The Murid Wars anyone?

Great Debates
1

I am reading a book about Shamyl the Avar, a Imam from Daghestan in the Caucasus mountains, who led a twenty year battle against the Russian army in the early 1800’s. He was able to unite warring moslem tribes together under ‘shariat law’ to fight off the imperialistic advances of “Holy Mother Russia”. The book is called Sabres of Paradise by Leslie Branch and I cannot help but see a lot of parallels to what is going on the world today with the war in Iraq. Not comparing USA to Russia, but it is apparent the level of fanaticism that the Murid warriors felt is akin to what we are witnessing today.

I can’t help but wonder about our foreign policy experts and their experience with diplomatic relations in this region of the world, was there anything to be learned by the western world about the Murid Wars that we could apply to the escalating situation in Iraq?

TIAA for your thoughts or comments.

2

There are significant differences between the two. Huge differences. I know in your mind is the stereotype of all Muslims as fanatical murderous Saracen hordes, the enemy of the West, but you will need to discard that stereotype to understand the major differences between groups of Muslims. When you use the loaded word “fanaticism” you stop seeing Muslims as human beings like you or me with homes and families and cast them in the role of monsters or thugs.

Shamil was a leader of the Naqshbandiyah Sufi order. Their motivation was to expel the foreign invaders (Russia) from their homeland. The Sufi orders, especially in certain mountainous areas like the Caucasus and the Zagros, practiced mystical techniques of mastery over self which made them more fearless and effective warriors. Techniques of breathing, chanting, visualization, meditation, mental concentration, to toughen the spirit, remove the fear of death, and gain mastery over pain. If this sounds similar to certain East Asian martial arts, well, it is similar in several respects. The Naqshbandiyah are thought to have cultivated some of these mental techniques derived from Central Asian and Mongolian shamanism. Along with this went training in a code of chivalry requiring warriors to protect the weak and oppose injustice.

That was back in the 19th century. Modern Islamist revivalism has been dominated by fundamentalists whose vehemently reject Sufism. They have none of the mystical mind training; they have no chivalrous code. Wahhabism, the most virulent form of fundamentalism, declared open war on Sufism and killed as many Muslims as it could to eradicate it. Wahhabi doctrine is determined by rigid categories of defining who is a believer (other Wahhabis) and who is an infidel (everybody else). Any infidels who do not submit are to be killed. This is all Wahhabism has to offer.

You need to understand what happened in Chechnya. The Chechen government under Aslan Maskhadov that signed a truce with Russia and a de facto autonomy agreement in 1996 was in part led by the spiritual heirs of Shamil. Many of them are Naqshbandis. Their only concern was independence from Russia, not terrorism. When Chechen terrorism began again in 1999 that brought on the current Russian destruction of the country, it was started by Wahhabi infiltrators. I remember listening to a Naqshbandi Sufi leader visiting Washington in 1998 warning that the Wahhabis were entering Chechnya to destabilize it and calling for support for President Maskhadov’s government to stop them. Now look what has happened.

There was no Wahhabism at work in Iraq until the Americans toppled Saddam’s regime which in the confusion allowed Wahhabi infiltrators into Iraq. The Wahhabi al-Qa‘idah fighters of the Ansar in Kurdish northern Iraq went there after being kicked out of Afghanistan. At first they only took over part of the Kurdish area (ostensibly controlled by Americans and their Kurdish allies). Our “friends” in Saudi Arabia are Wahhabis to the core. Saudi was the breeding ground of this virulent perversion of Islam into a doctrine of hate. Wealthy Wahhabis in Saudi, including members of the royal family and other prominent families, bankrolled al-Qa‘idah for years. With friends like this…

3

I’ll have to do some thinking about any potential parallels to Iraq, but as Jomo Mojo mentions, one should be quite wary of drawing too many of those for a variety of reasons. I can, however, recommend some further reading material for you, as Sabres of Paradise is interesting, but a tad dated:

Allen, W.E.D., and Muratoff, Paul. Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 1953.

Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Wimbush, S. Enders. Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1979. [this is the first book I ever read on the North Caucasus, and it really got me sucked in, to the extent that I ended up writing an M.A. thesis primarily on the North Caucasus…long story]

Broxup, Marie Bennigsen (ed.) The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World. Hurst & Company: London, 1992.

Gammer, Moshe. Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan. Frank Cass c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc.: Portland, Oregon, 1994.

These are the more historically-oriented sources; I have lots more recommendations on the North Caucasus if you’re interested in more contemporary stuff, especially on Chechnya. But it’s difficult to underestimate the pride that even non-militant North Caucasians, even the ones who barely observe Islam at all, feel in one of “theirs” who managed to stave off the Russian conquest for so long. My Dagestani ex-BF had a framed drawing of him on his dorm room wall, and that was before the last 2 Chechen campaigns.

4

I know nothing about the Murid wars. However, I did figure out why the name seemed so weirdly familiar:

here

5

Squink, irrelevant. The word murîd we’re concerned with here comes from the Arabic active participle of the verb arâda, which means ‘to will’ or ‘to want’. It refers to an aspirant on the Sufi spiritual path, someone who “wants” the inner spiritual knowledge it brings.

Eva Luna, glad you contributed. I was hoping you would join this thread with your knowledge of the Caucasus. I would like to recommend a book that is relevant to this topic:

Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory by Yo’av Karny (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000). The author of Highlanders is an Israeli Jewish investigative reporter who traveled to Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, and got to know some of the Sufi orders, and joined in their rituals. Some of what he reported opened a window of hope for a spiritual communion between Islam and Judaism based on the basic beliefs they share in common. Eva Luna, your ex-boyfriend from Dagestan was Jewish, right? Karny tells much along the lines of what you related, about the traditional life of these people, the role of Sufism in their national character, and the ugly way Wahhabism intruded and tried to wreck everything there in a grab for power.

6

Thanks for the word origin Jomo. :slight_smile:

7

Hrmmm…Well, yes and no. Ansar al-Islam is/was in at least a significant part an indigenous offshoot of the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan ( IMK ), a group that has rather deeper roots in the region, stemming back to the introduction of a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950’s and more directly to 1987. Ansar al-Islam itself actually formed from a merger of several ultra-orthodox splinters off the IMK ( Soran Forces, IMU, Hamas - not the same as the Palestinian group, obviously ), in 2001 ( initially as Juna al-Islam, shortly renamed and re-constituted as Ansar al-Islam ). So while the groups is rather young in some respect, it reaches back to genuine native Islamist roots.

However it would be fair to say it has been heavily influenced by Wahabi/Deobandi-type theology. That appears to have been one of the factors that led to the internal fissures in IMK - old school Muslim Brotherhood-types vs. “Ultra-Orthodox” Salafists.

Just as an aside, the head of the Barzani tribe just so happens to be a hereditary Naqshbandi Sheikh ( that is where the tribe apparently originated from, actually - accretions to a religious leadership drawn from the lower-ranking membership from surrounding traditional “kinship” tribes ). The Talabanis are Qadiri Sufis ( often rivals of the Naqshbandiyya in that part of the world ).

  • Tamerlane
8

I loved Highlanders! I thought about adding it afterward, even though the other stuff was all historical, but darn, you beat me to it! I’d love to have a looong cup of coffee with Karny someday and shoot the breeze; I’m a huge fan.

Nope, he was a nice Muslim boy. Lemme tell you how well that went over with the grandparents. :wink: Oddly enough, though, even though I never got to meet his parents (they lived in Derbent, and this was at a time when you needed a separate visa for each Soviet city), apparently they had no issue with my religious background. My nationality, yes, but not my ethnicity or religious background. One of his brothers had married a Russian woman, though, and they refused to acknowledge her existence for years. The grandkids eventually won them over, though.

9

Sorry - proper name typo.

That’s Jund al-Islam, not Juna.

  • Tamerlane
10

Here’s a snippet I found while trying to dig up a link to an article by Paul Henze surveying Soviet historiography on Shamil: I haven’t found what I was looking for yet, but this travelogue provides some IMO fascinating glimpses into the significance of Shamil to modern North Caucasians, and into Caucasian culture.

