Rebecca Ruth Gould and Abdalrahman Abou Almajd about Islamic literary traditions in the literatures of the Caucasus

We have a fresh opportunity to reflect on literature of insurgency in the Caucasus. Rebecca Ruth Gould is going to speak about literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus ، as well as Islamic literary traditions reflected in the literatures of the Caucasus.

Rebecca Ruth Gould.

She's a writer, scholar, and translator as well as Professor, Islamic World and Comparative Literatures at the University of birmingham. Her books include Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015). She has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, the Journal of Persianate Studies, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.

She has conducted fieldwork in Iran (2012, 2014); Tajikistan (2007); Palestine (2011 - 12); Syria (2010); Egypt (2010, 2012); Azerbaijan (2006); Hyderabad, India (2008); Daghestan (2004, 2006); Georgia (2004 - 6, 2013), and Chechnya and Ingushetia (2006), among other places.

Prior to joining the University of bristol, she taught at the University of Bristol and Yale - NUS College (Singapore).

Q: How did you become interested in the Islam in the Caucasus?

RG: It’s difficult to isolate to a single moment. But my most intense interest begins with my engagement with Chechen culture. Towards the end of the second Russo - Chechen War (which began in 1999), I spent two years (2004 - 6) in Tbilisi, working with Chechen refugees. My decision to apply for a grant to study Chechen in Tbilisi was influenced by the events of the Chechen war, which seemed to me to be very badly covered in the Western media. The Russian conquest was also presented in rather one - sided fashion in the Russian literary sources that I was introduced to during my university studies. I wanted to know more, in particular from non - Russian and indigenous Islamic sources.

Living and studying in Tbilisi provided an atypical introduction to Islam, but it awakened me to many aspects of Islamic culture and history in the Caucasus that are ignored by other approaches. I came to know North Caucasus peoples, such as the Kists, Chechens who migrated to Georgia in the nineteenth century, following the defeat of Imam Shamil. I also became enthralled by the long history of Georgian - Persian relations, that was evident in all spheres of Georgian daily life and literature culture, from food, to art, to the Georgian lexicon. Daghestan was another region to which I remain drawn, due to its extraordinarily rich history of contact with the Arab world since the beginning of Islam.

I spent most of time in Tbilisi studying the cultures of the Northeast Caucasus (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Daghestan), but towards the end of my residency in Tbilisi, I became interested in the countries to the south of Georgia’s border, specifically Iran, and its history of relations with the Caucasus. I became aware of what might be called an Islamicate identity (before I knew the term) that extended from Kazanin central Russia to Adjaria on the Georgian - Ottoman border to Bukhara and Samarqand in the east. This identity crosses divides of languages and culture, but its aesthetics, whether Sunni or Shia, are consistently Islamicate. I decided to dedicate myself to making the Islamic dimensions of Caucasus cultures better known to the world.

Q: How are Islamic literary traditions reflected in the literatures of the Caucasus?

RG: The Caucasus abounds in ancient literary traditions. Among the oldest of these are the Christian literatures of Georgia and Armenia, both which have been heavily influenced by Muslim traditions to the north and south. The antiquity of literary culture in this region has created a special role for the poet as an arbiter of politics and culture. The inordinate importance of literature in this region makes it rather ironic that today the Caucasus is mostly studied at the international level for its geopolitical significance. While large numbers of political scientists, anthropologists, and linguists focus on the Caucasus, scholars of the prodigious literatures of the Caucasus in Persian, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and numerous Turkic and indigenous languages are few and far between. The neglect of these literatures is often explained away as the result of perceived linguistic difficulties, but I believe that the barriers to inquiry have deeper origins. There is unfortunately an entrenched stereotype that Russian literature alone is the main source of culture in the region.

