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The Chechen peoples desperate struggle for freedom has taken many by surprise. As with Bosnia three years ago, the very existence of this Muslim country was unknown to many in the Muslim community. But now, as the savage hordes of Tsar Boris Yeltsen the First pour down from the barbarian lands of the north to bring fire and the sword to the Chechens, it is worth remembering that the Caucasus has always been the graveyard of invaders and the birthplace of Muslim heroes whose names still resound in the forests and valleys of that most romantic of all mountain lands.

The Caucasus, a sheer rampart which divides Europe from Asia, is like no other mountain range on earth. The highest peaks in Europe are here, compared to which the Alps seem like mere mole hills. Stretching for 650 miles from the Caspian to the Black Sea, their average height is over 10,000 feet. This spectacular prospect is made still more forbidding by the vertiginous steepness of the slopes. "The Caucasus is like a man, its body is without curves," says a Caucasian proverb. Cliffs, dropping in places more than five thousand feet into icy torrents, seem to dissect the landscape into sheer blocks of stone.

The very impenetrability of the Caucasus, and the difficulty of internal communication, have allowed countless different peoples and tribes to dwell here. The historian Pliny tells us that the Romans employed a hundred and thirty-four interpreters in their dealings with the warlike Caucasian clans. The Muslim historian al-Azizi dubbed the region the Mountain of Languages, recording that three hundred mutually-incomprehensible tongues were spoken in Daghestan alone.

The harsh climate and impossible terrain have imposed a similar ascetic lifestyle on all the various peoples of the Caucasus. Little agriculture is possible on the dizzying slopes, and only on the highest plateaus can sheep be husbanded with any success. Traditionally, the people lived in aouls, rugged Caucasian villages, fortified with stone blockhouses and sheer walls to keep out pumas, wolves, and enemy tribes. Built in the most inaccessible positions atop needle-thin peaks, the only route to these stubborn hamlets lay along footpaths which clung to the cliff face, providing no place for rest, but only dizzying views of surrounding peaks, and of the eagles circling far below.

In such an extreme landscape, only strong children survived. Spending their days in endless toil up and down the slopes, by the time they reached maturity Caucasian men were wiry and immensely strong. It is recorded that in the mid-nineteenth century many Caucasian girls would not consent to marry a man unless he had killed at least one of the Russian invaders, could jump over a stream twenty-three feet wide, and over a rope held at shoulder-height between two men.

The yawning gulfs which divided the aouls led easily to rivalry and war. Caucasian life was dominated by the blood-vendetta which ensured that no wrong, however slight, could go unavenged by the relatives of a victim. Tales abound in the epic literature of centuries-long conflicts which began with a simple offense and ended with the death of an entire clan. Warfare was constant, as was the training for it; and young men prided themselves in their horsemanship, wrestling, and sharpshooting.

Muslims have never conquered the Caucasus: even the Sahaba, who swept before them the legions of Byzantium and Persia, stopped short at these forbidding cliffs. The Muslims of neighbouring areas regarded it with terror, believing that the King of all the Jinn had his capital amid its snowy peaks.

Where Muslim armies could not penetrate, peaceful Muslim missionaries ventured. Many achieved martyrdom at the hands of the wild, angry tribesmen; but even remote valleys and the high aouls accepted the faith. The Chechens, Avars, Circassians and Daghestanis entered Islam; only the Georgians and the Armenians were unconverted.

The Russian Invasion

A threat to all the Caucasus was gathering on the horizon. In 1552, Ivan the Terrible had captured and destroyed Kazan, the great Muslim city on the upper Volga. Four years later the Russian hordes reached the Caspian. At their van rode the wild Cossacks, brutal horsemen who reproduced themselves by capturing and marrying by force the Muslim women who fell into their hands. As perversely pious as they were turbulent, they never established a new settlement without first building a spectacular church, whose tolling bells rang out over the Tsars expanding empire on the steppes.

By the late eighteenth century the Russian Orthodox threat to the Caucasus had not gone unnoticed by the mountain tribes. Their lack of unity, however, made effective action impossible, and soon the fertile lowlands of North Chechenia and, further west, the Nogay Tatar country were wrested from Muslim hands. The Muslims who remained were forced to become serfs: agricultural slaves of Russian lords. Those who refused or ran away were hunted down in an aristocratic Russian version of fox- hunting. Some were skinned, and their skins were used to make military drums. The enserfed women often had to endure the confiscation of their babies, so that the pedigree Russian greyhounds and hunting dogs could be nourished on human milk.

Overseeing this policy was the empress Catherine the Great, who sent the youngest of her lovers, Count Platon Zubov (he was twenty-five, she seventy), to realise the first stage of her Pan-Orthodox dream by which all Muslim lands would be conquered for Orthodoxy. Zubov's army broke up along the Caspian shores, but the warning had been sounded. The Caucasus looked up from its internal strife, and knew it had an enemy.

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