Ali-Hajji of Akusha

He was born in 1847 in the village of Akusha, then under the Akusha-Dargo Union. His father Mamma was a muezzin (budun) at Akusha's congregational mosque, and Ali was first educated by his father before studying at a local madrasa. He then studied under some of the best-known theologians in Dagestan at the time, including the tariqa sheikh Abdurrahman-Hajji as-Suguri, Hajjila-Ali al-Aqoushi and Ilyas ibn Muhammad al-Zhudqari; the Russian article adds Abdurrahman ibn Muhammad of Kaka-Shura, Ibrahim of Andi and Dazi of Gubden, and records that he mastered Avar, Arabic and Kumyk. ^{1 2}

Ali considered leaving Dagestan to further his studies, but as-Suguri persuaded him to remain and achieve renown in his homeland. In 1890, on the recommendation of the imam of Akusha's congregational mosque, he succeeded him as qadi of the mosque; the English article notes a disputed account of whether he succeeded Gadzhilaali on the latter's retirement or on his death. In the same year he undertook the hajj, after which he wore a green turban and added "Hajji" to his name. He had many murids in the Temir-Khan-Shura, Dargin and Kaytago-Tabasaran districts, whose populations held him in great respect, and religious figures and ordinary people from all over Dagestan turned to him to settle disputed questions. ^{1 2}

Local legend in Akusha tells that he refused a qotan (pasture) offered by a Derbent merchant whose family's property he had distributed according to sharia, once he learned the wealth had been dishonestly acquired, declaring that it belonged not to the family but to the people; and his son Muhammad recalled that he refused to allow a local official to undertake the hajj until the man first returned the bribes he had taken. He was critical of the Russian imperial government and supported the 1913–1914 anti-clerk movement in Dagestan; he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for his criticism of the government, his promotion of Islam and his condemnation of non-Muslims. Despite this, he took part in the November 1914 ceremony greeting Emperor Nicholas II at Derbent station as the emperor travelled to observe the Caucasus campaign of the First World War. ^{1 2}

After the February Revolution, Ali-Hajji supported the February and then the October Revolution and the overthrow of tsarism, believing the Bolsheviks would allow sharia in the North Caucasus. According to Takhu Abdullayeva, wife of the revolutionary Rasul Kaytbekov, he met the Dagestani Bolshevik leaders Djelal ed-Din Korkmasov and Mahach Dahadayev at Paraul in June 1917 — a meeting organised, she said, by Kaytbekov and Mamma-Hajji, a murid of Ali-Hajji from Nizhny Dzhengutay — and called on those present to support the two "for the victory of sharia"; his secretary Suleiman-Hajji dated the beginning of the socialists' support to June 1918. ¹

At a January 1918 congress of Dagestan's ulama and officers at Temir-Khan-Shura, an election was held for the title of shaykh al-Islām of the Northern Caucasus and Dagestan. The candidates were Ali-Hajji, Uzun-Hajji of Salta and Najmuddin of Gotzo; with the support and lobbying of the Dagestan Socialist Group, Ali-Hajji was elected. Dahadayev wrote to him that the Bolsheviks did not forbid people to live by sharia, and on 20 May 1918 Ali-Hajji wrote in turn: "The Bolsheviks are not against us living according to sharia and promise to return the weapons they took away by mistake. If they were to encroach on Islam, I would be the first to call the entire people to war." In 1927 the socialist Alibek Takho-Godi admitted that the promises had been lies made to win the masses. ^{1 2}

The Armed Forces of South Russia invaded Dagestan in May 1919, ending the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus. In April 1919 Ali-Hajji had already drawn up, jointly with Uzun-Hajji, a plan to liberate Dagestan and Chechnya from Denikin's Volunteer Army, and in the summer of 1919 he was the main initiator of the anti-Denikin uprising in Dagestan, whose headquarters were at Levashi and whose insurgents were called "Ali-Hajji's men" in the press of the time. The White-appointed governor, Mikail Khalilov, first tried to bargain with him — offering to let him keep the title of shaykh al-Islām if he defected — and, on his refusal, accused him of deviating from Islam and formally stripped him of the title on 15 July 1919. ^{1 2}