Alongside the longstanding importance of poetry in the indigenous traditions of the Caucasus, these traditions are also influenced by the importance of the poet in both Arabic and Persian literature. For the Persian strands of Caucasus cultures, the enduring importance of the poet is reflected in the status accorded to poets such as Nizami and Khaqani, who passed their lives in the towns of Ganja and Shirvan, respectively, both of which are located in what is now northern Azerbaijan. The poet has also long been a figure of enduring significance in Georgian literature, and many aspects of Georgian literary culture are clearly derived from Persian poetic forms. Arabic played a greater role in the culture of the Caucasus through its promotion of scientific and religious learning rather than poetry per se; however, many collections of locally - produced Arabic poetry are preserved in Daghestani private collections, as well as in the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography (http://www.ihaednc.ru/) in Makhachkala. Although very little of this rich legacy has been published, many Daghestani Arabic poems have appeared in editions of local histories and tabaqat (biographies of scholars) dating from the timing of Shamil’s imamate and after.

Q: You have visited and conducted research in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Syria, and Palestine. I'd like to know how the literatures these regions appear to you in comparison to each other.

RG: While obviously there are significant differences, I a large number of themes, images, and motifs connect the Caucasus to Central Asia in particular. While some of these stem from a shared history of Russian and subsequently Soviet rule, others have even deeper origins. As for Syria, the connections with Daghestan are enduring and date back to the Ottoman period. I have not discerned many direct connections between other parts of the Levant, such as Palestine, and the Arab phone Caucasus, but I have found the parallels in terms of Palestinian and Chechen experience following the nakba of 1948 and the deportation of 1944 respectively to be quite striking.

In terms of literary genres, one of the most important commonalities across all of these cultures is a genre that plays a major role in both Arabic and Persian literary production: the qasida (roughly: ode), a literary form that resonates across the Islamic world, in languages as diverse as Swahili and Bangla. Although successful translations of qasidasinto English are few and far between, this genre serves as the origin of other literary forms, such as the ghazal (lyric poem) across the Islamic world.

Q: Are you able to find common narratives and themes among literatures as diverse as Arabic, Persian, Chechen, Georgian, and Russian?

RG: I believe it is possible to conceptualise a body of texts that can be described as “Islamicate world literature.”This body of texts broadly partakes of Islamic culture, but it is not defined by its adherence to, or divergence from, specific religious doctrines. What does define it is less its religious affiliation than the script in which it was composed, and the aesthetic values that inform it. Islamicate as a understand it refers to an aesthetic principle that broadly characterizes literary production across the Caucasus, including in many Christian contexts. Islamicate world literature encompasses texts composed in Persian, Arabic, Turkic languages, and in the many indigenous languages of the Caucasus, from Avar to Chechen to Ingush to Dargi, Kabardin, and Abkhaz. Beyond the Caucasus, Islamicate world literature also encompasses many South Asian languages, including precursors to Hindi - Urdu, not all of which were defined in religious terms. Islamic world literature refers to an aesthetic universe governed by the science of rhetoric (ilm al - balagha), rather than to a set of doctrines or worldviews.

Q: What in your view are the major unstudied areas of research within Islamic Studies?

RG: One area that is urgently in need of further research is the science of Islamic rhetoric. Although highly influential on the development of literary criticism in Arabic, Persian, Turkic and other Islamic languages, the science of rhetoric has by and large been neglected today, most notably by the very scholars whom one would expect to be mostinterested in it: literary comparativists. I believe that the primary reason for this neglect is a lack of adequate translations. The few exceptions to this neglect, such as the Syrian poet Adonis, who recognises the importance of balagha in his critical works, reveal its potential to transform literary praxis across the Islamic world and beyond.

Alongside its potential contribution to contemporary Islamic culture, the discipline of Comparative Literature stands to gain a great deal by more extended engagement with balagha, in particular as it has beendeveloped by Quranic scholars such as al - Baqillani, al - Rummani, and, most importantly, ‘Abd al - Qahir al - Jurjani. My current project, “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures in a Comparative Context,” initiates such an encounter between contemporary literary studies and classical Islamic rhetoric. The project consists of four case studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Georgian contributions to the science of rhetoric, and brings these traditions into systematic comparison for the first time in European scholarship. I hope that placing this system into a comparative framework will make it available to scholars of other literary traditions, including those originating in Europe, Africa, and South Asia, enabling them to foreground the role of rhetoric and close reading in their engagement with literary texts.

