Homecoming in the Garden of the Believers

In the previous article we saw how Shamil ﵀, on the twenty-sixth of August 1859, in a noble surrender to Field Marshal Aleksandr Ivanovich Baryatinsky, brought the imamate in its formal shape to an end, how he was then conveyed by way of Tiflis, Kharkov, and Moscow to Saint Petersburg, where he was received by Tsar Alexander II in a formal audience, and how in the years that followed he would be settled in an honourable exile in the Russian provincial town of Kaluga. This final article is devoted to those ten years of exile, to his long preparation for the pilgrimage that he had regarded since his youth as a religious duty and that circumstances had not permitted him to fulfil during his imamate years, and to his definitive homecoming in 1871 at the grave of the Prophet ﷺ in the Garden of the Believers in Medina.

The years in Kaluga

Kaluga, a Russian provincial town roughly one hundred and fifty kilometres to the southwest of Moscow on the bank of the river Oka, was designated by the Russian authorities in the autumn of 1859 as a place of residence for Shamil ﵀ and his family for several reasons that in their combination made the choice of this town a logical one. It lay far enough from Saint Petersburg and Moscow to fall outside the direct observation of Russian diplomatic and public life, far enough from the Caucasus to rule out, in practical terms, any possibility of a return to the mountains, and at the same time it was a town with a reasonably developed administrative apparatus and a cultural infrastructure that could offer an honoured guest an acceptable standard of living. There Shamil ﵀ was lodged in a spacious country house placed at his disposal by the Russian state, with a generous garden, with the possibility of arranging a personal mosque in one of the outbuildings, and with a domestic staff able to see to his daily needs.

His daily regime in Kaluga, insofar as it has been preserved in the reports of his Russian escorts and in the testimonies of his family members, showed a remarkable continuity with the life he had led in Dargo and in his earlier imamate years. He rose for the fajr, he performed the five daily prayers in his personal mosque, he practised the dhikr of the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya both in silence and in group form with the companions present with him, he read for several hours each day in the Arabic texts held in his personal library, and in the afternoon and evening hours he received the visitors who over the course of his exile came in ever greater numbers from all parts of Russia, and even from abroad, to Kaluga to meet him.

The household in Kaluga

The household of Shamil ﵀ in Kaluga consisted in its composition of an extended circle of family members and associates who had followed him into exile or who over the years were reunited with him by the Russian authorities. Among the immediate family members were his wives Zaydat and Shuʿaynat with their children, his son Ghazi Muhammad, who devoted himself as his closest confidant in all public and domestic affairs, his daughters Patimat and Najibat, and at a later stage also his son Muhammad-Shefiʿ, who came over from the Caucasus to Kaluga in 1862. Alongside the immediate family, some dozens of associates were lodged in the household, among them his former secretary Hajji ʿAbbas, several officials who had worked in his direct staff during his imamate years, and the local domestic staff placed at his disposal by the Russian state for the ordinary household tasks.

Within this household Shamil ﵀, despite his outward exile, represented the spiritual and domestic authority he had held in his imamate years, and in the daily organisation of the house he maintained an order that in its strict application of the Shariʿa and in its arrangement of the day closely resembled the order that had prevailed within his personal circle during the imamate years. The five prayers were performed communally in the mosque he had arranged in one of the outbuildings, Ramadan was observed in a strict form with a shared iftar and shared tarawih prayers, and the schooling of the younger children was attended to with care by himself and by the scholars present in his circle.

The visitors in Kaluga

The nature of the visits that Shamil ﵀ received in Kaluga steadily broadened and gradually grew more varied over the ten years of his exile. In the first years the visitors were above all Russian officials, soldiers who had served in the Caucasian arm and who wished to meet in him their former adversary, and scholars who out of historical or linguistic interest wished to record his recollections of the imamate. Among these early visitors was Adolf Petrovich Berge, a Russian orientalist who in 1865 conducted an extensive series of interviews with Shamil ﵀ and with his closest associates and who in the years that followed published the results in the Acts of the Caucasian Archeographic Commission, a work that to this day forms one of the most important primary sources for the history of the imamate.

