Imam Shamil's Mountain Imamate

For a quarter of a century the peoples of the eastern Caucasus, in Dagestan and Chechnya, resisted the southward conquest of the Russian Empire, and from 1834 their resistance was led by Imam Shamil (rahimahu Allah), the third imam of the Caucasian Imamate and a teacher in the Naqshbandi Sufi path. Shamil welded the fiercely independent highland communities, with their stone villages, the auls, terraced into the mountainsides and crowned with watchtowers, into a single Islamic state governed by the Shariah. He appointed deputies, the naibs, over the districts, set qadis to judge by Islamic law in place of local custom, raised taxes and a disciplined fighting force, and built a network of mountain strongholds, using the terrain, the gorges and the forests as his greatest defence against the far larger and better-armed Russian armies. For decades the imamate held, inflicting heavy losses on the Russians and becoming famous across the Muslim world and Europe as a model of mountain resistance. Overwhelming Russian pressure, scorched-earth campaigns and the cutting of the Chechen forests gradually wore it down, and Shamil was finally besieged and surrendered at Gunib in 1859; treated with honour, he was settled in Russia and later allowed to make the pilgrimage, dying at Madinah in 1871. He is remembered in the Muslim tradition as a scholar, a Sufi and one of the great leaders of resistance to colonial conquest. This scene depicts the imamate at its height around 1850, a fortified stone aul of the Dagestan highlands with its watchtower and terraces beneath the high peaks.