Imam Shamil – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

last year some of you may have been with us on our journey through the complex always inspiring always relevant landscape of the sierra and various points on that journey tracing that uh incomparably gripping story we find ourselves confronted with inevitable questions the question 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 a 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 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 time itself factors and factors of success and we noted at various points that the holy prophet allah is inspirational not just to those who are interested in divine agency permission party sanctity but also in terms of what we generally refer to as charisma skill diplomacy statesmanship generalship uh the qualities um that ancient greeks would regard as uh specifically the manly virtues and uh there have been several in recent years uh 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 is 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 a western or an 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 sort of a private hobbyist's 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 humanism the idea that uh 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 mentioned a number of times last year the interesting book by the philosopher carlisle heroes and hero worship in this book he is a leading exponent of hegel's philosophy of history in high victorian england uh listed certain world historical individuals who as he saw it were the incarnation of geisha of spirits of this ontological cosmic principles that somehow always move things onwards you can see how compatible that was with the darwinian notions that were also breaking surface at the time that 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 karla 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 politicizing 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 sort of 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 and so carlisle understanding this very clearly as the new zeitgeist 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 perceptions simply through force of character and a lot of western biographies of the holy prophet and maxine rodenson'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 seerah seem actually to have been not the considerations that weighed heavily they were the considerations that mattered for quraish and his adversaries who were the real schemers those who are plotting and laying stratagems but throughout the courier 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 so let's begin with that thought after all the muslim world and the british umma 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 buy 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 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 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 somewhere comes along with the mp is photographed next to you this is increasingly part of our celebrity 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 hayat are almost a what word of the religion the hadith says every religion has a particular specific ethos the ethos of islam is shyness humility kind of 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 salallahu alaihi 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 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 can rasulullah again is a startling image but this is what is reported of him in many hadiths the holy prophet sallallahu alaihi 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 armor on the eve of the battle of badr and escapes with his closest companion on the hijra and those magnificent leadership moments that 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 the ethos of islam is one of humility shyness bashfulness sounds almost kind of stereotypically feminine then where is leadership whereas 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 khatrib and so forth is something that will force us to shift categories a little bit and what is going on here well what is going on as i take it specifically muhammad 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 firaoun 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 five thousand years because they're made out of such hard granite and his pyramids and the magnificence of that up high physical height splendor seeing him in his court must have been stunning there is leadership there's 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 and 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 we're 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 civilization and goes back to the earliest periods tribal kinship groups always recognized that the charisma of the shaman and the charisma of the chief and whoever else happened to have charisma or a warrior or a hunter it's part of what we are to detect and to intuit and to revere charisma and kind weber and others have talked a lot about this even though it's hard to define but it's clearly part of the human makeup 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 feral 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 navis 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 quran it is giving us these to use the buzz word paradigms of leadership but deconstructing our conventional worldly sense of what it is to be followed in quite a radical and troubling way it's saying that the people who are truly to be respected and those whose memories we bless thousands of years later are not uh 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 allow those uh yapping monkeys and dogs within to be silent and start to recenter themselves on the life of the spirit every culture has had that they nowhere in the quran says we've guided you make both paths as it were simple and both paths are accessible and we all know it whether or not we fray it and frame it in specifically religious terms but everybody has the 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 quran and its frequent retellings of those titanic 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 quran and then you visit rajis and malik fulan 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 um have you arrested in the embassy and chopped up into little pieces but because there is some kind of sort of negative force there which can sometimes feel like a curse the denial of the divine