n21 8 Imam Shamil
By Abdal Hakim Murad | 2026-01-14T20:26:56.297241+00:00 | Topic: Iman
Imam Shamil – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership
Opening
"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."
"All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. May prayers and peace be upon the noblest of prophets and messengers, our master Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, all of them."
Introduction to the Sirah and Divine Agency
Last year some of you may have been with us on our journey through the complex, always inspiring, always relevant landscape of the Sirah. And at various points on that journey, tracing that incomparably gripping story, we find ourselves confronted with inevitable questions. The story is one of historical record, but an almost inconceivably improbable achievement seems to have been the outcome, the happy ending.
The Arabs, pagan people, became monotheists. Tribal people became united. People with no interest in life after death became focused on life after death, and under one leader.
So, to what do we attribute this? Well, as believers, we attribute it first and last to the divine agency and the divine permission. This is what it is to be realizing the meaning of being Khalifatullah. But we also, because the world has been set up in such a way as to enable us to see what, at least to our weak vision, seem to be factors, causes, consequences, linearity in the mysterious concatenation of forces that constitutes this rather odd material world in which we find ourselves.
The Mystery of Prophetic Leadership
The mystery of time itself factors, and factors of success. And we noted at various points that the Holy Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam, is inspirational not just to those who are interested in divine agency, permission, piety, sanctity, but also in terms of what we generally refer to as charisma, skill, diplomacy, statesmanship, generalship, the qualities that ancient Greeks would regard as specifically the manly virtues. And there have been several in recent years who have taken this story almost as a secular model.
Bracketing out the divine agency and saying, well, this is a real story that happened in space and time, and what lessons are there for us today to be gleaned from this story of brilliant leadership? John Adair has this book, The Leadership of Muhammad, which a lot of Muslims are enthused by, and there are plenty of others. But what I'm going to suggest in this little series of lectures is that we need to be a little uncomfortable about importing such contemporary categories into our thought world.
Sometimes we have to import terminology that is not quite ours.
So when we translate iman, sometimes we say faith. Yes, but not quite. When we translate nabi, we say prophet. Yes, but not quite. The semantic resonances of the words are subtly different in the two linguistic universes, and we need to beware constantly of reinventing, reconfiguring Islam into a form of thinking and categories that seem to sit naturally with the Western or Anglo-Saxon linguistic frame.
Clearly, we have the responsibility to think carefully before such a transmutation, and nabi is not quite a prophet.
Similarly, this category of leadership seems to me to be, to some degree, an alien imposition. So I'm going to start with that thought. Is it not the case that in our Enlightenment world, where the divine agency has been sidelined as a matter for private hobbyists' consideration rather than the governing explanation for the human narrative, that we like to make man the measure of all things, and therefore man as the author of his own destiny becomes glorified, becomes autonomous in a way that for earlier generations of human beings, whether monotheistic or polytheistic or pagan, would have seemed very strange and improper.
The Glory of Man and Heroism
The glory of man. Humanism. The idea that man, through his own innate gifts and capacities, can take the horns of destiny and force them onto a new path. The idea of heroism. I mentioned a number of times last year the interesting book by the philosopher Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship. In this book he, as a leading exponent of Hegel's philosophy of history in high Victorian England, listed certain world historical individuals who, as he saw it, were the incarnation of geistes, of spirits, of this ontological cosmic principle that somehow always moved things onwards.
You can see how compatible that was with the Darwinian notions that were also breaking surface at the time, but of course the Victorians did see themselves as obviously the climax of a billion years of evolution. We began with amino acids and we end with the Church of England and the Raj, and this was generally accepted as something self-evident and not in need of interrogation. Carlyle was very much part of that world.
Social Darwinism. Marxists were in due season to take that perhaps to its logical conclusion. In fact we could say that many of the key catastrophes of the 20th century were the result of the politicising of Darwin. Communism took itself to be just helping natural selection along a little bit, and the Nazis took themselves to be helping natural selection along a little bit, and they collided, but ultimately they were singing from the same Darwinian hymn sheet. Our reception of theories of natural selection is of course contested and an ongoing debate. That's not really my point.
The point is that in an essentially secular view, which holds that human beings essentially are what they are and achieve things in the world as the result of being simply the latest generation in a mammalian and ultimately protoplasmic, meaningless, brutal, red in tooth and claw conflict with other life forms, with nothing really meaning anything except the perpetuation of one's genetic material, clearly this idea of leadership becomes essential. So Carlyle, understanding this very clearly as the Neuzeitgeist, a post-Christian idea, insists that there are certain world historical individuals who represent this Hegelian ontology of progress towards greater complexity and greater order, and he identifies them as certain key individuals in human history. And one of them, as we saw, is the Holy Prophet of Islam, who he sees as a heroic figure, somebody who genuinely brings about a paradigm shift in the human condition and in perception, simply through force of character.
And a lot of Western biographies of the Holy Prophet, and Maxime Rodin's very Marxist biography, which is still widely read, Penguin published it, tend to see this as the key feature of his career. Leadership skills, human management skills, diplomacy, statesmanship, careful planning, the calculation of chances. But these, if you actually look at the Syrah, seem actually to have been not the considerations that weighed heavily.
They were the considerations that mattered for Quraysh and his adversaries, who were the real schemers, those who were plotting and laying stratagems. But throughout the career of the Holy Prophet of Islam, we find instead the idea that one does one's duty and the rest is up to God. But this idea of leadership seems more like part of the old tribal glorification of certain charismatic individuals than the prophetic model which is being enunciated in scripture.
