The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus

by Lesley Blanch

The Sabres of Paradise was first published in 1960, a hundred years after the story it recounts had ended. The Soviet Union was at the height of its power and the Caucasus had been coerced into submissive conformity by the brutalities of Stalin. Today, the narrative is a lot more relevant – post-Vietnam, post-Afghanistan, post-Soviet Union and post-September 11.A dramatist by training, Lesley's Blanch's bold work of narrative non fiction – the definitive biography of Imam Shamyl – builds the story scene by scene of two worlds brought into sudden juxtaposition. It is the product of six years of diligent and scholarly research done in Russia and the Caucasus, including tracing his descendants in Turkey and Egypt. During the Caucasian Wars of Independence of 1834-1859, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of the Muslim chieftain known as the ‘Lion of Daghestan’. For years, Shamyl defied his enemy, the Tsar, who had taken his eldest son as a hostage to St Petersburg. Shamyl captured in turn two Georgian princesses (from the Tzarina’s entourage), a French governess, and the children, and kept them in his harem until they could be exchanged for his son.Also a historical narrative, there are beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus – a region of supreme natural beauty and mighty mountain ranges – and the campaigns in which Lermontov and Tolstoy participated.BRIAN ALDISS ― “A book as thick with flavour as roast wild boar, tusks and all. One of the most nutritious books I have ever read.”PHILIP MARSDEN ― “Like Tolstoy’s, her sense of history is ultimately convincing not because of any sweeping theses, but because of its particularities, the quirks of individuals and their personal narratives, their deluded ambitions, their vanities and passions.”HAMISH BOWLES in Jacqueline The White House Years ― “Jacqueline Kennedy and Khrushchev maintained a spirited badinage through dinner. Mrs Kennedy had recently read The Sabres of Paradise, Lesley Blanch’s dashing history of the Muslim tribes' resistance to Russian expansionism in the Caucasus, and attempted to engage the Soviet premier in conversation on the subject. He responded with the comparative numbers of teachers per capita in the Soviet and Czarist Ukraine. She cut him off with the playful riposte, “Oh, Mr Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics.”NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ― “I can imagine no better introduction to modern Russia.”LE MONDE ― “A magnificent historical drama; a marvellous, impassioned biography of Imam Shamyl.”AUTHOR BIO Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War Two. In 1946 she sailed from England to travel the world with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. By the time they reached Hollywood in the 1950s they were literary celebrities. Their marriage of eighteen years ended when Gary left her for the young actress, Jean Seberg. Blanch headed East to travel across Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sahara. Born in 1904, she died aged 103, having gone from being a household name to a mysterious and neglected living legend. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti, The Sabres of Paradise, and Round the World in Eighty Dishes, her memoirs – On the Wilder Shores of A Bohemian Life – are published by Virago and La Table Ronde in France.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Biography, Islam, Travel, War

490 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

A scholarly romantic, Lesley Blanch influenced and inspired generations of writers, readers and critics. Her first book, The Wilder Shores of Love — the stories of four ninteenth-century women who followed the beckoning Eastern star — pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on women escaping the boredom of convention. An instant classic, it has remained in print in English since first publication in 1954. Lesley Blanch was ahead of her time and prescient in the way she attempted to bridge West and East.

Savvy, self-possessed and talented, Blanch did what she wanted and earned a good living at a time when women were expected to stay at home and be subservient to the needs of husband and children. She was glamorous and stylish and, in her own unique way, distinctly powerful.

She knew something of the Middle East as it once was, before conflict and turmoil became the essence of relations between the Arab World and the West. The places she travelled to and which obsessed her are still newsworthy today: Russia, The Balkans, The Middle East, Turkey, Afghanistan.

Reviews

[Matthew Griffiths · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has proved to be quite a difficult one to review. if we took the story of Shamyl that this book presents at its face value I would happily have given it a more positive review. unfortunately to be fair I must take into account the authors added comments that are liberally spread throughout the book which unfortunately only add insight into her racism at times. Whenever describing Russians or the varied peoples of the Caucasus she often resorts to flimsy generalisations about oriental cruelty or such like. the overall story of the Murid wars is a very interesting one and serves as an interesting insight into the colonial wars of the Russian Empire in a world often saturated with more western orientated colonial era histories. It is simply a shame that this book was written by the author in question as the generalisations and stereotypes do make this quite tiresome reading at times.

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chechens vs. Russians Round 1

In the nineteenth century the Russian Empire was expanding east and south. It annexed all of Georgia between 1801 and 1804, but in between Russia and its new acquisition lay the Caucasus Mountains, a row of giant peaks lying between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Among these peaks lived numerous peoples speaking a myriad languages, mostly but not all, Muslim. They never agreed to be part of the Tsarist imperium, but their raids and depredations gave the Russians no peace. The Tsar decided that they must be conquered. This was easier said than done. It is estimated that over the next half century, the Russians lost half a million men to disease and in the endless battles with the guerrilla-style Caucasian fighters who, disunited at first, later united under a single, Islamic flag---the flag of a formidable individual named Shamyl. Shamyl, known in Europe as `the Lion of Daghestan', surrendered at last in 1859 and finished his days under house arrest in Kaluga, Russia. [He actually died on the haj in Arabia.] The Caucasians were subdued, but not forever. In World War II, some of them welcomed the Germans as liberators and were exiled en masse afterwards to the barren wastes of Central Asia. After the end of the Soviet Union, Caucasians again rose up, resulting in two more wars between Russia and tiny Chechnya. The struggle continues in the region, if at a lower level. Even the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 had its roots in this endless struggle against domination.

Blanch picked a topic not often discussed in the West. Growing up, we never heard of Chechens, Daghestan, Cherkess, or Kabards. Shamyl was totally unknown, as was his effort to unite all the Caucasian peoples as Murids (fighters) under his flag.. If you'd like to read about it, you might try this book, but I'll give you a warning. This is Romantic History with capitalization intended. Can this writer ever mention a market without lovingly speaking of spices and silks ? (Whatever happened to buckets and nails ?) Can she avoid detailing the beauty of female costume in the Russian court, the colorful, dashing uniforms, the malachite columns in some palaces, the troves of pearls, emeralds, and amethysts ? Not once, but every time. Do you like sentences that speak of "...the dark force of Shamyl who broods behind everything, a mysterious and satanic majesty enthroned among his mountain peaks." ? What about "...that densely dark glossy hair of the Asiatics, which seems plumage rather than hair..."? Talk about exoticizing "the Other" !! Then there is Shamyl, so many times, "his pale face inscrutable, framed in its dark beard, scarlet with henna, vivid against his sombre black bourka, and huge chieftain's turban. His slit-eyes still glittered as he surveyed his threatened mountain kingdom." Oi gavult ! An Armenian appears...."he possessed the astuteness of all his race." If this sort of lush verbiage and stereotype is your bag, you're going to love this book. I felt it should have been better-edited, her super-romantic tendencies reined in, and more attention paid to standard spelling of names, and getting her facts straight. Many phrases and sentences are repeated. But, you know, it's an interesting subject.

