Deni Arsanov

In his youth Arsanov was an abrek and took part in the 1877 uprising of Alibek-Khadzhi Aldamov ¹. He founded an Arabic school at Grozny in 1904, kept houses open to the poor at Grozny, Gekhi and Urus-Martan, and was known for reconciling feuding parties ¹. At the Chechen congresses of 1917 he was a leading clerical delegate; the district commissar Eldarkhanov yielded his post to him ¹.

When Cossack–Chechen clashes in Grozny in December 1917 threatened civil war, Arsanov rode in with 53 murids on a peacemaking mission. On 27 December 1917, at the Groznenskaya stanitsa, Cossacks demanded that he and his murids disarm; he refused, and in the ensuing fight the sheikh and more than thirty of his murids were killed ¹.

The Russian article — the only encyclopaedia article on Arsanov in any language — names him in its lead as founder of a brotherhood of the Naqshbandi current, and the scholarship it cites is devoted to him as a Naqshbandi sheikh ¹; Wikidata carries no religion value ². Because the lane records an affiliation only on two independent texts, his faith segment is recorded as unknown, with the Naqshbandi reading preserved here.

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