The Problem with Contemporary Leadership Culture
So let's begin with that thought. After all, the Muslim world and the British Ummah is awash now with leadership programs of various kinds. How to create great leaders for the Muslim community, and CMC, I suppose, is part of that industry, in a certain way. But how exactly does that translate into our own indigenous vocabulary and categories? Perhaps not very well. So one of the things that I want to do in this course of lectures is to look at certain figures who by secular canons could be regarded as leaders, military, political, diplomatic, cultural, spiritual, scholarly. The Ummah has no shortage of great figures to be inspired by.
And to see to what extent their success and their esteem in the eyes of the Ummah can be attributed to the kind of management-speak, calculating, flip-chart culture that talks about how to be a great CEO or how to be a successful MP or how to get a good job in the foreign office. These sort of CV-centered criteria for leadership that seem to be prevalent nowadays. Is there some overlap? Or are we talking about something radically different? And if we are, then what really are we doing to the logic of our community if we insist on this leadership idea? I'm not sure.
Sometimes it can go to extremes that seem quite absurd, certainly without precedent in our culture. This idea of Muslim Achievement Awards, for instance. Who is voted the best Nasheed artist of 2018? Round of applause, and it's like the X Factor or something, and somebody comes on, the egos are there, and everybody cheers, and it's great entertainment. Who is the Great Scholar of 2018? Round of applause, and here's a little badge, and the ambassador of somewhere comes along, and the MP is photographed next to you. This is increasingly part of our celebrity-oriented culture in Western Islam, which I think is rather strange in the context of a religion where scholars and others have generally preferred not to be in the limelight, and where humility and haya are almost a watchword of the religion.
The Prophetic Ethos of Humility
The hadith says:
Reference: Sahih al-Bukhari and other collections
Every religion has a particular, specific ethos, and the ethos of Islam is shyness, humility, this is part of the prophetic greatness.
And again, last year I tried to point to what seems, in secular eyes, to be something paradoxical about him and his leadership (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ - salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam). Who could doubt the virility of the way in which he led his people in peace and war? Magnificent. But at the same time, we see, for instance, all of those many hadiths which have him crying (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ - salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam). That would be an interesting book, to put together all the occasions where the Holy Prophet is moved to tears by the death of a friend, by the death of his son, by joy. He wept frequently, as we don't.
He was soft-hearted, despite his leadership.
Reference: Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim
Again, there's a startling image, but this is what is reported of him in many hadiths. The Prophet (صلّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ - salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) was more shy, more modest, than a virgin in her tent.
Sort of bashful. How does that fit with a man who's buckling on his armour on the eve of the Battle of Badr and escapes with his closest companion of the hijra and those magnificent leadership moments. That kind of bashfulness, shyness, won't be found in the contemporary management-speak leadership manuals.
We're dealing with something different here that is unfamiliar to those of us whose souls have been formed in the modern world. And this has to give us pause. If he is saying (صلّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ - salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) that the ethos of Islam is one of humility, shyness, bashfulness, it sounds almost stereotypically feminine, then where is leadership? Where is muruwa, virile manly strength? Which is also clearly an aspect of his prophetic perfection.
So balancing those two, I suggested last time, the Prophet who weeps, the Prophet who is shy, who lowers his gaze, with the Prophet who is the great warrior, diplomat, ambassador, rescuer of his people, preacher, khatib, and so forth, is something that will force us to shift categories a little bit.
The Battle Between Fir'aun and Musa
And what is going on here? Well, what is going on, as I take it, specifically Muhammadan and specifically Islamic, which is that the way of Islam is to be in the world, but not to seek magnificence in the world. The Quranic stories, which give you a variety of archetypes of the conflict that is in the world and in our souls between Fir'aun and Musa and Nimrod and Ibrahim and all of those other face-offs between two principles, are emblems told to awaken our innate awareness that the world is a battle and we are the battleground of the principle of the spirit and the ego.
There is the magnificence of the pharaoh with his monster statues that last for 5,000 years because they are made out of such hard granite and his pyramids, and the magnificence of that. In the Fir'aun, he is up high, physical height, splendor. Seeing him in his court must have been stunning. There is leadership. There is charisma, I guess. But opposing him and commended in the scripture, there is a different magnificence and a different leadership which doesn't really overlap with it at all.
It has a charisma, but it's not the charisma of the powerful. And if you've lived in the world and moved between worlds and been with the true scholars and also been with politicians and ministers and generals and even heads of state, you'll know that they are not the same form of Bani Adam. They both have a charisma, but it's different.
And that is evidently important, and how are we going to define it? Personal charisma, it's something intangible. You can feel it even when you close your eyes somehow in the presence of those people. It's like defining beauty or envy or some other powerful, elemental human property that has a kind of radioactivity or magnetism within it.
How do you define those things? Who is going to define beauty? Who is going to define any of these? The basic palette of human emotion and charisma is clearly an important part of it and predates civilisation and goes back to the earliest periods. Tribal kinship groups always recognised the charisma of the shaman and the charisma of the chief and whoever else happened to have charisma, a warrior or a hunter. It's part of what we are to detect and to intuit and to revere charisma.
And Durkheim and Weber and others have talked a lot about this, even though it's hard to define. But it's clearly part of the human make-up to be in awe of charismatic individuals. But the charismatic individual who is of the mosaic type, the one who has spent his or her life going against the Fir'aun within, becomes a different type of radioactive human being to the type who spent his whole life dismissing the higher possibility and just following Hawa and Ego and Nafs.
It's a different modality of being human. Somehow the processing of the world is just different. They see things differently. Everything is ego. So this is clearly important to the Qur'an. It is giving us these, to use the buzzword, paradigms of leadership, but deconstructing our conventional worldly sense of what it is to be followed in quite a radical and troubling way.
