The Eagle Rises from the Ashes of Gimry

In the previous article we saw how, in the summer and early autumn of 1832, the Russian high command under General Velyaminov completed the logistical and military preparations for the first great operation against the imamate’s heartland in the Avar mountains, and how in Gimry the imam Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and his naib Shamil ﵀ prepared their defensive plans with a combination of courage and realism, knowing that their village could not ultimately hold out against a Russian main force equipped with artillery. This article follows the siege of Gimry as it unfolded in October 1832, the final resistance in the watchtower where Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ met a martyr’s death, the near-death of Shamil ﵀ and the manner in which he escaped the Russian encirclement through what his contemporaries regarded as a miracle, and the recovery from which, in the years that followed, he would rise as an eagle ascends from the ashes to carry the struggle forward in a renewed form.

The Russian Troops in the Mountains

In the first week of October 1832 the Russian detachments under Velyaminov began systematically to occupy the mountain passes around Gimry. The first manoeuvre was directed at the southern approach to Gimry by way of the village of Iroganai, an Avar village that had already come under the imamate in 1830 and whose inhabitants, together with a small detachment of a few dozen imamate fighters, offered a first resistance to the Russian vanguard. The fight at Iroganai lasted a day and a half, and the Avar defenders, though heavily outnumbered and outgunned, managed for a short time to delay the Russian advance at the cost of a few dozen casualties on either side before withdrawing in orderly retreat into the mountains behind Gimry. Their resistance was not intended to halt the Russian advance altogether, for that was impossible given the scale of the Russian force, but rather to grant the imam Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in Gimry a few extra hours for his final preparations.

At the same time other Russian detachments were manoeuvred close to Gimry by way of the northern and eastern mountain passes, and by the tenth or eleventh of October Velyaminov had enclosed the village on three sides. The fourth side, to the west, was formed by the natural barrier of a deep river gorge across which no formal path was available for a troop movement, and the Russian scouts believed that no escape by the imamate leaders could be attempted from that quarter. As would later become clear, this was a mistaken assessment, yet under the circumstances of the moment it was not unreasonable.

The Mood in the Besieged Village

In Gimry itself, in the days before the Russian arrival, the families with their children and elderly had already been quietly evacuated to the higher villages beyond the western gorge, and the village was held by several hundred imamate fighters who had gathered for the defence under the leadership of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀. The fighting force consisted not only of Avar murīds from the immediate surroundings but also included detachments from Chechnya who had been sent under Avko of Tsjirjurt ﵀ to stand by their brothers in the Avar heartland, as well as several dozen Lezgin volunteers who over the preceding weeks had travelled to Gimry from the south to take part in the resistance.

The mood among the defenders, according to the tradition of those who could recount it after the siege, was not the mood of a desperate crowd giving itself over to its final hour, but the mood of a community preparing for a spiritual and military trial in the certainty that its cause was just and that the outcome of the fight lay in God’s hands. In the village mosque, during the evenings before the siege, the qiyam al-layl was held, the night prayer in which the defenders together called upon Allah ﷻ to grant them steadfastness in the coming ordeal, and the imam Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ spoke in a separate gathering with the fighters words that have been preserved in tradition and that set down for his men the spiritual character of the coming encounter.

The Watchtower and the Final Fight

In the centre of Gimry stood a stone watchtower that in earlier times had been raised by the Avar villagers as a refuge in the event of invasions by neighbouring tribes, and that in its construction possessed the usual form of a Caucasian mountain tower, with thick stone walls, with narrow loopholes at various heights, and with a flat stone platform on the upper storey from which, in case of last-ditch defence, resistance could be offered to the last man. On the evening of the twelfth or thirteenth of October, Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ withdrew with a small group of his closest comrades into this tower, while the greater part of his force had dispersed among the houses of Gimry for a final street battle in which the Russian vanguard would be held up as long as possible.

