INTRODUCTION
The Bariqat al-Suyuf al-Daghistaniyya fi Ba‘di al-Ghazawat al-Shamiliyya (The Shining of Daghestani Swords in Certain Campaigns of Shamil), written not in a language of the Caucasus but in Arabic, reflected the Islamic education of its author: Muhammad Tahir al-Qarakhi (died 1882). Al-Qarakhi, presumably from the area around Qarakh in Daghestan, served as Shamil’s scribe and adviser from about 1850 until the death of his own father later that decade.1 He produced this work to present Shamil’s story as an inspiration for Muslims struggling to live a righteous life and build a good society.
The Shining of Daghestani Swords joined a long series of Muslim biographies that began with the Sira (the main account of Muhammad’s life written in the eighth century CE). The earliest depictions of great military campaigns conducted in God’s name (ghazawat) were the stories of Muhammad’s initial confrontations with unbelievers who had attacked him and his followers. This work also bears resemblances to another classic Islamic literary genre: the manakib accounts of holy men’s virtues and excellences, particularly those about great Sufis. Shamil was a leading figure (although not formally considered a spiritual master) of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which had spread from Ottoman lands into the Caucasus at the beginning of the nineteenth century and remains strong around the world today, particularly in Turkey and South Asia. More than some other Sufi groups, the Naqshbandis believed that the best way to achieve the ultimate Muslim goal—union with God—was to emphasize strict obedience to Islamic law in all actions. With its greater focus on action than contemplation, Naqshbandi doctrine easily became a rallying force for native Muslim resistance to Russian expansion in the Caucasus, which began to accelerate in the 1820s.
Shamil was a disciple and distant relative of Ghazi Muhammad, who had been recognized by the Daghestanis as their first imam (Muslim spiritual/political leader) in 1829. When Hamza Bek, the second imam, was killed, Shamil became the third imam in 1834 and remained this community’s leader until 1859. In that year, he sunendered to the Russians, but was considered to have remained the imam until his death in 1871 on a pilgrimage to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Shamil was buried in Medina.
It is not surprising that The Shining of Daghestani Swords portrayed Hadji Murat, Tolstoi’s hero, as unreliable, since he fled to the Russians after being sentenced to death by Shamil. An intriguing aspect of the work is how it differs from previous ghazawat accounts by celebrating Shamil’s peaceful surrender to the Russians. His surrender was not depicted in this work as a shameful capitulation but as the reasonable response of a wise man to a difficult situation. Shamil was shown retaining his dignity and honor as he experienced the modern wonders of St. Petersburg, hardly the way earlier accounts of Muslim warriors had ended. Shamil was shown, after his death, being brought to Medina to rest among the great Muslim holy men—a happy repose for someone who had struggled so hard to promote justice for those of his faith. The reader must evaluate these selections from The Shining of Daghestani Swords to assess whether al-Qarakhi, at the end of his work, was simply resigned to Shamil’s defeat by superior modern forces, whether he was consoled by Shamil’s success in reaching Medina, or whether Shamil’s quest for God in the next world had transcended military defeat in this world. With such uncertainty, The Shining of Daghestani Swords conveyed some of the unease felt by the Muslim world as it encountered the juggernaut of Western expansion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It took several decades after its composition for The Shining of Daghestani Swords to be circulated widely. Al-Qarakhi’s son Habibullah put it into final form after his father’s death. Habibullah almost succeeded in getting it published in Daghestan after the turn of the century but was stopped by Russian imperial censors. At that time, the text was seized by tsarist authorities and did not reappear until 1934, when scholars at the Soviet Academy of Sciences located four versions of it. The entire text and its Russian translation were published by 19462 Versions of al-Qarakhi’s work appear to have been circulated earlier in the Islamic world, given its several Ottoman and modern Turkish translations, the most recent of which was published in 19873The selections included here are all based on the version of the text from the oldest extant manuscript (dating from around 1872) discovered by A.M.Barabanov, a promising young Soviet scholar from the Caucasus who was killed in World War II soon after he had completed his thesis on al-Qarakhi and published a Russian translation of the text in the spring of 1941. His academic mentor, I Iu. Krachkovskii, edited and published Barabanov’s original edition of the Arabic text after the war in 1946. Barabanov’s Russian translation of al-Qarakhi was used extensively in the preparation of this edition.
The work should not be read as a linear history in the modern Western sense. It portrayed Shamil as a leader by recounting particular stories in great depth without always providing information about everything that happened. The Shining of Daghestani Swords covered Shamil’s whole career by focusing on episodes that revealed how Shamil embodied the Naqshbandi Sufi ideal of the leader. Al-Qarakhi showed him as a man mystically in touch with God but also very faithful to the letter of Islamic law. Hence, we urge the general reader not to get lost in the swirl of place and personal names, but rather to focus on what the stories reveal about the mountain peoples’ conception of the nature of the struggle and about the nature and source of Shamil’s legitimacy as imam.
The Shining of Daghestani Swords told a number of dramatic stories about how Shamil demonstrated his right to rule in many episodes through his career. One good example can be found in its description of how he was nearly mortally wounded at a battle in Gimrah, yet survived to continue battling the Russians until he could pause to bury the first imam, Ghazi Muhammad. This point of this story was not to focus on the narrative details of exactly what had happened between the Russians and Shamil’s forces in Gimrah, but rather to show how Shamil’s survival of a mortal wound, his escape to fight another day, and his supervision of the burial of Ghazi, Muhammad all revealed him to be a man who embodied the union of mystical and orthodox Islam throughout his career.
For this reason, only a few selections from al-Qarakhi’s entire text are presented here. These are accounts of key points in Shamil’s career, such as when he became the imam, to illustrate how al-Qarakhi, the devoted follower, portrayed his master, Shamil.