[Stephen Brody · Rating 4 out of 5]

“ ‘Throughout the East’, says Sir Richard Burton, ‘a badly dressed man is a pauper, and a pauper – unless he belongs to an order having a right to be poor – is a scoundrel.’ But Shamyl was neither of these; he was a noble, and though austerity was the first tenet of his faith, he never abandoned the fastidious standards of his caste. And here he recalls Tolstoy, who ultimately attained an almost extravagant austerity, exchanging the Moscow salons, champagne suppers and smart tailoring for the simplest food grown on his own lands. He liked to wear a peasant’s shirt woven for him by his own peasants from the finest linen or lambs’ wool. It was a state of mind based on surfeit and sophistication. To him, simplicity was the greatest luxury. And if, as his daughter recalled … there was no running water at Yasniya Poliyana, it was not Tolstoy who fetched the buckets from the well. For unfortunately simplicity is a state which is achieved only through great difficulty, or the complicity of others.”

“While Worcester and Staffordshire dinner-services often dwelt on pig-sticking, whole services being devoted to big game hunting with Maharajahs on elephants, slaughtering noble tigers in bamboo jungles, gory scenes which cannot have encouraged the appetite, tea-services were in a gentler vein, suited to the ladies who sipped and chatted. A teapot’s curved flank reveals the most romantic scenes, shepherds pining besides ruins, or leading curiously formed camels to kneel before Zenobia ….”

“The world is a carcass, and he who seeks it is a dog.”


* * * * *

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia’s expansionist foreign policies started to move south-east from Moscow, greatly alarming the British – “the Russian bear linked to the Persian lion” – as their own Bulldog battalions were advancing north-west from Delhi. A potential clash known as the Great Game had commenced. In spite of rumours that Tsar Paul and Napoleon had signed a secret treaty to wrest India from the British, it is unlikely that under successive rulers the Russians had any serious intentions in that direction but a great deal of jingoism was drummed up, resulting in the catastrophically-pointless Anglo-Afghan War of 1842, a mistake which ultimately lost the Jewel in the Crown. All this is recounted in William Dalrymple’s Return of a King. Lesley Blanch writes from the Russian point of view, or more specifically of the ‘conquest’ of the Caucasus, the great natural barrier between Europe and Asia as the Hindu Kush is between Central Asia and India, and perhaps Russia’s militaristic history could be said to have come back as a haunting presence equally. Most of the area between the Black and Caspian Seas, adjoining Persia and Turkey to the South and with a predominantly Moslem population, was already on affable enough terms with Russia; the opposition came from the more isolated and fiercer tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya and lasted for thirty years of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The writer is a charmingly feminine one with an appreciative eye for the opposite sex without any need to pose as a ‘feminist’, and how much one regrets that sort of agreeable and worldly woman. With sangfroid and scholarship almost equal to Mr Dalrymple’s she recounts all the horrors while almost romping with the pair of Georgian princesses abducted as hostages by the Murids and imprisoned under terrible conditions in a wild mountain retreat, just as those of the camp followers of the Army of the Indus held by the Afghans remembered almost fondly their captors’ handsome appearance and gracious manners. This is no dry military chronicle. Mme Blanch is evidently greatly captivated by an ‘exotic’ romance of the time, off-setting the Mountaineers’ austere manliness against the glittering foppishness of the St Petersburg dandies, “blond Arabs in the wrong climate”; and flitting around most entertainingly like a butterfly alighting on every colourful detail of the domestic, amatory, social and personal circumstances of the participants, deriving an authentic additional sparkle from her own highly adventurous life (she died in 2007 just short of her one-hundred-and-third birthday). She dwells on Shamyl’s elegant wasp waist, magnificent henna-dyed beard and superb athleticism – undiminished by murderous battle-scarring and self-imposed privations – and his adoration for his four wives and a pet cat which he fed from his own plate (though whether these affections were returned anyway by the ladies is less clear, elsewhere they’re referred to as “lower than dogs” and somehow even in an inaccessible mountain retreat managed surely illicitly to obtain fashion magazines of crinolines from their more enlightened foreign sisters). Her admiration for the lady-killing curls and graces of the more glamorous and gilded of the Elite Corps, “for God and Tsar”, comes a close second. The conditions of travel were appalling once off the Georgian Military Highway. There was said to be barely one lavatory anywhere south of Moscow, accommodation primitive in the extreme, yet thousands of persons at all levels regularly plied their way often through the wintriest conditions over the nearly 3,000 km between St Petersburg and Tiflis (Tbilisi), some of them hauling crates of dinner services and silverware, vast wardrobes, even grand pianos with them. One princeling was accompanied into the thick of battle not only by his own cook and valet but a batman to lie on the ground to warm it up before he settled down on it himself with his dressing cases of pomades and colognes. Many of them never returned, though anyone who was anyone – including Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy and their entourages – was dying to be a part of the Caucasian adventure and bask in its heroic aura. It can’t be denied that the fascination is infectious for those with a taste for such old-fashioned matters when war could be made picturesque and the world was full of wonders, who don’t interpret the past through the narrow lens of their own duller and unimaginative present, though of the sentiments of ordinary soldiers dragooned on both sides into this prolonged and futile war there’s as little to be said as of the lesser veiled inhabitants of the harem.

