revision of Caucasus strategy that in the course of 1831 and 1832 would take on its new form under General Rosen, the successor of Paskevich in the Caucasian high command.

The Expansion into Chechnya

Alongside the struggle in the Avar mountains, from 1830 onward a second front of the imamate also began to develop in the Chechen plains and mountains, an expansion that would prove of great importance for the durability and the strategic reach of the imamate and that in the following years would grow into one of the pillars of the resistance. The Chechens, a Vainakh people that had for centuries already lived on the northeastern flank of the mountain range in the eastern Caucasus, had their own long tradition of resistance to Russian advance and had in the 1780s, under Shaykh Mansur Ushurma ﵀, undertaken a first organized attempt at a spiritual and military answer to the Russian cordon strategy. The preaching of Yarag reached the Chechen villages in the late 1820s through a number of channels: through Avar students who connected themselves with Chechen students, through traveling Sufi shaykhs who journeyed from Yarag to the Chechen plains, and through the spiritual bond that already existed between the Vainakh people and the Avars by way of shared pilgrimage routes, marriage ties along the border, and the shared acceptance of the Shariʿa as a legal foundation.

A key figure in the Chechen expansion of the imamate in these first years was Avko of Chiryurt ﵀, a Chechen mufti who had received part of his education at Yarag and who in his own village in the southern Chechen mountains maintained a halqa that spread the message of Shaykh al-Yaraghi ﵀ in a Chechen reading. He was appointed in 1830 or 1831 by Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ as naib for the Chechen territories, and in the following months he organized the first imamate structures in the mountain villages between the Argun and the Sunzha. The Chechen imamate organization was in its earliest form looser than its Avar counterpart, for it rested more on the old Vainakh jamaʿat assemblies than on the stricter qadi structure that was introduced in Dagestan, but in the following years, under Shamil ﵀, it would be developed into a truly effective extension of the imamate-state that in the 1840s and 1850s would make its greatest strategic contribution.

The Adhesion of Vedeno and the Argun Valley

In the course of 1831 several Chechen villages in the mountainous southeastern corner of Chechnya, particularly in the Argun valley and in the region around Vedeno, formally joined the imamate, and they accepted the Shariʿa as their legal order and the duty of participation in the jihad. Vedeno, which in the 1840s would even become the temporary seat of the imamate under Shamil ﵀, was already in this early phase an important strategic junction on account of its situation in an enclosed mountain valley that was difficult of access for Russian troops and that in its dense forests offered the imamate fighters excellent cover. For Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ personally, the Chechen expansion brought a second great administrative responsibility, for he now had to organize the coordination between the central Avar territories and the Chechen wing, and he had to ensure that the administrative and legal lines between the two regions remained sufficiently integrated to be able to arrive at a single common response in times of crisis.

The State Form of the Imamate

While the armed struggle rolled on in these first years through its shifting episodes, there took place in the territories that had been brought under imamate sovereignty a state-forming process that in the modern literature on this episode is sometimes underestimated because the military aspect draws all the attention to itself. Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and his closest associates, among them Shamil ﵀ in his role as naib for the Gimry region, built up in the years 1829 to 1832 a rudimentary but workable administrative structure in which the Shariʿa was implemented as legal order, in which the taxes were collected and administered according to the rules of fiqh, and in which the village militias were formed into a first, still fairly untrained but coherent fighting force that in case of mobilization could be drawn together at a central gathering place within a few days.

The legal pillar of this state form was the qadi organization, in which in every village that had accepted the imamate a Shariʿa judge was appointed who administered justice in civil and criminal matters and who in appeal cases referred back to Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ himself or to a higher qadi designated by him. For Shamil ﵀ as naib of Gimry this meant that he had to organize the application of the Shariʿa in his own district, that he had to settle disputes between villagers in the last instance when the local qadi arrived at no decision, and that in all legal matters he bore the ultimate responsibility in a territory that extended from Gimry itself as far as Untsukul, Chirkata, and the neighboring Avar villages.