Shamil ﵀ found himself, in this last phase of the siege, in the tower beside his imam, together with some fifteen to twenty other fighters who are named by name in the hagiographic sources and who in these final hours made a choice that would hold out to them the likelihood of martyrdom. Among them was Said ibn Said al-Iroganai ﵀, a cousin of Shamil’s mother, along with several younger murīds from the halqa that Shamil ﵀ had built up in Gimry itself. For each of them the choice to remain in the tower was a personal profession of faith, for in the hours before the Russian assault they could still easily have escaped westward by the secret mountain paths had they wished to do so. Their presence in the tower beside their imam was not a military necessity but a spiritual declaration of loyalty.

The Russian Assault

On the morning of the seventeenth of October 1832 (according to most sources, with a few deviations in others that place the event a day or two earlier or later) Velyaminov launched the general assault on Gimry. The Russian artillery bombardment of the village had over the preceding days already reduced many houses to rubble, and in the streets of Gimry a hard and bloody fight took place in which the imamate fighters offered a house-by-house resistance that raised Russian losses considerably but that could not, in the end, hold out against the overwhelming numerical and material superiority. By the afternoon most of the houses of Gimry were in Russian hands, and the surviving imamate fighters withdrew to the watchtower in the centre of the village for their last stand.

The tower was assaulted for hours under heavy rifle fire and with the use of two mountain guns positioned at close range. The stone walls withstood the cannon fire for a long time, but by evening a breach had been driven in the outer wall at ground level, and the Russian infantry undertook a first assault through this opening. The imamate fighters within the tower threw back the attackers in a first hand-to-hand melee, and in this melee Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and Shamil ﵀ fought with a personal courage that has been preserved in the tradition of both sides, the Russian as well as the imamate.

The Martyrdom of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀

In the chaos of the fighting in and around the tower, in the evening twilight of the seventeenth of October, Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ met a martyr’s death. The traditions differ on the precise circumstances, but most agree on the following account: after the first Russian assault on the tower had been thrown back, the imam saw a second attack approaching, which he answered with a sortie in which he personally went to meet the attackers with his sword. In this sortie he was struck a mortal blow in the side by a bayonet thrust, and he died within a few minutes on the threshold of the tower, his weapon still in his hand and his face turned toward the enemy. His body was dragged back into the tower by his companions, who declared in a short solemn statement that their imam had met a martyr’s death in a battle he had waged for no earthly reason but had sustained to his last breath for the sake of Allah ﷻ and His Messenger ﷺ.

For Shamil ﵀ personally, the death of his friend, fellow student and imam was a loss that drew its deepest personal meaning from the twenty years of shared silence, shared study and shared spiritual formation they had passed through together since their childhood in Gimry. Tradition relates that in the hours after the death of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ he shed no tears in the sight of his comrades, for he understood that this was not the time when he could afford himself the luxury of public mourning, but that in the shadow of a corner of the tower he passed a brief private grief observed only by his closest companions, and that he then took up the leadership of the final defence with a resolve that surprised even his men, saying that he would no more forsake his imam in death than he had left him in life.

The Second Russian Assault

After twilight had fallen, the Russian high command resumed the assault with a fresh commitment, this time with the aim of taking the tower once and for all in a nocturnal attack. The imamate fighters within, by estimation still twelve to fifteen men after the fall of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and the losses of the first fight, organized themselves under Shamil ﵀ for a final defence in which they knew that escape by the ordinary routes was no longer possible. It was Shamil ﵀ himself, tradition relates, who at this moment called those present to a choice of courage: he asked them to hurl themselves in a joint sortie upon the Russian troops at the foot of the tower, and in this sortie either to force an opening that would offer them escape or to receive a martyr’s death that would unite them with their imam in the community of the martyrs.

The sortie that followed has grown, in the Avar tradition, into one of the most celebrated episodes of the entire Caucasian war, and it has been confirmed in its essential contours by both sources, Russian and Dagestani alike. The roughly fifteen surviving fighters, led by Shamil ﵀, leapt from the upper storey of the tower out through the driven openings, and they threw themselves in a furious melee upon the Russian infantry at the foot of the tower. In this melee most of them fell, weapons in hand and without having surrendered, and they thereby received in the imamate tradition the name of shuhada that seals their martyrdom in a struggle of faith.