For Shamyl, the ultra-pious self- styled Imam whose eldest son was taken as hostage early in the proceedings to be brought up in the greatest luxury in the Russian capital as a future vice-roy, when it comes down to it is, if more cunning, as mad as the glacial pewter-eyed tyrant Tsar Nicolas I in his refusal to ever compromise, as just one incident suggests: his mother, an influential figure in the Murid hierarchy, had at times been heard to criticise her son’s fanaticism as too harsh and inhuman. The neighbouring Tchetchens, fed up with being caught between two stools, sent a deputation to her to ask her to intercede on their behalf. After several hours, stony-faced, he went to the mosque where he stayed for three days and nights. “All life seemed suspended, a silence hung over the aôul, the streets and rooftops were empty … Suddenly the doors of the mosque were flung open and Shamyl appeared, livid pale, his half closed cat’s eyes glinting beneath the huge chalma, as he pronounced ‘for three days and night I have sought the Prophet’s judgement. Now at least he has answered my prayers. It is Allah’s will that the first person who spoke to me of submission should be punished by a hundred lashes. And this first person is my mother’. His mother was bound and Shamyl seized the whip himself from the executioner. At the fifth blow she lost consciousness, at which he flung himself across her body sobbing uncontrollably. But suddenly, with that force and grace so often remarked in his movements he sprang to his feet, his face now radiant. ‘Allah is great!’, he cried, ‘He allows me to take upon myself the rest of the punishment. I accept with joy’. No grief or pain showed on his face as the flesh was torn from his bleeding shoulders. At the ninety-fifth stroke he rose to his feet, put on his shirt and advanced among the people, who remained kneeling, rooted with terror”. His word, already dreaded on account of what seemed like super-naturalness of endurance and a theatrical piquancy, from then on was as absolute as the Tsar’s of all the Russias, who wasn’t famous for mercifulness either.

Was any of this ever really necessary? The Russians had long had the Christian Georgians of the plain as allies and therefore a corridor to the Orient, there was no real need from their own point of view for them to control everything between the Black and Caspian Seas apart from a lust for power. But in an uneven contest and by a combination of terror and charisma Shamyl invoked a holy war against the intruders, the Byzantine Russian Devils versus the Bearers of the Sabres of Paradise for Heaven itself, with long-lasting consequences of which the modern reader will not have to be reminded. It seemed that a stalemate was going to be indefinite, neither side after years making any headway. The Murids, however, no matter how careless of their own lives, were seriously out-numbered and also losing the support of other tribes no more friendly towards their own fanatical intransigence than to the detested Infidels. Nor did a distressingly-naïve attempt to gain the support of Queen Victoria come to anything however much Her Majesty’s government had its own reasons for wishing to keep the Russians at bay; Shamyl was a nine-day popular wonder amongst those who had no comprehension of where the Caucasus were, but those who did were nervous of mention of such things as ‘rebels’ and ‘harems’ and anyway by now the British reputation throughout Asia was so unsavoury that no-one would trust them, the Russians even at their worst were more honourable. But when Nicolas, over-stepping himself, declared war also on Turkey, things might have turned out very differently if Britain and France had taken their chance to back Shamyl and finally vanquish Russia altogether. Instead a strange sort of apathy descended, the Crimean War was a complete shambles and the Murids, already greatly weakened, seemed to have accepted their impending defeat with Oriental fatalism.

One final coup de théâtre remained to be played out. Even with the war within close proximity, the ancient Georgian capital of Tiflis remained a fashionable settlement of Oriental romance at the most southern extent of the Russian Empire, where visiting ladies had long been titillating themselves over visions of the thrilling mountaineers in their dramatic costumes as a hundred years later their western counterparts were swooning over Rudolph Valentino’s cinematic impersonation of the Sheik of Araby. In the summer of 1854 the Princess Anna Tchavtachavadzé, her recently-widowed sister-in-law and her sister, their small children, an elderly aunt, a young visitor from St Peterburg, a French governess and a number of household retainers had against advice gone to escape the heat in the estate of her husband, two hard day’s travelling away. Unknown to anyone Shamyl had long had his eye on this place as an opportunity for seizing an important hostage to trade against his own son taken as ransom as a boy of eight fifteen years before. Without warning a selected band of his warriors descended from the mountains, laid waste to the house and carried off in the most undignified manner the prize captives and those of their servants they hadn’t massacred on the spot. The terrified women in what remained of their clothing were dragged for a month and by a circuitous route to put off rescuers to Shamyl’s near-inaccessible lair, where twenty-three of them were confined in one primitive room for the next eight months while protracted negotiations went on. An account of their ordeal is partly taken from a sensationalist journal published subsequently, so possibly it was somewhat exaggerated and anyway even princesses then were made of sterner stuff, but even so it seems astonishing that most of them survived it. All Shamyl wanted was his son back and as far as it went he treated his prisoners well enough when he was there, never even entering their quarters further than the door, nor did he know anything of the softer existences of well-to-do Russians; his own chief wife was not so kind and his naïbs, without whom Shamyl was powerless, regarded them as prey unless a ransom payment of an amount so enormous they couldn’t count it had been extracted. Prince David Tchavtachavadzé, in despair at the enormity of a demand which no-one could have met, unhappily consigned his wife and relatives to God’s mercy and swore that the son, now Prince Djemmal-Eddin Shamyl, protégé of the Tsar himself and darling of the Winter Palace, would never return. It was a vow taking account of the better side of his adversary, who likewise harboured no personal animosity toward foes he regarded as honourable. With his customary performance of highly effective drama, the rapacious Murids were persuaded, as if by Allah’s decree, to agree to a swap for a much more reasonable sum and the unfortunate Djemmal-Eddin, making the greatest sacrifice by forgoing without complaint everything he knew and loved to return to barbarity, set off on the long journey south. The exchange took place on the day that Nicolas I died of suicidally-induced pneumonia from his failure in keeping neither his empire after the disaster of the Crimean War nor the young man he’d come to regard as his real son. The ‘conquest’ of the Caucasus, though won, had brought no real victory to either side, only mutual catastrophe. Djemmal-Eddin pined away and died within three years, the fiercely-independent ‘Tartars’, their villages erased from the map, either gratefully deserted to the Russians or subsided into surly resentment and centuries of Old Russia started a decline into a nihilistic emptiness waiting to be filled with something that was not remotely ‘romantic’. Only the defeated Lion of Daghestan, treated with the utmost magnanimity by the new Tsar, lingered on against all the odds into venerable old age as a legend of heroic resistance and discovering, finally, that compromise need not be without its satisfactions, showing for the first time in his life signs of ordinary innocent sensual pleasure .

