Following the break-up of the USSR in 1991 the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus – corresponding to present-day Azerbaijan and the Russian North Caucasus – have been in a continuous process of renegotiating their Islamic identity and the role of Islam in the processes of nation-building. This has involved a complex set of factors, including the correlation between the rise of Islam and socio-economic well-being (or the lack of it), the level and longevity of Islamic heritage, the relationship between Islam and the nature of the ruling post-Soviet Caucasian regimes, and the degree of susceptibility to the region’s exposure to foreign influences, Islamic and Western. This article examines some of these factors from an historical perspective, concentrating on how the political elites and the populace variously dealt with essentially external influences in the course of their centuries-long incorporation within successive political empires. From the seventh century AD these were Islamic, emanating from the Umayyad, Abbasid, Timurid, Ottoman and Safavid empires; and from the nineteenth century, Russian Orthodox and Soviet atheist. An analysis of the dynamics set up by these influences and the distinctively Caucasian Muslim responses to them is crucial in understanding how current elites and their antagonists in the region embrace, reject and otherwise instrumentalise Islam. Keywords: Caucasus, Islam, nationalism, post-communist transition, secularism. Introduction An important factor in the de-Sovietisation of the new ethno-national elites and the populace of the multi-ethnic Muslim Caucasus2 has been the re-discovery of their Islamic heritage and the re-engagement with Islam as a component of their nationhood and individual identity. The level and forms of this re-engagement have differed significantly across the region and correlate with the socio-economic situation, the specifics of particular ethno-national regimes and their approaches towards opposition, the degree of exposure to external Islamic and Western influences and the depth and longevity of Islamic tradition. Thus, initially the social and political impact of Islam was most intensive in the north-eastern Caucasus corresponding to present-day Russia’s Muslim autonomies of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia, characterised by a strong Sufi Islamic presence which withstood the decades of Soviet atheism. It was less intensive in the north-western Caucasus corresponding to Russia’s Muslim autonomies of Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia and Adyghea where the Islamic tradition was mosque-centred and therefore was seriously violated by the state-driven destruction of mosques and Islamic ‘clergy.’ Re-Islamisation has been the least intensive in the independent republic of Azerbaijan, which is characterised by a higher level of secularisation resulting from its lengthier period of oil-related urbanisation and Westernisation. From the 2000s, however, the Islamic resurgence has intensified in Kabardino-Balkaria, while it has been suppressed in Chechnya as a result of brutal stabilisation by the Kadyrov regime. In the North Caucasus the aggravating factors have been the Russo-Chechen conflict, escalating into two successive devastating wars, its jihadist internationalisation and the growing political assertiveness in Russia of the Russian Orthodox Church, which campaigned for the restoration of its pre-Soviet status as a pillar of the Russian nation. By contrast, in Azerbaijan, the Islamic dynamic has been shaped by its wider exposure to external influences as a result of the country’s ‘re-connection’ with Turkey, Iran and the wider Middle East, on the one hand, as well as its higher levels of oil-related economic growth, Westernisation, and social polarisation, on the other. But alongside these differences, all Caucasian Muslims – as with Muslims in other parts of the former Soviet Union – have experienced much in common in the ways they have dealt with their re-discovered ‘Muslimness’ at both the state and individual levels. Thus, political and intellectual elites across the region have revoked their Soviet-era historical narratives and revisited their nineteenth century national debates, which identified Islam as a central component of their respective national identities. All of them opted for the preservation of the Russian-invented dichotomy between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ Islam, although under the new names of ‘traditional’ and ‘untraditional’ Islam, as an effective tool for the management and control of the Islamic sphere. They have also exhibited striking similarities in their suppression and ‘securitisation’ of ‘untraditional’ Islam of both Sunni and Shi’a orientations. The article examines from a historical perspective the complex Islamic dynamics in the Muslim Caucasus which were shaped by the interplay between powerful external influences, both Islamised and Christian, and the distinctively Caucasian Muslim responses – dynamics essential to understanding how current elites and their antagonists in the region embrace, reject and otherwise