| Sufi burial ceremony in the Chechen village of Mairtup After some shots of the village, the video shows a collective trance ceremony, complete with a beautiful example of male polyphony, followed by a zikr (mystical ritual), accompanied by drums and in which the women of the village also take part(!). For their peculiar use of drums, these Chechen dervishes have been called "barabanshchiki" (drummers) by the Russian ethnographers. Rough footage from my next movie "A Chechen Confession". The film will have as a pretext my experience in Chechnya and it will decrypt the most common myths about the Chechens, including the widely accepted one about their supposed presence among anti-Western Islamist fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also a presentation of the traditional Chechen brands of Sufi Islam, with all the pagan, pre-Islamic elements that it still contains. For the Sufis, the Great Jihad is the fight against one's own ego. The Little Jihad is the less important fight against the infidels. The Chechen language, together with the tongues from neighboring Daghestan, form a totally isolated family of languages, resembling no other languages in Europe or Asia. |