Life under the Shariʿa Order

For the ordinary Avar villager in a community that had accepted the imamate, the transition from the old mixed law to the pure Shariʿa order was in many respects far-reaching. The daily dealings of the people with one another were regulated in their outward form more strictly than before the introduction of the imamate: obligatory attendance at the Friday prayer was most strictly enforced in every village, open fasting in Ramadan was inexorably supervised, and absence from the five daily prayers was punished by the qadis with disciplinary measures. For those to whom these changes were in line with their own already long-standing religious life, the imamate formed a welcome legal protection that enabled them to express their piety in public without fear of dissenting fellow villagers. For those to whom these changes were experienced as a new burden, an inner tension arose between loyalty to their own community and the increasing strictness of the public legal order, a tension that in the course of the years would lead in many places to public disagreements and in a number of cases to open conflicts.

For Shamil ﵀ as naib it became, in these years, a gradual learning process to find the right calibration between the strict enforcement of the Shariʿa and the preservation of a minimal base of support in the villages for which he was responsible. He understood that too strict an enforcement in a village that in its majority still clung to the old mixed law would undermine the support for the imamate in that village and might drive the inhabitants into the arms of the loyalist Avar khans, while too lax an enforcement in a village that had already in its majority chosen for the Shariʿa would erode the gains of the tarīqa in that village. To find the right middle between these two extremes, and to find it anew in every village on the basis of the specific composition and history of that village, was the art of governance he learned in these years and that would later, in his own imamate, yield him an invaluable store of experience.

The Preaching of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀

In the personal leadership that Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ exercised in these years in Dagestan and Chechnya, his preaching in the mosques of the villages he visited played a central role. He was, by the testimony of his contemporaries and the transcripts of his Friday sermons that have been preserved, an orator of exceptional directness and force, able to bring a village community in a sermon of twenty or thirty minutes from a sober acceptance of Russian rule to a passionate allegiance to the imamate. His method was not that of the subtle theological argumentation prized in circles of scholars, for while he was indeed a scholar he was no subtle theologian, and his foremost gift lay not in developing fine distinctions but in summoning the spiritual earnestness that is potentially present in every Muslim and that can be brought to action by the right words.

He spoke much of the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions ﵃ in Mecca and Medina, of the transition from patience to struggle when the revelation called for it, and of the duty of every generation of Muslims to follow in its own time the same pattern of devotion that the first generation had exemplified in its time. He also spoke much of hell and heaven, in a terminology that the more rationalistically oriented scholars sometimes regarded as too simple but that in the mountain villages of Dagestan and Chechnya had a strong effect on the common people. And above all he spoke of sincerity, that is ikhlas, as the determining quality that decided whether or not a deed was accepted by Allah ﷻ, and he repeatedly asked his listeners to examine themselves in their inner motives before they proceeded to any outward action.

For Shamil ﵀, who accompanied him as naib in many of these sermons and who in some places also himself stepped forward to support the words of his imam with additional explanation, the method of his friend was a continual study. He saw where the directness had its full effect and where it provoked resistance that could have been avoided by a more circumspect phrasing, he saw where the simplicity of the message drew its strength and where in a specific political situation it allowed too little nuance, and he made in silence the notes that he would work into his own sermons in his own later leadership, in a manner that preserved the core of Ghazi Muhammad’s ﵀ style but would supplement it with his own more deliberate tone.

The Russian Counter-Strategy Develops

In the course of 1831 and the first half of 1832 the Russian high command under General Rosen gradually shifted its counter-strategy from a purely defensive posture along the cordon line to a more active strategy in which the imamate core in the Avar interior would be directly attacked. The occasions for this shift lay, in the first place, in the Kizlyar attack discussed above and in a number of comparable incidents, in the second place in the growing concern in Saint Petersburg over the British and Persian diplomatic presence in the region that hoped to profit from a weakening of Russian rule in the Caucasus, and in the third place in the specific nature of the imamate-state itself, which in its administrative and legal form was increasingly understood in the Russian analysis as a rival sovereignty that could no longer be accommodated in a diplomatic settlement but that had to be dismantled in its entirety.

The plan that Rosen developed in the summer of 1832 consisted of a two-stage operation in which, in a first phase, the neighboring Avar villages around Gimry would be occupied and pacified by several detachments of the Russian army, and in a second phase Gimry itself, as the effective capital and the personal village of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀, would be besieged and taken by a main force in order to decapitate the imamate-state in a single blow with the capture or death of the first imam. It was an ambitious plan that required for its execution a considerable body of troops and a long logistical preparation, and its execution would take place in the autumn of 1832 under the leadership of General Velyaminov, an experienced Caucasus officer who in the preceding years had already proven his ability in Chechnya.

