Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘My father left Dagestan in the early 1900s, with Serafuddin,’ said Hatice Sener, the 75-year-old great-aunt of a friend who took me to see the village. She told me some of the stories of the village, where fact and fiction mix together in confusing ways.

  ‘This was before Nikolai [II] became tsar. They decided to emigrate because the tsar was very cruel. After the collapse of Imam Shamil there was pressure on Dagestanis. There was fear that the roads to Turkey would be closed. Muhammad Madani predicted that communism would bring big problems for religion. He said the roads would open for three months and then they would be closed by snow. He said those that left would go to Turkey, and those that did not leave would stay for ever and that it was a pity to live in Russia.’

  The stories told about Muhammad Madani show him to have been an unusually gentle man.

  In one legend, he was leading the zikr – the ecstatic prayer ritual of the Sufis – for the whole village, when he felt a small undercurrent of unhappiness which nagged at him. ‘Everyone is doing zikr. All the animals are doing zikr with us. The worms are doing zikr with us. The birds are doing zikr. Every being in the village is doing zikr with us except one animal who is disconnected from his father and feeling depressed. Allah is not happy. The prophet is not happy, the saints are not happy,’ the sheikh intoned.

  It turned out that a small child was keeping a worm in a box, and the misery of the worm had upset God. ‘From that, the people of the village understood and raised their children with an understanding that harming any creature, no matter how small, causes unhappiness and earns the displeasure of God, of the prophet, and of saints,’ the story relates.

  And the influence of the sheikh’s teachings was still strong. As Hatice Sener sat there in a flowered top, a white headscarf and brown cardigan, she recounted tale after tale from her family’s past. The husband of her great-aunt was in the leather trade and he stayed in Dagestan, and she had long dreamed of trying to find her family and seeing a land where everyone spoke Avar, but she said she would never do so.

  ‘I never plan to go to Dagestan, because the sheikh said that Dagestan was a bad place and that people should not return ever,’ she said.

  Muhammad Madani passed leadership of the community on to Serafuddin, and the village became a refuge for many Dagestanis. Although Serafuddin himself died in 1936, his house is still open to all supplicants, and his daughter-in-law – a tiny, wizened old lady who was watching television when I called – keeps it ready for prayer meetings and callers.

  Those Dagestanis who made it to Guneykoy were the lucky ones. Most emigrants faced conditions far more extreme than those enjoyed in the Yalova region, which is nestled in the hills overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

  Groups of Chechens were settled elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, and many were forced to make their own way to the unforgiving lands of the Middle East. They arrived in what is now Jordan in 1901, and found a land of ruins and nomads.

  ‘It was completely Arabs then, there was nothing in this place, just a few ruins,’ said Abdul Baki Jamo, an 87-year-old who is now perhaps the most powerful Chechen in Jordan, having served in government or parliament more or less without interruption since 1956.

  ‘We have preserved our culture because the people around here were living in a very tribal community. For this reason, the Chechens lived lives separate from the rest of the people.’

  When I had driven up to his house, which is in a pure Chechen area of Zarqa, Jordan’s second city, I saw how the Chechens were tied to their own identity. The guttural buzz of Chechen was the only language I heard on the streets, which were marked with graffiti telling incomers that this was no Arab neighbourhood.

  ‘Warning Chechen area,’ said an English-language inscription on one wall. Others were in Arabic writing, but made more or less the same point, while one or two were even in Cyrillic.

  ‘The Chechens only really interacted with the Circassians, who had come here twenty years earlier. The Ottoman authorities did not have full authority over the tribes and for this reason the Chechens lived a double life, both agricultural to support themselves and a military life as well to protect themselves from the attacks of the Bedouin,’ said Jamo.

  Jamo, a small, dapper man with a white beard and a house full of books, said his father left the Caucasus at the end of 1899, as part of a group of Chechens. Apparently, their Sufi leader – identified by Jamo as Suleiman al-Gilani, although that may have been the founder of the whole Sufi order – prophesied that Islam would die out in the Caucasus, and the emigrants would have to preserve their faith so they could take it back to their homeland when the threat had passed.

