Highlanders A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory

by Karny, Yo'av

• ISBN13: 9780374528126
• ISBN10: 0374528128
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-05
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

The story of the region, told by an intrepid journalist Many dire predictions followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but nowhere have they materialized as dramatically as in the Caucasus: insurrection, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, economic disintegration, and up to two million refugees. Moreover, in the 1990s Russia twice went to war in the Caucasus, and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a nation so tiny that it could fit into a single district of Moscow. What is it about the Caucasus that makes the region so restless, so unpredictable, so imbued with heroism but also with fanaticism and pain? In Highlanders, Yo'av Karny offers a better understanding of a region described as a "museum of civilizations," where breathtaking landscapes join with an astounding human diversity. Karny has spent many months among members of some of the smallest ethnic groups on earth, all of them living in the grim shadow of an unhappy empire. But his book is a journey not only to a geographic region but also to darker sides of the human soul, where courage vies with senseless vindictiveness; where honor and duty require people to share the present with long-dead ancestors, some real, some imaginary; and where an ancient way of life is drawing to an end under the combined weight of modernity and intolerance.

Author Biography

Yo'av Karny, an Israeli foreign correspondent, has covered conflicts the world over for more than two decades in The Washington Post and The New York Times and on public television and radio.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Highlander's Mind	xi
Geopolitics, geophysics, metaphysics
A mankurt's memory
Altitude shapes attitude
Time for Braveheart
God's mule stumbled
Nothing but a ``mountain man''
Russian generals gone mad
Imagining the past
My lost Ukrainian syllables
PART I: THE LAST SWORD DANCE OF THE SHAPSUG	1	(72)
The Nose
The Narts
Time for War
``Little Cossacks Mine''
Yermolov Comes (Oh, No!)
``The Bravest Troops in the Universe''
Give Us a Tower of Babel
``Grandpa, Khassa Will Kill Us All!''
The Circassians may have given Europe chivalry, knights, and Arthurian myths
They thought dying of old age in one's bed was an unforgivable disgrace---so they fought to the heroic end
A century and a half later, only a handful stay on in a provincial Russian Riviera by the Black Sea, exacting revenge on a nemesis long-dead, begging the attention of the living (and begetting none)
This is also the story of their sworn enemies, the Cossacks, former law-enforcers-turned-victims, who would like so much to have a second shot at the whip
PART II: THEIR SQUARE INCH IN THE SUN	73	(126)
The Tale of Two Redeemers
And Sad Flows the Samur
The City of the Great Shamkhal
And How High Would the Sheikh Fly?
Generals in Search of Armies
The Torah Scroll of Kryz
Looking for Khazaria
Ali Aliyev, a Highlander
See You at Lenin, by the Samsung Sign
The Autonomy No Despot Should Ever Risk
Imam, Come Back, But Smile
Will a Peculiar Land Survive?
Reading a Daghestani Teaspoon
This is the tale of a land named after its mountains, Daghestan, where dead Muslim saints are endowed with magical powers---but none as magical as the one exercised by terrain
For centuries, high altitude (coupled by human resilience) shielded the tiny nations of Daghestan against a long succession of conquerors
Archaic languages and quaint outlooks survived in the highland, which would have been swept away in the plains
Then came the Russians, then rose an unsmiling imam, and then began a thirty-year war, still casting a long shadow 140 years later
Some would like to start it all over again
Could a peculiar land survive? Indeed, should it survive?
PART III: THE GODS OF THE MOUNTAINS	199	(150)
Every Man and His God
``Naught But My Destitution to Plead for Me''
The Bearer of the Genes
``The Stream Was Warm, the Stream Was Red''
Kishiyev Comes Home
Shame On You, Haji Tolstoy
Bringing Rancor to the Arsanov Court
How the Zikr Saved Their Islam
The War on the Zikr
``Wahhabis Send Sufi Sheikh to Hell''
Abdul Wahhab the Jew (and More)
Romanticizing the ``Black Faces''
Abdul Latif Had a Beetle and Two Hundred Tanks
``The Golan Should Be Chechen'' (It Nearly Was)
The Last People of the Sabbath
Wrestling with the Spirits
A Hebrew God on the Iranian Border
``My Cossacks? Jews?''
On the road to Baghdad, a North Caucasian goatherd had a revelation
He went home and taught his people a new path to God
Dance, he told them
And they have danced in despair for a century and a half
They are the Chechens, remarkable and incomprehensible, defiant and vengeful, rising from the ashes time and again
But if they owe the shepherd and the dance so much, why are those zealots from the Arabian desert so angry? Then comes the story of fellow seekers of God, the mysterious People of the Sabbath, whose revelation remains unknown
PART IV: REMEMBER AND FORGET: THE POL. TICS OF MEMORY	349	(56)
The Dark Side of Elbrus
The Ghosts of Caucasian Albania
Can a whole nation lose its memory? It sure can, if the memory is stored exclusively in the minds of people who plan to pass it on when they reach old age---but then they never reach old age
This happened to the Balkars, a tiny Turkic nation in the North Caucasus
On the other side of the Caucasus, a mightier Turkic nation, Azerbaijan, seeks a past in the mists of antiquity
A slighted neighbor, Armenia, picks up the gauntlet, and a bitter war of words ensues
Would only sticks and stones break one's bones? Not in the Caucasus
Epilogue: The Camouflaged Mountain	405	(8)
Bibliography and Essay	413	(12)
Acknowledgments	425	(2)
Index	427