instrumentalise Islam. It approaches the ongoing Islamic revival within the wider context of the global Islamic revivalist movement and pays special attention to the implications for this process of the 70 year-long Soviet atheistic rule, which mutated various Caucasian Muslim peoples into a specific social entity – ‘Soviet Caucasian Muslims’ – and which still significantly influences the nature and forms of the relationship between the state and Islam. The Caucasian Muslims before the USSR The Muslim Caucasus, as part of the Greater Caucasus, which also includes Georgia and Armenia, possesses a strong Caucasian civilisational core, shaped during its lengthy inclusion in various pan-Caucasian state formations before the Christian era.3 Despite its conceptual fuzziness, features of a core Caucasian civilisation can be traced in such phenomena as the region’s honour-centred customary norms, the respect and tolerance of neighbours, the high social status of the old and women, the distinctive concern for hospitality and the cult of guests, the poetic mindset, its ancient and unique wine-making culture, its ceramics, metal and jewellery works, weaving, cuisine and dress-code (de Waal 2010, 10). Among its written monuments are, for example, the Adygh4 Nart sagas, the importance of which for the Caucasus is comparable to that of Greek mythology to Western civilisation.5 It is significant that this Caucasian civilisational core withstood many conflicting and powerful external influences, resulting in the region’s fascinating ethno-linguistic and confessional kaleidoscope. The belief systems of its ancient inhabitants included polytheism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Manichaeism, Mazdakism and early Christianity. From the fourth century AD the partial Christianisation of the region was advanced by missionaries coming from Georgia and Armenia, the rulers of which adopted different versions of Eastern Christianity (Akaev 2011, 52). Between the eighth and nineteenth centuries the region was either a constituent or a dependent part of a succession of world Muslim empires responsible for the very emergence of the phenomenon of the Muslim Caucasus. Islam was brought to the present-day South Caucasus and southern Dagestan in the mid-seventh century AD by Arabs of the Umayyad caliphate6, representing the first generation of Arab Islamic expansionists.7 Hundreds of Arab warriors and scholars of Islam settled in the region, adding an Arab Islamic component into its architecture and ethno-cultural make-up. For instance, the famous Juma mosque was built in Derbent during that time. From that period onwards the Dagestani ulama (Islamic scholars) have been part of the Arabic Islamic scholarly tradition.8 It is significant that even despite two centuries of Russian and Soviet domination the Dagestani ulama, Sufi shaykhs and even rank-and-file Islamic ‘clergy’ have maintained their proficiency in Arabic.9 This is quite different from Turkey, south-east Asia and other parts of the subsequently Islamised world which witnessed a gradual linguistic switch among their respective Islamic elites to local languages. It could also be argued that the historical retention of Arabic among the Islamic ‘clergy’ of the north-eastern Caucasus was a facilitating factor in the region’s higher level of re-Islamisation and susceptibility to foreign Arabic Islamic influences after the end of Communism. During the Arab Abbasid10 domination over the region Islam gradually spread peacefully northwards from southern Dagestan and by the mid-sixteenth century most peoples of present-day Dagestan and Azerbaijan adopted Sunni Islam of the Shafi’a madhhab (juridical school within Sunni Islam). Jamal al-Din Yusuf al-Ardabil (fourteenth century), Jamal al-Din al-Mahalli (fifteenth century) and other Dagestani Islamic scholars were renowned authorities in Shafi’a madhhab in the Islamic world. From the tenth century Dagestan became one of the leading centres of Sufism (Khanbabaev 2010, 85-6; Shikhsaidov 2010, 46-7). In the post-Arab period the advance of Sunni Islam was facilitated by the Islamising policies of the Muslim Turkic dynasty of Seljuks (1040-1157) and the Mongo-Turkic dynasty of Timurids (1370-1507), who subsequently controlled the Caucasus between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The Seljuks introduced a Turkic element in the ethnic make-up of the region, contributed to the linguistic Turkicisation of the Azeris and some of its other peoples, as well as to the creation of a distinctive Turko-Persian culture in the region. In the sixteenth century the region was split along Sunni-Shi’a lines as a result of the policy of forcible ‘Shiisation’ by the Iranian Safavids (1502-1736), who incorporated present day Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan within their vast empire (1502-1736).11 Among the implications of the Sunni-Shi’a split was the divergence of Islamic scholarly traditions between largely Arabic-centred Sunni Dagestanis, and Turkish and Persian-centred Azeris, both Sunni and Shi’a (Sattarov 2010, 150; Yunusov 2012, 10). From the late sixteenth century, the