The Two Paths
It's saying that the people who are truly to be respected and those whose memories we bless thousands of years later are not the Davos elite of the prehistoric world, but are those who were engaged in the more interesting struggle within the most ancient human quest, which is turning away from the immediate desire for whatever sensory pleasures might be to hand, and allow those yapping
monkeys and dogs within to be silenced and start to recenter themselves on the life of the spirit. Every culture has had that.
The Qur'an says, We've guided you, made both paths, as it were, simple. And both paths are accessible and we all know it, whether or not we frame it in specifically religious terms. But everybody has a sense of rising above their lower immediate appetites, whether or not they're religious. But religionists do it for a reason.
So when we look at the Qur'an and its frequent retellings of those titanic showdowns between the ego man and the spirit man, we find something that applies 100% to today's world. And we find an explanation of why it is that if you leave the presence of the self-denying faithful scholar or the simple fruit seller on the street corner who's really got no ego but really likes to read the Qur'an, and then you visit Ra'is al-Jumhuriyah or Jalal ad-Din Malik, it's a different experience. Even if they're also praying and fasting and doing the same kind of Muslim things, it's a different kind of leader whose presence you are in.
And the presence of those whose habitat is the corridors of power is overwhelmingly a disturbing one, disorienting. There's a kind of dark energy there, which is palpable to most human beings that generally don't find those places very congenial. You breathe a sigh of relief when you leave, not just because this guy could have you arrested in the embassy and chopped up into little pieces, but because there is some kind of negative force there which can sometimes feel like a curse, the denial of the divine presence, however absurd that human project might be.
Interrogating Leadership Culture
So this is important in our scripture, and it kind of subverts our conventional language about leadership and makes us interrogate very carefully the burgeoning Muslim culture of developing leaders and leadership programs and Muslim achievement awards and the 500 greatest Muslims in a particular year and all of those strange league tables. It's for God to judge who is a great Muslim. He says:
The noblest of you in his sight is the one who fears him most, and who knows who that is? Who knows? Who is the best of us today? We have no means of detecting that, any more than we have means of detecting who has secret vices, secret virtues.
Allah is keeping these things hidden, and that is part of his mercy, that we are all veiled creatures. So that's a way of beginning, and what I want to do to drill down into this a little bit more, into this rather
disorienting doubt that I'm raising about the virtue of leadership, self-promotion, self-vaunting, smiling in the limelight, is to look at some hadiths. Hadiths that should be quoted often in our community.
You go to community events, and you see the sort of Uncle G types, the community leaders, and what they really want is to be photographed with the local MP, more than anything else. Are their heads of Islamic something? Are their trustees of this mosque or that mosque? But you can see them kind of, almost bursting with pleasure and childish delight when the MP is there. It's a great white man, and I'm going to have a photograph with him, and I can send it to my uncle, and the other rival trustee hasn't been photographed.
It's pitiful, and it is not respected by anyone. It's a kind of groveling, and it's because of our denial of this basic prophetic principle. So if I could have those books. Sorry to force you to carry them. Yeah, so enough of me rabbiting on. Let's look at what the Holy Prophet says about this principle of leadership.
Prophetic Teachings on Authority and Leadership
How can it be a problem in Islam when so many of these hero figures in the Qur'an clearly are leaders of their people, and it is through their leadership, it seems, that their peoples are brought to salvation. Noah was a leader, Moses a leader, and so forth. Sayyidina Muhammad, (صلى الله عليه وسلم - salallahu alayhi wa sallam), led his people. What's not to like?
Well, this is Sahih al-Bukhari with the famous storied commentary of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, known as the Fath al-Bari. He's, I guess, a leader of the Muhaddithin, one of the great figures of late Mamluk Egypt, which was a period of extraordinary fluorescence in Hadith studies in particular, and his life is well worth charting. Interesting life.
But he produces this. What greater achievement could there be for a Muslim than to produce the most respected commentary on the most respected Hadith collection? So let's approach this with reverence, and here is his way of addressing one of the later books in Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al- Ahkam, Book of Rulings or Judgments, and it's the place where you tend to get Hadiths that are leadership related, to be a judge, to be an inspector, to be in authority of some kind. And it begins with the idea of not being a leader but obeying leaders.
Allah says, Obey Allah, obey the Messenger, and those who have authority amongst you. أمر command, authority of some kind.
Allah is instructing us to obey him, his Messenger, and those amongst us who have authority. Leadership, well, it's not quite the same category, but this is as near as we're going to get. Modern
Arabic words for leader,زعيم قائد and so forth, are post-prophetic, and perhaps that's indicative of how the semantics have shifted.
(Sahih al-Bukhari)
Whoever obeys me has obeyed God, and whoever has disobeyed me has disobeyed God. Whoever obeys my, the one who I have appointed to be in authority, has obeyed me and whoever has disobeyed, the one to whom I have given authority, has disobeyed me. This is expressed in stark terms, absolute, going to need some kind of commentary.
Ibn Hajar supplies that, but the basic principle is authority is a big deal in the religion and it comes through the prophetic example. During his lifetime, peace be upon him, through practical commands, this army goes here, that tax is used for that purpose. Subsequently it's through increasingly extended processes and chronological lines of interpretation and jihad, but the principle is the same.
Obedience to God, therefore obedience to his prophet, therefore obedience to people in authority. Okay, and then another famous hadith from the prophet, peace be upon him, he said:
(Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)
Every one of you is a shepherd, this would have been understood as being a shepherd specifically, and each one is answerable for his flock, those whom he shepherds. The greatest leader, al-Imam al- Azm, who is an authority over people, is a shepherd and is answerable for the state of his flock.
A man is the shepherd of his household and shall be called to account, is answerable for his household. A woman is a shepherd over the people of her husband's house and his children, and she is also answerable for that.
