Legitimacy of Imam Shamil & The Murid Revolts
In December 1843 during the murid revolt in the North Caucasus against the Russian Empire, Tsar Nicholas I issued a proclamation to the Muslim rebels. Hoping to delegitimize their leader, Imam Shamil, he proclaimed to “punish Shamil and the supporters of that deceiver, who out of personal interests, greed, and desire for power, stirred the mountain communities…” The Tsar, portraying his nemesis as an “oriental despot,” threatened the Muslim tribes while simultaneously appealing to their independent spirit. Evidently, Tsar Nicholas failed to recognize that the North Caucasus of his imagination had been changing rapidly: the formerly independent awuls of Dagestan and Chechnya have now pledged their allegiance to the Sufi Khalidi-Naqshbandi Imam Shamil, whose legitimacy relied on more than simply a charismatic, “despotic” appeal.
For as long as Shamil led the resistance to the Russian Empire between 1833 and 1859, he sought to establish a quasi-state where there had previously been independent communities, or awuls. As Charles King contends, “Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Shamil fashioned something resembling a state in the lands he controlled… at the top stood the Imam himself: the central political decision maker, commander in chief, religious authority, and judicial arbiter.” King’s description introduces a question of state and legitimacy—if a political entity now exists where there had previously been none, how does the head of this political entity construct the grounds for legitimacy? How have loyalists to Shamil rationalized their loyalty, and how have dissidents articulated their disdain? A closer look at the murid resistance movement, and its indigenous critics epitomized by Hadji Murat, reveal that Tsar Nicholas’s evaluation of Shamil could not have been further from the truth. Rather than following the simplistic model of the despotic “charismatically legitimate,” as even Russia’s greatest thinkers misunderstood him, Imam Shamil built his authority among the communities of the North Caucasus as a religiously-legitimate social reformer rebelling against the decadent status quo.
The term “charismatic legitimacy” derives from the work of German sociologist Max Weber, perhaps the most renowned thinker on the political and sociological implications of legitimacy and the modern state. Weber classifies legitimacy into three broad categories: traditional legitimacy, charismatic legitimacy, and rational-legal legitimacy. Traditional legitimacy, as Weber explains it, pertains to the “mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform.” Charismatic legitimacy, on the other hand, lies in “revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership,” qualities Weber believes to manifest most clearly in war-lords and demagogues. Weber’s final classification of legitimacy, the rational-legal form, entails the establishment of a “legal order” through which the state creates a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence. Shamil’s legitimacy cannot fall under the fold of the first Weberian ideal type—Shamil hardly represented a “natural” authority figure, if anything, his rise emerged as a direct counterpoint to traditional modes of organization in the Caucasus. The other two Weberian types of legitimacy, however, usefully break down how the Muslim mountaineers rationalized (or disagreed with) Shamil’s claims to authority. Shamil’s emphatic adherence to Sufi spiritual perfection gave him an aura of charismatic legitimacy, and his vehement calls to replace customary and tribal laws with the Islamic sharia grounded his claims to legitimate violence in legal terms.
Shamil’s legitimacy cannot be understood without recognizing the foundations of violent resistance to the Russian Empire laid by his predecessors. Before Shamil, various members of the Khalidi-Naqshbandi Sufi order challenged the norm of non-violence within the order. These challenges began with Mullah Mohammad Al-Yaraghi, a widely recognized Imam of Dagestan who decried the state of societal decadance in the Caucasus and compliance with Russian rule. Al-Yaraghi, however, mysteriously vanished after having given his speech, retreating back into spiritual nonviolence. His murid (follower or student) Ghazi Muhammad, however, did not; Ghazi Muhammad became widely regarded as the first Imam of the murid resistance against the Russians. From 1830 to 1831, Ghazi Muhammad rode throughout Dagestan, agitating the awuls in mobilization against the Russian Empire. Many Sufi scholars, however, did not agree with Ghazi Muhammad’s resort to violence and openly criticized him for it. To bypass the disapproval of other Sufi leaders, Ghazi Muhammad had to appeal to his teacher Al-Yaraghi, whose approval ultimately validated Ghazi Muhammad’s movement. After Ghazi’s death, the successor Imam Hamza Bek continued with the resistance, though he also faced pushback for being not as spiritually unimpeachable as his predecessor (he occasionally indulged in drinking.) Nevertheless, all of these pre-Shamil figures challenged the Sufi norms of nonviolence by posing the question: “how can you serve God if you are serving the Russians?”
