kha ¯lidiyya networks in daghestan 41
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Die Welt des Islams 42, 1
KHA
¯
LIDIYYA NETWORKS IN DAGHESTAN AND
THE QUESTION OF JIHA
¯
D
BY
MICHAEL KEMPER
Bochum
1
There is no doubt that the Naqshbandiyya Kh¸lidiyya Sufi order
played an important role in Daghestan during the jih¸d under the
Three Im¸ms (1828-1859). As the anti-colonial struggle of the
mountaineers against Russia and her Muslim allies became famous
under the name of “Muridism”, many Western, as well as Russian,
historians believe that the Naqshbandiyya Kh¸lidiyya Sufi order
provided the political and spiritual leadership to Sh¸mil’s murºds,
2
and it is often claimed that the «arºqa lent the jih¸d its “ideology”
as well as its social network.
3
Yet the positions and activities of
Kh¸lidiyya shaykhs during the jih¸d are still far from being clear,
and as Alexander Knysh recently stated, the issue of how the jih¸d
was related to Sufism is still open to question.
4
In addition, the
development of the «arºqa after the end of the jih¸d in 1859 has
barely attracted the attention of scholars to date.
In this article, the author intends to study these questions on
the basis of some Arabic biographical material from Daghestan
which, for the most part, only became available recently. These
texts reveal that there was no clear-cut position of the Kh¸lidiyya
on the question of jih¸d even during the era of the Im¸ms. After
1859, two factions of the Kh¸lidiyya emerged in the North Cau-
1
I am very grateful to Anke von Kügelgen (Bern), Stefan Reichmuth (Bo-
chum) and Allen J. Frank (Takoma Park) for critically commenting upon this pa-
per, as well as to Ann G. Franken (Oelde) for her corrections of the English text.
2
Marie Bennigsen Broxup, “The Last Ghazawat. The 1920-1921 Uprising”,
in: The North Caucasus Barrier. The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World, edited
by Marie Bennigsen Broxup, London 1992, 112-145, here: 114.
3
For this interpretation see now Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom.
The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, London 2000.
4
A. Knysh, “Sh¸mil”, EI
2
, Leiden et al., vol. IX (1997), p. 286.