presence however absurd that human project might be so uh 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 it's for god to judge who is a great muslim because the noblest of you in his sight is the one who fears him most and who knows who that is yeah 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 or lies 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 uh to get to 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-wanting 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 [Music] what they really want is to be photographed with the local mp more than anything else and they're heads of islamic something they're trustees of this mosque of that mosque but you can see them kind of almost bursting with pleasure and childish delight when the mp is there oh the 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 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 uh prophetic principle so if i could have those books sorry to force you to carry them um yeah so enough of me rabbiting on let's look at some what the holy prophet says about this principle of leadership how can it be a problem in islam when so many of these hero figures in the quran 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 says his people what's not to like well this is uh sahih al-bukhari with the famous um storied commentary of eben known as the fat halberi he is i guess a leader of the muhaddith 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 what greater achievement could there be for a muslim than to produce the most respected commentary on the most respected hadith collection so um let's approach this with reverence and here is his way of addressing one of the later books in sahih bukhari 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 so obey allah obey the messenger and those who have authority amongst you amr command imara to be a commander to have 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 are post-prophetic and perhaps that's indicative of how the semantics have shifted okay so the text of the hadith is the holy prophet says whoever obeys me has obeyed god and whoever disobeys 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 and absolute gonna need some kind of commentary ibn 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 sallallahu alaihi wasallam through practical commands this army goes here that tax is used for that purpose subsequently it's through extreme increasingly extended processes and chronological lines of interpretation and each 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 and rasulallah every one of you is a shepherd this would have been understood as being shepherd specifically and each one is answerable for his flock those whom he shepherds the greatest leader al-imam al-azam who is an authority over people is a shepherd and is answerable for his 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 allah 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 then 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 then the sheep disappears who knows if you're not doing your job as a shepherd you can be taken to task for uh the sheep that disappears or that falls down a hole or whatever it is a 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 they have to be families that have to be structured in society there has to be somebody who's in charge of these structures but this hadith is saying watch out not saying this is a glorif glorious thing that's the pharaonic model pharaoh is not are interested in being called to account for the state of the population of egypt uh 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 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 isn't ads and grammatical stuff and we certainly aren't going to look at that but let's look at the next hadith hmm only two people should be envied a man whom god has given wealth and he uses it you know almost to its depletion in right causes and another whom god has given wisdom in accordance of which with which he judges and teaches envy advice except it's permissible to envy a billionaire who's giving away all of his money yeah because his holy prophet says of such a person he's praying and fasting but is also doing these other things and then also this idea of wisdom somebody's why is 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 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 um envied and let's move on a bit because there's uh and then bab a chapter on the fact that he who does not ask for authority will be given help in exercising that authority by allah all right 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 sallallahu alaihi wasallam abdulrahman even [Music] so here is a hadith that immediately seems to challenge the leadership industry abraham samurai is a convert who goes on to actually become a governor in iran after the conquest so he's somebody who is in authority is a leader oh abdulrahman 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're given it without asking for it you will be helped in it and then the hadith goes on and if you swear you 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 is better which is another issue but it's 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 upon myself do not make my own self my reliance so in arabic you say when you make this use this verb and you hand over to something 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 zeal because of his ambition we probably say so we gain from this the fact that to seek anything relating to authority is disliked and included in authority here is things like being a judge or being a kind of magistrate or policeman and things like that and that whoever is zealous for such positions uh is not to be helped or will not be helped so that seems to be the 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 hers 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 strut your stuff and you boast and do talk on news nights and you veil your faults and you play uh 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 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 your 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 but then of course as has to be done the commentary points out that there seems to be a conflict with some other texts so he says apparently this is contradicted by another hadith narrated by abu hadi 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 predominance predominates