Lesley Blanch’s particular skill lies in giving a unique humanity to history, displayed to maximum effect at the conclusion of this long and sad saga. Leaving their prison the captives in spite of their relief were saddened by the lamentations of those whose hard and narrow lives had been brightened by faint glimpses of a world they could hardly imagine and would never know. Even Mme Drancy, the French governess who had been treated least well from being of no value, wrote of their escort: “A brilliant cortège, their tcherkesskas were sewn with silver lace, their arms resplendent, their turbans magnificent, their cloaks fur lined, their horses pure-bred …. in their midst Shamyl, his fine and noble face literally shining with joy”. “They are human beings and have human sentiments”, one of the princesses said later, “but they do not happen to be civilized”. Djemmal-Eddin, wearing Russian uniform, head high while grieving over his melancholy fate, rode forward to embrace a brother he no longer recognised. “The princesses threw back their veils the better to see their deliverer. He drew rein beside them, staring long and earnestly. But not a word was said …. Tears rolled down Princess Varvara’s thin cheeks as she looked on the man who had been the Tsar’s favourite….” The amazement and subdued delight of Shamyl at the might and splendour of the Russian capital, where he was expecting his execution, the vociferously enthusiastic warmth of the reception he met and the startling generosity of the hated Gaiours, brings a true story truly stranger than fiction to a fitting finale. The tragedy is that what might have been learned from it never was.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book maybe forty years ago and was astounded at its quality as history and because it revealed a whole other history which I had not the faintest knowledge of but a history that was immediately relevant to what was happening in this area in the immediate post Soviet years. Although I have no doubt that the historiography of the area has advanced, and no doubt been reinterpreted, in the light o the collapse of the Soviet Union but I recommend this book as worth reading with complete confidence. It is also a superbly written history which draws into the unknown and unfamiliar with ease and confidence. It is not often that I would say any of those things about a history book written nearly seventy years ago,

Having said all that I am now going to quote extensively from a review from 2024 of the book:

"The Sabres of Paradise was first published in 1960, a hundred years after the story it recounts had ended, after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was at last complete. Nikita Khrushchev was in the Kremlin. President Kennedy was running for the White House. Soviet power was at its height. The republics of the Caucasus were just another comer of the vast Soviet empire cowed into conformity by the brutalities of Stalin. The episode of Imam Shamyl’s thirty-year resistance to Russian expansion − perhaps the most dramatic story ever to emerge from the Caucasus (where dramatic stories are hardly in short supply) − had receded to its rightful place in ancient history. The days of small bands of mountain guerrillas raiding, hostage-taking, hiding up in the thick Chechen forests were long gone; whole divisions being tied down by such tactics was unthinkable in an age overshadowed by nuclear weapons.

"Forty years on, the story looked a little different and a lot more relevant, post-Vietnam, post-Afghanistan, post-Soviet Union and post-September 11. Who, in 1960, would have dared predict that the heirs of the Red Army − that vast force which had done so much to shape the geo-politics of the late twentieth century, already humiliated by the Afghan mujaheddin − should in 1996 be defeated and run out of its own territory by a band of lightly-armed Chechens which rarely exceeded a few thousand in number?

"Imam Shamyl and his band of holy warriors, his Murids, stand at one end of Russian rule in the Caucasus. Soon after the publication of The Sabres of Paradise, another Shamyl was born in the Chechen mountains who would emerge to stand at the other. Shamil Basayev was raised just outside Vedeno, the Great Aôul, the village from where Imam Shamyl had conducted his campaign. The boldest, most ruthless commander of the post-Soviet Chechen wars,Shamil Basayev ran rings around the Russians. Like his Avar namesake, he was frequently wounded, escaped from several impossible positions and developed a mythical reputation − equally potent for both sides − for invincibility.

"In truth Imam Shamyl’s war never really ended. It was merely stifled by Russian power. Whenever that power weakened − in 1877, 1905, 1917 and 1990 − the peoples of the Eastern Caucasus became restive. Dzokhar Dudayev, president of the self-proclaimed Chechen republic in the early 1990s, spoke of continuing the ‘three hundred years of struggle with Russia’....

"For two centuries Russia’s empire included the entire Caucasus range. As its power ebbed north at the end of the twentieth century, old enmities re-emerged. Armenians fought Azerbaijanis over Nagorny Karabagh, Ossetians fought Georgians in South Ossetia, Georgians fought Abkhazians in Abkhazia, Georgians fought each other in Georgia. The Russian rearguard played its divisive part. Of all these conflicts, the fiercest and most persistent has been in the north Caucasus, in Chechnya, fought with the same tactics, the same brutality, often around the same mountain villages, the same gorges, the same river banks and between descendants of the same combatants who rallied around Imam Shamyl a century-and-a-half earlier.

"Lesley Blanch’s account of the Caucasian wars is...the product of years of diligent and scholarly research. The particulars of clothing (‘the sea otter collar of his fur-lined pelisse’), the colours of an Ossetian market store, herbal remedies, the dried-dung smoke of the dusty aôuls, the crushing ennui of the Russian aristocracy, the mood of a garrison town are all evoked with sensual enthusiasm; the lives of the main players − and many minor ones − are sketched with a novelist’s relish for moments and details.

"These are not mere digressions. Each adds to the central drama, a drama that builds scene by scene until it has established the compelling duality at the heart of the story. For it is essentially the story of two worlds − two faiths, two societies, two ages, two continents − brought into sudden juxtaposition. The outcome was never in doubt; what is surprising is that it took so long.

"It would be easy, using contemporary parlance, to explain the Caucasian wars of the mid-nineteenth century as part of the ‘clash of civilizations’...(and)...the wars do neatly fit this pattern...Russia’s colonization of Islamic peoples mirrored that of its fellow Christian powers − the British in India and Aden, the French – briefly − in Egypt and Syria, less briefly in Algeria. Russia was an early participant in that game, having annexed the Tartar khanates to the south of Moscow...The long-term impact of this gradual squeezing of the Muslim states...(resulted in their being)...quickly and permanently reduced to a dependent bloc by the European powers.

"In 1827, that rage manifested itself in Yaraghl in the north Caucasus with the re-emergence of Naqshband Sufism and the preaching of Ghazavat, or holy war. Initially, under the pacific teaching of Mollah Jamul u’din, Shamyl resisted these calls. His militancy came later, overlaying a faith of unswerving austerity. He always stressed that he and his followers were exercising the will of God by resisting the infidel invader.