فَكُلُّكُمْ رَاعٍ وَكُلُّكُمْ مَسْئُولٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِهِ
So he repeats it, every one of you is a shepherd, every one of you is answerable for his flock.
So this is more like a kind of warning and a statement of fact than a glorification of being a leader. You'll be called to account. Just like the shepherd who is neglectful, goes to sleep, or in Morocco they smoke hashish sometimes and the sheep disappears, who knows.
If you're not doing your job as a shepherd, you can be taken to task for the sheep that disappears or that falls down a hole or whatever it is. The shepherd requires mindfulness, we'd say nowadays, so you have to be mindful. So the fact of authority is there, there have to be rulers, there have to be families, there have to be structures in society, there has to be somebody who is in charge of these structures, but this hadith is saying watch out.
It's not saying this is a glorious thing. That's the pharaonic model. Pharaohs are not interested in being called to account for the state of the population of Egypt. He's interested in his own magnificence. But this hadith is telling us something quite different. So it begins with this, which is already a healthy and a sobering thought, it seems to me.
Envy of the Righteous
And then, I'm going to fast forward through this interesting chapter. And with these commentaries, as you can imagine, a lot of it is highly technical stuff about arguments over isnads and grammatical stuff, and we certainly aren't going to look at that. But let's look at the next hadith.
(Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)
Only two people should be envied. A man whom God has given wealth and he spends it in the way of truth, and another whom God has given wisdom in accordance with which he judges and teaches. Envy is a vice except.
It's permissible to envy a billionaire who's giving away all of his money because his... The Holy Prophet says of such a person:
He's praying and fasting inshallah but he's also doing these other things and then also this idea of wisdom. Somebody who's wise, you can envy that person. And the commentary goes on to explain that this has a lot to do with wisdom in disposing of the affairs of those for whom one is responsible, this raya, this flock.
If you have wisdom in dealing with people and in giving judgment over them, it's permissible for people to envy you. So that again puts you up there. Somebody in a position of authority can be legitimately envied.
The Hadith on Not Seeking Authority
And let's move on a bit because there's... And then, baab:
A chapter on the fact that he who does not ask for authority will be given help in exercising that authority by Allah. So this is exactly the heart of what we were talking about with this apparent prophetic paradox of the humility and the magnificence of his leadership.
(Sahih al-Bukhari)
Abdurrahman ibn Samura becomes a governor in Iran after the conquest, so he is somebody who is in authority, is a leader. O Abdurrahman, the Holy Prophet says, do not seek authority, do not seek leadership, because if you are given it, having asked for it, it will be given authority over you.
But if you are given it without asking for it, you will be helped in it. And then the hadith goes on, and if you swear, take an oath to something, and then you see something else is better than it, then you can pay an atonement for breaking your oath, and then do the thing that is better, which is another issue, but it is mentioned in this hadith. So, the commentary then, trying to filter out some of the grammatical interest.
Whoever is entrusted to his own self will be destroyed.
So this word is used in the famous prayer where we say, do not make me rely on myself, do not make my own self my reliance.
So in Arabic you say, when you use this verb, and you hand over something to someone, then you're giving it over to him.
So the meaning of the hadith is that whoever seeks authority and is given it is not helped or is not to be helped in it because of his ambition, we'd probably say.
So we gain from this the fact that to seek anything relating to authority is disliked, makruh. Included in authority here is things like being a judge or being a magistrate or policeman and things like that.
And that whoever is zealous for such positions is not to be helped or will not be helped. So that seems to be the basic sense of the hadith and again it's really pulling the rug from underneath our sense of leadership. And here is my CV, I'm going to apply for this job because I want to have some kind of authority over people.
But if you're given the authority without asking for it without this حِرْص,without this ambitiousness God will help you. So where does that leave us in our contemporary situation because after all
applying for a job nowadays or competing for a ministerial portfolio in Whitehall it's all about self- promotion, isn't it? You hire a PR firm to tell everybody about your achievements you kind of structure stuff and you boast and you talk on news night and you veil your faults and you play to the gallery and tell everybody how wonderful you are because you really want that job. You want to be health minister or you want to be CEO of Glaxo or something and you're ambitious for that, you have this (حِرْص - hirṣ).
Now the Holy Prophet is telling us in this Bukhari hadith that if you do that and you have that strong ambitiousness you're not going to be helped in it but yourself will be your aid. In other words there won't be divine assistance you're just relying on your own capacities. It seems quite clear.
Reconciling Different Hadiths
But then of course as has to be done the commentary points out that there seems to be a conflict with some other text.
Apparently this is contradicted by another hadith narrated by Abu Dawood from Abu Huraira where the Holy Prophet says whoever seeks a judgeship over the Muslims and gets the job and then his justice prevails over his injustice he shall go to paradise but whoever's injustice predominates over his justice shall go to hell another hadith where it seems that if you really seek a judgeship and you do it well you go to heaven so how do we balance these two hadiths both about leadership.
And the way of reconciling the two is that the fact that he is not to be helped because of his seeking it doesn't mean that when he does get the job he's not capable of being just.
Or it may be that in the first case the hadith is referring to intention, in the second case it's referring to actually when you are in authority and you get the job.
And we've commented on the hadith from Abu Musa in some previous volume of course people who use these books would know exactly which page to turn to and nowadays we have to spend hours looking for it but there's another hadith which is already commented on in which the Holy Prophet says I do not give authority to somebody who wants it.
The Hadith on Leadership as a Source of Regret
(Reference: Sahih al-Bukhari)
Interesting hadith. Holy Prophet here is offering a prediction: you shall certainly be ambitious for authority and it will be a source of regret on the day of judgment so blessed be the suckling and wretched be the weaned and the commentary goes on to explain the meaning of this which is that the suckling is the fortunate one who's enjoying this position when he's still attached in this world but in the next world when he's detached from those comforts he will find himself in a state of regret and misfortune and then he goes on to talk about the vanity and instability of positions of authority.