over his justice shall go to hell there's 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 the job 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 the hadith is referring to intending and in the second case it's referring to actually when you are in authority and you get the job [Music] i mean hadith and we've commented earlier on the hadith he says 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 uh in which the holy prophet says i do not give authority to somebody who wants it okay so and then there's another hadith interesting hadith holy prophet here is offering a prediction you shall certainly be keen to have authority and it will be a source of regret on the day of judgement so blessed be the suckling and wretched be the weaned an odd expression 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 and 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 yep and then he goes on to talk about the the vanity and instability of positions of authority um so one scholar says ambition for power is the reason why people fight for it so that blood is shed and properties are ransacked and there is rape and widespread corruption in the earth um 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 which is one reason why we find the scholars historically and the imam talks about the acaba generally refusing positions of authority because of the fitness that it brings the believer wants to pray to fast to be right with god to bring up his family but all of this sort of pharyonic 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 short sought out that position and that's the difference so the nba ali didn't want to be prophets didn't ask to be prophets they didn't fill out the job application it was allah subhanahu wa ta'ala speaks to musa from the depths of the the desert in allah speaks to him in 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 firaoun with his brother and all of those commandments but throughout the discourse 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 feral after all there's no 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 islands unless their teachers and their students absolutely insist their reluctance to write sometimes unless their teachers and their students absolutely insist that kind of they don't want to appear in the limelight and the danger of being a top-notch big shot scholar is exampled in the life of imam qazali who suffers his 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 um is going to be out of luck and that prompts that famous crisis so we find rulership is generally something that the olimer 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 criticize them on behalf of the la'iya that's one of the obligations of the scholar and he may find that mosaically he risks life and lim in order to say that truth 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 mausa cannot be the wazir al-aqf firaoun cannot co-opt him and musa will not allow himself to be co-opted and this is one of the the harshnesses of the scholars 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 nowadays across the umma we find the nationalization of the uluma the co-opting of the people who should be warathatul and 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 but one of them is boasting to another prince we can get our olimar to say whatever we want them to say that's the reality of much of the umber 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 yomokiyama 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 mufti's of the russian federation under communism they tried to keep a tiny little spark alive in the almost extinguished candle of islamic scholarship the madras is closed the olomat sent to siberia everything smashed by a militant state atheism and these kind of figureheads the so-called red mufti's well 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 uh understanding although there's little they could say was that if they don't do this thing and become the mufti of tashkent in 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 olimar is to be cherry of engaging with the salatin 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 we 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 alama which is not to be co-opted by anyone so that's again something that is we're going to be looking at in these various episodes i want to say something just uh to conclude today about one particular instance of this and this is one that is important for cmc because cmc is 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 olympia of the russian federation which is an important place because 40 of muslims in europe live in russia big community we went to jummah prayers the cmc delegation at a mosque in moscow where 160 000 people pray the aid 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 a unstable kind of place and nobody's 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 um perhaps these could be passed around these are my handouts i'm sure that you don't want to observe me struggling with powerpoint it has comedic value but it's not really good educational practice so i'm doing it the old sky style with handouts now uh 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 institutionalize religion and to co-opt it and dealing with a situation of genocide so he's from dagestan the caucasus if you go to the main madrasa in khasavyort in dagestan 20 lecturers each one is named after an alim of daristan who's been assassinated in the last 20 years that's how touchy things are because of the so-called salafi jihadis who don't like the traditional chef a scholars it's a kind of precarious place but it's a very ancient muslim place dalabant in the south was called by the arabs and it is uh an ancient city a unesco heritage site sahaba buried there really beautiful if you think about the early muslim conquest everybody spread out like waves of a sort of 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 elbros is the highest mountain in europe not more black mount elverus is a thousand meters higher than more block 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 jebel and lugot 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 dara islam and there's still substantial christian communities there armenia and georgia are caucasian people that are still christian after all of this time they're still pagans though after all of this time a lot of the oceans