Introduction

Unlike Tatar and Bashkir Muslims who had been within the Russian state since the middle of the sixteenth centuries the various Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus, with the exception of several Kabardian families, came under Russian rule only at the end of the nineteenth century. The protracted and brutal Caucasus War (1817–64) and the ensuing establishment of Russian rule over the Muslim Caucasus forced many surviving Muslim leaders and their followers to conduct hijrah to Turkey to seek the protection of Ottoman sulṭāns who since 1517 had claimed caliphal authority. As a result, Ottoman Turkey acquired a sizeable Cherkess diaspora, while the muhājirs’ ancestral land was subjected to an influx of Cossack, Russian and other non-Muslim settlers. These factors affected the attitudes and the religious and political positioning of the North Caucasian Muslim leaders and ordinary Muslims during the Russian bourgeois-democratic and Bolshevik Revolutions. Following the establishment of Bolshevik rule in the north-eastern Caucasus, the region's Sovietization was hampered because of its difficult mountainous terrain and the extreme polyethnicity of its population. At the same time, the high mountains and wild forests served as a safe haven for the remaining ‘ulamā’ and Ṣūfī sheikhs, thus allowing for the continuation in the north-eastern Caucasus of the Arabic-based Islamic learned tradition and of Naqshbandī, Shādhilī and Qādirī Ṣūfī ṭarīqahs.

It took the Bolsheviks over two decades to incorporate the North Caucasus into the Soviet politico-administrative and economic system. Moreover, the Stalin leadership still remained suspicious of Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars and some other Muslims of the region, who in 1943–44 were deported en masse to Central Asia where they came to constitute the majority among the deportees. A life in deportation (1943/44–1957) affected the Muslims’ world view, Islamic beliefs and practices while children born during that period would make up a pool of potential national and religious leaders in the post-Soviet period. One of them would be General Dzhokhar Dudayev (1944–96), who in 1994 mobilized Chechens for an Islamized national-liberation struggle against Moscow. In the north-western Caucasus, the religious and national dynamic was also affected by the continuing political, economic and cultural imbalance between the privileged Circassians and the disadvantaged Turkic Karachai-Balkars.