In later years the stream of visitors widened to include Ottoman diplomatic representatives, British travellers making their journey through the Russian Empire by way of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and scholars and pilgrims from the Muslim world who wished to seize the opportunity to see a man whose name had become throughout the entire umma a symbol of resistance to unbelieving domination. In all these visits the Russian authorities permitted a surprising degree of freedom, and in many cases they made interpreters and escorts available to make the conversations possible. Shamil ﵀ for his part received each of his visitors with the same dignity he had shown in his imamate years, and he spoke with each of them in a careful yet unforced manner in which he could regard his imamate years with a certain detachment without denying their spiritual meaning.

The request for the Hajj

In the spring of 1868, at the age of seventy-one, Shamil ﵀ submitted to Tsar Alexander II a formal request to be allowed to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. The request was supported by the consideration that the Hajj is a religious duty for every Muslim who possesses the physical and financial means, that he had been unable to fulfil this duty during his imamate years on account of the conditions of war, that his age had by now become such that any further delay carried the risk that he would no longer be able to accomplish the duty in his earthly life, and that he wished to express to the Tsar his gratitude for the honourable treatment he had received in his exile and that he wished gladly to bring to a definitive completion through the performance of his religious duty.

Tsar Alexander II weighed the request for several months, seeking the advice of his council of ministers and of the governor-general of the Caucasus, and he granted it in November 1868 under a number of conditions. Shamil ﵀ was to undertake the journey in the company of a Russian escort as far as Istanbul, he was to be obliged to return to Russia after the Hajj, and during his absence he was to leave a number of his family members behind in Kaluga as a guarantee of his return. Shamil ﵀ accepted these conditions, and in the spring of 1869 he began his journey with the solemn blessings of the Russian authorities and with the farewell of a large part of his family and his associates in Kaluga.

The preparation of the journey

In the months between the permission of Tsar Alexander II in November 1868 and his actual departure from Kaluga in the spring of 1869, Shamil ﵀ carried out a thorough spiritual and practical preparation for the journey that would give him, for the first time since his admission into the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya in 1814 or 1815, the possibility of visiting the places of which he had known during his imamate years only in the spiritual imagination. Spiritually, in these months he performed an extended series of personal prayers in which, in a final reflection, he surrendered his imamate years to Allah ﷻ, and he read attentively the classical works on the manasik al-Hajj of Imam an-Nawawi ﵀ and Imam Ibn Hajar al-Haytami ﵀ in order to acquaint himself down to the fine details with the correct performance of the Hajj rite. Practically, he organised his travelling party, arranged the financing of the journey through the sale of a number of his personal possessions in addition to the subsidy placed at his disposal by the Russian state, and, in an admonition to the family members who were to remain behind in Kaluga, he gave a final series of spiritual instructions which in his elder wisdom he understood might be a support to them should he not return.

From Kaluga to Istanbul

The journey led by way of Kiev, Odessa, and the Black Sea to Istanbul, where he arrived in the summer of 1869 and where he was received by Sultan Abdulaziz with an honour that in its execution matched the status of a head of state. Sultan Abdulaziz, who as the son of Sultan Mahmud II was the direct successor of the rulers with whom Shamil ﵀ had maintained correspondence during his imamate years, received him in a formal audience in the Dolmabahçe Palace, and he ordered a broader reception in the city in which Shamil ﵀ was associated with the clergy of the Hagia Sophia, in which mosque, according to tradition, he performed a prayer of thanksgiving for his long life and for the possibility granted to him in his later years of fulfilling his religious duty.

In Istanbul he stayed about three weeks awaiting the right sailing season for the crossing to Alexandria, and he used this time for extensive conversations with Ottoman scholars, for a personal meeting with the Sheikh ul-Islam, and for visits to many of the great mosques of the capital. It was, by his own later remarks to his fellow travellers, a time in which the spiritual shape of his imamate years was placed within a deeper spiritual framework, and in which, in the presence of the older Muslim world with which his own Daghestani struggle had stood in spiritual bond, he received a kind of spiritual orientation that he had had to do without in his Russian exile.