Note the many references to copious toating with vodka and Dagestani cognac (a substance capable of degreasing a tank engine), which may surprise those who believ those proud of their Muslim identity would not touch a drop of alcohol:

http://www.ca-c.org/dataeng/henze.shtml

I’ll keep poking for the other citation.

11

OK, Eva Luna. I must have been thinking of your posts about the Dagestani Mountain Jews or Tats who speak an Iranian dialect. Dagestan is famous as the “Mountain of Languages” because they have a huge number of languages spoken in a fairly small area. Practically a different language for each mountain valley. The name comes from Turkish dag meaning ‘mountain’. In the old days, the educated Dagestanis used classical Arabic as a contact vernacular, making Dagestan the only country in the world where Classical Arabic was actually spoken as an everyday language (instead of just a literary language). In a somewhat different way, it was comparable to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in 20th-century Israel. In the Soviet era, though, they made everybody use Russian to comunicate between language communities in Dagestan.

Tamerlane, thanks for the information and corrections about the Ansar. Somehow I had gotten put on a mailing list from the Assyrian Christians of northern Iraq, and a few years ago they started sending out alerts about the Ansar terrorizing the people up there. This was the first I heard about it, and otherwise their skulduggery has gone underreported in the American media. Maybe because it’s an embarrassment that the only place al-Qa‘idah was able to operate in Iraq was in the American-held zone, for cryin’ out loud.

12

Ah thanks again, esp for the further reading suggestions.

No, Jomo mojo believe me I do not have the murderous saracen horde aka Muslim stereotype in my mind. Quite the opposite, really as I am fantasizing about being thrown over the back of a sturdy cossack pony and kidnapped away by a tall dark and handsome Avar! The fanaticism I was referring to was the utter resolve of Shamyl’s people to never surrender, ever! Including the woman and children who would fight to the death rather than capitulate to the Tzar.
This book I am reading might be dated but the anecdotes and stories abound about the people and customs of that time and place. Rambling passages about the Tzarina Catherine and Nicholas I and other leading figures of the time including poets Pushkin, Yermolov and Dumas and the excesses of the Russian nobility contrasted with the austerity of life in the aouls. It would make a great movie! Cross vs Crescent told through the eyes of Shamyl’s son Djemmal-Edin who was taken hostage at the battle of Akhulgo and brought up as an aristocrat and pawn of Nicholas I. Don’t tell me it’s already been done?

13

I think a movie would be a brilliant idea, and as far as I know it’s never been done, although it has an echo of Masada somehow… I’d go see it, and drag all my friends, anyway. But then I’m biased. Who would you cast? The only movies I can think of offhand about the North Caucasus are current:

“House of Fools” (quite probably the most bizarre film of any sort I have ever seen, by the way…takes place in a Chechen insane asylum, with Bryan Adams appearing as himself)

and “Prisoner of the Mountains”

Both are on Chechnya. I’ve never heard of a movie on Dagestan, although Georgia had (and has) a pretty well-developed film industry for a country its size.

14

Oh, and welcome to the SDMB, chela! That’s quite a random topic for your first post, if I may say so. How did you stumble upon it?

15

I’m not sure what any of Catherines have to do with Caucasian wars, because they were long dead by then. Yermolov was a general, not a poet. Dumas fathered many books about practically everything in history (rumours were he was running a literary “sweat shop”; he referred to his “slave” writers himself), but I haven’t heard about his book on Caucasian wars.

Russo-Caucasian wars belong to the same age as US-Mexican wars. From our moment in time it is curious to observe extremely little propaganda for the war or opposition to it in both cases. I’m sure both were present (especially in US), but not even close to the extent we are accustomed to nowadays, and history preserved very little record of it. What records left in Russia are based on the poems and stories of the best writers (many of whom served in the Russian army) and tend to be quite even-handed and truthful, practically without any demonization of the Caucasian tribal people or glorification of Russian soldiers. Something like, “Czar sent us to war, so went and fought, and they fought back, of course; they are tough warriors, we did OK; fascinating land and people!” Although there still survives a “Cossack lullaby song” (written by Lermontov), commonly sung to babies, with the words “Wicked Chechen creeping over the river bank/Sharpening his dagger.”