The Leap of Shamil ﵀

In the midst of this melee there took place the episode that has kept its central place in all the Avar and Dagestani memory of this war, and that is no more denied in Russian historiography, though it is valued by the Russian authors with different emphases than by the Avar sources. Shamil ﵀ was gravely wounded in the melee by three or four bayonet thrusts. A first thrust struck him in the chest and pierced, as later medical examinations show, the wall of the lung. A second thrust caught him in the shoulder. A third thrust was deflected by his ribs without reaching a vital organ. A fourth thrust, if it took place, caught him in the thigh. He was, in other words, in a condition in which, by every normal expectation of his comrades present and of his Russian attackers, death would inevitably follow within a few minutes.

Yet instead of sinking, Shamil ﵀, as tradition relates and as the Russian reconnaissance reports confirm on essential points, struck down with his sword the Russian soldier who stood before him, leapt over the fallen bodies, and, in an incredible movement, thrust himself off a boulder at the edge of the watchtower with which, in a single leap, he cleared the heads of the second rank of Russian soldiers and landed on the slope below. From there, still bleeding from his wounds, he drew back through the shadows of the evening toward the western gorge, and in the course of the night and the following day, by paths he had known from his youth, he managed to reach the higher villages behind Gimry where the refugees from the evacuation had gathered.

The Image of the Leap in Avar Tradition

The leap of Shamil ﵀ from the watchtower has grown, in the Avar village tradition, into a genre of tales all its own, and in the decades that followed it was recited by travelling storytellers in the mountain mosques on feast days in a stylized form in which every detail of the event was bound to a spiritual meaning. The boulder from which he pushed off was designated in these tales as the threshold across which the imam cast himself out of the earthly encirclement into the hand of Allah ﷻ; the leap itself was compared to the leap of the companion of the Prophet ﷺ over the wall at Tabuk in the traditions of the sira; and the wounds he survived were taken as the signs by which the Creator had prepared His servant for the work to come. This stylization, though the modern historian must judge it with a certain reserve because it recasts the factual occurrence into a spiritual-typological event, itself belongs to the historical material of imamate culture, for it shows how the Avar village community took up the events of its own time into the existing spiritual structures of imagination.

The Medical and Spiritual Meaning of His Survival

In medical-historical terms the survival of Shamil ﵀ with such wounds and in such a physical condition is an exceptional event that the modern medical reader cannot recount without a certain wonder, and it has been examined with attention by several modern military historians without their arriving at a conclusive explanation. The Russian physicians who in the years that followed were able to inspect the scars of Shamil’s ﵀ wounds on the occasions when Russian emissaries were admitted to his presence confirmed in their reports the nature of the wounds and expressed their astonishment at the fact that the man who bore them had survived the ordeal.

For the imamate and for the Avar villages that received the tradition in the days and weeks that followed, the survival of Shamil ﵀ was no medical riddle but an unmistakable sign from Allah ﷻ. It was told in the mountain mosques as proof that the imamate cause was upheld by Allah ﷻ, and it strengthened the spiritual and political authority of Shamil ﵀ to a degree that had not yet been present in his earlier role as naib. He returned from Gimry not as the deputy of a fallen imam but as the one who had stood in the tower beside Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ to the end, who had accepted martyrdom as fully as his imam had received it, and whose survival had been determined by Allah ﷻ Himself for the continuation of a work that in its very endurance had received a divine meaning.

The Body of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ and the Burial of the Fallen

In the hours after the fall of the tower, while the Russian army established its final occupation of Gimry, a brief but weighty episode arose around the body of the fallen imam that has been preserved in the Avar tradition and that is confirmed in its factual contours by the Russian reports. General Velyaminov, who as commander of the operation had ordered his men to secure the imam’s body for identification and for possible transfer to Tiflis as a trophy, received word that the body had been found in the tower beside those of several other slain men, with weapons still in hand and the face turned in the direction of prayer. Velyaminov gave, in a decision later briefly explained in his official correspondence with General Rosen and not shared by all the members of his staff, the instruction to hand the body over to a delegation of local Avar elders for a proper burial according to the Islamic rites, a gesture he defended with the consideration that an honourable treatment of the fallen leader would be more likely to bring the Avar villages to an accommodation with Russian power than a more demonstrative dishonouring of his mortal remains.

