Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Khon, however, barely looked over his shoulder, and just snapped out the words: ‘Wu adiga ba?’

  In English, that would be: ‘Are you not a Circassian?’, but the question has far more force in the original. In fact, I could not think of an English phrase which even came close to its spirit. It is a rhetorical question that suggests someone has shamed himself. The boy was crying. Circassians do not cry. Therefore the boy could not be a Circassian, and had shamed himself before his ancestors.

  The doings of those ancestors are endlessly recounted in tales of the Narts – the legendary giants that lived in the Caucasus before people – which bear lessons in how men and women should behave. Savage punishments are meted out for minor indiscretions, such as criticizing a wife unfairly, or being overproud. The true heroes of the tales are those who persist in doing the right thing – caring for the poor, saving the weak, and so on – even when their foolish neighbours mock them for it. Where Western children swap tales of Robin Hood or Tintin, Circassian children all over the diaspora will tell of Setanaya or of Sosruquo, born when a shepherd was so overcome with desire for Setanaya that he ejaculated across a river onto a rock.

  Sosruquo, even when a child, could beat any Nart in a fight, out-shoot them, and outdance them, yet would refuse riches, presents or praise. As an adult, he would likewise refuse praise for brave deeds or great feats of strength, crediting instead his neighbours or his horse.

  These were the virtues Khon was trying to inculcate into his boys, although he was not always very consistent about it.

  Under the stern rules of traditional habze, no father can touch his child, and brothers should never be in the same room as each other. Khon was earlier quite happy to pick up his angelic golden-haired daughter and bounce her around before lunch with the jokey words: ‘This is not habze’. He had his two sons wedged up against him on each side while he did it, and they clearly adored rather than feared their father.

  Nonetheless, he guided me though the principles of habze with a steadiness and certainty that showed he truly believed in them.

  The cornerstone of habze is respect. Respect for the Circassians must be earned and awarded. In order to earn respect you must respect others in turn, and that reflects itself in many ways. True Circassians, for example, must never interrupt when an elder is speaking – a trait which, incidentally, makes them terrible translators.

  I later heard the apocryphal story of a young man who was standing near the fire in a house when an elder started to speak. The elder had a lot to say, and took his time about saying it. The young man was unable to move while he was speaking and thus ended up with severe burns. Several Circassians told me this story, or a closely related version of it, as a model for how young people should behave. It would have been disrespectful to interrupt the old man by moving during his speech.

  Elders, on the other hand, must behave honestly and respectfully to the young. Another apocryphal story that I heard at around the same time relates how some Circassians were choosing a new leader for their group. Several elders were presenting themselves as candidates, and the group was discussing their merits. One of the elders showed signs of wanting to go to the toilet, so a young man quickly ran into the toilet ahead of him and dirtied it. When the elder returned, the young man checked the toilet and found it to be clean. He then told the assembled men that he would back the choice of this old man, since he had the dignity to be humble. His choice was then ratified by the group. Respect, the story showed, is for the Circassians a two-way process. This is not a society that celebrates aristocrats or slaves, but free men who appreciate they are part of a community.

  Likewise, Circassians must respect members of the opposite sex, and Circassian women enjoy much greater freedom than in the Arab communities of the Middle East.

  Several Circassian men boasted to me that they had kidnapped or ‘stolen’ their wives, in order to force them to marry them. At first I was shocked, but the situation was not in fact what it sounded like. Far from being effectively the rape of an unwilling woman, Circassian bride-stealing is a strategic step taken to force her unwilling parents to agree to her getting married. The stealing is ritualized, and accompanied by a volley of gunshots to alert the parents that it has happened. The couple would never be alone together, and the groom’s uncle would normally be employed as an emissary to sound out the prospective in-laws.

  If they relented – which they almost always do – and agreed to the match, she would return home immediately, and the wedding would be prepared. If they did not agree, she would go to live with the groom’s uncle until the wedding.

  Khon was in fact one of the most recent people in Kfar-Kama to steal his wife, and many of the villagers were sad that, under the influence of Islam and with more tolerant parents, bride-stealing and the slight whiff of scandal it generates was dying out.

  ‘It is all very easy now, so there is less and less kidnapping. The last case was a year and a half ago, when they decided to get married they wanted to do everything properly, but the mother of the girl said she was too young at only twenty years old and that her grandmother had only died two years before. That night, gunshots were heard. There are lots of weapons here, you see soldiers with weapons, but we do not use them. So if you hear gunshots that means someone has been kidnapped. Then they told the mother the girl had been kidnapped, by SMS I think, and she said okay, they could get married, and everything was fine,’ said Zoher Tahawha, curator of the village museum.

  The most famous Circassian trait, however, and the cornerstone of habze, is hospitality. Circassians must respect their guests, and treat them as a member of their own family – a trait I exploited shamelessly.

  While travelling through the Circassian communities – from Kosovo, around Turkey, to Israel, Jordan and then to the Caucasus itself – I rarely had more than one phone number to call for help in any of the countries I visited. Sometimes I would not even have that. Still, everyone I met would put me in touch with a friend or acquaintance in the next town or village. And people gave up sometimes several days in a row to show me their communities.