Q: What is the most important contribution of your recent book, Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus?

RG: Although both are concerned with aesthetics in relation to politics, Writers and Rebels speaks to a different aspect of my research than does “Global Literary Theory.” I began the research for this book during the years when I was living in Tbilisi, gathering materials and conducting interviews relating to the history of resistance to colonial rule in the Caucasus. Following many interviews, archival research, and immersion in primary sources, I was struck by apersistent tendency in my sources to aestheticize militant anticolonial resistance, especially among Chechens. This tendency extended to Russian sources, but it was by no means restricted to them. Across the indigenous literatures of the Caucasus, including texts in Chechen and Georgian, the figure of the anticolonial bandit shone through as a hero and ultimately a martyr for a higher goal. His struggles were conceived of in quasi - religious term, even when his foremost concern was with national liberation. But while prior scholars had discussed the political dimensions of this sacred bandit, and this perspective had dominated Soviet history, few had attended to itsreligious implications. The sanctification of transgression remained understudied and untheorised.

I began to wonder: what historical and political conditions enable the holy bandit’s sanctification? I developed the theory of “transgressive sanctity” in order to enable us to better analyse the process, which can be discerned across the Islamic world, whereby a form of violence that used to be condemned as antisocial under earlier political dispensations (structured according to customary law, ‘adat, as well as shari’a) becomes sanctified as just and righteous when this same violence is directed against colonial rulers. As a result of new legal dispensations, familiar ethical points of reference are inverted, and antisocial violence suddenly becomes a path towards sanctity.

The study of insurgency in the colonial Caucasus provides support to the view that the perception of violence, and the extent to which it is given legitimacy, is nearly always a function of on whose behalf this violence is exercised and against which types of populations. It is rare to see violence condemned unilaterally by anyone. Notwithstanding certain strands of Sufi pacifism (such as the Qadiriyya branch of Sufism followed by the shepherd Kunta Hajji that was influential among some Chechens and Ingush), Caucasus history in general provides more examples of violence used for what are perceived as justified ends than it does of individuals who unilaterally reject violence. The task facing those of us who stand opposed to violence, or who wish to understand it critically, is to understand better how violence is justified within specific contexts, and to use this critical consciousness to desacralize it, and thereby to reduce its ethical appeal. Coming to terms with violence in way this does require at some level understanding it from within, which is what I tried to do in each chapter of Writers and Rebels, all the way from my treatments of the antisocial bandit in Chechen, Georgian, and Daghestani literature in Chapters One and Two to my ethnography of contemporary Chechens who were neighbours when a female Chechen suicide bomber in Chapter Four.

Q: How do you interpret two centuries of turbulentIslamic insurgency in the Caucasus? Is violence the only story worth telling?

RG: I think it’s important to remember that these “two centuries of turbulentIslamic insurgence” were characterised by much more than violence. In addition, it is important to remember that, although the resistance was informed by Islamic idioms and sometimes transpired under an imamate, it was directed against a colonial state and was driven by a broadly political rather than religious agenda. For every story of violent resistance, there is also a story that may have been pacifist or pragmatist, but which was not violent. However, there is no doubt that violence is one of the major themes of the anticolonial literature of the Caucasus.

Q: Well, the older works focused on the insurgency against Russian forces in Caucasus. Poems written by women—mostly wives or widows of militants—usually share their personal experiences about how to cope when their husband is killed. Could you give us some examples of these works?

RG: One of the most famous stories on this topic relates to the attempt of Shamil’s mother Bahou Messadouto persuade her son to seek peace with the Russians in order to stop an attack on Chechen villages. Shamil was so outraged by this proposal that he ordered that his mother be struck with one hundred lashes. After five lashes, Bahou lost consciousness. Shamil insisted that he take his mother’s place and the remaining ninety - five lashes were administered to him. Although his followers hesitated to inflict this punishment on their leader, Shamil threatened anyone who tried to stop the flogging with death. In this way, Shamil’s harshness was revealed alongside his love for his mother. He was unwilling to compromise his struggle in order to appease her, but he also insisted on making her suffering his own.