  The difference in the circumstances of their emigration had also helped the Chechens to preserve their culture and identity. Where the demoralized Circassians had fled the Caucasus as a starving rabble, the Chechens had left in discrete groups under the leadership of the Sufis.

  ‘We preserved our language and traditions for the reason that we were always under the leadership of these Sufi sheikhs. The Sufi path helped us to preserve our culture more than the Circassians. And until now, we do not speak any language other than Chechen to our children. We interact with them according to our customs.’

  The Caucasus community in Jordan is made up entirely of Circassians and Chechens, of whom there are 5,000 – 10,000, and they are treated together under tribal law. I met no Ossetians while I was there, and only one Dagestani.

  But she was distinguished in a way that more than made up for the lack of a community. She was a relative of Imam Shamil.

  Shamil’s existence in Kaluga becomes less well-documented after 1862, when Runovsky stopped being his minder, and the replacement officer was both less scrupulous in keeping a diary and less friendly to his charge. One visitor, the black American actor Ira Aldridge, who was forced by racism in his homeland and in England to seek a living on tour in Europe, described Shamil as looking calm and happy.

  ‘There is a decidedly benevolent expression in Schamyl’s countenance, so much so, indeed, that he looks more like a placid Patriarch of old than a fierce mountain warrior. He is considerably above the middle height; I should say full six feet when standing erect. He wore on his head a large white turban, with a small red crown and tassel, and just below it an encircling band of beautiful black lamb-skin, ’ the actor wrote in a letter in January 1864 after a meeting with the imam.

  ‘His face, which is of oval form, is of remarkably fair, almost delicate, complexion, his forehead high, broad, and unwrinkled, his nose aquiline and thin, and his mouth beautifully formed. His eyes are grey, deep-set, and expressive, and his teeth, which are somewhat large, are of pearl-like whiteness, seldom seen in a man of his age, for he is verging on seventy. His moustaches and long flowing beard are perfectly white – the latter extending to his chest – and his hands, which are small for so large a man, are as soft and delicate as a lady’s.’

  Shamil had, it would seem, not lost his ability to hide his feelings. His minder – a colonel of Polish origins – had made his life a misery, and personal losses had destroyed what peace of mind was left. The fact that his beard had turned completely white in just four years may, however, have been a sign of the stress he was under. In May 1862, Keremet – the wife of his son Gazi-Muhammad – died of a fever. Perhaps he did not mind that, since he hated her father, but her death was a foretaste of what was to come. His favourite daughter Nafisat died in 1865, shortly after the death of her son. Another grandson of Shamil’s also died as an infant.

  All told, seventeen members of Shamil’s family and household would not survive the stay in Kaluga, and he mourned each one. After the death of Nafisat, it is said that he never smiled again, even when he finally rid himself of his hated minder. He left Kaluga in 1869, moving on to Kiev, before being allowed to make the pilgrimage to Mecca the next year. He was aged seventy-four.

  In Turkey, he was received as a celebrity and cheered as wildly as he had been in St Petersburg.

&nb
sp; The effect was the same when he arrived in Mecca, where the police had to assign special hours for his prayer to prevent public disturbances. Shamil, visibly ailing, lived a life of contemplation. His wife Zeidat died here, and only Shuanat was with him, for the Russians had not allowed Gazi-Muhammad to go into exile alongside his father. When Shamil’s son was finally allowed to leave the tsar’s empire, he was too late. Shamil died on 4 February 1871 without his favourite son by his side.

  Although he surrendered to the Russians, and had governed with severity, he was mourned in the Caucasus, according to Baddeley, who quoted one of his guides as saying there had been one last miracle on the night of the imam’s death.

