Near the Alazani River: Zikr with Sufi Women in Georgia

By Patrycja Przeslakiewicz - TOL Transitions Online - Czech Republic
Friday, June 22, 2007

Prayers for Peace and Tourists: Sufi women in the Georgian Caucasus are trying to balance old traditions with modern commerce

“I dream of making a big concert tour in Europe. I dream that European people can see how we sing and pray,” says Badi, a 70-year-old woman.
“We are not savages and terrorists as we are seen in Russia and Europe.”

Badi is a Kist, the small community of Georgian Chechens living in the Pankisi Gorge near the Russian border. Today, the Kists face what may be the most serious threat their unique way of life has met in the two hundred eventful years since their arrival in Georgia.

A legend says that boys searching for lost sheep were the first Chechens to cross the mountains into the small Caucasian valley on the Georgian side, soon followed by fathers looking for their strayed sons and then whole families. The Georgian princes to whom the land belonged welcomed the newcomers as a safeguard against plundering incursions by Dagestani and Azeri bandits. During the 19th century, fugitives from the Russian army's invasions of the North Caucasus, social outcasts, outlaws, and others swelled the flow of immigrants.

These Muslims of Georgia came to be known as Kists. Some were Chechen and Ingush seeking a less regimented way of life than the forced Islamization and Sharia law established in the 19th century by Imam Shamil and his allies in the insurrection against Russian rule. They brought with them old cults, ancestor veneration, and vestiges of paganism, and found a similarly syncretic society on the south side of the Caucasus, where the Georgian highlanders, superficially Christian, still worshipped local deities such as “White George” and Tushola, goddess of the hunt and nature. New ties of marriage, friendship, and kinship soon took hold.

The mosque soon became a center of Sufi activities. Numerous brother- and sisterhoods sprung up. Today members of women's orders, known as hadjistki, meet every Friday to perform their ecstatic prayer, zikr.

Just as when they first came to the Pankisi, today the 8,000 Kists again find themselves at a crossroads between “Georgian-ness” and “Chechen-ness." Although most of the wartime Chechen refugees have left the valley, the tensions of that time are kept alive by the children of some 2,000 migrants who found work in Chechnya in the early 1990s, later to return home from the blighted republic. Exposed to Wahhabi Islam from an early age, these now-grown children now try to propagate their views in the Pankisi. In addition, mosques and charities with Saudi backing are magnets for jobless local youth.

Recently, efforts to promote the attractions and way of life of the Pankisi have emerged from an unexpected direction: the hadjistki, members of the local Sufi women's order, headed by Badi, a member of one of the valley's most noble families.

In 2003 Badi (like most Chechens she is generally known by a nickname) set up Marshua Kavkaz, "Peace for the Caucasus," an association that seeks to ease conflict and promote prosperity through tourism and publicizing the valley's heritage.

In November 2006 a group of Sufi women came to Poland to attend a workshop on agro-tourism run by a Polish non-profit organization, the Foundation for Intercultural Education.

Already, venturesome travelers can stay in farms near the Alazani River, walk or ride in the nearby Caucasus mountains, and even take part in the Friday zikr ceremony.

Prayer rather than tourism, however, remains these women's chief activity. Most are experienced woman of middle age or older; younger women rarely participate in public affairs. Zikr sessions begin on a sign from Altzani (photo, left), the oldest member of the order, a woman whose green dress and white headscarf mark her as a pilgrim who has visited Mecca.

After a moment of silence, the women began to sing in Arabic and the Kist dialect, a mixture of Georgian and Chechen, chanting the names of God in rhythmic repetition accompanied by clapping and swaying. They pray for peace in the Pankisi, everlasting life for their ancestors, health for their families.

As the session goes on, they sing of the Chechens' many troubles: the lost struggle against Tsarist armies for independence, deportation under Stalin, the thousands killed in the modern wars with Russia.

When the excitement reaches its peak, they stand and form a circle, moving at first slowly and majestically, then faster with rhythmic clapping and foot-stamping. On another sign from Altzani they reverse direction and enter a trancelike state. Finally the mistress of the ceremony brings the circle prayer to an end.

"The sweat and spurt of energy raised by such ecstatic prayer is to purify the participants from sin and release life energy we need to implement great projects like developing tourism, an orphanage, and a center for homeless people," Badi says.

[picture: Women of the Sufi sisterhood. Badi is seated in the center.]

About the Author: Patrycja Przeslakiewicz is an ethnologist specializing in the peoples of the Caucasus. She is associated with the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Warsaw University and the refugee and asylum department of the Polish Office for Repatriation and Aliens.