Shamil’s rise as the Third Imam further exacerbated the tension between “serving God” and “serving the Russians,” as revealed in the chronicle written by his confidante and advisor Mohammad Tahir Al-Qarakhi. In the very introduction to The Shining of Dagestani Swords, Al-Qarakhi writes: “The people of Daghestan in this late age called themselves “Muslims,” but no one was summoning them to [obey Islamic] law or to avoid what is forbidden… how vile their reprehensible actions… especially in collaboration with the Russian infidels.” Throughout the chronicle, Al-Qarakhi emphasizes the morally reprehensive nature of those societies loyal to Russia—in fact, Shamil and Al-Qarakhi seem to hold more bitterness to other Muslim communities than to the Russians themselves. Shamil directs much of his energy to “correct the transgressions of Muhammad’s sublime religious community [and] revive the abandoned signs of Islam.” The end goal of Shamil’s campaigns did not stop at resistance to the Russian Empire for the sake of freedom; the Russian Empire simply stood in the way of Shamil’s broader vision for societal reform.
Perhaps most indicative of Shamil’s “charismatic legitimacy,” Al-Qarakhi depicts Shamil throughout The Shining of Dagestani Swords as a prophet-like figure, likened to Muhammad and presented as a Sufi saint ideal. At multiple points across the course of Dagestani Swords, Shamil dreams predictions of the future, disappears to go into deep reflection, and even weeps out of deep faith and belief in God. European accounts of Shamil went as far as to claim he positioned himself as a prophetic successor to Muhammad —though this is likely an exaggeration, given it never appears in Dagestani Swords, and that it would go contrary to the fundamentals of his Sufi Muslim faith. However, Al-Qarakhi most certainly does allude to Muhammad’s classical biography, or Sirah, in how he writes about Shamil. Al-Qarakhi likens Shamil’s journey from Dagestan to Chechnya to Muhammad’s hijra from Mecca to Madina, and both Dagestani Swords and the Sirah conclude with a trip to Mecca. Story after story through the chronicle, Al-Qarakhi demonstrates how Shamil was “finished with this earthly realm and longed for death,” exaggerating Shamil’s saintly character and portraying him as a devotional ideal for Muslim readers. Depicting Shamil’s ability to perform miracles and deeply adhere to his faith promotes a certain mystical charisma, giving Shamil legitimacy among his followers on the grounds of spiritual commitment.
However, Shamil’s legitimacy relied on more than just the charisma of a Sufi ideal: his assertion of reforming corrupt customary law and replacing it with religiously-ordained, unquestionably legitimate sharia. At various points of Al-Qarakhi’s chronicle, Shamil encounters a scenario in which acts contradictory to the sharia are permitted by unnamed individuals. The narrative follows a typical arch: Shamil criticizes them, they fail to listen, Shamil attacks them, local judges find Shamil’s acts questionable, Shamil points to the sharia as justification for his actions, and the judges appear dumbfounded. In one particularly egregious example, Shamil beat male and female villagers with a staff for “evil mixing.” When the villagers protested his behavior, he proclaimed, “Today is the day to distinguish the sharia’s enforcers from its opponents… Do you think there is no one left to enforce the sharia?” By positioning himself as the champion of an abandoned yet unquestionably legitimate religious tradition, Shamil ascribes himself the ability to commit legitimate violence in the name of law. Evidently, Shamil’s legitimacy goes beyond his charismatic existence, grounding itself in Weberian legal legitimacy through adherence to a legal code.
Considering that Shamil’s reformative vision for the North Caucasus challenged pre-existing legal and societal norms, he attracted a great deal of opposition from within the North Caucasus. Interestingly enough, Al-Qarakhi does not refrain from highlighting these moments of internal opposition to Shamil. At one point, awul elders reproach Shamil for “creating unrest,” claiming that “The likes of you [Shamil] are responsible for stirring things up and taking advantage of this!” Later, the villagers living in the awul of Ansal revolt against Shamil for his cruelty in punishing violators of sharia, and they complain to a local judge of customary law who condemns Shamil for “causing strife.” Of course, these stories always conclude with Shamil inevitably proving his adversaries wrong—in this case, he compares his legitimacy to that of the Ottoman Sultan by asking the judge, “If the infidels were to overtake the people of Islambol [Istanbul]... and demand the expulsion of the Sultan from their midst, would you issue a fatwa [order] for his expulsion merely to calm things down…?” Shamil’s challengers question his authority on the grounds of his failure to maintain a traditional “order,” and his retort places him in legally and charismatic “legitimate” terms, silencing any opposition.
Additionally, Shamil’s most serious and most famous dissident, Hadji Murat, embodied the image of the illegitimate antithesis to Shamil. Initially, Hadji Murat overlooked the past blood-feud enmity with Shamil in a common quest to rid the North Caucasus of Russian control. Securing Hadji Murat’s loyalty not only put large swaths of Avari land under Shamil’s rule, but also added a strong, demonstrably competent military commander who proved quite valuable in the mountain wars. However, Hadji Murat’s military prowess failed him on one occasion, which Shamil exploited to curb Murat’s growing power and prestige. Outspoken and unhappy with Shamil’s accusations of treason, Hadji Murat defected into the Russian side of the conflict, making him an ideal target for scapegoating. Al-Qarakhi writes a scathingly unforgiving account of Murat in his chronicle, mentioning none of his military contributions and focusing exclusively on his failure. Ironically, Al-Qarakhi depicts Shamil here as a magnanimous ruler who “forgave” Murat for his repeated indecencies. Rather than citing Shamil’s condemnation as the signifier of Hadji Murat’s corruption, Al-Qarakhi emphasizes Murat’s “bad behavior” and disloyalty to Islam and the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus. To Shamil loyalists, Hadji Murat characterized the very antithesis to Shamil: disloyalty to Islam and the Muslim peoples.