  ‘It was long ago – some thirty years – when I was a lad. I was out by night watching my sheep on yonder mountain; all at once the sky grew bright as fire and red as blood. I was afraid, for I knew not what it meant. Afterwards, when I returned to Shoura, news came of Shamil’s death that night in Medina,’ the guide told him.

  Gazi-Muhammad lived on in Istanbul for a while, and even attempted to retake the Caucasus at the head of irregular cavalry in 1877 – 8. But he fell under suspicion from the Turkish government and was despatched to the Middle East a couple of years later, as was his young brother-in-law, Muhammad Fazil Daghistani.

  Muhammad Fazil’s father had been a follower of Shamil’s but, accused of treachery in 1852, the family had been exiled to one of the most inaccessible of all the villages in Dagestan. Their lives were ruined, despite Gazi-Muhammad’s struggles to clear the family’s name – a struggle that introduced him to Fazil’s sister, an educated, charming and devout woman.

  When Keremet died, Gazi-Muhammad called for the woman he remembered as being so articulate and beautiful, and she travelled to Kaluga, where she married him and took the name Habibet, ‘the beloved’. Her brother Fazil found a place in the Russian service, where he was an officer until he too went into exile. In Turkey, he and Gazi-Muhammad became close advisers of the sultan.

  It was Muhammad Fazil’s granddaughter I met in Amman. She did not know the Avar language of her ancestors, but she still retained enough of the Dagestani virtues to have surely won Shamil’s approval, though her appearance and behaviour would most likely have shocked him.

  Tamara Daghistani is a short-haired lady with an absurdly infectious laugh whose lovely limestone villa on the outskirts of Amman is packed with antique weapons, pictures and mementoes of her family’s glorious past. When I arrived, her husband Nasser al-Sadoun was standing in a tree in the garden – he may have been pruning it but he looked more like he was levitating as I walked up the path – which set a suitably absurd tone for surely the jolliest interview I conducted during the entire time I spent researching this book.

  She went to school in England, and still speaks perfect English. But she had the old-fashioned slang of a 1950s schoolgirl, which made her seem like an extra from an Ealing comedy. Imam Shamil, for example, was a ‘toughie’, as was her grandfather, who had, she said, at one point wrestled a lion back into its cage in the presence of the Turkish sultan himself.

  After her grandfather was expelled from Istanbul, he went to Iraq – then a Turkish province – where he lived quietly until he came out of retirement to lead the Ottoman resistance to the British invasion of Iraq during the First World War.

  ‘He went off to war, aged sixty-four. He did not have to but he did not want the English unbelievers to take Iraq. But he was killed by the English in 1915,’ she said.

  ‘The Turks retreated, but he did not retreat. He had a Chechen with him and they never retreat, those Chechens. He went on his horse with his followers, but a machine gun hit him and he fell from his horse. The horse was called Weder, she carried him home but she refused to eat and drink after he died, and she died too. The horse stood by his body until it was dark.’

  Her husband had by this stage changed into non-gardening clothes, and had come into the living room to help tell the story. He could not resist chipping in with a blow-by-blow account of the battle, and the glorious role of his own ancestors, much to his wife’s fury. He darted around the living room to evade her attempts to silence him, while keeping up his account of how an army controlled by one of his relatives had forced the British to retreat.

  ‘Oh, why will you not retreat somewhere else?’ she called out, as he moved on to how the British army became besieged in Kut.

  ‘He is not interested, he must feel like he is besieged,’ Tamara called out. But al-Sadoun could not be silenced, and continued with an account of the ransom that was paid to release certain British officers.

  ‘Oh, he will be offering a ransom to get away from you in a minute,’ was his wife’s riposte.

  By this stage, I was literally crying with my attempts not to laugh, and could not help reflecting inwardly on how funny the picture was compared to what I had expected.

  I had imagined she would be a Dagestani woman in a headscarf, with a demure manner and a deferential attitude to her husband. Instead, it was as if I had dropped into the house of a friend’s eccentric, articulate and beloved grandparents.