Mecca and the Hajj

From Istanbul Shamil ﵀ travelled onward by way of Alexandria and Cairo to Suez, and from there by ship across the Red Sea to Jedda, where he set foot on land in October 1869. The journey from Jedda to Mecca, a distance of about seventy kilometres over a caravan route that until then had not been fully modernised, he carried out in the company of a delegation of Ottoman escorts who had been sent to Jedda by the Sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn Muhammad, to escort him in honour to the holy city. The reception in Mecca was exceptional, for his name was known throughout the entire Muslim world and his arrival in the holy city was regarded in many Muslim circles as a spiritual event of the first order.

He performed the tawaf around the Kaʿbah in the customary form, he carried out the saʿy between Safa and Marwa, he stood at Arafa on the ninth day of Dhul Hijja in the stillness of the thousands of pilgrims who had gathered on that day from all parts of the Muslim world, and he accomplished the remaining rites of the Hajj in a spiritual bearing that was later described by his fellow travellers with reverent admiration. In the tradition handed down by his son Ghazi Muhammad, who accompanied him on this journey, it is recorded that throughout the day of Arafa he remained standing in a long silent prayer and that in that prayer he surrendered to Allah ﷻ the full course of his imamate years, with all their trials and all their victories, in an attitude of complete acceptance.

The spiritual experience of Arafa

For Shamil ﵀ personally the day of Arafa, which in the Hajj of 1869 fell in a special way upon a Friday, was a spiritual event that in his later remarks was repeatedly recalled as the summit of his life’s path. According to the tradition of his son Ghazi Muhammad and of his fellow travellers, he stood from the dhuhr until after the asr in an unbroken prayer upon the plain of Arafa, with his hands raised and his gaze fixed upon the mountain, while in his silent supplications he laid before Allah ﷻ the whole content of his imamate years and, in a final surrender, placed their outcome in His hand. He experienced, by his own later remarks, in these hours an inner peace that he had indeed known in his imamate years but that at Arafa took on a depth he had not previously held to be possible, and he regarded the day of Arafa in 1869 as the spiritual completion of a path that had begun in Gimry, had received its formal shape in Yarag, had reached its highest outward outcome in Dargo, and had received its outward working-out in Gunib.

In a conversation he held with his son Ghazi Muhammad on the evening of that day in their rented tent upon the plain of Arafa, he spoke of the certainty in which he stood, namely that everything he had accomplished in his life had been taken up into a greater spiritual reality in which the outward outcomes determined its meaning only in part, and that the Hajj, in its own completion at Arafa, had granted him the acceptance of this certainty in a way that no scholarly treatise and no personal reflection could have furnished him. The day of Arafa was, in his reading, not merely a summit of the Hajj rite but the definitive confirmation of the cause to which he had devoted his life, and it gave him in his final months the spiritual calm with which he could await his approaching death in complete peace.

The meeting with the Sharif

After the completion of the Hajj, Shamil ﵀ was received in audience by the Sharif of Mecca in his palace on the edge of the holy city. The audience was no formal affair of state, for the Sharif held no diplomatic status that would have justified him in a formal political conversation with a former imam, but it was a spiritual meeting between two men who each in his own surroundings represented the authority of the Islamic faith. The Sharif spoke with him about the Daghestani years, about the spiritual meaning of the imamate struggle for the whole Muslim world, and about the place that the name of Shamil ﵀ would retain in the tradition of resistance. Shamil ﵀ answered in his customary restrained dignity, and in the conversation he spoke of the cause of the imamate not as his personal achievement but as a work that had been entrusted to him by Allah ﷻ and that had been completed in its outward shape at the moment that Allah ﷻ had determined its completion in His wisdom.

Medina and the last chapter

After the Hajj, Shamil ﵀ asked the Ottoman authorities, and through them the Russian embassy in Istanbul, for permission to remain for a time in Medina in order to continue at the grave of the Prophet ﷺ his spiritual preparation for his return to Kaluga. The permission was granted him, and in the final quarter of 1869 he settled in a simple house near the Prophet’s Mosque, where in the months that followed he continued his daily exercises in a quiet consecrated attentiveness and where, in the immediate nearness of the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, he attained the spiritual completion of his life’s path that he had been unable to find in Kaluga.