However, Hadji Murat also captured the imagination of one of Russia’s greatest thinkers and authors: Leo Tolstoy, whose depiction of Murat not only completely contradicts Al-Qarakhi’s, but also reveals fundamental misreadings of Shamil’s claims to legitimacy. In his famous last novella named after Hadji Murat, Tolstoy uses Murat as a canvas to illustrate his perennialist takes on Christianity. As Gary Hamburg argues, “Hadji Murat was a tale about power, about despotism in its European and Asiatic forms.” By following Hadji Murat’s journey from defection to Russia to his eventual murder by suspicious Russian authorities, Tolstoy draws parallels between the North Caucasian and Russian “despots”: Tsar Nicholas and Imam Shamil. Murat’s story illustrates that all members of mankind, whether Muslim or Christian, share a fundamental inherent “goodness” ultimately corrupted by power structures. However, Tolstoy uses the “charismatic despot” Shamil as a foil to the decidedly noble and down-to-earth Hadji Murat. In a chapter dedicated fully to Shamil, his followers brainlessly follow his every word and command out of his sheer charisma as a powerful “oriental despot.” Rather than showcasing Shamil as a spiritual revolutionary upending the communal law status quo with a religiously-ordained redefinition of law, Tolstoy paints Shamil as an inherently evil political leader emblematic of “status quo” power dynamics.
Nevertheless, long after Hadji Murat’s murder by Russian troops, Shamil’s authority in the North Caucasus would come to an end as the Russian Empire reoriented its troops towards Dagestan and Chechnya after the Crimean War. Fully focusing its energies on the North Caucasus after a humiliating defeat in Crimea, the Empire crushed Shamil’s murid army and cornered him in the awul of Ghunib. Surrounded entirely by certain defeat, Shamil “pleaded, cajoled, and admonished” the villagers to join him in the battle “to die for the faith.” By then, however, the murid resistance and its revolutionary fervor collapsed into itself as the war-weary villagers did not “display any eagerness for this.” As his mission to reform and his larger-than-life persona faded into the bitter reality of a lost war, Shamil surrendered to the Empire and was taken hostage, dying on a trip to the Islamic holy city of Medina in 1871.
When writing historical narratives from the perspectives of colonized peoples, historians often grapple with the question of archival gaps. In the context of the Muslims of Russian-occupied Chechnya and Dagestan in the 19th century, these issues of historical silence persist. The majority of sources on Shamil and the murid resistance movement consist of colonizers and visitors commenting on the colonized, giving more of a window into outsider attitudes on the movement rather than showcasing the voices of the movement’s most ardent adherents. Russian accounts, even by thinkers as sympathetic to the Muslims of the North Caucasus as Leo Tolstoy, consistently minimize the question of Shamil’s legitimacy to the “oriental despot” cliché. Though Shamil’s charisma as a religious leader and his oppression of dissenters undoubtedly factored into his legitimacy as a ruler, his followers also place his legitimacy in his status as a social reformer more akin to his revolutionary counterparts in Russia. Until his resistance to Russia collapsed in 1859, Shamil’s claims to leadership pertained to his ability to reform a society of divided communities by reintroducing sharia as binding the broader Muslim community. Shamil’s active construction of his legitimacy among the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus reveals agency in Shamil’s followers where dominant narratives deny them even that—rather than brainlessly submissive agents of a single man’s despotic will, these silenced men and women likely evaluated Shamil’s authority, occasionally rebelled against his changes to mountaineer society, and finally took arms with him against the Empire.
Bibliography
Al-Qarakhi, Muhammad Tahir. “The Shining of Daghestani Swords in Certain Campaigns of Shamil.” In Russian-Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus, 1830-1859,e d. and trans. Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg, 11-74. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Gammer, Moshe. Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1995.
Hamburg, Garry. “A Commentary on the Two Texts in their Historical Contexts.” In Russian-Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus, 1830-1859, ed. and trans. Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg, 171-238. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
King, Charles. The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg, eds. and trans., Russian-Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus, 1830-1859. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Tolstoy, Leo. “Hadji Murat.” In Russian-Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus, 1830-1859,e d. and trans. Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg, 77-167. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Von Hauxthausen, Baron August Freiherr. The Tribes of the Caucasus: With an account of Shamyl and the Murids. London: Chapman and Hall, 1855.
Weber, Max. “Legitimacy, Politics, and the State.” In Legitimacy and the State, ed. William Connelly, 32-62. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 1984.
