Divine immanence & the binding of a people
Divine immanence & the binding of a people
Shamil, Part II: overcoming tribalism through fanaticism
They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this - the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
I
This is the second in our series about Shamil, the Avar, terror of Russia, whose wars against the Russian Empire inspired the creation of Dune. You can find Part I here, which outlines the historical foundation of these events, and explores the relationship between Dune and ‘The Sabres of Paradise’, Lesley Blanch’s epic biography of Shamil.
This chapter concerns religion, fanaticism, and the power of holy war to bind a people together. It demonstrates that radical faith is an irreplaceable asset for the cohesion and perseverance of a minority in the face of an oppressive power.
— Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Seated (1890)
II
Shamil’s people - the Murids - faced a foe that possessed every conventional advantage. The Russian Imperial army was vast in scale and relentless in its willingness to shed blood. They could summon legions from every corner of the empire, unified under a single crown.
Once the Tzar declared that a province was to be his, failure was unthinkable. His generals would march their men into storms of blood in every gully, on every mountaintop, through every forest, until that domain was won. When they met Shamil’s resistance, they issued a proclamation throughout the land: were the heavens to fall, Russian bayonets would prop them up.
The warrior bands of the Caucuses enjoyed no such unity. They were limited in number and divided by clan. The mountains of the Caucuses, like Samarkand and Baghdad, represented one of humanity’s great confluence points. This was the cradle and tomb of peoples. Groups tried to pass across the peaks; some succeeded, some died, some stayed.
Their echoes are still found, in a dialect, a place name, a creed, a legend, a piece of armour, a strain of fair-haired people, like the Khevsours. At last no man could unravel the merging of peoples; of Scythians, Medes and Persians, Genoese, Greek and Mongol; Koumoukh, Kurd, Armenian, Turcoman, Ossete and many more. It was said that seventy different languages were heard in the marketplace of Tiflis, while Pliny tells us the Romans employed a hundred and thirty-four different interpreters to conduct their affairs in the Caucasus.
These people were poor, fractured, and outmanned. It would take an inhuman force to unite them and to deliver them victory.
You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
III
A physically inferior force can overcome a stronger one through metaphysical supremacy. This was what Shamyl knew that he must cultivate: a system of belief so gripping, so vital, that it locked the peoples of the Caucuses together, so that they were willing to fight and die as a single unit.
Under his sway the whole Caucasus became a fortress, its disunited tribes forged together in mystic exaltation, yet gripped by an implacable administrative system. Their new leader was to enforce the Shariat like his own laws, with fire and sword, so that this moment passed into local history as ‘The Time of the Shariat’ – Shamyl’s Time.
Our task is to understand how this was achieved. How do you make a faith sing in the ears and rush through the blood? How do you set a man ablaze with ecstasy? How do you bind a dance of death into the very identity of a people?
The Russians had yet to realize that they were pitted, not only against a national resistance, but against a fanatic religious movement − which was to grow until every village was a fortress, every man a fighting monk, and the whole country led, in battle, as in prayer, by an Imam who preached resistance with fire and sword.
IV
First we must understand Shamil’s own faith.
Although the resistance that he whipped up was fundamentally Islamic in character, it arose in a land of deeper mystical belief. Shamil’s people were pre-modern. The metaphysical plane that they occupied was just as wild as the physical land in which they lived.
This was a land of djinns, of myths, of monsters - of terrible storms and rushing winds that sounded like beating wings. We are told that great jets of flame would blaze upwards into the night from cracks in the rock. These desolate peaks were not as vacant as they seemed: unseen beings swept through the darkness.
No villager would go out after dusk. But the boy Shamil would venture out alone, spending whole nights in mysterious contemplation lit only by tongues of flame.
It was against this backdrop that Shamil’s Islamic education began. His spiritual teacher was Mollah Jamul u’din, a descendant of the prophet, who initiated Shamil into the Naqshbandi Sufi Tariqa - a mystical tradition within Sunni Islam.
Shamil completed his discipleship alongside Khazi Mollah, who, in 1830, became the first Imam of Daghestan. Khazi Mollah fell under Russian bullets, but not before sowing the seeds of Muridism: the merging of the Naqshbandi order with calculated military organisation, in order to better resist the Russian infidels.
What gradually emerged from this was a total military-theocratic state that demanded religious duty, obedience to a master, strict religious law and a will to fight. “The mystic and political aspects of the struggle were becoming one – Ghazavat − Holy War.”
After the execution of the second Imam, Hamzad Beg, Shamil ascended to Imamship in 1834. It was Shamil that intensified and imposed the Shariat on the whole of the Caucasus.
His first priority was the unification of the Caucuses against the Russians. This was a subtle art, requiring generosity and punishment, brotherhood and subjugation.
The death penalty was imposed for treachery and disobedience. He expected absolute submission to his will. This required martial as well as political prowess - the mountain aôuls had to feel that they were safer with Shamil than with the Tzar.