um you might have heard of south ossetia in the news pagans to this day really remote out of the way places so islam spreads slowly in these mountains and it spreads from uh the south um the dagestan is basically chef and the chechens as well uh chechnya converts in 15th and 16th century ingoshetia which is also chef which is one of the muslim republics there converted only in the 19th century and then to the uh west of the caucasus around the black sea people tend to be hanafi's because the influence comes up from the kind of turkic speaking world and that includes one of the lost nations of the umma the circassians some of my favorite people ciarkas 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 as 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 um 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 1864-1867 ninety percent 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 in 1861 towards the end sir 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 a 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 muslims maybe 20 percent of the russian federal population significant is that the russian national story is constituted by the expansion of the country against some except prussians and polls 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's the eighth only worse he had six wives just 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 a 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 baptized 300 years they're not allowed to pray the muslim way and then catherine the great re-legalizes islam and the muslims pop up again saying oh i'm not going to go to church any longer fooled 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 astrahan formerly known as hajjit muslim city which is where the volga river hits the caspian sea and then uh he goes east and the muslim khanate of sibir today 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 steps but the process continues and the russians continue to expand partly through the cossacks with these kind of border mounted mercenaries semi-independent sometimes suppressed sometimes encouraged to the russians tend to put on the frontiers the policy of russian expansion is to establish garrison stations stanisa governed by these wild very orthodox kind of crusading cossacks and an amnesty is granted to criminals and exiles and other nerdwells if they want to settle those lands and which removed from the previous muslim population so that's how russia from fairly small things 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 neighbors so the circassians really get it in the neck which is if you ever meet circassians and those circassian websites because the ten percent that that escaped still exists mainly in turkey but the ottomans settled them into 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 czechoslovakian people women are famously beautiful so much of the blood of the ottoman royal house is actually a circassian so peridev nial vale de sultan in the 19th century was the wife of sultan abdul majeed and therefore the mother of sultan abdulaziz 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 sargassian woman peritectomy because these ottoman women were really powerful um went on to found hospitals and she has a the validity sultan mosque in aksarai in istanbul is is by her and you know she was powerful i was reading an ottoman history book recently and her son abdul aziz had been traveling in europe and was stopping at the ottoman town of rushchuk 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 and amir muhmeen immediately went back the the wives of the sultans were often not powerful but the mothers were incredibly powerful another one cardinal fendi 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 um they weren't turkish interesting europe called it turkey but they weren't actually turkish but in any case um circassia now you won't find on the map sochi in those places solidly russian and a few of the smaller peoples um the cabardians and others kind of consider themselves to be circassians but they have vanished 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 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 connor 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 uh and uh the prevailing law was called the adats even though they respected the sharia but the adat 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 nakshpandi chieftain who was an ava a v a r not a dagestani 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 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 blanche the sabres of paradise there's an interesting kind of moment she died quite recently she was over 100 kind of traditional aristocratic storytelling orient loving woman sort of who wore turkish clothes and had a villa in in the south of france made quite a lot of money out of her books and she was a sort of superior mills and boone type writers european women who went out and found love in the arms of sort of um hunky oriental men uh 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 sort of european romantic writing um 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 shammil'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 chorobe or 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 somebody somewhere that seems to be so strange and so distant so her book is uh actually quite gripping and quite worth the read so after the conquest of syracasia which has really traumatized the whole muslim world the khalifa 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 and so they're pushing further into the caucasus and it becomes this legendary scene of battles lermontov and turgenev and tolstoy tolstoy's famous novel morad 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 more disciplined um so the first coherent response comes from a very shadowy still not properly researched uh 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 said offendage 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 that really old man a really good book in russian about the the spiritual history of the region um 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 the russians with an authorization from the ottoman khalifa and he's known to have fallen at a battle at a place called tatartov in the caucasus in 1791. he uh demonstrated the potential military power of the caucasians the people's to the north the black sea once was an entirely muslim