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Concept
Ghazi (warrior)
Summary
A ghazi (غازي, ɣaːziː, plural ġuzāt) is an individual who participated in ghazw (غزو, ), meaning military expeditions or raiding. The latter term was applied in early Islamic literature to expeditions led by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and later taken up by Turkic military leaders to describe their wars of conquest.
In the context of the wars between Russia and the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus, starting as early as the late 18th century's Sheikh Mansur's resistance to Russian expansion, the word usually appears in the form gazavat (газават).
In English-language literature, the ghazw often appears as razzia, a borrowing through French from Maghrebi Arabic.
In modern Turkish, gazi is used to refer to veterans, and also as a title for Turkic Muslim champions such as Ertuğrul and Osman I.
In pre-Islamic Bedouin culture, ghazw[a] was a form of limited warfare verging on brigandage that avoided head-on confrontations and instead emphasized raiding and looting, usually of livestock (see cattle raiding). The Umayyad-period Bedouin poet al-Kutami wrote the oft-quoted verses: "Our business is to make raids on the enemy, on our neighbor and our own brother, in the event we find none to raid but a brother." William Montgomery Watt hypothesized that Muhammad found it useful to divert this continuous internecine warfare toward his enemies, making it the basis of his war strategy; according to Watt, the celebrated battle of Badr started as one such razzia. As a form of warfare, the razzia was then mimicked by the Christian states of Iberia in their relations with the taifa states; rough synonyms and similar tactics are the Iberian cavalgada and the Anglo-French chevauchée.
The word razzia was used in French colonial context particularly for raids to plunder and capture slaves from among the people of Western and Central Africa, also known as rezzou when practiced by the Tuareg. The word was adopted from ġaziya of Algerian Arabic vernacular and later became a figurative name for any act of pillage, with its verb form razzier.
Official source
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