So one scholar says ambition for authority is the reason for people fighting for it such that blood is spilled and wealth is ransacked and there is rape and widespread corruption in the earth so there's more here but I think we get the general idea quite strongly which is that ambitiousness for leadership is regarded prophetically as a very big problem and that God will not give you success if because of your ambition for something you get it.
The Scholars and Authority
Which is one reason why we find the scholars historically and the Imam talks about the Aqabir generally refusing positions of authority because of the fitna that it brings the believer wants to pray, to fast, to be right with God to bring up his family all of this sort of pharaonic glory of having something splendid to boast about on your business card is not the Islamic way that doesn't mean that there aren't to be leaders but the leaders ideally are there without having zealously sought out that position and that's the difference so the prophets didn't want to be prophets didn't ask to be prophets they didn't fill out a job application it was Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala who speaks to Musa from the depths of the desert speaks to him from that fire in the desert:
I, only I am God there is no God other than me so worship me and establish the prayer for my recollection and then he's told to go to Fir'aun with his brother and all of those commandments but throughout the discourse Sayyidina Musa alayhi salam is kind of not very keen on all of this the ego's not there the danger is manifest and who wants to go to the palace of Fir'aun after all there's no khair there only danger and the danger of the ego and being caught up in that dark psychic turbulence is far greater than any danger to life or limb because the spirit itself and its welfare is at stake.
So in our civilization very often we find that the truly prophetic individuals are those who are in their positions without really having wanted them at all and in again and again in the biographies of the scholars you find their reluctance to teach for instance their reluctance to give isnads unless their teachers and their students absolutely insist their reluctance to write sometimes unless their teachers and their students absolutely insist they kind of they don't want to appear in the limelight and the danger of being a top notch big shot scholar is example in the life of Imam Ghazali rahmatullahi
alayhi who suffers this crisis precisely because as he says in his autobiography he seems to be enjoying this kind of leadership position and maybe he's enjoying being a suckling in this world and in the next world he's going to be weaned and he's going to be out of luck and that prompts that famous crisis.
The Scholar's Independence from Political Authority
So we find rulership is generally something that the ulama and the pious do not aspire to you leave it to the mamluks or whoever is there but you have to remain independent and the scholar has the right to criticise them on behalf of the ra'iya that's one of the obligations of the scholar and he may find that mosaically he risks life and limb in order to say that truth:
(Reference: Sunan Abu Dawood, Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Sunan Ibn Majah)
Jihad, jihad we hear but the best jihad the Holy Prophet says is to speak the truth in the presence of an unjust tyrannical ruler so one of the things we're going to be looking at in these lectures is the independence of the people of religion the faith leaders of Islam from political authority. Musa cannot be the wazir al awqaf, Firaun cannot co-opt him and Musa will not allow himself to be co-opted and this is one of the harshnesses of the scholar's vocation that the people love the scholars and are doubtful about the rulers and they're looking to the scholars for guidance to be in that mosaic place.
And nowadays, across the ummah we find the nationalisation of the ulama the co-opting of the people who should be the heirs of the prophets and sometimes excruciating pressures are brought to bear on them if you look at the wikileaks website there's a big download of royal Saudi emails very depressing not least the fact that they really don't know the basis of Arabic grammar it's shocking one of them is boasting to another prince we can get our ulama to say whatever we want them to say that's the reality of much of the ummah today and this is profoundly subversive and is not our idea of leadership you continue to speak the truth even if you are strapped down on the guillotine and then you'll be loved until the yawm al qiyamah and this is a hard thing for the scholars to bear so many of them are now behind bars.
But then sometimes realistically to conserve what's left maybe you have to go along with it what are we to make of the muftis of the Russian Federation under communism they tried to keep a tiny little spark alive in the almost extinguished candle of Islamic scholarship the madrasas closed the ulama sent to Siberia everything smashed by a militant state atheism and these kind of figureheads the so- called red muftis I knew one or two of them when I was a student they were both studying with me at a bit of the Azhar and there were two of them from Russia and the rumor was they were both KGB men sent to spy on each other actually I found them to be decent and their understanding although there's little they could say was that if they don't do this thing and become the mufti of Tashkent and receive a salary from an atheist state there'll be nothing there at all and the thing will be dead.
So sometimes they are in that excruciating difficult position but still historically the role of the ulama is to be chairy of engaging with the sultan. The best of sultans is he who visits the scholars and the worst of scholars is he who visits the sultans and this is really absolutely relevant to us today even in the west governments are really trying to get a handle on Muslim communities and developing Muslim leadership skills and even paying money even counter-radicalization money to various charities and quangos and odd shadowy agencies that have suddenly popped up and are throwing money around to try and develop Muslim leadership skills and we need to sup with them with a long spoon I think not because we don't also want to destroy radicalism because it's more of a threat to our religion really than it is a threat to their sovereignty but just for the integrity and the honor of the tradition of the ulama which is not to be co-opted by anyone.
Introduction to Imam Shamil
So that's again something that we're going to be looking at in these various episodes. I want to say something just to conclude today about one particular instance of this and this is one that is important for CMC because CMC has a memorandum with the Islamic University of Moscow and we have hosted the deputy mufti of Moscow, the deputy mufti of Siberia and the Muslim ulama of the Russian Federation which is an important place because 40% of Muslims in Europe live in Russia big community we went to Juma prayers the CMC delegation at a mosque in Moscow where 160,000 people pray their Eid just at that one mosque and there's other mosques in Moscow and it's a big big vibrant important community.