"So, a classic holy war? A close examination of the Caucasian wars, as with all such wars, reveals just how simplistic and dangerous it is to explain them in terms of a clash between Christian and Muslim. As Blanch shows, the Islamic peoples of the north Caucasus were never united under Shamyl − many fought for the Russians against him. He himself appealed for support to that great infidel leader Queen Victoria (without success), and became a popular hero in Victorian Britain. Nor do religious or cultural differences between the Russians and the Caucasians serve to explain the war. It was not so much spiritual devotion that led men to the black banners of Shamyl’s Ghazavat as the more worldly threat of Russian occupation. Conflicts tend to arise not from religious differences but from political realities − territorial threat, local disenfranchisement, opportunism. Only once underway do the differences take on their totemic significance, the participants elevating them to distinguish themselves from their adversaries to seek wider alliances in their struggle. It often suits everyone − combatants, observers and ideologues − to label a conflict ‘religious’ when it is, at heart, political.

"The distinction is an important one. In the more recent post-Soviet Chechen wars, the dangers of ignoring it have been well illustrated. The Russian authorities put much of the blame for the continuing war on Islamist groups, ‘fundamentalists’. Linking the war to that unassailable cause − the global war against terror − has to some degree exonerated the Russians’ own often brutal part in it. Likewise the Islamists − who have certainly been involved − exploit the religious aspects of the conflict for their own ends. The problem of grand global rhetoric is that it overshadows the local causes, the particular causes, in which the resolution often resides. ‘From my own observations,’ wrote journalist Anatol Lieven after several years covering the war, ‘I would say . . . that the Chechen struggle of the 1990s has been overwhelmingly a national or nationalist one . . . Islam seems less of a motive force in itself than something which has been adopted both by the Dudayev regime and by individual fighters as a spiritual clothing for their national struggle.’

"It is the range of The Sabres of Paradise that enables Lesley Blanch to avoid this trap. While she dwells on the differences between the warring parties, they are too various to be linked to any wider pattern. She presents the parties as distinct from each other in almost every respect − but the differences are an end in themselves. Like Tolstoy’s, her sense of history is ultimately convincing not because of its sweeping theses, but because of its particularities, the quirks of individuals and their personal narratives, their deluded ambitions, their vanities and passions. The figures of the Russian commanders Yermolov, Voronzov, Bariatinsky stride these pages like uniformed colossuses. Shamyl’s son, Djemmal-Eddin, plays his own tragic role, the Georgian hostages and their French governess languish, Shamyl’s Naibs all have their parts. But ultimately the story belongs to its two towering central figures − Tsar Nicholas I and Imam Shamyl himself.

"None of its rulers better embodied the excessive pomp and blind arrogance of imperial Russia than Nicholas I. He is Shakespearean in his majesty and his mortal flaws. Belief in his own military might not only led to the bloody and fruitless Crimean War, but also the unnecessary protraction of the Caucasian campaigns. In Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, a reading of which makes an excellent accompaniment to The Sabres of Paradise, the brief cameo of Nicholas I is one of the clearest, most convincing portraits of power to be found in literature. Having seduced the daughter of a Swedish governess, the tsar returned to his quarters in the Winter Palace: ‘. . . and lay down on the narrow, hard bed of which he was so proud, and covered himself with his cape which he considered (and said as much) just as renowned as Napoleon’s hat . . . But despite the fact that he was certain that he had behaved as he should, a certain unpleasant aftertaste remained with him and, in order to stifle this feeling, he began thinking about the thing that always reassured him: about what a great man he was.’

"Blanch’s Nicholas is drawn with the same vividness. She tells of an unfortunate officer being banished by him to the Caucasus − forced to travel there in winter in nothing but his nightshirt. Her Nicholas is a fabulous autocrat, whose merest whim becomes policy, but he is ultimately a tragic, failed figure. Her real sympathies lie with Shamyl − the battling underdog, the determined ascetic. She does not shy from his brutalities (he who travels through the mountains with his attendant executioner) but recognises in him a man, like Nicholas, who appears as something rather more than mortal to those around him. Instead of relying on the gilded throne of imperial St. Petersburg for his elevation, Shamyl derived his legitimacy directly from God. In fact, his life shows uncanny parallels with that of Muhammad. Like the Prophet, he was known to disappear into a high rocky region above his home-town, was persecuted by jealous compatriots, built up a vast following after narrowly escaping death, was a devout man driven to pursue his ambitions with the sword, was touchingly devoted to his various wives and had a particular fondness for cats.

"His defeat, when it comes, is not a surprise − but its coda certainly is. While there are obvious parallels with the current war, his final treatment by the Russian people shows how far removed that age is from ours. It is impossible to imagine that, were he to surrender or be captured, Shamil Basayev would receive the reception of the Imam − cheered by a huge crowd when he arrived in St. Petersburg, and permitted a quiet retirement in the provinces. His surrender is just one of the bizarre twists in Shamyl’s extraordinary story. Lesley Blanch has recreated a historical drama which has all the universality of a Greek play, proving that history is at its most compelling not when focusing on the great collective context, but on the lives of those individuals caught up in it." (the full 2024 review can be found at: https://lesleyblanch.com/the-sabres-o...).

[Laurent · Rating 5 out of 5]

7 stars. I don't think I've read anything so deeply exhilarating, moving and well-written in a long time.

[Javier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got interested in this book when I read an article that said that it inspired Frank Herbert to start writing Dune. And OMG it´s excellent. Beautifully written, if sometimes derivative, it´s jam packed with complex characters and dramatic stories, but none as complex and as legendary as that of the Imam Shamyl. I can´t believe showrunners are doing a series about LOTR again when real stories like this one are just lying around. It reallye got to me, as a reader and as a human being. It surprised me beyond any expectation, turned upside down everything I thought I knew about Tzarist Russia and the middle east. By the end of the book I was moved and felt like I obtained an important piece of the puzzle that is Russian - Middle Eastern politics.

