Academic literature on the topic 'Shamil, imam, 1798?-1871'

The article deals with one of the most important and at the same time completely events in the biography of Baysungur of Benoy (1794–1861), the Chechen Naib during the Caucasian War of the 19th cent., namely his stay at Ghunib (August 1859) and his personal presence at the capture of Imam Shamil. This episode has recently attracted much attention and became a subject of various speculations both with a scholarly and ideological background. The author based her research on a wide array of hitherto unknown as well as already published documents. The latter, however, have not received enough attention. The unpublished sources originate from the Russian State Military Historical Archive (Moscow), the State Archive of the Kaluga Region, the Central State Archive of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, etc. This cornucopea of rich historical data allows her to reconstruct in detail the very last period of the Imam Shamil State and to successfully put it within the framework of the and political situation in the Caucasus in 1859. A detailed analysis of numerous local sources, which are written in Arabic and directly originate from the Imam Shamil environment as well as the papers from the headquarters of the Russian Imperial Caucasian Army leads to a convincing conclusion regarding the whereabouts of Naib Baysungur in August 1859. It proves that at that time he was definitively away from Ghunib.