In Quest for God and Freedom - Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus,Hardback - 288 pages,
by Anna Zelkina.
Product Description :
After the first war in Chechnya in 1994 and related flareups in
Daghestan, the world suddenly discovered within Russia the existence of
"exotic," freedom-loving but also "warlike" Muslim peoples intent on
liberating themselves from the domination of a distant Russian
government.
In,
In Quest for God and Freedom, Anna Zelkina delves into a
past that remains alive in the minds of the peoples of these regions, a
past that is crucial to understanding current events. She examines the
formative period of the first half of the nineteenth century, during
which the Chechens and Daghestanis joined forces under the banner of
Islam and
shari'a to resist Russian attempts to conquer them, an all-too
familiar scenario in light of recent events. Zelkina focuses on the Sufi
brotherhoods,
mainly the Naqshbandiyya, under whose charge the
resistance was conducted.
The author reveals the immense impact of this Muslim
mystical order upon the social, religious, and political life of the
peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan during this crucial period. In the
process, she sheds light on the Islamization of the North Caucasus and
on the leading role the Sufi brotherhoods still play in Chechen and
Daghestani public life today. In Quest for God and Freedom is must
reading for anyone wishing to understand the current crisis in the
Caucasus.
This review is from: In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (Hardcover)
'' This is a book that for very bizarre reasons is not well known about and
yet informs almost every book written in the last decade about the
political and religious history of the Caucasian during the
Russo-Caucasian Wars.
Her scholarship is exceptional, the writing is
fluid, never caught up in absurd academic terminologies, and yet
rigorous referencing with great diligence a host of key, and largely
forgotten historical figures that made the Sufi Brotherhoods of the
Caucasus the formidable force of resistance they were.
She dissects
the Qadiri and Naqshbandi Orders, both founded by Persian Mystics and
charts their spread first across Central Asia and then into India and
the Caucasus via Baghdad (Naqshbandism in particular) charting their
metamorphosis from spiritual quietism to political activism. Her work
reveals through its own process of investigation the twist and turns of
these orders through the scanty referenced profiles of their leaders.
Mystics turned warrior like Hamza Bek, Shamil are contextualised in the
spiritual and worldly (all too worldly) branch of the Naqshbandi tree.
It becomes clear that establishment of the Sharia and a return to 'pure'
Islam was as much a preoccupation then, as it is today in the better
known guise of Wahabbism.
The significant role of Dagestan as a
centre of serious Islamic learning, and a production line of clerics
able to reach out to the people and touch their deeper moral needs as
well as their sense of political grievance, emerges very clearly from
this book.
All in all it is a masterpiece of work, being serious,
superbly written and outstandingly referenced from a wide range of
Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Persian sources.
No serious scholar or reader on the Caucasus can afford to be without this book.''
---
by Spilsbury
(UK, Liverpool).
