SHEIKH YOUR BOETTI

”Two hundred years before, the first modern Islamist had emerged to the north of Afghanistan, in the Caucasus. He was called Sheikh Mansur. Mansur fused ideas of nationalism and anti-colonial struggle with Islam and used them to lead a struggle against the Russian forces that were trying to occupy Chechnya and Daghestan. From other accounts of Sheikh Mansur it is clear that this power came from the fact that he had fused what were modern western ideas of nationalism and anti-imperialism with Islamic ideas. Up to that point the resistance to the growing Russian empire had been from secular leaders in Chechnya. And they had failed. Mansur-Boetti was something new and mysterious.” ( Adam Curtis )

Into a Turkish retreat, in 1785, went a scapegrace Christian Friar. Out came the conquering prophet of Mohammed. Was it the same man? His last letters seem to prove it was.

The eighteenth century was the heyday of social adventurers. The rigid class structure of earlier times was cracking; the idle gentry, afflicted with endemic boredom, seemed to welcome amusing gallants. Handsome, unscrupulous young men, bearing invented titles, could make their way by gaming, amour, espionage and chicanery. This was the era of Casanova, of Count Cagliostro, of Comte de Saint-Germain, who was three hundred years old by his own reckoning. We may say, with a superior sniff, that the adventurers lived by their wits. However, not many of us have enough wits to live by them in that fashion; we are compelled to more honest industry.

One of the most remarkable and least remembered adventurers, was Giovanni Battista Boetti. He was born in 1743, in the tiny village of Piazzano, halfway between Milan and Turin. His mother died early; his father, ntary, village mayor, and a hard angry man, married again. The boy hated his father and step-mother and no doubt developed a set of stimulating complexes. He briefly studied medicine in Turin, but dropped out to pursue adventure. In Prague, he bewitched a lovely widow, rendered her pregnant, and proposed marriage. Her family bought him off for three hundred florins. Thus, he learned the economics of nuisance value.

In Strasbourg he wooed the rich niece of a canon, who paid him well to leave town. Heading for Rome, he was robbed of the profits of unpopularity by a scoundrelly servant and was forced to retreat to his native village. There he won the heart of a well-to-do girl, but not that of her family. His own father illustrated his disapproval by trying to shoot him.
”Then the Russians noticed Boetti. In 1785 General Potemkin wrote to Catherine the Great:

“On the opposite bank of the river Sunja in the village of Aldy a prophet has appeared and started to preach. He has submitted superstitious and ignorant people to his will by claiming to have had a revelation”

The Russians decided to send an army of three thousand men to destroy this prophet. They marched though the mountains and the farmland where Grozny now stands and across the river into the village of Aldy. But when they arrived they found no-one there. It was as if Boetti and all his army had disappeared. “As though they were ghosts” wrote one Russian.” ( Curtis )

Disheartened, Boetti set forth again toward Rome. On the ship bearing him to Civitavecchia he diced with a Spanish friar and won from him all his money and baggage; but on disembarking, the friar, no sportsman, denounced him as a thief and forced him to give up his winnings. Boetti had his revenge. At an inn on the way to Rome he arranged

a servant girl to entrap the friar, who fell into the trap and from the trap into jail.

Finding no outlets for his talent in Rome, Boetti pushed on to the famous shrine in Loreto. There he had a mystical experience. During four days of tears and prayer he saw visions and heard voices summoning him to leave the world. Obedient, he entered the Dominican order, irksome though he found its discipline during his five years of reclusion. The mission field ever allures adventurous spirits within the church and after some delay, which he turned to account by studying Arabic, Father Boetti reached the Dominican mission in Mosul on the Tigris, ancient Nineveh, today within the bounds of Iraq.

On the strength of his slight medical training he was appointed city physician. But a patient died; the daughter of the deceased assembled a mob by screaming ”poison!”. Boetti was arrested and treated to a flogging. Complaints were laid against him in Rome and he returned to defend himself. But the friar had had enough discipline. He returned without authorization to the Near east, and in Urfa set up as a doctor, doubling as secretary treasurer to the pasha and as bishop of the schismatic Jacobite church. He then removed to Constantinople, where he practiced medicine, improved his command of Eastern languages, and carried on a profitable intrigue with the wife of a chamberlain of the Sublime Porte.

”In the Caucasus, the Russian defeat was received with enormous excitement. Mansur’s fame increased to an unprecedented degree and people began to speak of him as of a saviour sent by God. Large numbers of people from all over the Northern Caucasus flocked to his side and most of Daghestan and Chechnya now accepted his leadership. The Kabartay, who joined Mansur in fighting the Russians, sold their ganimets (booty) in Ottoman forts, such as Anapa and Sog˘ucak, which impressed the Circassian tribes and convinced them to join Shaykh Mansur as well. Thus, attacks on the Russian defence lines multiplied and the success of at least some of them further increased Mansur’s fame and the number of his followers. He now chose a yellow, red and green banner and his warriors began to dress in the same colours.”

Charged with heresy in Italy, Boetti fled to a Kurdish town fifty miles from Mosul. He went into a retreat of ninety-six days and emerged a different man. Father Boetti stepped forth from his retreat as Sheik Mansour, which means ”the Conqueror”. The Christian monk became a more or less Mohammedan seer. His tonsure was replaced was replaced by a scalp lock, by which Mohammed could seize him and carry him to heaven. His Dominican black and white was replaced by flamboyant oriental dress and a green turban, implying that he was a relative of the prophet. He preached, weeping and writhing, in Kurdish and Armenian.