But their relationship with the government and we talked to the head of the Islamic University in Moscow and his predecessor six years earlier had been shot dead in his office and it's an unstable kind of place and nobody is quite sure who is who, they are in a much more difficult situation than we are here but they are asking these questions and the Muslims of Russia are looking to the scholars for leadership and not being co-opted but that's part of a long story and I want to go through some of that story partly because it's really interesting and dramatic and just as the kind of first of these little vignettes.
So perhaps these could be passed around these are my handouts I'm sure that you don't want to observe me struggling with PowerPoint which has comedic value but it's not really good educational practice so I'm doing it the old style with handouts now I'm going to lead up to an example a champion of Muslim leadership of the 19th century who is Imam Shamil of the Caucasus who many of you will have heard about who is worth dwelling upon because of his being kind of on the cusp of modernity he's not from some Mamluk back when he's dealing with the reality of European conquest the European determination to institutionalise religion and to co-opt it and dealing with a situation of genocide.
The Caucasus: Geography and History
So he's from Dagestan the Caucasus. If you go to their main madrasa in Khasavyurt in Dagestan 20 lecture rooms each one is named after an alim of Dagestan who's been assassinated in the last 20
years and that's how touchy things are because of the so called Salafi jihadis who don't like the traditional Shafi scholars it's a kind of precarious place but it's a very ancient Muslim place Darabant in the south was called by the Arabs Bab al-Abwab and it is an ancient city a UNESCO heritage site Sahaba buried there really beautiful.
If you think about the early Muslim conquests everybody spread out like waves of a storm in every direction and they were only stopped by the Atlantic in one direction and the Chinese in another and to the north really by the Byzantines and then by the Caucasus. Caucasus is formidable the highest mountains in Europe Mount Elbrus is the highest mountain in Europe, not Mont Blanc. Mount Elbrus is a thousand metres higher than Mont Blanc enormous phalanxes of sheer cliffs.
You can go to some of the Muslim villages in the Caucasus which are built kind of on the edge of this incredible abyss and you look down from somebody's roof or from the wall next to the mosque and you can see below you there are clouds because it's so far down and apparently sometimes you can see thunderstorms from above it's a really extraordinary place and so because it's so remote, so hard to get around in those mountains that it's very divided ethnically. Ancient Arab historians called it Jabal al-Lughat because there's so many different languages so if you look at this little map, ethnic plurality most of you probably haven't heard of any of those languages except perhaps Russian and Georgian but this is just the surface of it because there's other languages as well.
So really inaccessible impossible to conquer and the Sahaba didn't get beyond it some of them went around to the east along the Caspian but then according to the historians they came to a great plain, a desert full of dangerous snakes and then there's something called the putrid sea where you can't get any fresh water and they didn't go further north so this was the furthest limit of the Dar al-Islam and there's still substantial Christian communities there, Armenia and Georgia are Caucasian people but they're still Christian after all of this time, they're still pagans there after all of this time.
A lot of the Ossetians you might have heard of South Ossetia in the news, are pagans to this day, really remote out of the way places. So Islam spreads slowly in these mountains and it spreads from the south. Dagestan is basically Shafi and the Chechens as well, Chechenia converted in the 15th and 16th century Ingushetia which is also Shafi which is one of the Muslim republics now converted only in the 19th century and then to the west of the Caucasus around the Black Sea people tend to be Hanafis because the influence comes up from the kind of Turkic speaking world and that includes one of the lost nations of the Ummah the Circassians some of my favourite people Cherkess.
The Tragedy of Circassia
There's a map of Circassia 150 years ago, there were maps of Circassia and people went there and it had a population of about 3 million and it was if you consider the map of the Black Sea it's kind of the top right hand corner Sochi its main city we heard of the Sochi Olympics the main stadium was built on the site of a mass grave where the Russians buried many of the former Muslim inhabitants.
Julian Shenfield says that it was the biggest single genocide of the 19th century the catastrophe of the loss of Circassia which was a big trauma across the Muslim world where 1.5 million were simply massacred, men, women and children and the survivors were dispelled.
So, yes here's a nice quote in 1829 Russia gets Circassia from Turkey and then you have the Circassian genocide 1864 to 1867 90% of the Circassian people die so a Russian prince who is in charge of this says to a group of visiting Americans, these Circassians are just like your American Indians as untamable and uncivilized and owing to their natural energy of character, extermination only will keep them quiet.
1861 towards the end Tsar Alexander II says:
"Now with God's help the matter of complete conquest of the Caucasus is near to conclusion a few years of persistent efforts are remaining to utterly force out the hostile mountaineers from the fertile countries they occupy and settle on the lands of Russian Christian population forever."
This was part of the story of Russian expansion and Russian national identity and this again is a headache for Muslims living in Russia maybe 20% of the Russian federal population significant, is that the Russian national story is constituted by the expansion of the country against some say Prussians and Poles Lithuanians to the west but mainly Muslims to the south and east and this begins with Ivan the Terrible 1552 he was kind of like Henry VIII only worse he had six wives read about what happened to them and once he had an argument with his pregnant daughter because she was wearing something he didn't like and so he beat her up and she miscarried and then the daughter's husband objected and so Ivan the Terrible killed him and killed all his children and kind of unhappy sort of person.
But he is the one who really begins this crusade towards the east and he captures the great Muslim city of Kazan 1552 and Muslim population is either killed or forcibly baptised 300 years they're not allowed to pray the Muslim way and then Catherine the Great re-legalises Islam and the Muslims pop up again saying oh we're not going to go to church any longer, fool you and they start building mosques and it's now a mainly Muslim town, capital of Tatarstan which is interesting because Tatarstan is the most prosperous of all of the republics of the Russian Federation and it's a Muslim republic.