General Velyaminov and the Logistical Preparations

General Aleksey Aleksandrovich Velyaminov, to whom the supreme command of the Gimry operation was entrusted, was in 1832 fifty-four years old and counted in the Russian high command as one of the ablest officers of the Caucasian arm, with extensive experience in mountain warfare against Chechen and Avar insurgents. He had already served as a young officer in the Caucasus in the 1780s and knew the logistical difficulties of a mountain campaign from his own experience. For the Gimry operation he assembled a body of troops of about ten thousand men, including two regiments of Cossacks for reconnaissance and mountain-pass guarding, four infantry battalions for the actual assault, two artillery batteries with, among other things, heavier mountain cannon that were to be carried in pieces to the mountain positions, and a considerable train of supply troops, guides, and pioneers for the construction of access roads over the most difficult passes.

The logistical preparation of the operation took up the whole summer and early autumn of 1832, and it comprised, among other things, the establishment of forward depots at Tarki and Tjazul-Aul where supplies for several weeks of warfare were stored, the recruitment of local guides who knew the specific mountain paths to Gimry and who in many cases were engaged under compulsion or under reward, and the assembly of a staff of Chechen and Avar interpreters who would be indispensable in communication with subjugated or neutral villages. The care with which this preparation was carried out, and the scale on which it took place, showed that the Russian high command now assessed the imamate threat at an entirely different level than in the years before, and it definitively refuted the earlier prevalent notion that the Avar mountain peoples were merely disorganized bandits who could be deterred by a simple punitive expedition.

The Reception of the News in Gimry

In Gimry the news of the intended Russian operation was received in the summer of 1832 through the usual channels by which the imamate kept itself informed of Russian troop movements, that is to say through spies in the Russian garrisons, through messengers from the neighboring villages that were in contact with Russian detachments, and through the official Russian communiqués issued in Tiflis that in some form also became known to the imamate leaders. Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀ thus knew, several weeks before the Russian troops set in motion, that a large operation against Gimry was being prepared, and they used these weeks for a defensive strategy that in later years would be appreciated by military historians as a combination of courage and realism.

They resolved not to defend Gimry at all costs, for they understood that a village of a few hundred houses in a valley between three mountain ranges could not, in the end, hold out against a Russian main force with artillery and unlimited supply, and they did not wish to let the imamate-state hang upon a single siege. But they did resolve to conduct a symbolic resistance in and around Gimry that would make the Russian conquest a costly price and that would give the mountain peoples a sign that the imamate fighters were prepared for resistance to the last. At the same time they laid provisions for a retreat in the event of an unavoidable fall, with secret paths through the mountains along which the imamate leaders could, in case of need, leave Gimry and continue the struggle in another part of the Avar mountains.

Toward the Siege

By the end of September 1832 the Russian detachments under Velyaminov stood in the neighboring Avar villages, and it was clear that the siege of Gimry would begin within a few weeks. The imamate had prepared its defense as well as it could in the circumstances, and the inhabitants of Gimry had not left the village but were ready to stand in the resistance alongside the imam and the naib. What would follow was the first great military confrontation between the imamate and the Russian army in the Avar mountains, a confrontation that in its outcome would bring the death of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, that would bring the near-death of Shamil ﵀, and that in the following years would usher in the second and definitively formative phase of the imamate’s history under the leadership first of Hamzat Bek ﵀ and thereafter of Shamil ﵀ himself.

The story of this confrontation, and of the remarkable manner in which Shamil ﵀ would emerge from the fall of Gimry in an escape regarded by his contemporaries as miraculous, forms the subject of the next article. In this article we have seen how the jihad passed from its spiritual preparation in Yarag to its outward form in Ghimrah, how the imamate found its administrative and legal form in the first four years, how the armed struggle took its earliest shapes in the first skirmishes and in the Kizlyar attack, and how the Russian high command came in 1832 to the decision to attack the imamate directly in its Avar core. The kindling of the jihad was complete, and the siege of Gimry would be the first great trial by fire that it would have to withstand.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 52–80.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 219–248.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 286–308.
• 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. 84–124.
• Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan: Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum jihad-Staat, Reichert Verlag (2005), pp. 294–352.
• Clemens P. Sidorko, Dschihad im Kaukasus: Antikolonialer Widerstand der Dagestaner und Tschetschenen gegen das Zarenreich (18. Jahrhundert bis 1859), Reichert Verlag (2007), pp. 204–244.
• Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press (2008), pp. 76–91.