Raiding booty was used to bribe the allegiance of wavering tribes; but when inter-tribal fighting over riches broke out, Shamil destroyed the wealth rather than allow it to corrupt his political order:
…he flung his treasure into the depths of a mountain lake, rather than have it destroy the unity of his troops. And, to this day, the villagers of Andi still believe that somewhere below the glassy surface of a nearby tarn, there lie gold dishes, ruby-studded sabre scabbards, great ankle-bracelets set with emeralds and coral and amber drinking cups, all the loot of a Caucasian raid, flung to the fishes that unity might remain.
But his most powerful tool of all was Muridism.
V
Violence was a cornerstone of the culture of the people of the Caucasus. It was a tool for self-refinement, for the resolution of disputes, for ensuring that the orientation of the society was ever towards the cultivation of strength. In the last chapter of this series we heard that “kanly – vendetta − was the whole creed of these people, often pursued through three or four generations. Sometimes whole families were destroyed, fighting for days and nights, till the last man or boy fell.”
The foundations of this mode of life were sustained by intensity, ritual, and combat. Any attempt to channel these energies into a unified and productive direction would have to integrate this need for spiritual and physical violence.
Muridism was a heady brew of mystic and absolute power… If to live in peace meant submitting to the Infidel rule, there could be no peace. While the Tarikat abhorred violence and, in the face of force, counselled a withdrawal to some inner spiritual sanctuary, this was not a doctrine which came easily to the fiery Caucasian tribes. Most of them felt that, in this issue, the Tarikat must be modified, or adapted, to meet the more bellicose tenets of The Koran, which promised short shrift to an Infidel foe.
Outside the Caucasus, the Russians were able to subdue conquered peoples because it was clear the alternative was death. If Muridism was to be the tool by which Shamil would convince the Caucasus to fight a desperate last stand, it would have to make death more attractive than life.
War had to become Holy War; the objective was not just the freedom of this land but access to the next; for the honor of suffering for Allah, to be martyred in his name, and to be granted the keys to Paradise!
Shamil told his men:
‘We sleep tonight as beneath the veil which, lifting, reveals to us the glories of our Prophet’s abode in Paradise. And tomorrow, when we fight in his name, be sure that wherever you see floating the black banner of your chief, there will be Allah. And know that his defence is swift and strong.’ ‘Mashallah!’ answered the Naibs and Murids, gathered before the mosque from which Shamyl habitually addressed his forces. ‘Mashallah! In the name of God!’ The cry broke from the crowds and echoed round the bare hills, to rumble like faraway thunders, across the vast and empty valleys, while the sound of women wailing for their doomed men was lost in the turmoil of an army on the move.
VI
The centrality of sacrifice and the integration of pain were instrumental to Muridism's power. There could be no hypocrisy if these virtues were to be sustained. The discipline had to flow outwards from Shamil's own life.
While still an initiate studying Sufism at Yaraghl, a fellow student asked Shamyl to give him forty lashes, for the sin of tasting wine in a moment of weakness. Shamil obliged, but insisted on submitting to the same chastisement himself, to better prove his sincerity and commitment.
No matter how hard the campaigning became, the Imam Shamil kept his Murid troops at prayer and pious ritual for several hours each day.
Caucasians, both the exalted mystics and the people, were sustained by a stoic discipline and humility, feeling themselves part of some Divine pattern which nullified individual anguish. They offered up their sufferings almost impersonally, with a sense of fatality, for Allah!
…in 867 B.C. the Baghdad mystic Sari Saquati wrote: “Ah!” is the supreme name of God. He put this cry on earth to help the suffering people take breath.
But with the pain must come the ecstasy.
VII
Man cannot live on suffering alone. For him to sustain the pains of privation and a longing for death, he must glimpse the divine. His reward must be before him. His brothers must be felt beside him, their sabres pointed towards paradise. The heavens must shine above even as his days on this earth are spent in darkness.
The asabiyyah is the motive force of history.
How can a simple people, alone in the mountains, experience the transcendent?
…the women, with slow, almost imperceptible steps, sidling, trembling, sipping paces. The dancers’ long flowing sleeves shield their faces. Gradually the rhythm quickens to a furious stamping beaten out by drums, as the women are joined by the men who circle round them, hem them in, advancing, before each fresh retreat. It is a dance of conquest; of mating. Some of these dances represent prayers and begin with the slow postures of worship. But gradually they quicken to the mesmeric frenzies of dervish dances… performed by torch light, the dancers weaving in and out of the shadows, the flames glinting on the weapons stuck in their belts, the daggers and pistols which they never removed, even in the dance. Torch light flickering on swarthy faces, catching the curve of a lean cheek, the flash of black eyes, brilliant beneath the towering black sheepskin caps, as they darted love and daring at a veiled girl.
The terrible logic of the dance. The furious stamping of rampaging spirits. The serpentine shimmering of the veiled women. The holy gravity of their orbit of fire.
Divinity made immanent. A taste of what death was to bring.
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.
― Frank Herbert, Dune
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Love it! Cannot wait for the next installment. Great job!