Imam Shamil

Imam Schamil, lithograph by R. Hoffmann after Laurens

Imam Shamil surrenders. Painting by Franz Roubaud

Imam Shamil , also Sheikh Shamil ( Avar Имам Шамил , Russian имам Шамиль ; * around 1797 in Gimra , Dagestan ; † March 1871 near Medina in Saudi Arabia ), was the religious and political leader ( imam ) of the Muslim mountain peoples of Dagestan from 1834 to 1859 and Chechnya and during this time organized their resistance against the Russian conquest of the Northeast Caucasus .

Life

Shamil was the son of a landowner and belonged to the people of the Avars on. He studied grammar, logic, rhetoric and Arabic, gained a reputation as a scholar and in 1830 joined the Sufi Brotherhood ( Tariqa ) of the Nakschibendi , which in Russia was referred to as Muridism (Russian мюридизм). Under the leadership of Imam Ghazi Muhammad (Russian Kazi-Mullah / Кази-Мулла), from around 1827, the Dagestani mountain peoples defended themselves against the Dagestani princes of the plain and the Russian state , which supported the princes and made them vassals. From 1830 on, Chechens also joined the anti-colonial resistance movement under Hajji-Tashav. The ideological basis of the resistance was Islam, which unified the different ethnic groups of Dagestan and Chechnya. Shamil became one of Ghazi Muhammad's most important comrades-in-arms and friends.

When the Russian army stormed the Gimra fortress in Dagestan in 1832, Ghazi Muhammad and many of his colleagues were killed, and Shamil was seriously injured. For this reason, not he, but Hamza Bek ibn ´Alî Iskandar Bed al-Hutsâlî (Russian Гамзат-бек) was elected as the new imam.

When Hamza Bek fell victim to a blood revenge by Hajji Murat in 1834 , Shamil was elected the new imam, although he had to assert his claim to this office against several competitors. At that time there were several generals in Dagestan and Chechnya who each had strong domestic power in their area and who claimed leadership of the Sharia movement founded by Ghazi Muhammad. In the course of time Shamil succeeded in transforming his competitors and fellow campaigners into "governors" ( Nuwwāb ), whose activities he determined and controlled. In 1836 his leadership position was recognized by Haji Tashav in Chechnya.

In 1839 Shamil suffered a devastating defeat by the Russian army in Achulgo, Dagestani . His son had already been handed over to the Russian army as a hostage, but the surrender negotiations failed and the Russian army stormed the fortress. Shamil was able to escape again and in 1840 rebuild the resistance movement from Chechnya . As a result, Shamil began building an orderly state in order to give the resistance a more solid foundation. To this end, he created a three-tier hierarchy of village chiefs, district chiefs and finally his own central government. The area chiefs were recruited from his nuwwāb. The state received a standing army, postal system, tax administration and its own Islamic judiciary.

Shamil experienced the climax of his power when he almost completely destroyed the large army of the newly appointed Caucasus governor Mikhail Vorontsov sent against him in 1845. These successes also caused quite a stir in Western Europe. But the subsequent reorganization of all Russian policy in the North Caucasus, initiated by Vorontsov, ushered in the decline of Shamil's power.

After the end of the Crimean War in 1856, it was decided to use the additional troops stationed in the Caucasus because of the Crimean War against Shamil, and in 1857 another large-scale military campaign began, which resulted in the final defeat of Shamil. A well-equipped 200,000-strong tsarist army under Generals NI Evdokimov and Al Baryatinsky surrounded Shamil. Gradually the situation became hopeless for Shamil and his supporters and fighters in the villages, so that a gradual surrender began. Finally, in April 1859, the Russians stormed Shamil's fortress near Vedeno in the hope of his arrest.

Shamil was not found because he recognized the trap set by the Russians and retired to Mount Gunib with hundreds of his fighters . On August 25, 1859, Shamil himself surrendered in the face of Russian superiority. He was brought to Saint Petersburg . Shamil was exiled from St. Petersburg to Kaluga . In 1870 he made a pilgrimage to Mecca with the permission of the Tsar . There he died the following year near Medina in what is now Saudi Arabia.

One of his sons served in the Russian army , another, Ghazi Mehmed, but left Russia and went to Istanbul; In 1877 he commanded a Circassian volunteer corps in Armenia.

To this day, the heroic myth of Imam Shamil exists especially among the peoples of Dagestan and Chechnya.

The city of Svetogorsk in Dagestan, founded in the 1980s, was renamed Shamilkala in 1991 .

See also

• Islam in Russia

literature

• John F. Baddeley: The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. Longmanns, Green and Co., London et al. 1908, ( digitized ).
• Moshe Gammer : Muslim Resistance to the Tsar. Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan. Cass, London 1994, ISBN 0-7146-3431-X .
• Шапи Казиев: Имам Шамиль (= Жизнь замечательных людей. Серия биографий. 1434 = 1234). Молодая гвардия, Москва 2010, ISBN 978-5-235-03332-0 ( at the publisher ).
• Michael Kemper: Rule, Law and Islam in Daghestan. From the khanates and community leagues to the jihād state (= Caucasian studies. 8). Reichert, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-89500-414-6 , pp. 255-316, (at the same time: Bochum, Universität, habilitation paper, 2003).
• Uli Shamiloglu: Muslims in Russia. Mason Crest, Philadelphia PA 2006, ISBN 1-59084-884-5 .

Web links

Commons : Imam Shamil  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Imam Schamil in the catalog of the German National Library

supporting documents

1. ↑ Cf. Kemper: Dominion, Law and Islam in Daghestan. 2005, p. 247.
2. ↑ Cf. Kemper: Dominion, Law and Islam in Daghestan. 2005, p. 255.
3. ↑ Cf. Kemper: Dominion, Law and Islam in Daghestan. 2005, p. 283.