  In the afternoon, Khon took me to talk to his friends, and they too greeted me like a long-lost brother.

  We sat, the four of us – Khon, me, and his friends Ali and Gerchad – and discussed habze in the delightful warmth of an Israeli afternoon, cups of coffee on the table in front of us and the breeze stirring the folds of a Circassian flag – a green rectangle, with three golden arrows crossed below twelve gold stars.

  ‘Just to begin to understand the Circassians you have to be such a philologist,’ said Gerchad. ‘There are no histories of us, so you have to be able to read English, Arabic, Turkish, French, Russian, Circassian and more. If you can’t read all of these you will not get a complete picture. Besides, I don’t think anyone could write down habze anyway.’

  Habze, they told me, is about obedience and loyalty. Look at the Circassians, they said. The whole nation fought for the army of whatever state they found themselves in. I thought back to the conversation with Khon in the morning. I had asked him if, being a Muslim, he was not troubled by serving in the Israeli army.

  ‘When the British were here,’ he had replied, ‘we served the British as policemen. Then in 1948 some younger men moved into the Israeli army. I did not plan a career in the army, but I am from Rehaniye, a small village. There is no factory, and all there was was the police or the army: what we call security jobs. I did not enjoy the war, fighting the Palestinians. We have a problem because we are Muslims but we are a part of Israel, and so we do our best to be part of the community, but we do not like the war between the Palestinians and Israel.’

  This loyalty to their new homes had been a characteristic of the Circassians ever since the tragedy of 1864. Circassians fought for the Ottoman Turks until their state collapsed after the First World War.

  When the sultan was deposed, they fought for the Turkish Republic against the Greeks and the occupying powers, although the
ir leader, Ethem, received no thanks for it. He was driven out by Ataturk, who disliked rivals and accused him of being a traitor.

  With the Ottoman Empire shattered, they also served their new masters in Jordan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They earned a reputation as tough soldiers to fight alongside or against. One Sir Gerald Clauson wrote a memo to the British Foreign Office in 1949 about his time fighting with the Arab Legion – of Lawrence of Arabia fame – against the Ottoman state.

  The Circassians in Jordan, he said, were ‘the best fighters in that area, and, generally speaking, a pretty tough lot’.

  He reminisced about a Circassian officer commanding an Ottoman force near the Iraqi city of Fallujah who refused to surrender until the British sent a plane over and dropped artillery shells on him. ‘The gentleman sent us a message to say that honour was satisfied now that the angel of death was hovering over him and that he was willing to surrender. I saw him when he was brought in in a thick black uniform in the height of summer and thought he was one of the toughest and most attractive creatures that I had met in the course of the campaign.’

  His note formed part of a memo suggesting that the Circassians might be trained up as an anti-communist force to be secretly despatched from the Middle East to fight Moscow. The idea apparently originated from émigré Circassians from the Soviet Union. The suggestion was rejected, as likely to cause severe embarrassment if the local Arab governments found out about it, but does show the regard with which the world viewed the Circassians’ prowess.

  The plan would probably have failed, however, for the simple reason that Circassian loyalty does not know borders. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the local Circassians were equally loyal to the Russian state and had been since before 1864, and would have resisted insurgents. Regiments of Circassian cavalry were raised from the region of Kabarda for all the nineteenth century, and the tribesmen in their national costume regularly formed the honour guard for the emperor, as they do now for the king of Jordan.

  With great irony, Alexander II – whose armies destroyed the Circassians and conquered the Caucasus – had a Circassian bodyguard in 1881 when he rode through St Petersburg. As he passed, an anarchist hurled a bomb at his carriage. The bomb bounced off, exploding on the street and fatally injuring one of his Circassian guards. This emperor, who had so uncaringly sent the Circassians into exile and seized their homeland, was now overcome with compassion for this individual. He descended from his carriage, presenting an irresistible target to another anarchist who had kept a bomb in reserve. The bomb was thrown and the emperor killed, victim of his regard for a loyal Circassian.

  The Circassians fought for the tsars again in the First World War, raising the Caucasus Cavalry Division even though they, as Muslims, were exempt from conscription. Circassian regiments may even have fought each other since the Turks also employed them as cavalry, and most Circassian villages in Turkey have photographs of the volunteers they sent off to fight the Russians. In the Second World War, the Soviet Union’s Circassians fought again, although – Turkey being neutral – they no longer had to fight against their ethnic kin.

  The Circassians, however, are no longer the fighters they once were. Young Circassians are now – in Israel, Jordan and Turkey – more likely to study technology than to enter officer training school. The older martial qualities are slipping away, and the world offers more opportunities than Khon ever had.

  But it is the lasting respect for military virtues that sustains the Circassian regard for a phlegmatic nature – for the lack of which Khon rebuked his nine-year-old. Traditionally, a Circassian should never express frustration, anger or weakness. To be seen drunk in public is shameful, and a Circassian should be able to hold his alcohol. Circassian women traditionally wore a corset from puberty to marriage, the strings of which were only untied once a day by her mother. On the marriage night, the groom would have to restrain his impatience by untying the fiendish knots concocted by his in-laws. Any man who used a knife to release his new wife showed a lack of self-control, and was publicly shamed.