inclusion of the region within the Ottoman Empire, the dominant madhhab of which was Hanafi Sunnism, enhanced the proliferation of the latter among Turkic peoples of the Caucasus, both plains-dwellers (Nogays and Kumyks) and highlanders (Karachay and Balkars), as well as various Adygh peoples. This advance of Hanafism in the region occurred in parallel with the spontaneous spread of Shafiism among the lowland Chechens (a Vainakh people), whose Islamisation continued well into the nineteenth century. A powerful catalyst was the Chechen and Ingush involvement in the Avar-dominated ghazawat (jihad) against the invasion of Christian Orthodox Russians (Zelkina 2000, 34). Due to the resilience of Caucasian customs and beliefs, Islam among the Caucasians absorbed many pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian and early Christian components. This rendered it a distinctively Caucasian Islam in spite of its formal Sunni-Shi’a and maddhab differences. In the case of the Adyghs the process of Islamisation was particularly problematic due to their strong adherence to the customary norms codified in Adyghe Khabze.12 The ethnic, cultural and confessional complexity of the Caucasian Muslims also accounted for the wide diffusion among them of Sufism (mystical Islam), which historically developed in opposition to established normative Islam. Sufi Islam also more easily appropriated non-Islamic practices, like the veneration of tombs and other traditional places of worship. This integrated, localised, and in some cases Sufi, Islam formed the essence of so-called ‘folk,’ or ‘parallel’ Islam during Russian/Soviet times (Bennigsen and Wimbush 1986, 21), which in the post-Soviet period became almost synonymous with home-grown ‘traditional’ Islam in contrast to foreign, often Arab, ‘untraditional’ Islam. From the eleventh century onwards the Sufis acted as the main messengers and promoters of Islam in the region. Initially they were from the tariqas (brotherhoods) of Badawiyya, Zarrukiyya, Safaviyya, Khalwatiyya and Sukhrawardiyya.13 Ottoman control over the region was responsible for some proliferation of the Mawlawi tariqa among the Azeris. But from the eighteenth century the Naqshbandiyya14 became the largest and most influential tariqa across the region (Sattarov 2010, 149; Khanbabaev 2010, 85; Akaev 2011, 64, 86; Yunusov 2012, 31). In the mid-nineteenth century, the defeat of the Naqshbandis, who constituted the core of the anti-Russian resistance, led to the rise of the Qadiri tariqa among the Chechens and Ingush. The leading messenger of the Qadiriyya was shaykh Kunta-hajjee15, who founded a regional wird (branch) of the Qadiriyya, which was subsequently named after him. Throughout history the formal divisions of the Caucasus Muslims along the Shi’a-Sunni, madhhab and tariqa lines were instrumentalised by local elites and external powers. Thus, Shi’a Iran and Sunni Ottoman Turkey, who competed for dominance in the region, often enjoyed military and moral support from local Shiites and Sunnis, respectively. During the Caucasian War Imam Shamil and other leaders of the ghazawat successfully used the Naqshbandi network for the mobilisation of local Muslims against Russia. Russia’s advance into the region introduced a strong element of ethnic and confessional otherness into the already complex ethno-cultural and confessional make-up of the region. It also triggered a large exodus of Caucasian Muslims into Iran and the Ottoman Empire. The Sunni Adyghs were the most affected: the bulk of them were forced to perform the hijra (migration), as the Prophet Muhammad had done in his time, to Dar al-Islam (‘Lands of Islam’) of the Ottoman Empire16 and became muhajirs (migrants), while their traditional habitat along the Black Sea was populated by Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Estonians and Ashkenazi Jews. The new settlers began ethnically to dominate the north-western Caucasus, while the indigenous Adyghs turned into a minority.17 It was this sizable Caucasian diaspora, formed in the late Ottoman Empire, which provided descendants who, in the post-Soviet and hence post-atheist period, arrived in the region as the bearers of ‘untraditional’ and ‘foreign’ Salafi Islam. The symbol of the latter was Emir Khattab (1969-2002), an alleged muhajir, and the charismatic leader of the mujahideen (Islamic fighters) of post-Soviet Chechnya and the wider North Caucasus. Later on, St. Petersburg, in its drive to strengthen the Christian presence along the Russian southern borders, encouraged the resettlement in the region of Christian Armenians from eastern Anatolia (Richmond 2008; Uras 1988, 422-423). The persistent influx into the region of economically and ideologically more sophisticated Armenians was a major factor in the development of the national self-awareness of the Azeris as well as of educated representatives of other Muslim ethnic groups (Akkieva 2008, 260). The incorporation of the Muslim Caucasus within the Russian Orthodox state18 introduced an element of ‘civilisational clash’ into the relationship of some Muslim peoples with their new Christian suzerain, while dividing