So yes, if you´re into history, read this. Lesley Blanch spent many years researching every single thread that led to Shamyl, and it shows. Yes, it´s full of casual (or more than casual) racism that I didn´t care for, and her bias towards Shamyl is evident. But over all, the writer didn´t shy away from the problematic aspects of his core subject. In the end, I did not see Shamyl as "the good guy", certainly not a fighter for freedom, but then again, these are human beings, with regrets, misjudgements and who made terrible, horrible actions in the name of God. What moved me is that everyone felt absolutely human. Horribly, cruelly human. Pure gold.

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lesley Blanch’s writing is characterized chiefly by the exuberant excess she attributes to her Russian and Caucasian subjects. As history, The Sabres of Paradise is outdated and contains enough Orientalist tropes to knock out a Circassian stallion. But the storytelling and eye for colorful detail make this book as pleasurable and gripping as any novel. Readers of Dune will also appreciate the clear influence it exercised on Frank Herbert’s imagination.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to imagine a book with such great strengths and weaknesses combined. This is a superb history of Shamyl, a Muslim from Dhaghistan who fought the Russians. The book is superbly researched and brilliantly written and has background on the whole era. Yet, it lacks maps so the battles are obscure. It is full of things that are no longer valid: racist comments, steriotypes, generalizations. And the author makes no attempt to hide his admiration for Shamyl so the book is grossly biased. Still, a compelling read.

[Bungus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. It is not a region that I am familiar with, so lots to learn about and the author does a very good job detailing things in an engaging way.

I assume I had heard about this book due to Dune, but I cannot recall for certain. Regardless, I haven't yet read dune, and this hasn't detracted from how much the book kept me engaged. I'm curious now to see the actual similarities to Dune.

[Ofelia Galvez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me fascinó la pasión de estos hombres a pesar de ser guerreros despiadados eran sensibles con sus familias .

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A big, bold, gorgeous, bloody, colourful epic of the mighty struggle between Shamyl the Imam of the Caucuses and Nicholas the Tsar of all the Russias. Lots of people die horribly, lots of people do horrible things, on all sides, but there is amazing heroism in the struggle, much to deplore on both sides, but some to admire. Blanch plays fair, being even-handed in her depiction, though it's clear her heart's with the fierce mountain folk in their struggle for freedom over the vast serf-owning empire. The descriptions are astonishing - vivid and rich, bursting with passion for the landscape, the events and most of all for the people involved. Thee are historical events depicted unashamedly as historical epic, almost overwhelming in detail and odd tangents and illustrative scenes and dramatised events. An overpowering book in many ways, that completely takes hold and refuses to let go.

[JM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this with the goal of finding the bits that Frank Herbert lifted for writing Dune and I did initially find them (Chakobsa, feydakin, sietches, religious resistance against an empire). However this is purported to be the story of Shamyl the Avar, the Lion of Daghestan, and though it tells his life from beginning to end, this is another biography where the author found other aspects of the story more interesting. Leslie Blanche clearly wanted to write a history of 19th century society and military figures in the Russian Empire but chose Shamyl’s life as the lense to do so and it shows. He is still portrayed as a mysterious character, while the others she dives into tangents for are in full color. All told a very colorful sketch of 19th century Russian and Caucasian history told from a mid century point of view.

[Steve Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fair treatment of the early struggles of the struggles in Central Asia against the Russian Empire. One my black belt gave this to me about six years ago or so.

Given recent events having to do with the Boston bombing, this is a good starter for those wanting to know more about the history of the region and the religious conflicts surrounding it.

[Mansoor Azam · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely book. i was thrilled by the events and the way they were described. it was definitely a learning experience about a place which was little known before and a hero which is seldom talked about. it has a certain romantic touch to it.

[George Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best way to start with Lesley Blanch. Every minute you delay opening this book is enjoyment and wonder denied. After this you will read more. From here the reading disease will take you to Hopkirk.

[Gill Shaddick · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books of all time.

[Ali Akbar Zaidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sabres of Paradise is an excellent book for someone who has little to no idea of the past struggles of central Asian and Caucasian people amid the wars between the empires of Persia, Ottoman and the Russians. This is by far the longest book Ive ever read and it has been a journey of discovery and wonder.

Sabres of Paradise sets the stage in Caucasus, the area between the Black and the Caspain sea which literally means shimmering snow and in mythologic languages pertains to people of the mountain or the snow. The area is full of mountains and rough terrain and after the arab conquests, a major part of this area converted to Islam. Till the end of the 17th Century, the area was ruled by the Persians but was won over by the Russians after the Russo-Persian wars. Even after the war, the Muslim tribes of a place called Dagestan refused to bow down to the Russian Empire and so started the struggle to resist Russian armies amidst the mountains of Dagestan.
The book is written with magnificence. Ms. Lesley draws the reader with her sense of superior vocabulary which consists of indigenous words of the Caucasian language which have no counterpart in English. Aoul means small village, Kindjal is a small knife while a Shashka is a proper sword to behead enemies. The book is an account of the murid wars, the islamic resistance against the Russians but the writer breaks down a 500 pager book into small events and personalities.

The book explains the condition of depression and struggle in Tsarizt Russia in great depths. Parties and indulgence of the 1800s in St. Petersburg and Moscow are described to the extent of how much of bosoms could be seen in women's dresses. The writer has a special ability to describe the sensual side of every event. The torn clothes of women. The girl markets. The harems of muslim leaders, the dealing with slave girls and selling off of prisoners of war.
The writer a contrast between the modernized civilization of Russian life versus the austere and basic life of Shamyl, the hero of the causasusus who hunts and kills russians in the thousands resisting the yolk of the empire. While the Tsar is enamored with praise, loyalty and luxury, the imam of dagestan is a symbol of resistance, simplicity and brutality.

Shamyl is presented as a supreme protagonist, the one with the Sabre of paradise. Ghazavat is his word, holy war against christian russians. He is the imam of the Dagestan resistance but many a times seems totally anti-islamic. He calls himself the second prophet after Prophet Muhammad PBUH whereas one of the basic concept of Islam says there are no more prophets after Prophet Muhammad PBUH and anyone who calls himself or believes in any Prophet is automatically a non-muslim. Shamyl is also interested in islamic mysticism through the ideas of Tareekat but on the battefield he seems to kill women and children and take part in an offensive war without remorse.
He does all this in the name of islam and ghazavat and claims to be in contact with God. It seems that shamyl was just another mongol who took advantage of islam to establish his rule and resist the Russian empire which cost him dearly.