  Circassian women no longer wear corsets, but the tradition has been updated, according to Tahawha, who talked me through the wedding traditions used by the young Circassians of Kfar-Kama.

  ‘People used to try to make the groom tired. His friends would often kidnap the groom, and eat, dance, play – the only sad one being the groom. They only sent him home at first light, and when his wife opens the door she has been asleep and she was not afraid of anything. Then, twenty years ago or so, they started to put obstacles in front of the groom, or burst the tyres on his car. When I got married in 2002, my friends sat with me until two in the morning. I kept telling them I had to go to my wife, but they would ask me what the rush was. I was angry, and did not know what they were doing. But afterwards I understood, they were making me tired so I would be gentle with my wife. People still do this now, although only until twelve midnight or so.’

  All of this perhaps gives the impression that habze is a rather austere discipline, but that is far from the truth. Hospitality is given joyously and willingly, while loyalty and comradeship are an excuse for competitions and showing off. Nineteenth-century travellers wrote how the Circassian young men raced and fought to establish precedence.

  In a strange reflection of this tradition, I made kebabs.

  In Kfar-Kama, a wedding takes place almost every weekend in summer. At least a quarter of Israel’s 4,000 Circassians are invited to each one and the catering is a major challenge. A dozen or so men are required to shape the mince into shish-kebabs, to skewer the marinaded chicken, and to chop the onions and other vegetables. Although, as a vegetarian, I did not look on preparing several thousand kebabs as a major treat, I could hardly turn down an invitation to take part.

  Funnily enough, although the mince was clammy and the fat stuck to my hands, the occasion was a joy. Conversation was almost all in Circassian, with just the occasional comment in English to me, but the constant laughter and spirit of the occasion made me feel included and happy.

  Our host, who spoke very little English, kept encouraging me to ‘make kebabs with love’ – a baffling comment that I only later discovered was a reference to an Israeli hummus advert. Every time he said it, a gale of laughter would sweep the room. Then the fierce competition that had developed between our table and that next door, where a group of older men were trying to match our prodigious kebab output, would resume in even deadlier earnest.

  Every task was the excuse for a joke. And when I wiped my eyes after peeling an onion, there was a good half-hour of banter about whether it was or was not habze for a man to cry if he was not actually sad.

  The same good-natured rivalry extended to the wedding itself, where the men competed for the most flamboyant dancing. Circassian dancing is a well-developed tradition, in which the women glide on scarcely moving feet within a circle of clapping onlookers, their hands undulating and dipping like fish in a tropical sea. The men, however, are all flash and fire. Their feet stamp, and their arms dart as they shepherd their partner around the ring. With chests out, and their heads thrown back, their dances have a primal quality: a mating display in its rawest form. That men and women dance together at all is, of course, a rarity in the Middle East and just another sign of the exceptional nature of Circassian culture in the region.

  The dancing, the accordion music, and the rules of habze were common elements to all the Circassian communities I visited, even ones where the language had been lost. But, for decades, the Circassians of Israel did not know that. They had only the smallest signs that any Circassians outside their two villages survived at all.

  ‘In my time,’ remembered Khon, ‘there was one radio station from Amman or Syria maybe that played one hour of Circassian music a week, this was the only thing we had outside our own community. And the whole lot of us sat by our radios and listened to this music.’

  Khon visited the Caucasus in 1992 for a month and is still excited about it. ‘It was a
spiritual journey,’ he said. ‘It was more than I expected, I did not expect to ever see that we had a country. I went to the theatre, I heard people in a town speak Circassian. At last we had a chance to raise the nation up again.’

  At that time, Israel and Jordan were not to sign a peace treaty for another two years, so Khon could not visit his Circassian compatriots the other side of the Jordan valley. He looked for another way to connect with the diaspora, and found it in the internet. If you searched for the word Circassian on the internet in those days, he remembered, you found nothing. And since the Israeli Circassians got the internet before any of the other diaspora communities, and they could learn from their Jewish neighbours how to mobilize a scattered nation, they hit the ground running.

  They used the internet to seek out other Circassians dreaming of creating a united nation for the first time in over a century, and forged ties that have strengthened and spread in the years since.

  Kfar-Kama is now home to a radio station called Adiga Radio that broadcasts over the web twenty-four hours a day. It has news in several languages and plays a peculiar selection of Circassian music in which home-made hip-hop will morph into a folk melody and back again, to an audience around the world. The radio site also allows visitors to download Circassian versions of classic films – including Bambi, which has been renamed Nalbi, perhaps because Bambi has an unfortunate double meaning in Circassian, although none of the locals would explain it to me. Israel’s Circassians are also active in chat rooms and discussion forums trying to reach out to their compatriots across the Middle East.

  This ability to expand their horizons while remaining Circassian came along just in time. Israel’s Circassians were running out of non-relatives to marry and the opening of borders has allowed people to look for wives or husbands in Turkey and Jordan.