Another vivid account of the experience of life as an insurgent from a female perspective is given in a novel by Magomed Mamakaev, Zelamkha (1968), about the most famous insurgent of the Caucasus after Imam Shamil, best known in English as Zelimkhan of Kharachoi (d. 1914). Zelimkhan’s background was quite unlike that of Shamil. He was Chechen (Shamil was Daghestani Avar) and had no legal standing as an imam. Instead, he became a bandit (abrek). Although it deployed Islamic idioms, Zelimkhan’s rebellion is remembered in more nationalistic than religious terms. At the same time, Writers and Rebels amply demonstrates that the religious and the national are not entirely separate when it comes to the history of anticolonial resistance in the Caucasus.

Back to your question, Zelimkhan’s wife Bitsiis portrayed in Mamakaev’s novel as a strong supporter of her husband’s vocation as an anticolonial insurgent. She even briefly becomes an insurgent herself. Another novel about Zelimkhan, by the Ossetian writer Dzakho Gatuev (d. 1937), similarly depicts Bitsi as a female bandit. Zelimkhan confides his fears of dying at the hands of Russian forces to her, but Bitsiencourages him to continue fighting, knowing that he will eventually die. So although the figure of the abrek is overwhelmingly a masculine one, it is important to remember with examples like Bitsi that it is not entirely restricted to men. Women can also become abreks. Finally, when discussing these texts about Zelikhan, it is important to remember that both the works of Mamakaev and Gatuev are novels, not histories. Yet they are novels written in documentary style, which contain a great deal of historical truth, and which reveal a great deal about Chechen cultural memory.

Q: What about the novels that focus on shahadah (martyrdom) in the Caucasus?

RG: One of the most compelling works on this topic is a novel written in English and from a Muslim point of view, by the Sudanese writer (currently resident in Scotland), Leila Aboulela. Entitled The Kindness of Enemies (2015), this novel offers a compelling portrait of the resistance to Russian conquest from the perspective of Imam Shamil and his family. I highly recommend it as possibly the most compelling fictional account in English of the Russo - Caucasus wars. Aboulela is very knowledgeable about the Islamic background to the anticolonial resistance, although she somewhat exaggerates the influence of Sufism on Imam Shamil.

Q: What are you working on now?

RG: My next book, currently entitled Narrating Catastrophe: Forced Migration from Colonialism to Postcoloniality in the Caucasus, is conceived of as a sequel, and as an answer to my first study of anticolonial violence in the Caucasus. This project follows on from Writers and Rebels in that it looks beyond violence as the dominant idiom to describe the effects of colonial rule and instead adopts another focus, on forced migration and the narratives it generated. Narrating Catastropheexamines the uses that were made of the Islamic migration narrative—hijra—in the literatures of the 19th and 20th century Caucasus.

I focus in particular on the migrations of peoples from the North Caucasus (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Daghestan, Circassia) to Ottoman lands during the 1860s, as well as on the deportations of Chechens, Ingush, and others to the Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan during the 1940s. As with Writers and Rebels, literary texts bring these forced migrations together in cultural memory.Becausethe 1940s deportations were forbidden topics during the Soviet period, many of deported peoples turned to literature to memorialise these events allegorically. Their interest in the 1860s forced migrations of Caucasus peoples to Ottoman lands was influenced by the persistentand increasingly brutal pattern of forced migration during the 20th century. When this book is placed alongside Writers and Rebels, I hope that they two works will together enable a shift away from the Russian - dominated lens through which the colonial encounter in the Caucasus has by and large been viewed for the past two centuries and towards a more pluralistic vantage point that encompasses the full diversity of Caucasus literatures.

Abdalrahman: Thank you very much, Rebecca.

Rebecca Gould: Thank you, Abdalrahman. It’s been a pleasure to join the company of the many other illustrious scholars you have interviewed here.