Jomo Mojo, while you are humanizing Shamil and his warriors, aren’t you making a similar mistake of demonizing all the Wahhabi? To me they look almost like Lutherans, albeit petrified in time, still fighting their own “Roman whore”.

16

I know, I hate to see any people demonized, but the Wahhabi ideology is the vilest thing I’ve ever come across. I’ve had the misfortune to read their literature, and it is just plain sick. From a distance, Europeans in the Romantic era heard about Wahhabi revolts against the Ottomans and approved of them, saying “Islam needs a reformation just like Christianity had.” Well, they got the “Reformation” they were asking for, only be careful what you wish for. The Europeans had been fighting the Ottomans for so many centuries, they thought anything that could weaken their historical enemy would be good. They were ignorant of the fact that Islam as understood by the Ottomans was a fairly benign religion and Wahhabism was just plain ugly and inhuman. Kill everybody who doesn’t agree with you, is what it amounted to. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, used Wahhabism to whip up a fighting frenzy in his tribesmen to conquer territory. But once he had his kingdom and tried to take his place among the nations of the world, the tribesmen didn’t want to quit killing infidels, so they turned against him. He had to put down a Wahhabi revolt. The same thing is the inspiration behind al-Qa‘idah. Only the puritans are pure enough and everyone else is filth who must die. Westerners made the mistake of thinking these “reformers” were desert Martin Luthers and seemed surprised when they came up with 9/11 and other terrorism aimed at them. If they’d actually studied what Ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab had to say, it wouldn’t have looked so attractive.

17

Thanks, it was somewhat an intentional stumble, right after the nine-one-one apocalypse when searching my online library catalog for information about an area of the world I know nothing about really.

I know! I really should be jotting notes with all the stuff stuffed in this read, it was Lermontov? the poet. Yermolov was a general? Anyway, fascinating history, one that is alive in my mind right now.

18

From the times less political and more poetical:

*The Dream
In noon’s heat, in a dale of Dagestan
With lead inside my breast, stirless I lay;
The deep wound still smoked on; my blood
Kept trickling drop by drop away.

On the dale’s sand alone I lay. The cliffs
Crowded around in ledges steep,
And the sun scorched their tawny tops
And scorched me – but I slept death’s sleep.

And in a dream I saw an evening feast
That in my native land with bright lights shone;
Among young women crowned with flowers,
A merry talk concerning me went on.

But in the merry talk not joining,
One of them sat there lost in thought,
And in a melancholy dream
Her young soul was immersed – God knows by what.

And of a dale in Dagestan she dreamt;
In that dale lay the corpse of one she knew;
Within his breast a smoking wound showed black,
And blood ran in a stream that colder grew.*

(By Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov, 1841; translated from Russian by Vladimir Nabokov.)

19

I am beginning to understand…and am very curious why the recent tension and dire warning to US citizens to immediately leave SaudiA has gone unnoticed practically in the media, or is becasue the media is not informed. I was blurried eyed watching late night news and heard the report, stunned thinking of what jomo mojo posted!

What of Condoleeza’s Russian academic background? WHo are the experts in this area? Spencer Abraham?

That is beautiful poetry new iskander

Eva Luna asked about casting for the epic historical drama, I would name Mel Gibson/Danny DeVito as Nicholas I, Rupert Murdoch as Shamyl, Cate Blanchett hmmm, oh the COunt Elizabeth Voronzov, SHounete “the Pearl” ? who else but that gimp Gwyneth!! :rolleyes:

20

Condoleeza Rice, keep in mind, is of a generation whose academic training took place during the Cold War. Bio:

http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/rice.html

She is of an academic/professional milieu populated by people who paid little attention to issues of ethnicity as a factor in the breakup of the USSR; her focus was more on tradiitonal political/military strategy as far as I know. She doesn’t know anything in particular about the Caucasus, or about minority issues, that I’m aware of. (Post-Soviet minority issues, that is; I’m sure she’s got some interesting perspectives on U.S. minority isuses.)

Experts: what field are you thinking about? History? Sociology? Anthropology? Linguistics? Or do you just want to read stuff on the Caucasus in general?