| Jihad in the Caucasus -- Part Two |
Shaykh Mansour - First Mujahid Leader of the Caucasus
The first coherent response to the danger came from an individual whose obscure but romantic history is very typical of the Caucasus. He is known only as Elisha Mansour, an Italian Jesuit priest sent to convert the Greeks in Anatolia to Catholicism. To the anger of the Pope, he soon converted enthusiastically to Islam, and went to the Caucasus to help organise Caucasian resistance against the Russians. At the battle of Tatar-Toub in 1791, his resistance came to an untimely end; captured by the enemy, he spent the rest of his life a prisoner at a frozen monastery in the White Sea, where monks laboured unsuccessfully to bring him back to the Catholic fold.
The Second Great Jihad Leader - Ghazi Mollah
Mansour had failed, but the Caucasians had fought like lions. The flame of resistance soon spread. Mollah Muhammad Yaraghi, a scholar deeply learned in the Arabic texts, helped fan the flames by preaching to the harsh mountaineers. His leading pupil was Ghazi Mollah, a religious student of the Avar people of Daghestan, who began his own preaching in 1827, selecting the large aoul of Ghimri to be the centre of his activities.
For the next two years Ghazi Mollah proclaimed the message of pure Islam. The Caucasians had not accepted Islam fully, he told them. Their old customary laws, which differed from tribe to tribe, must be replaced by the Shari'ah. In particular, vendettas must be suppressed, and all injustices dealt with fairly by a proper Islamic court. Finally, the Caucasians must restrain their wild, turbulent egos, and tread the hard path of self-purification. Only by following this prescription, he told them, could they overcome their ancient divisions, and stand united against the Russian Orthodox menace.
In 1829, Ghazi Mollah judged that his followers had absorbed enough of this message for them to begin the final stage of political action. He travelled throughout the Caucasus, openly preaching against vice, and overturning with his own hand the great jars of wine traditionally stored in the centre of the aouls. In a series of fiery sermons he urged the people to take up arms. It was the time of Jihad, he proclaimed. The great Islamic scholars of Daghestan gathered at the mosque of Ghimri, and, acclaiming him Imam, pledged their support.
The murids at Ghimri, standing out from the other mountaineers by their black banners, and the absence of any trace of gold or silver on their clothes and weapons, marched out behind Ghazi Mollah, chanting the Murid battle-cry: "La ilaha illaLlah." Their first target was the aoul of Andee, which was submissive towards the Russians. So impressive were the Murids that at the very sight of their silent ranks the formerly treacherous village submitted without a fight. Ghazi Mollah then turned his attention to the Russians themselves.
At this time, the Russians had moved colonists into the region. Large military outposts had been established in the plains to the north, at Grozny, Khasav-Yurt and Mozdok, but elsewhere the process of clearing the Muslims from the land had only just begun. Ghazi Mollah could therefore count on local support when he attacked the Russian fort of Vnezapnaya. Without cannon, he proved unable to capture it; but its defenders, commanded by Baron Rosen, were forced to send for help. This came in the form of a large relief column, which, thinking it feared nothing from the Muslims, pursued them into the great forest which then stood south of Grozny.
In the dark woods, the murids were fighting on their own ground. Shooting from the branches of the giant beech trees, constructing traps and pitfalls for the stoical but disoriented Russians, they methodically picked off the enemy officers, and captured many of the bewildered foot-soldiers. In this twilight world of vast beech trees and tangled undergrowth, the lumbering Russian column, led by priests bearing icons and huge crosses, and burdened with oxcarts carrying five-foot samovars and cases of champagne for the officers, found itself slowly eroded and scattered. Only remnants emerged from the woods: and the first Mujahideen victory had been won.
Baying for revenge, the Russians attacked the Muslim town of Tschoumkeskent, which they captured and razed to the ground. But they paid heavily for this conquest: four hundred Russians had been killed in the operation, and only a hundred and fifty Murids. Even greater was their humiliation at Tsori, a mountain pass where four thousand Russian troops were held up for three days by a barricade, which, they later found to their chagrin, was manned by only two Chechen snipers.
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