The book also describes interesting characters like Jamal-uddin, son of Imam Shamyl who is surrendered to the Russian Tsar who raises jamal as his own and later on, he becomes so accustomed with Russian way of life and civilization that he forgets his life in Dagestan and dies of depression when he is forced to go back as part of a hostage exchange deal under Shamyl.

Shamyl keeps failing but rises up against the Russian armies. Weapons, households, style of fighting, dealing with prisoners and other aspects of life are explained in great detail. For a person who knew nothing about Caucasus, by the end of the book, one can understand a lot about Central Asia, the dynamics of the region and how the previous century changed the circumstances.

The writer also introduces characters like the French Main Nancy who is captured by the Moslems and then remembers her days in paris. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russians had developed as taste for French foods, luxuries and literature. The life of the Tsar and suffering of the Russian people is also explained at great length.

Sabres of Paradise is a work of art. A long book worth every page. I was sad to know that Lesley blanch passed away and I am keen to read her other works. This book is a cultural and religious epoch that took place in a exotic land of Caucasus, a game played between the Russians and the Muslims of the mountain of Dagestan. The stories and events stored in this book are priceless.

[Nicolay Hvidsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did you know the word bistro comes from Russian, and hails from the time Russian troops occupied Paris after the Napoleonic wars? Or that you can seal torn arteries with a Caucasian species of ant? Now you do!

My love of trivia is getting me ahead of myself. Let's try this again.

I think I've found my new favourite genre of history: romantic history!

Reading Blanch's primer on the Caucasian wars (known as the "Murid wars") in 19th century Russia was much akin to reading Tolstoy or Conan Doyle's historical fiction. Every page was filled to the brim with romanticised passages which helps tremendously with immersion, and makes the oft droll and stolid business of telling a convoluted and uncertain series of events into quite the spectacle.

This is how Blanche describes the inhospitable Caucasian capital, Daghestan:

"(...) in Daghestan, where nothing lived: where an endless labyrinth of precipices and gigantic phantasmagoric peaks formed an accursed desolation - a hell which they had reached before death."

But the Caucasus is also a marvellously beautiful place, and to sing its praises Blanche quotes one of her favourite poets, the celebrated Mikhail Lermontov:

"It was a glorious place, that valley. Mountains all around; inaccessible red cliffs, hung with ivy and crowned with clumps of giant plane trees; yellow slopes streaked with ravines; and far above, the gilded fringe of the snows; while, far below, lay the Aragva thundering out from a black gorge, now filed with mist, to become a silvery thread glittering like the scale of a snake's skin."

Lermontov was part of a celebrated company of poets (Tolstoy and Pushkin among them) who served bravely in the Murid wars. Pushkin and Lermontov sadly died there, in that peculiar Russian passion of pistol duelling.

But whom did the Russians fight, exactly? Well, they fought the Caucasians: a patchwork group of Muslim clans, who swore undying fealty to the Murid sect of Islam.

Many of the clans (though not all, and many shifted allegiance with alarming frequency) were gathered under the banner of Muridism by the imam of Daghestan. The third imam, a man named Shamyl, would prove to be the mightiest of all, and is the main subject of this book. But more about him later.

These clans lived in fortress-cities named aôuls high into the steep mountains, which were places of great abnegation, where almost nothing grew, and time was spent fighting or praying.

The Caucasians are portrayed by Blanche in the same flowering language she uses to describe their geography, and she often mentions their brilliant, steely eyes, wasp-like waists, and great strength. But they were also brutal. The Murids were strict enforcers of Sharia law, and women's lot in the Caucasus was not an easy one. They reminded me a great deal of Cormac McCarthy's brilliant depiction of the Apache in Blood Meridian.

Before the actual Murid wars began, the Caucasus was never truly subjugated by Russia. The mountain clans constantly raided and harassed Russian/Georgian settlements, and it was this constant humiliation of the Tzar which eventually spurred the entire enterprise onward. The wars themselves didn't properly begin until Shamyl took the stage, in spectacular fashion.

The battles are depicted brilliantly, and Blanche draws on sources from both sides of the contest. Blanche's skill at evoking the horrors and macabre beauty of war rivals any author I've read. I suspect Count Voronzov's hopeless foray to the aôul of Dargo will forever remain in my mind, just like the doomed charge of Patroclus towards the walls of Troy, and Prince Andrey's wounding at the battle of Austerlitz.

My only objection to the book is its length. Blanche does tend to let her romantic tendencies go a bit overboard at times, and she spends much time describing contemporary Russian society, narrates the life of seemingly every Russian general (there were quite a few of them), and is very fond of dedicating long passages to extol the virtues of Shamyl and his naibs (generals).

Her book is well worth a read for the language, battles, and history alone! Apparently, it greatly influenced Frank Herbert when he wrote Dune, and I can absolutely see why. I can't wait to read more of Blanche's work.