After the defeat of the Denikin forces, an extraordinary assembly at Levashi on 19 October 1919 created the Security Council of the Northern Caucasus and Dagestan to coordinate the insurgency, with Ali-Hajji as its chairman. The council was supported by the Dagestani committee of the Communist Party and by Ottoman officers such as Nuri Pasha and Kâzım Bey, each side seeking to bend it to its own ends. On 7 February 1920 he was made honorary chairman as the Bolsheviks took the council over and Sultan-Said Kazbekov replaced him; on 30 March 1920 the Army of the Security Council paraded in his honour at Temir-Khan-Shura. On 3 April 1920 he told the Bolsheviks that only recognition of the independence of the mountain peoples could secure a lasting peace in the Caucasus; the Bolsheviks did not accept the idea, and Soviet power was established in Dagestan. ^{1 2}

Ali-Hajji at first continued to cooperate: he refused to agitate against Najmuddin of Gotzo's anti-Soviet uprising, holding that Muslims must not fight one another, and in 1921 he took part in the Dagestani delegation received by Korkmasov's circle — Lenin sent him a personal watch, which his family kept until their exile to Kyrgyzstan, when it was pawned and lost. As the Soviet state separated church and state, abolished the sharia courts, disenfranchised the clergy and began the "godless five-year plan", his attitude changed. He travelled through Dagestan with a large retinue and with his murids, speaking against Soviet policy; at Karabudakhkent he told the crowd: "Do not join the party, and if someone asks for bread — do not give it to them and do not give it to soldiers." Through his murids he secured the sharp contraction of the Soviet schools at Gubden — from five schools and 225 pupils to one school and 49 by the end of the 1925–26 school year — while the religious schools there continued to take students; and in Akusha, the daughter of the village party secretary recalled, there were effectively two powers: the sharia authority headed by the sheikh, and the communists, who worked almost underground. On 15 October 1925 he told the people of Akusha: "We Muslims do not need Soviet schools, but madrasa schools, in which our children should receive Arabic knowledge and knowledge of Sharia law." ^{1 2}

Two Dagestani sheikhs exiled in Turkey, Muhammad Madani and Sharafuddin of Kikuni, invited him to bring his family to Turkey, as they had already done before the Civil War; he refused, unwilling to leave his homeland, his relatives and his murids. ^{1 2}

In December 1928 the Dagestan branch of the OGPU opened a case against an alleged counter-revolutionary group of 66 people said to have been organised by Ali-Hajji and his eldest son Muhammad. All of the alleged members except Ali-Hajji himself were arrested; the Russian article gives 29 shot and the rest sent to camps and exile, the English article several executed and the remainder sent to the Gulag or internal exile. The death sentences of his sons were commuted in recognition of their father's Civil War role. Ali-Hajji himself was not arrested, because of his age — over eighty — and his authority among the Dargin Muslims. He died soon afterwards, on 8 April 1930 by the English article and Wikidata; the Russian article notes that all publications give 1930, but that his younger son Ilyas repeatedly wrote that his father died in 1931. He was buried in his own house in Akusha; his large library was confiscated and burned, and the house was seized and turned into a collective-farm storehouse. His whole family was exiled to Kyrgyzstan. ^{1 2 3}

In June 1989 Ali-Hajji and all the members of the alleged group were rehabilitated, the Soviet authorities having found insufficient proof that the group had ever existed. His grave and house in Akusha have since been restored and the house made a museum; a main avenue in Makhachkala, mosques in Makhachkala and Akusha, and an Islamic university bear his name, and his grave has become a place of ziyarat (visitation). A republican freestyle-wrestling tournament in the Akusha district has been held in his memory since 2005. The scholar Magomed Abdullayev published a study of his life in 2013, "The Triumph and Tragedy of the Shaykh al-Islam of Dagestan, Ali-Hajji Akushinsky". ^{1 2}

While an expert on sharia and the sources of Islamic law, Ali-Hajji was a moderate who expressed sympathies towards social justice, equality and socialism. He viewed communism positively, seeing it as responsible for uplifting the poor, but was opposed to the Soviet anti-religious campaigns. He was a pan-Caucasianist and pan-Islamist, seeking the creation of a single state among the Muslims of the North Caucasus, and he made the preservation of the religious foundations of highland life on the basis of a single, indivisible Muslim nation the central aim of his political platform. ^{1 2}

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