At a glance
Era 11- Dates
- 1797-1871 CE
- Who
- Third imam of Dagestan and Chechnya, who resisted Russia for twenty-five years
- Era
- Colonialism & Renewal
ProfileImam Shamil
Shamil was born in 1797 in the Avar village of Gimry in Dagestan and studied under a Naqshbandi teacher alongside his friend Ghazi Muhammad, the first imam of the resistance. He escaped when Ghazi Muhammad was killed in 1832, and in 1834 he became imam himself.
He ruled an imamate in the mountains by the Sharia and fought the Russian Empire with great skill, using forests and gorges against much larger armies. He escaped the siege of Akhulgo in 1839 and destroyed a Russian army near Dargo in 1845. He was strict with himself as with others, and once took most of a legal punishment on himself in place of his mother.
As the Russians cut down the forests and closed in, his support shrank. He surrendered at Gunib in 1859. In 1869 he was allowed to make the Hajj, met Abd al-Qadir in Makkah, and died in Madinah in 1871.
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