  Finally, Tamara had to enlist the help of her son – by telephone – to get the conversation back on track.

  ‘Faisal, your father is causing a scandal. We have a terribly nice Englishman here who wants to talk about Dagestan and your father is forcing him to listen to an account of the First World War, please make him go to the office instead,’ she said into the telephone.

  ‘And make him put a different shirt on,’ she added as an afterthought. Faced with opposition from wife and son, her husband was defeated. Tamara returned to talking about Dagestan, although she had to be alert to attempts by her husband to rejoin the conversation via a side-door and the window.

  Her father was a small child when her grandfather was killed by the British, but he was still raised in the traditions of a Dagestani and taught the value of restraint and honour. They were values that Imam Shamil would have approved of, but Tamara herself said she could not stand the traditional customs of the Caucasus.

  ‘They invited me to go and see a rehearsal of a Dagestani show in London. And the girls were sitting on one side and the men on the other, and even if they were married the man would go into the middle and the woman would come into the middle and they would talk. I asked if they would ever sit together and they said no,’ she said, when I asked her if she would like to live in Dagestan.

  ‘I am a tough cookie myself and it is important that women have rights, and these did not have rights. When Shamil had his lunch he would sit with his mother and his favourite cat and the others could go where they liked.’

  Nevertheless, she was brought up with the traditional Caucasus values of bravery and forbearance, which have served her well in light of the history of Iraq for the last half-century.

  ‘My grandfather was another Dagestani, he was a toughie. And we were all taught as children that we could not cry. Crying was not done. My aunt told me a story that when she was a little girl she was in the men’s divan, and my grandfather loved animals so baby lions were wandering about. She said she was sitting near her father and a horse stuck its head through the window and puffed into her ear. She squeaked, so he said to her in Turkish: “You have shamed me, leave the room” and he did not speak to her for days.’

  Later, Tamara’s aunt was showing a seal in her father’s menagerie to a friend, and the seal bit her hand. Although there was blood pouring from the wound, and her hand was still in the seal’s mouth, she did not make a sound. ‘You are now my daughter again,’ her father, Tamara’s grandfather, said.

  Tamara was brought up with the same injunction to never show weakness, and it was a lesson forced into her when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Her father, who was deputy chief-of-staff of the Iraqi army and named Gazi-Muhammad after his celebrated uncle, was arrested. Tamara said she was pressured into begging the country’s new rulers to release her father, but she refused, saying it would shame him.<
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  And the Dagestani conventions would serve her in even better stead during her life ahead. Her family fled to London in 1959 when she was twelve. She attended a British school and tried not to think of her father in prison. Homesick and worried, her weight ballooned from 45 to 120 kilograms, but she still did not cry, all the time until her father was released.

  ‘Caucasus people are extremely loyal wherever they go, it is important to remember. I remember talking to my father about the revolution and to him it had been very disloyal. They had sworn loyalty to the king and the country, and to him that made them traitors and he despised them,’ she said.

  ‘You had to gain their respect and once you had it then you had it for life.’

  24.

  This is All for the Sake of Allah

  In March 1921, a Soviet official responsible for the hundreds of small nations scattered across the Bolsheviks’ new state addressed the 10th Congress of the Communist Party.

  In the four years since the revolution that brought down the tsars, he and his comrades had battled the old ruling classes, rival left-wingers, foreign armies, separatists, religious leaders, maniacs, democrats and monarchists for control of Russia.

  Now, on 10 March, that battle was all but won. The foreign armies had either withdrawn or were about to. Internal opposition was continuing, but would soon be crushed. The Bolsheviks were looking about them and deciding how to build the perfect society.

  The Soviet official, himself a Georgian from the southern flanks of the Caucasus mountains, said he sympathized with the ethnic minorities, whom he governed as Nationalities Commissar. They had been forced into the Russian state, he said, their land had been stolen and given to favoured groups like the rich peasants – ‘kulaks’ in Soviet speak. They had been driven to the verge of complete destruction.