In Medina, however, his physical strength underwent a gradual decline. The years of his imamate struggle, the wounds of Gimry and Akhulgo that had continued to glimmer in his body, and the spiritual intensity of his Hajj experience had together brought about an exhaustion which in the first months in Medina he still believed would recover with rest, but which over the course of the year 1870 passed into a more serious decline. He sent, according to what tradition records, a final request to the Russian authorities in which he asked to be allowed to die in Medina and to be buried there rather than to have to return to Kaluga in a bodily condition that would make the return journey physically impossible for him. Tsar Alexander II granted this request, and he allowed Shamil ﵀ to remain in Medina until the end of his life.

Daily life beside the Prophet’s Mosque

In the months of his stay in Medina, before his physical strength began to decline visibly in 1870, Shamil ﵀ developed a daily rhythm that in its structure mirrored the ordinary daily arrangement of an advanced Naqshbandi disciple in the immediate surroundings of the Prophet’s Mosque. He rose for the fajr and performed the prayer in the mosque in the first row of the jamaʿa, he then remained in the mosque after the morning prayer for his personal dhikr, he returned to his house for a few hours of rest and reading, and he devoted the afternoon and early evening to receiving visitors who came in ever greater numbers from all parts of the Muslim world to his place of residence to meet him. Among his visitors in Medina were pilgrims from Java who had come during the Hajj season by way of Singapore and Jedda, scholars from Egypt’s al-Azhar who wished to visit him in his final years with respectful interviews, Indian Muslims serving in the British-Indian service who travelled to Medina during their leave, and in a number of cases also Daghestanis and Chechens who had completed the years-long journey from their mountains to Medina in order to see their former imam in his last resting place.

In these meetings he spoke with each of his visitors in a manner that acknowledged the specific background of the visitor and that cast the general message of his life’s path into a form comprehensible to that visitor. To the Javanese pilgrims he spoke of the general shape of the Muslim struggle against non-Muslim colonial domination, a subject whose direct relevance they could feel in their own colonial situation. To the scholars of al-Azhar he spoke of the specific legal and spiritual questions of an imamate state under the Shariʿa, a subject in which the Egyptian scholars showed considerable interest within their own academic traditions. To the Daghestani and Chechen visitors he spoke in more confidential terms of the shape in which their communities under Russian domination could preserve their spiritual identity without falling into an immediate military confrontation that would lead only to further misery.

The definitive completion

In the first months of 1871, at the age of seventy-four, Shamil ﵀ felt his approaching death, and in a communal gathering with his family members present and with several scholars of Medina he gave his final spiritual instructions. He spoke of the wisdom of Allah ﷻ in every turn of his life, of the duty of his family members to preserve the idea of the imamate in a spiritual shape for the generations to come without seeking to continue it in an immediate military form, of the gratitude he felt for the possibility granted him of closing his earthly life in the immediate nearness of the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, and of the certainty in which he stood, namely that the cause of the true faith in Daghestan and Chechnya, despite its outward defeat, had not been extinguished in its spiritual core and would in the generations to come be taken up again after its own manner in its own shape.

He died on the fourth of Dhul Qaʿda 1287 in the Hijri reckoning, that is on the twenty-fifth of January 1871 in the Gregorian reckoning, in the house he inhabited in Medina, with the words of the Shahada upon his lips and with his family members and his closest associates gathered around him in a final prayer. By his own express wish and with the consent of the local authorities, he was buried in Jannat al-Baqi, the cemetery on the edge of Medina in which, since the time of the Prophet ﷺ, the believers of the holy city were laid to rest and in which, over the preceding thirteen centuries, many thousands of Companions ﵃, scholars, Sufis, and ordinary Muslims had found their last resting place.

Jannat al-Baqi and the legacy

The Garden of the Believers, in Arabic Jannat al-Baqi, is a plain of a few hectares on the eastern edge of Medina that has been in use as a cemetery since the time of the Prophet ﷺ and in which, among the buried, numerous Companions ﵃, wives and children of the Prophet ﷺ, and later scholars and saints have been interred. The burial of a man from Daghestan in this ground was no small honour, and it placed Shamil ﵀ within a spiritual community that had been accessible to him during his imamate years only in the spiritual imagination. His grave was, after the custom of the Garden of the Believers in the late Ottoman period, marked simply with a flat stone slab on which his name and the date of his death were recorded in Arabic, without the pomp that in other Muslim societies would have been added to a figure of his stature.