lake and there were no significant christian settlements on the black sea um crimea was a semi-independent muslim khanate under the girai family and quran 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 bhakti-sarai and the khan's palace it's like kind of the east of europe's granada as it were very evocative so the the 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 surf status basically like being agricultural slave and the girais 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 uh these people don't put up much of a resistance the nogai is kind of nomadic pastoralists can't do much against a million russian bayonets and they submit there's still a few no guys around 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 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 of course 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 with the nakshbandi sheikhs band is uh often associated with pro-sharia militancy in islamic history and certainly in the caucasus the caucasians are basically nowadays either bundys or cadaries and both of them have a tradition of militancy 1827 a kind of capital is established by somebody called razi mullah who is a nakhmandi mureed in the town of rimri 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 the 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 ghadi who imposes a penalty and a line is drawn under the dispute so much of the battle in caucuses is about replacing old ideas of venteta and honour with shari values and to this day in the region they call this the time of sharia in the caucasus there is the 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 well 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's also drunk to flog him publicly even though he's 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 so uh you have grazie moller starting to try and take territory back from the russians and then the russians besiege rimri and razimola is there and his leading murid shamil is there with their naives who are the kind of khalifas of the tariqah and they decide that they're not going to leave but they're going to make a stand the russians besiege it and according to the russians when they finally take the town they find razi muller there still seated on his prayer carpet and he's still in the prayer position but he's actually dead having been killed with his hand on his beard but shamil is still fighting with 60 of the naives great sharpshooters the chechens shooting from uh a bastion uh and then famous incident uh inspirational really in this got even into the english press uh when there's only two men alive uh 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 is 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 bayonetted 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 his own flesh cut down the man and with another superhuman leap cleared the wall and vanished into the darkness we were left absolutely dumbfounded this is a famous moment in russian imperial history really the idea of the russian troops with their bayonets surrounding imam shamil and he cuts down three of them and jumps over their heads and disappears and lives to fight another 30 years in this extraordinary campaign and of course events like that secure him the loyalty of so many others he escapes from rimberry he's badly wounded he goes up even higher in the mountain to the side of a glacier to a little stone hut where a shepherd sends word to his wife fatima who comes to him with food nurses him through a fever by this time he's already got 18 bayonet and sword wounds on his body and he's then when he recovers appointed by the muslims of all of the caucasus to be the al-imam al-azam the leader of the struggle so we find and we don't really have time to trace all of the details of this even though the russians lose half a million men in their attempts to subdue imam shamil and his campaign a master of guerrilla warfare and it said that the russians only succeed eventually just by cutting down all of the forests chichenya and dakistan are covered by a huge beautiful deciduous oak woods where the the maurids would hide themselves and so the russians decided just to rather like the americans with agent orange in vietnam you just plaster the landscape with defoliant and there's nowhere for the vietcong to hide the russians do the same kind of thing so it said eventually uh chichenya and dagestan were conquered by the axe rather than the musket but um still he his exploits become uh legendary uh the russians attack another chechen village a shilter [Music] thousand of shammas mureeds take an oath to defend it to the death hand-to-hand fight through the streets and the russia's russians capture the town and massacre everybody men women and children incidentally very often women in the the chechen and dagestani tradition are fighting and even the children on one of the famous sieges of ahulgul i think it is that the women and children are hiding in a cave and the russians are taking the the main village and then the women and children burst out of the cave and even the children with knives are kind of jabbing up at the russian soldiers they're really formidable formidable opponents so uh shamil continues to the great humiliation of the tsar sort of three months right away in saint petersburg to um to prevail and he develops also a scholarly tradition we have writings from him he has his own of card which is called the zaboor of shamil which is a kind of development of the nokshmandi khatmir um yeah dramatic dramatic stories um of the the final capture but what i what i here another account from a russian officer uh on the attack on acholgo which is shameless new capital and the russians have just betrayed imam shammil because they're besieging the town and say if you give us your son jamal din as a hostage we'll leave you in peace and we'll raise the siege channel saying that the town is about to be annihilated reluctantly agrees and gemalidine goes off and as soon as the russians have their hands on him they start the bombardment again and it's clear that it's just been urus and jamil his hatred of the russians is partly due to the the kind of treasonous uh behavior he's been duped so the russians advance again and this is the account of a russian officer we had to lower soldiers by means of ropes our troops are almost overcome by the stench of the numberless corpses in the chasm between the two villages