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After securing its dominance in the southern parts of the Caucasus with 
signing the Treaty of Gülistan with Persia in 1813, Russian claims over the North 
Caucasus were officially recognised, and the “Russians turned towards the 
mountains to secure their rear and communications.”
78
 The duty was given to 
General Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov who was appointed the Governor and Chief 
Administrator of Georgia and the Caucasus, commander-in-chief of the separate 
Georgian Army Corps and Ambassador Extraordinaire to the court of Fath Ali 
Shah of Persia. This appointment earned him the nickname of Proconsul of the 
Caucasus.
 79
 Thereafter, with his chief of staff General Veliaminov, he began to 
implement a new policy of his own, the ‘siege policy’. He aimed to drive the 
Mountaineers away from the plain area and restrict them to the mountains by 
establishing lines of fortresses using the Caucasian line as the first parallel. In 
compliance with this policy, he built the fortresses of the Sunja and Sulaq lines, 
Groznaya (‘Menacing’) in 1818, Vnezapnaya (‘Sudden’) near Enderi in 1819 and 
Burnaya (‘Stormy’) near Tarku in 1821. Through ruthless actions and genocidal 
tactics directed from these new centres, Russians managed to subjugate larger parts 
of Dagestan. 
In this short period of time, although the rulers of Dagestan tried to form an 
alliance against the Russian forces, they failed and were beaten. Then, the pro-
                                                                                                                                        
the Russian sovereign, and sought cultural and linguistic assimilation. See Chantal Lemercier-
Quelquejay, ‘Cooptation of the Elites’. Also see A. V. Fadeev, 1960. Rossiia i Kavkaz: Pervoi Treti 
XIX v., Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR. 
78
 Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 7. 
79
 For Yermolov see Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 29-38. 

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Russian ones replaced the rulers of the Avar Khanate and Ghazi-Kumuk and those 
of Mekhtuli, Kaytak, and Tabasaran were deposed and their lands were annexed.
80
 
 
During the 1828-29 Russian-Turkish war, the Russian forces captured 
Anapa and in the Treaty of Edirne (Adrianople), the Turks agreed to give up all 
positions and claims on the northwestern Caucasus or the Circassian lands in return 
for the restoration of Kars and Batum. 
 
8-Re-emergence of the Muridizm: 
In this milieu, in the footsteps of Mansur, Islam once again emerged as the 
major political force capable of crossing tribal and ethnic divides, and uniting 
various peoples in a broad anti-colonial struggle. This new movement, which was 
shaped by Naqshbandi orders, first emerged in the central areas of the North 
Caucasus, in which there was no ruling elites and princely dynasties, and thus no 
co-optation by the Russians. Then, it gradually spread into the eastern and western 
areas. The first Mountaineers’ revolt, under the banner of Islam took place in 1825-
26, under the leadership of Beybulat Taymi
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, in Chechnya, and supported by the 
Naqshbandiya heartily. In spite of its importance as a reflection of a centralising 
tendency that began to emerge in the North Caucasus, this revolt had limited 
success.
82
 
                                                 
80
 Rasul Magomedov, 1939. Bor’ba Gortsev za nezavisimost’ pod rukovodstvom Shamilia, 
Makhach-Kala: Daggiz, 21-33. 
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 He was born in 1779 to the family of a Chechen craftsman in the village of Bilty. His courage and 
the other qualities as a statesman rose him to a prominent position of an elder. But the 
Naqshbandiya, especially the most important sheikh, Muhammad al-Yaraghi, supported the revolt 
that he led. Zelkina, God and Freedom, 126-7. 
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 For a detailed account of this revolt see Zelkina, God and Freedom, 121-134. 

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The leader, who bridged the gap between the ‘political’ and ‘spiritual’ 
Naqshbandiya and merged the two into a united movement, was Ghazi 
Muhammed.
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 As a Naqshbandi sheikh, he saw the sharia as the only guarantee 
against the corruption of the North Caucasian society by Russian colonial rule. He 
called on Muslims to replace the traditional ‘adat’ system with a sharia-based 
legislation. 
This kind of development in the North Caucasus caused the beginning of 
the Mountaineer-Russian struggle in the entire region and strengthened the vitality 
of the establishment of unified body for a successful resistance. The Russians 
began to implement a policy based on the premises that “fear and greed are the two 
mainsprings of everything that takes place here” and that “those people’s only 
policy is force.”
84
 Under the command of Yermolov and his successors, Paskevich 
and Rosen, Russian forces stormed entire Chechnya and Dagestan. 
In response, the influence of the tariqats and consequently Ghazi 
Muhammed grew steadily. The local authorities and the people in general inclined 
to Imam and ready to struggle with ‘infidels’, i.e. Russians. At the end of 1829, he 
summoned the Naqshbandi sheikhs and mullahs to a gathering at Gimrah (Gimri) 
and declared a holy war, ghazavat, in early 1830. Until his death in October 1832, 
he managed to establish his authority over the territory of central and eastern North 
                                                 
83
 Ghazi Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Gimrawi was born some time in the early 1790s in the village of 
Gimrah. Although nothing is known about his family, it is supposed that it was a common family of 
the Avar uzden. At the age of ten he was sent to Karanay village to study Arabic and the Qur’an, 
and then he visited the other Dagestani centres of learning. In 1825, he went to Ghazi-Kumuk, to 
see the famous Naqsbandi sheikhs, and became one of the ardent murids of Jamal al-Din al-Ghazi 
Kumuyki and Muhammad al-Yaraghi. In early 1827, following his meeting with al-Yaraghi, he 
returned to his native Gimrah, where he established himself as a sheikh in his own right and started 
to take up murids. See Gammer, Muslim Resistance, 49-59, Zelkina, God and Freedom, 135-159, 
and Magomedov, 43-44. 
84
 Baddeley, 65. 

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