In 1925 or 1926, in the course of the upheaval in which the kingdom of Saudi Arabia came into being in its definitive form and in which the Hejaz, after several decades of Ottoman and Hashemite rule, was brought under Saudi control, the grave slabs in Jannat al-Baqi were for the most part demolished by the new authorities within the framework of a strict Wahhabi conception of the Salafi legal order, and the cemetery was transformed into a bare plain in which no individual graves were marked any longer. The grave of Shamil ﵀, like that of the Companions ﵃ and the other buried, lost its outward marking in this upheaval. Its precise location in the present-day plain of Jannat al-Baqi can no longer be determined by the visitor, but his presence in the ground of Medina remains confirmed by the spiritual tradition and is quietly commemorated by pilgrims from Daghestan and from the whole umma on their visit to the holy city.

What the outward effacement does not efface

It is a property of spiritual history, one that has arisen in many places over the course of this whole account, that its true meaning cannot be determined by the outward outcomes that were visible to the contemporary at a given moment. The sword of the soul was whetted in Yarag within a halqa of a few dozen present, it was converted in Gimry into its outward shape under a first imam whose martyrdom took place three years later in the same watchtower, it was brought by his successor Shamil ﵀ over twenty-three years of imamate into a political shape that dealt Russian power a deep military defeat, and it was at last dismantled in its outward shape in a noble surrender at Gunib and in an honourable exile in Kaluga. What was dismantled in the outward shape was not effaced in the spiritual shape. What seemed to end in the outward defeat found in the Garden of the Believers in Medina its definitive homecoming in a spiritual community whose continued existence can be disturbed by no earthly power.

For the inhabitants of Chechnya, Daghestan, and Ingushetia who in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would have to bear their fate in new forms of resistance, the name Shamil ﵀ remained a point of reference against which they could measure their own steadfastness and to which they could attune their own spiritual shape. In the Chechen wars of 1994 to 1996 and of 1999 to 2009 his name was repeatedly uttered by the Chechen population in a manner that confirmed the continuity with his nineteenth-century struggle in a contemporary shape, and in the Daghestani Muslim community his grave in Medina remains to this day a place of pilgrimage for pilgrims who see in his shape the spiritual continuation of resistance under a foreign domination. The eagle that in 1832 had risen from the ashes of Gimry found in 1871 its last resting place in the Garden of the Believers, but the shape of its flight remains in the mountains of Daghestan and Chechnya in the memory of a people that continued to recognise him as its imam.

Thus ends the story of Imam Shamil ﵀, not in a gravestone in a Medinan cemetery nor in a closed file in a Russian archive, but in a spiritual continuation that wrests itself free of every outward termination and that through the generations carries on its work in new shapes. In this cycle of nine articles we have followed the man from his birth in 1797 in the Avar village of Gimry to his burial in 1871 in the Garden of the Believers in Medina, and we have seen how the inner formation that had begun in his youth attained in the years of his imamate an outward shape that in its spiritual foundation could be assailed in its essence by no military or political trial. May Allah ﷻ be merciful to him and to his fellow fighters, and may the cause to which they devoted their lives in their time carry on in its spiritual shape in the generations that come after us.

Sources

• Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, Frank Cass (1994), pp. 294–322.
• Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, Hurst (2000), pp. 340–356.
• John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, Longmans (1908), pp. 488–502.
• Adolf Petrovich Berge, Akty sobrannye Kavkazskoyu Arkheograficheskoyu Komissiyeyu, t. XII (Tiflis, 1904), pp. 1454–1488.
• 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. 124–186.
• Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press (2008), pp. 112–134.
• Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise, John Murray (1960; new edition Sphere Books 2004), pp. 478–542.
• Werner Ende, Religion, Politik und Literatur in Saudi-Arabien: Der geistesgeschichtliche Hintergrund der heutigen religiösen und kulturpolitischen Situation, in Orient 22:3 (1981), pp. 358–414 [for the demolition of Jannat al-Baqi in 1925–1926].