The ‘warrior and mystic, ogre and saint’ who became Paul Atreides

Shamil, Part I: On the inspiration for Dune, ‘The Sabres of Paradise’

I

Dune is a titanic work. Its themes are grand in scale: the weight of history, man and fate, mystical immanence, ethnogenesis and environment, holy war and fanaticism, degradation and nobility. 

Frank Herbert - despite his genius - could not have produced such a work without drawing upon the stories of men and civilizations that came before. Today we return to one of those stories: that of Shamil, terror of the Russian Empire. 

The great chronicle of the wars of Shamil is Lesley Blanch’s 1960 The Sabres of Paradise. Herbert loved this biographical epic, and its influence pervades the universe he created. 

Readers of Becoming Noble have much to learn from Shamil in their quest for aristocratic ascendency. This will be a multi-part series covering the birth of a faith, the wielding of fanaticism, the cultivation of personal mystique, the binding of peoples, environmental hormesis, and the orientation of a warrior race.  

In this first post, we will set the stage by clarifying the relationship between Dune and The Sabres of Paradise, and will provide the historical foundation that Shamil’s lessons are embedded within.

II 

To Shamyl, who straddled these mountains like a legendary giant, they were his birthright, his kingdom. From their shadows he first unfurled his black standard. In the name of Ghazavat! Holy War! he wielded the dissenting mountain tribes into the implacable army of fanatics whose private feuds were submerged in their common hatred of the Infidel invaders. For twenty five years, he dominated both land and people. For twenty five years, the Caucasians accepted lives of bleak abnegation and hardship − for Shamyl. His Murids revolved around his dark presence with the slow set circling of planetary forces. In life and death his word was law. All of them were vowed to resist Russia to the death. His four wives bowed before him in love and submission. His little son was sacrificed to the cause of freedom. His sister flung herself into a raging torrent, six hundred feet below, to die on his command. His mother lay at his feet, beaten unconscious on his orders when she pleaded mercy for a defaulting tribe.

Our story takes place in the Caucasus, the mountain land to the south of Russia. Here, in 1801, the kingdom of Georgia fell to the Tzar Alexander. Imertia and Mingrelia followed in 1803 and 1804. But in the north, from the peaks of Dagestan and Chechnya, a warrior people resisted. Their desperate violence became the Murid Wars, a name taken from Shamil’s fighters: Muslim tribesmen and fanatical monks known as Murids, and their leaders, the Naibs. No Naib was ever taken alive.

Shamil was more force of nature than man. Before he arose, the tribes fought each other. Through Shamil, the catalyst, the Avar, the chosen of Allah, the brother wars ceased. Powerless to resist his holy gravity, their fates were bound together under his banner. The mystical and political tides of the land converged into a single raging stream: Ghazavat. Holy War.