The delegation of Avar elders who received the body and conveyed it to a remote spot in the mountains where it was quietly buried belonged for the most part to villages that had remained more or less aloof during the imamate period and that were for that reason seen by Velyaminov as acceptable intermediaries. They carried out the burial in the customary manner: the body was wrapped in a kafan shroud, a janazah prayer was performed by a scholar present, and it was laid provisionally to rest in a simple grave for want of an appointed place. In later years, once the imamate under Shamil ﵀ had undergone its spiritual and political recovery, the grave of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ was honoured with visits by his successors, and it became a place of pilgrimage for the murīds of the tarīqa who in the following decades preserved the history of the first imamate phase in their shared memory.

The Russian Assessment of the Operation

For Velyaminov and for the Russian high command the fall of Gimry was a military victory that in its nominal outcome answered to the aims of the operation: the imam Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ had fallen, the imamate’s village was occupied, the Avar interior had for the first time been exposed to a large Russian military intervention, and the political claims of the imamate state had been broken through at their geographic core. In the official reports to Tiflis and to Saint Petersburg the operation was presented as an important success, and General Rosen received, for his role as commander-in-chief of the Caucasian arm, a special recognition from Tsar Nicholas I that would remain a mark in his career.

Yet beneath the surface of this nominal victory a more ambivalent appraisal developed. The Russian losses during the operation were considerable, with several hundred dead and wounded, and the logistical exhaustion of the force was such that there could be no question of an immediate pursuit of the imamate in the weeks that followed. Moreover, within a few weeks of the fall of Gimry it became clear that the tarīqa movement had not been decapitated by the capture of its leaders, and that in the neighbouring villages new scholars were already at work carrying on the legacy of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ in an altered form. The escape of Shamil ﵀, though at first presented in the Russian reports as a marginal incident, drew attention in its true significance in the months that followed, when it became clear that in the mountains behind Gimry he was undergoing his recovery and that his presence formed a centre around which the resistance could organize itself anew.

The Years Between Gimry and Khunzakh

In the two years between the fall of Gimry in October 1832 and the proclamation of Shamil ﵀ as third imam of Dagestan in 1834, there fell an interval in which Hamzat Bek ﵀ acted as second imam, and in which Shamil ﵀, in gradual recovery, regained his physical strength and prepared himself anew for his role in the imamate. He spent the greater part of this time in the neighbouring village of Untsukul, where he was cared for by his wife’s family and where, in the quiet months of his recovery, he undertook a fresh beginning of his daily exercises, albeit in an adapted form that took account of his not yet fully healed wounds.

Hamzat Bek ﵀ as second imam carried on the jihad in a more aggressive form than his predecessor, and in 1834, among other things, he undertook the march on Khunzakh in which he had the Avar regent Bahu-Bika and her sons put to death in an attempt to absorb the Avar khanate definitively into the imamate. This action would cost him his own life, for a few months later he was murdered in the mosque of Khunzakh by kinsmen of the Avar khans in an act of vengeance for the killing of the regent and her sons. With his death the imamate was once again without a leader, and the Naqshbandi scholars who gathered in 1834 in the neighbouring village of Korotsj to choose a successor now turned to Shamil ﵀ as the most fully formed and most fitting candidate for the office.

The Recovery in Untsukul

In Untsukul, in the first months of his recovery, Shamil ﵀ was cared for by his wife Patimat and by several local scholars who worked in the village as physicians, combining the classical Islamic medicine of the tibb al-nabawi with the local Avar herbal medicine that had been practised in the mountain villages for generations. His lung wound, which in the first weeks kept becoming inflamed and which at several moments brought him again into mortal danger, healed at a pace that surprised the physicians and that in the imamate tradition was once more interpreted as a sign of Allah’s ﷻ protection. By the spring of 1833 he was able to ride again, and by the end of that year he had so far regained his bodily strength that he could once more take part in the daily exercises he had kept up before the fall of Gimry.