the guard had to be changed every few hours more than a thousand bodies were counted large numbers were swept downstream or lay bloated on the rocks 900 prisoners were taken alive mostly women children and old men but in spite of their wounds and exhaustion even these did not surrender easily some gathered up their last force and snatched the bayonets from their guards the weeping and wailing of the few children left alive and the sufferings of the wounded and dying completed the tragic scene shamil has escaped with his family and he has his two wives fatima and johara with him johara falls prey to a russian bullet a sniper she's pregnant falls into the river never seen again but still they managed to escape and then uh famous episode he wants to get his son back uh and in order to do this he captures in a very daring raid in georgia two christian princesses and this is a great shame to the court instant petersburg and he says i'll return your princesses if you return my son and this turns out to be successful and the princesses are returned and his son jumaladeen comes back in a very famous and touching scene but what is particularly interesting is that with the princesses uh there is uh a french um tutor a governess anna tronsi she just a kind of teacher from paris who's got a job teaching the royal princesses in georgia and she's captured with them and shares their captivity up in the mountain village owl the uh the mountain fastness and when she is returned along with the princesses as part of the hostage exchange she writes a book when she goes back to france which explains how honorably she has been treated even though these people are so shockingly poor her honor as she put it and the honor of the princesses remained intact the imam was stern but treated them with respect and part of the the mythos the legend of imam shamal is the honorable way in which he always treated prisoners and respected the sanctity of non-combatants despite the fact that the russians had massacred the entire population of nearby circassia he did not retaliate in kind and treated prisoners honorably finally captured um 1859 in the last remaining owl or mountain settlement a place called gunib which is still almost a kind of place of pilgrimage in the caucasus for the the nox bundes he only has 300 faithful murids left and the russians have a vast army and the russians say unless you lay down your arms we're going to hunt down every member of your family and kill them as shameless realizes that the game is up and so famously he gives himself up and goes off to petersburg in captivity and the cmc group last year visiting the hermitage museum in saint petersburg were shown his dagger and his banner which they still have in the museum they are quite an evocative thing seeing those things from a time that was not that long ago uh so that was the end of the independent nox bandi state and what we glean from this is imam shamil is appointed by his teacher razi mullah it's clear that he doesn't want to do any of this it's evident that his real concern is vika and with implementation of the divine law but given this false measure of the possibility of serbian style ethnic cleansing in the caucasus he has no choice but to take on the mantle of being a leader at every point he maintains his independence and his austere and ascetical lifestyle his food is the food of everyone else he lives in a very simple stone hut throughout the quite excruciating caucasian winters at altitude he shares their suffering he is at the front line of combat and in this we detect something of the prophetic muhammadan spirit true leadership which does not lead from behind but from the front and which does things not because one desires some kind of glory in the style of napoleon and so many others but rather because one is obliged by god's law and by the urgent entreaties of one's people to uh take up this this mantle but at all times despite being angry at what the russians had done and it was a righteous anger at no point does his anger lead him into needless massacre and mayhem he treats hostages and prisoners honorably he despite the fact that the russians cheat him every opportunity always upholds his undertakings and thus is his memory in medina with his family and in the caucasus russia much of the alma still revered as somebody who was mosaic and not pharyonic somebody who did not wish for leadership but had it thrust upon him and as a result as is promised in the hadith of the holy prophet was given help in his leadership nobody today particularly reveres those generals and those tsars but who doesn't revere the memory of imam shamil and even this romantic fiction writer leslie blanche really admires the man though she had nothing to do with islam this is how dawah exists this is how leadership should be but it doesn't have much to do with the kind of self-seeking self-promoting flip chart culture of the leadership programs in today's ummah is to do with spiritual charisma and self-denial to the extent that you deny the ego you can exercise just authority and god will help you to the extent that your ego is in it and your rise to fame and fortune is an ego trip you're going to be a disaster to the world and we see this today in washington moscow so many places egos result in the destruction of the rahia and the humiliation of beni erdem so that's the end of this rather brief introduction and outline to the life of imam shamil but worth reading more about because it's a very dramatic heroic buccaneering kind of story in an age when things were looking bleak as they are today but still the umber continues and islam is still there and thriving in the caucasus muslim population in russia continues to grow they don't drink so much they don't have as many abortions they have big families continues to grow there so who would have thought in imam shammil's time that there would be 160 000 people praying that eid prayer at the olympic stadium mosque in moscow you can see it from from the space station apparently it's extraordinary a huge jannah so god is the best of plotters cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

Views: 41,109

Rating: 4.9286985 out of 5

Keywords: 20181020_s1_imam-shamil, finals, media

Id: e1EG4MEMEl8

Length: 94min 46sec (5686 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CaesarSultanShah]

Excellent series in general. Looking forward to the recent one on Imam Malik.