some other doctrinally homogeneous Muslim communities along political lines. As mentioned above, Russian rule provoked selfless resistance on the part of the highlanders of the north-eastern Caucasus. Their participation in the anti-Russian ghazawat deepened their Islamic beliefs and in the case of the Chechens and Ingush, enhanced their Islamisation and ethno-national self-awareness. According to Yasin Rasulov, a leading Dagestani Salafi intellectual, the ghazawat changed the nature of Sufism by politicising the intrinsically apolitical Naqshbandi tariqa19 and producing ‘the first Dagestani Salafi thinkers such as Muhammad al-Quduqi.20 Among the outcomes of the ghazawat was the establishment on the territory of present-day Dagestan and Chechnya of an independent Islamic state, an imamate, which functioned on the basis of the shari’a for over 20 years. In the early 1900s pro-Salafi Islam and its correlation with national identity were debated on the pages of Jaridat-u Daghestan21, founded and edited by Ali Kayaev (Khanbabaev 2010, 90). The establishment of Russia’s dominance in the region also led to new internal divisions among the region’s Muslims. It stimulated the formation of various political alliances between St. Petersburg and some Kabartay, Avar and Azeri feudal rulers who used Russia’s backing for political and economic gains against their local Muslim rivals. It also resulted in splitting the Azeris into two distinctive political communities due to the newly drawn Russo-Iranian borders.22 This political division was aggravated by the isolation of Russia’s Azeris from the major Shi’a cities of Qom, Mashhad and Tabriz (Balci 2004, 206). While Russia’s Azeris experienced a russified version of modernisation linked to the country’s partial oil-related industrialisation, Iran’s Azeris continued their rural existence according to centuries-long traditions.23 Russia’s Azeris reacted to their encounter with modernity through the Azeri Islamic reformist movement known as maarifcilik (‘enlightenment’) under the leadership of Ali bey Huseynzade (1864-1941).24 Huseynzade, Ahmet Aghaev (1869-1939) and other members of the maarifcilik movement, like the Tatar Ismail Gasprinskiy and other jadids25, saw the future of their nation in a creative synthesis of an Islam-based worldview, Turkic ethnicity and Western technological progress. Many of them, as well as the widely respected Akhund Abdusalam Akhundzade, who between 1880 and 1907 was shaykh-ul-Islam, downplayed the Azeris’ traditional Shiism and called for their religious unity with Sunni Muslims (Sattarov 2010, 151; Balci 2004, 206). It is worth noting that these ideas were not dissimilar from the thinking of Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, Muhammad Abduh and other nineteenth century Islamic reformers who sought to reconcile Islam with Western models of economic and social modernisation (Tamimi 2000, 19; Esposito and Voll 2001, 19). Yet another major consequence of the Muslim Caucasus’ inclusion within the Russian Empire26 was the officially imposed dichotomy between the pro-government and loyal ‘official’ Islam and the oppositional ‘unofficial’ Islam, which was largely represented by the aforementioned ‘folk’ or ‘parallel’ Islam. Significantly, this dichotomy persisted throughout the Soviet period and has continued to shape the religious dynamic of the post-Communist Caucasian umma. The embodiment of ‘official’ Islam was the muftiate of the Transcaucasus, which was established in 1872.27 It was headed by the shaykh-ul-Islam, who administered Shi’a Muslims, and the mufti, who oversaw Sunnis, both of whom were generously sponsored by St. Petersburg. Its main function was to control and co-opt those ulama potentially dangerous to Russian rule (Sattarov 2010, 150). Overall, however, the establishment of Russian rule and the institutionalisation of ‘official’ Islam did not significantly affect the vast majority of rural and highland Caucasian Muslim communities, who continued to apply both shari’a law and Caucasian customary norms. Islam remained the key marker of Muslims’ identities. Throughout the Russian period ethnically diverse Caucasian Muslims were collectively referred to as ‘Muslims’ as distinct from the region’s Christians – the Georgians and Armenians. This was due to the system of Russian military-popular governance, which, in contrast with direct Russian rule over the Volga Muslim Tatars, allowed Caucasian Muslims to preserve a considerable religious and ethno-cultural autonomy through the combination of unified administration (General-Governorships and provinces) and traditional institutions of self-government and Islamic shari’a law.28 Nevertheless, the politico-territorial separation of Caucasian Muslims from neighbouring Iran and Turkey and the Middle East created a social, cultural and religious gap between them and their ethnic brethren beyond Russian borders, and laid the foundation for the formation of a distinctive ‘Russian’ Islam, which later evolved into ‘Soviet’ Islam.29
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 23:59:12 +0000
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