[Samet Öksüz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Herbert'ın 'Dune' adlı başyapıtında bu kitaptan esinlendiğini öğrenince bu kitaba başlamaya karar verdim. Umduğundan fazlasını buldum. İmam Şamil'in hayat hikayesini anlatan bir macera romanı beklerken bir İngiliz'in kaleminden bir Rus klasiği ile karşılaştım. Kafkasyalı müritler, Frank Herbert'ın Fremenlerine ilham vermişler; çetin şartların şekillendirdiği zorlu savaşçılar. Hançerlerine ("hıncal"ın uzun kama olduğunu bu kitapta öğrendim, Dune serisine "kindjal" olarak transfer edilmiş) aşk şiirleri yazan, düşmanlarına "hançerin paslansın" diye beddua eden ("May thy knife chip and shatter"), hançerin ucuyla öldürmeyi acemilik olarak görüp hançer kullanmayı bir sanat addeden acımasız müritler!
Kitaptaki Rus edebiyatı esintileri, Kafkasya'ya sürülmüş/yolculuk etmiş şöhretlilerin izlerini taşıyor. Çarlık Rusyasında mujikler Sibirya'ya, aristokratlar ise Kafkasya'ya sürülmüş gibi. Puşkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Bestujev Kafkasya'da orduda hizmet vermiş şöhretlilerden bazıları. Burada geçirdikleri zamanları Puşkin'in romantizmine, ezelin hatırasıyla ebediyete dair bir hayalden muzdarip olan Lermontov'un naturalizmine, Tolstoy'un realizmine ilham vermiş gibi. Kitap da bu duygular arasında salınıp gidiyor. Uzun ve ayrıntılı betimlemeler, manzarayı gözümüzün önüne seriyor. Lesley Blanch karakterlerin tanımlanması esnasında bazen stereotiplere başvursa da çoğu karakter zalimlik ile merhamet, düşmanlık ile dostluk, dürüstlük ile iki yüzlülük arasında gidip geliyor. Kafkasya'yı ilhak etmek isteyen Ruslar, taraflarına geçenlere zeytin dalı uzatarak halkın kalbini kazanmaya çalışıyor. Evcil kedisi için özel yiyecekler getirtecek kadar duyarlı gözüken Şamil, kuşatılmış bir Çeçen aşiretinin teslim olma talebini kendisine getiren annesini kırbaçlatacak kadar zalimleşebiliyor. Beşinci kırbaçtan sonra bayılan annesinin yerine de cezanın kalanını kendisinin çekmesini sağlayarak tüm ahlak anlayışımızı alt üst ediyor. Bu kitap bir yandan Şamil'in, ailesinin, özellikle de St. Petersburg'a rehine giden oğlu Cemaleddin'in trajedyası.
Kitabın orjinal ismi "The Sabres of Paradise", Türkçe'ye çevrilirken "Şeyh Şamil Efsanesi" eklenmiş. Bu isim sizi yanlış yönlendirmesin; kitap sadece Şamil'e odaklanmıyor. Kafkaslardaki amansız şartları ve mücadeleyi iki taraf arasında da gidip gelerek anlatıyor. Bu beklentiyle yaklaşırsanız, Rus klasiklerini seviyorsanız kitabı edinin. Ancak Rus klasiği istihkakınızı Tolstoy, Dostoyevski veya Turgenyev ile kullanmak istiyorsanız, bu kitaptan önce başka eserlere yönelebilirsiniz.
85/100
Cila şehirden, akıl dağdan (çölden) gelir

[Carl Barlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was brought to my attention as an inspiration for Frank Herbert's Dune. That it most certainly is: there are kindjals, sietchs, fanatic followers, the many influences of geography, living divinity, royal families, vast empires pitted against disparate tribesmen, the honourable and the dishonourable. Even the purported subject of TSoP, Shamyl the Avar, is the obvious seed from which Duke Leto Atreides grew, though his exploits became those of Paul Atreides (who could further be said to have been embodied by Shamyl's youngest son, though the fictional creation did not share his tragic end).

Very quickly though, this aspect of the book was forgotten as Blanch's evocative prose brought to life a period of history I previously knew next to nothing about. She absolutely revels in her subject, her words dripping the era, giving us -in vivid colour and cutting light and shade- the haunting Caucasus Mountains and their eyrie-like aôuls, the Russian palaces and their resplendent ballrooms, the ballets and battles, the samovars and swords - but most of all the wonderfully varied peoples and all their enmity and friendships, fortunes and misfortunes.

The only negatives for this large, dense, but never dry or even remotely boring, book are so minor as to hardly warrant mentioning... but I will. Blanch knows her stuff, and is very learned. I do not and am not, so I get annoyed by the untranslated French that peppers the near 500 pages. Also, there is only one map, and that not a particularly clear or informative one - there is ample requirement for at least a dozen of them!

Otherwise, this is history and biography at its best. Come for the Dune references, stay because you are enthralled by History.

[Richard Balmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vibrant technicolour popular history written in the 1960s, when it was a big hit (quipped about by Jackie Kennedy in repartee with Nikita Khrushchev, no less!). Written with a real taste for exoticism and heroic violence, the Russians are all decadent and cruel, the Chechens are noble savage superhumans, and every landscape is gargantuan and beautiful. I don't know enough about the period to know how accurately this book portrays the era, but I suspect the answer is "not very." However, it was immensely entertaining (if a bit overlong).

I admit I read this primarily as a fan of the novel Dune, which I gather owed a lot to this book. The inspiration is obvious and writ large across the page, even down to Lesley Blanch's idiosyncratic spelling of "Sich" (Sietch!). I'm surprised at how much of Fremen culture and language is taken directly from this book (although Herbert renamed their hidden fortresses - as a reader, I'd like to thank him for not making me regularly have to pronounce the word "Aoul"). (read 2022)

[Omama. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caucasus, one of the last regions to be colonized by the modern world.

The tale of Shamyl, the Lion of Daghestan, who repelled the powerful Tsarist army for 25 years in the Caucasus War (1834–1859). In the depths of the Chechen and Daghestani mountains, fierce fights rage. This group of ferocious, barbaric mountain tribes is committed to ruling a free Caucasus. Russia keeps dispatching its most courageous and intelligent officers to subjugate them.

But how can you defeat a foe who has no regard for mortality or the passage of time....? The conflict is still ongoing.

An excellent illustration of a persistent issue.

[Jamal Abisourour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read if interested in Russian and Caucasian History

An mind capturing and detailed read of the events that engulfed the Caucasus in the mid-19th century. There is so little us in the west know about that part of the world and the drama that unfolded all along the AlAzani River.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it Orientalist? Absolutely. Are many of the anecdotes exaggerated? Maybe. But this book is absolutely fascinating and the author's ability to stitch together a narrative from shoddy, disparate sources into such an engaging, coherent narrative is incredible. A great example of an outsider historian, with all the strengths and weaknesses that entails

[Ayesha Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first non-fiction book and I was pretty impressed. I like the way Blanch portrays things in a romantic and beautiful sense, though some things seemed strange and unrealistic looking forward to more, I guess?

[Jacob Folker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well researched popular history of the 19th century Murid Wars in the Caucuses. It is said that this book greatly influenced Frank Herbert, author of Dune. His celebrated Fremen are a clever mixture of 19th century Murid warriors and Russian Cossacks.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

You may read that Shamyl had a black and white cat and wonder "does this 19th century religious fundamentalist warrior-imam have anything else in common with Postman Pat?"

And boy oh boy, no he does not.

[Nick McRae · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant and completely absorbing

Absolutely brilliant and completely absorbing. The most compelling nonfiction work I've read in years. Worth every single minute spent reading.

[Robert Dillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Fascinating biography with a broad historical sweep, written almost poetically at times. Highly recommended.

[Jonathan Miela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decided to read this, and definitely see how it inspired Dune.