Anyway Kazan is a great story but it's not today's story and then Ivan the Terrible goes south and takes Astrakhan formerly known as Haji Tarhan Muslim city which is where the Volga River hits the Caspian Sea and then he goes east and the Muslim khanate of Sibir today's Siberia which is thinly populated but Muslim land also submits and that's really the end of the large Muslim preponderance in the central and eastern Russian steppes.
Russian Expansion and the Cossacks
But the process continues and the Russians continue to expand partly through the Cossacks these kind of border mounted mercenaries, semi-independent sometimes suppressed, sometimes
encouraged who the Russians tend to put on the frontiers. The policy of Russian expansion is to establish garrison stations, stanitsa governed by these wild, very orthodox, kind of crusading Cossacks and an amnesty is granted to criminals and exiles and other ne'er-do-wells if they want to settle those lands which were moved from the previous Muslim population so that's how Russia from a fairly small thing starts to become now still after the cessation of the independent states in 1991, the world's biggest country, largely because of expansion against Muslim neighbours.
So the Circassians really get it in the neck which is if you ever meet Circassians and there's Circassian websites because the 10% that escaped still exist mainly in Turkey but the Ottomans settled them to the Circassian villages in Kosovo for instance the royal guard of the Jordanian royal family is made up of Circassians so the guy who taught my son Yusuf to shoot Circassian Europeans European looking people and there's Circassian people women are famously beautiful so much of the blood of the Ottoman royal house is actually Circassian.
So Pertevnial Vali de Sultan in the 19th century was the wife of Sultan Abdul Majid and therefore the mother of Sultan Abdul Aziz and the Ottomans often imported Circassian women because of their beauty, famously beautiful even the Italians, Cosimo di Medici the great sort of Medici baron of Renaissance Florence had an illegitimate child by a Circassian woman. Pertevnial because these Ottoman women were really powerful went on to found hospitals and she has the Vali de Sultan mosque in Aksaray, Istanbul is by her and she was powerful was reading Ottoman history book recently and her son Abdul Aziz had been travelling in Europe and was stopping at the Ottoman town of Ruschuk which is now in Bulgaria he intended to spend a month there got a letter from his mother saying come back and of course the Sultan, the Amirul Mu'min immediately went back. The wives of the Sultans were often not powerful but the mothers were incredibly powerful.
Another one, Tiri Mujgan Mujgan Kardan Efendi who was the mother of Sultan Abdul Hamid, also Circassian so you could say that the blood of the Ottoman royal house was actually European Caucasian, Bosnian some French Venetian they weren't Turkish Europe called it Turkey but they weren't actually Turkish but in any case Circassia now you won't find on the map in those places a few of the smaller peoples the Kabardians and others kind of consider themselves to be Circassians but they have vanished.
The Need for Unity Under Sharia
So the fear of other Muslims in the Caucasus who'd always been fighting each other was the same is going to happen to us Chechnya, Dagestan Ingushetia, Abkhazia all of these are the Muslim peoples and so the only way of resisting the Russians was somehow to unite not easy because they are mountain people like a lot of mountain people in the Balkans, Lebanon, elsewhere they have a culture of vendetta so if you steal a chicken from the next village they come and sort you out and it becomes a deal that can go on for generations and the prevailing law was called the adat even though they respected the Sharia but the law that was kind of customary law was in many cases something that cemented the Jahili divisions of the Caucasian people.
So it was clearly a matter of survival for these people faced with the extreme brutality of the Cossacks and the invading forces people really facing liquidation, genocide. 200,000 people died in the Bosnian ethnic cleansing but 1.5 million in Circassia, that was a very serious operation so they had to unite, so we have the great figure of Imam Shamil Naqshbandi chieftain who was an Avar not a Daghestani not a Chechen he was from one of the smaller nationalities who became one of the best known Muslim leaders or heroes of the 19th century.
Leslie Blanch's Account
One of the interesting fun places to read about him and this is of course, like so many other good books in the CMC library Leslie Blanch the Sabres of Paradise. Interesting kind of woman she died quite recently she was over 100 kind of traditional aristocratic storytelling orient loving woman who wore Turkish clothes and had a villa in the south of France made quite a lot of money out of her books and she was a sort of superior Nelson Boone type writer, European women who went out and found love in the arms of sort of hunky oriental men.
The Wilder Shores of Love is her best known book which is people like Jane Digby and others who went out and married usually Arab Muslim men it's a kind of theme in European Romantic writing Pierre Loti would be another example of that kind of author but this book is actually more serious because she actually met people from Imam Shamil's family including his great granddaughter in Istanbul, she met some of the Georgian royals and she put together this account and the family still live in Medina because Imam Shamil died and was buried in Medina he used to have a nice tomb there so it's kind of since he dies at the end of the 19th century almost living memory even though he's from somewhere that seems to be so strange and so distant, so her book is actually quite gripping and quite worth to read.
The Context: Russian Wars and the Beginning of Jihad
So after the conquest of Circassia which has really traumatised the whole Muslim world, the Caliph wants to send forces but he doesn't necessarily want, even though he's won the Crimean War another struggle against the Russians the Russians have a million men under arms in southern Russia following the Crimean War so they're pushing further into the Caucasus and it becomes this legendary scene of battles, Lermontov and Tolgenev Tolstoy, Tolstoy's famous novel Haji Murad is set in the Caucasian wars, it becomes as important for the Russian imagination as the Wild West is for Americans except a little bit more literate and perhaps a little bit more disciplined.