Spiritually, the interval was for Shamil ﵀ a period of deep reflection on the nature of imamate leadership and on the manner in which the work begun by Ghazi Muhammad ﵀ could be carried forward in the altered circumstances of an imamate militarily defeated but spiritually unsubdued. In these months he spent many days in seclusion, sometimes in the mosque of Untsukul, sometimes in a remote cave in the mountains behind the village, and he resisted the urging of several disciples who wished as early as 1833 to proclaim him the successor of Ghazi Muhammad ﵀, with the consideration that the tarīqa still needed a time of mourning and reflection before it could resume its work under a new leader.

The Killing of Bahu-Bika and Her Sons

The attack of Hamzat Bek ﵀ on Khunzakh in 1834, which was meant to bring about the fall of the Avar khanate in favour of the imamate, took place in an episode that to this day is remembered in the Avar tradition, in both its execution and its aftermath, with a certain unease. Hamzat Bek ﵀ marched with several hundred imamate fighters against Khunzakh in August of that year, and through a combination of military threat and political negotiation he managed to bring the regent Bahu-Bika and her two sons, Abu-Sultan and Nutsal-Khan, to a meeting in the citadel of Khunzakh at which the future of the khanate was to be discussed. In the course of this meeting, as tradition relates and as Hamzat Bek’s own report to his fellow sheikhs confirms, the regent and her sons were killed by his men, in a manner presented in the Avar sources as sudden and in the imamate reports as a necessary military action against persistent Russian loyalism.

The killing of the regent and her sons, though it brought Hamzat Bek ﵀ his immediate aim of an Avar khanate takeover, brought him into a deeper conflict with the Avar noble clans who now received a duty of blood vengeance that, by their own code of honour, had to be carried out. A few months later, in September or October 1834, he was shot down in the mosque of Khunzakh by two young Avars, Osman and Hadji Murad, in an act of vengeance for the slain regent. He died on the spot, and the imamate was once again without a leader in a spiritually and politically precarious situation in which the choice of a successor was necessary yet at the same time extremely delicate.

The Eagle Rises Again

When Shamil ﵀ in the autumn of 1834 received in Korotsj the bayʿa of the scholars present and saw himself installed, in his thirty-ninth year of life, in the office of imam, the form in which he first appeared publicly was not that of a subject promoted to leader by his predecessors, but that of a man who had risen in a new form from the ashes of Gimry and whose work stood in a spiritual bond with his fallen imam Ghazi Muhammad ﵀. In his address of acceptance he spoke of the duty he had taken over from his predecessors, of the necessity that the community not let itself be discouraged in the act of resistance by personal loss, and of the certainty in which he stood, namely that the imamate cause was a cause borne by Allah ﷻ and one that in its progress could not be definitively stopped by any earthly power.

The address was delivered in the Avar mountain villages as a new formation, and the name eagle that from this moment onward was attached to Shamil ﵀ in the tradition acquired its meaning in this renewed appearance. The eagle of Gimry had risen from its ashes, and the struggle would now continue in a third form under the leadership of a man whose survival in the watchtower had already become in itself the proof of his appointment to the office.

To his years as imam, which began in 1834 and which in 1859 would find their provisional outcome in his surrender at Gunib, the next article will devote its attention. In this article we have seen how the fall of Gimry was not the end of the imamate but its transition to its definitively formative phase, and how Shamil ﵀, in a leap through the Russian encirclement, received the channel in which his own twenty-three years of leading the resistance would take their spiritual form.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 80–110.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 248–272.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 308–334.
• Mukhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi ﵀, Bariqat al-suyuf al-Daghistaniyya fi baʿd ghazawat al-Shamiliyya, Arabic manuscript from c. 1856; Russian translation by A. M. Barabanov, Moscow (1941), pp. 124–162.
• ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ghazi-Ghumuqi ﵀, Khulasat al-tafsil ʿan ahwal al-Imam Shamil, Arabic manuscript from 1869; edited by Said Shihaliev, Makhachkala (1992), pp. 23–56.
• Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan: Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum jihad-Staat, Reichert Verlag (2005), pp. 352–402.
• Clemens P. Sidorko, Dschihad im Kaukasus: Antikolonialer Widerstand der Dagestaner und Tschetschenen gegen das Zarenreich (18. Jahrhundert bis 1859), Reichert Verlag (2007), pp. 244–284.