This book studies the relationship between Islam and the resistance among the Chechens and Ingush of the North Caucasus. Christian Paul Osthold's central argument is that Islamic resistance in the Chechen and Ingush lands was a reaction to cruel colonial subjugation by the Russian imperial army and the Bolsheviks, not an expression of any fanaticism inherent in Islam. Osthold analyzes the many cases of resistance against colonialism beginning with the jihad of Mansur in the 1780s, followed by other leaders such as Beybulat and Hajji Tashaw, and continued with Chechen support for the famous three Daghestani imams of the 1820s–1850s (including Imam Shamil) and their Sufi masters of the Naqshbandiyya khalidiyya brotherhood. After the defeat of the Imamate in 1859, the Chechen Kunta Hajji developed a new Sufi network in Chechnya based on another brotherhood, the Qadiriyya. Kunta remained peaceful, but the Russians exiled him and thereby triggered more Sufi-led unrest. Osthold also discusses Bolshevik policies to subjugate the Chechens, including by aerial bombardments of mountain villages. Armed resistance continued until the 1940s in the form of small groups of bandits, with less emphasis on Islam. Wehrmacht attempts to organize the Chechen resistance in 1944/43 (discussed in an interesting chapter based on German military reports, memoirs, and Soviet interrogation reports) failed but might have contributed to Stalin's order to deport the whole Chechen nation—plus the Ingush that had largely been mere by-standers. Osthold discusses the horrors of their deportation to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in February 1944; by mid-1946, a third of the Chechen and Ingush populations had perished. The Soviet authorities were not bothered by the massive loss of life through starvation, cold, and disease; Osthold calls this a “methodological genocide” that shaped the Chechen and Ingush national identities. In Soviet Central Asia, the Chechens and Ingush again relied on their clan-based solidarity, and the leadership of their shaykhs, mullahs, and elders, rejecting all attempts of the Party-State to make them docile. With de-Stalinization, the Chechens and Ingush returned to their homeland, where they however remained marginalized, largely employed in kolkhozes with little upward mobility or access to education.

This story has been told before, but Osthold's work is unique in that it combines a longue durée approach to Chechen and Ingush history with a detailed analysis of Russian-language sources. For the imperial period Osthold makes use of documents from various Russian archives, many of which have recently been brought together, in electronic form, in the archive of the Chechen government in Grozny to which Osthold had access. For the later period the author mainly draws on documents that Chechen and Russian historians published in the past three decades. These Russian-language sources are of great interest because they reveal much about how imperial and Soviet officers and bureaucrats perceived the Chechens and Ingush, and about administrative machinations and military operations against them. A different question is whether these sources offer accurate information about the Chechens and Ingush themselves, and about the role of Islam in their resistance. What do we make, for instance, of imperial or NKVD statistics about the numbers of mosques, schools, and Sufi groups at a given date, if we know that the compilers had little access to the region, and that they were operating within a system that required particular information to justify particular policy? At times Osthold nuances the reliability of such accounts, but all too often he takes them at face value and draws conclusions about the political role of Islam among the Chechens and Ingush. In result, Islam remains a black box also in Osthold's work, something that can only be accessed through the language and terminology of the oppressors. The author pays little attention to Muslim writings and Islamic discourses (confusing, for instance, the central concepts of jihad as a “personal” or “communal” duty, page 265), and his transliterations of Islamic terms are incoherent (with self-made forms such as “Ḥalīdiīja”). The only indigenous document reproduced in the book, without translation and analysis, is wrongly attributed to Imam Shamil (its real author being Shamil's deputy Muhammad al-Muhajiri, as the Arabic letter itself indicates, 311). While claiming that the Sufi leadership was central in most of the Chechen insurrections, Osthold does not offer any systematic discussion of the individual Sufi groups (wirds), their networks, local geographies, and links to particular clan structures (clans allegedly being the other building block of Chechen society). Tellingly, the practice of shrine veneration, a central feature of Sufism in the Caucasus, is introduced close to the end of the work, on page 639 (in footnote 3049). This lack of interest in Islam of course reflects the indifference of Osthold's imperial and Soviet sources; it leaves little room for challenging the reduction of Islam to an ever-available mobilizational force for anti-colonial jihad. To conclude, I recommend this book as a detailed and coherent study of Russian and Bolshevik violent policies in the North Caucasus. Regrettably, the lack of an index makes navigation not easy.