So the first coherent response comes from a very shadowy, still not properly researched individual, you might think well there aren't records here but actually the libraries of Dagestan in particular are absolutely packed these were highly literate scholarly communities who conversed with each other and wrote their books in Arabic even though they were not ethnically Arabs and there's a lot of histories, Saeed Effendich who wrote a book on the history of the Tariqas in the Caucasus who was assassinated five years ago, he was one of the sheikhs of the Tariqas, a really old man who wrote a
really good book in Russian about the spiritual history of the region these are literate people and the sources do exist.
But the beginning of the jihad comes at the hands of a very strange individual known as Sheikh Mansour or Elisha Mansour and there's lots of stories about him, one of them is that he was actually an Italian Jesuit priest who had been sent to convert the Caucasians to Catholicism but ends up converting to Islam and takes up arms against the Russians with an authorization from the Ottoman Khalifa and he's known to have fallen at a battle at a place called Tatar-Tub in the Caucasus in 1791 and he demonstrated the potential military power of the Caucasians.
Catherine the Great and Muslim Resistance
The peoples to the north, the Black Sea once was an entirely Muslim lake and there were no significant Christian settlements on the Black Sea. Crimea was a semi-independent Muslim khanate under the Giray family and Kyrgyzstan was a great, powerful Muslim country that traded with the rest of the world and we should all visit Crimea it's amazingly beautiful and to see the great mosque in Bakhchisaray and the Khan's Palace, it's like kind of the east of Europe's Granada as it were, very evocative.
So Catherine the Great at the end of the 18th century starts to push down towards the Black Sea and she takes Crimea and the mosques are pulled down and the population either dispelled or reduced to serf status, basically like being agricultural slave and the Giray's removed and then the Nogai steppe which is Muslim nomadic territory around what is now Odessa and down towards Circassia is progressively ethnically cleansed and settled by Cossacks in this traditional fashion and these people don't put up much of a resistance, the Nogais kind of nomadic pastoralists can't do much against a million Russian bayonets and they submit there's still a few Nogais around.
The Caucasian Warriors
But the Caucasians these mountaineers are a different matter. These are people who are incredibly physically tough who live on almost nothing a bit of dried meat and porridge that sustains you forever. It's said that in the 19th century a Chechen woman would never marry a man unless he had killed at least one Russian and jumped over a river at least 15 feet wide and also jumped over a rope held at shoulder height between two of his friends and if he hadn't done these things she wasn't going to give him the time of day. These are real warriors and because they lived in these mountains always walking up and down, tremendously physically strong physically strong, tough and turned out to be something of a match for the enormous Russian legions.
These are some of the world's great warriors, they fought like lions and the leaders of this resistance were the Naqshbandi sheikhs. Naqshbandis are often associated with pro-Sharia militancy in Islamic history certainly in the Caucasus the Caucasians are basically nowadays either Naqshbandis or Qadiris and both of them have a tradition of militancy.
Ghazi Mulla and the Establishment of the Muslim State
1827 a kind of capital is established by somebody called Ghazi Mulla who was a Naqshbandi murid in the town of Ghimri which is on top of this impossibly steep needle-like mountain and it's difficult even to get a mule up there, but this becomes for three decades the capital of the independent Muslim state of the Caucasus. His preaching in Naqshbandi lines is about self improvement and also about replacing the adat and these laws of vendetta with Sharia. Sharia doesn't recognize this kind of tit-for- tat killing, but instead insists that you deal with an injustice by going to the Qadi who imposes a penalty and a line is drawn under the dispute.
So much of the battle in Caucasus is about replacing old ideas of vendetta and honor with Sharia values and to this day in the region they call this the time of Sharia in the Caucasus. There is a problem of alcohol consumption in the center of the villages there are these big earthenware jars full of alcohol and this has to be dealt with and Imam Shamil when he comes along issues a ruling that anybody who claims to be Muslim who has ever consumed alcohol has to be flogged and then somebody points out you have also in your own youth are known to have tasted wine and he says yes and I will be the first to enact this law, so he has his brother who is also drunk to flog him publicly even though he is the ruler the leader in front of everybody and then he flogs his brother.
That's the kind of toughness of these people and that imposition of the rules on oneself so that one is also part of the populace that is subject to one's leadership is one reason why he manages to inspire people so much the fact that he is living with their life and lives an extremely simple style of life.
The Siege of Ghimri and Shamil's Legendary Escape
So you have Ghazi Mullah starting to try and take territory back from the Russians and then the Russians besiege Ghimri and Ghazi Mullah is there and his leading murid Shamil is there with their Naibs who are the kind of Khalifas of the Tariqa and they decide that they are not going to leave but they are going to make a stand and the Russians besiege it and according to the Russians when they finally take the town they find Ghazi Mullah there still seated on his prayer carpet and he is still in the prayer position but he is actually dead having been killed with his hand on his beard.
But Shamil is still fighting with 60 of the Naibs, great sharpshooters, the Chechens shooting from a bastion and then famous incident inspirational really and this got even into the English press when there is only two men alive out of the entire garrison. This is what a Russian officer says describing the incident:
"It was dark by the light of the burning thatch we saw a man standing in the doorway of the house which stood on raised ground rather above us, this man who was very tall and powerfully built stood quite still as if giving us time to take aim then suddenly with the spring of a wild beast he leapt clean over the heads of the very line of soldiers about to fire on him and landing behind them, whirling his sword in his left hand he cut down three of them but was bayoneted by the fourth, the steel plunging deep into his chest his face still extraordinary in its immobility, he seized the bayonet, pulled it out of
Closing Reflection
So who would have thought in Imam Shamil's time that there would be 160,000 people praying their Eid prayer at the Olympic Stadium Mosque in Moscow, you can see it from the space station apparently it's extraordinary, a huge jama'a.
So wallahu khairu al-makireen, God is the best of plotters.
Cambridge Muslim College: Training the Next Generation of Muslim Thinkers