SUMMARY

Custom, Law and Violence among the North Caucasian Muslims

(studies in history and ethnography of law in Highland Dagestan)

This book is about crime and punishment as they were understood, practised and regulated by Muslim peasants of Highland Dagestan in the period from the 1860s to the 2000s.

The Dagestani case of the Islamic legal transformation sheds light on key issues in the history of the North Caucasus — particularly on colonial and socialist integration of the region into the Russian state. These issues include the appearance of the abrek banditry, the introduction of the Shari'a norms into local customs, Shamil’s legal reform, construction of the so-called voenno-narodnoe upravlenie (‘military people’s administration’) — an administrative regime of the late imperial Russia which combined elements of military and indirect rule — the Shari'a movement of the first Soviet decade, the museumification of local cultures from the 1930s on, ‘Islamic revival’ and Shari'a courts in the post-socialist decade. The book also offers a particular insight into the relationships between ethnography and modern reforms, as well as into the emergence of modem hybrid societies in different Muslim countries in both colonial and socialist contexts.

There are three parts in this monograph. The first one discusses a quasi-traditional phenomenon of the abrek banditry in the 19th and 20th century North Caucasus. It emerged in a context of, though in reaction to, the Russian conquest. Paradoxically, the more the colonial state ‘pacified’ Muslim highlanders, the more it stipulated the growth of modem criminal practices among them. This process was associated with criminalisation of the pre-modem legal culture. After the Russian conquest, blood revenge, ishkil or baranta (capture of the debtor’s property), punitive raids and some other local customs were defined and settled by imperial law as serious crimes. Independent (nemimye) chieftains and some members of prohibited military associations of the village youths became outlaws (abreks).

The cultural meaning of violence practices changed much under the colonial rule. Bloodjeud and punitive raids still created jigits, highland folk heroes, only now these heroes were bandits. Highlanders who committed murders, thefts or any other criminal activities against the Russian administration and its Muslim supporters were resisting the Russian rule by ignoring laws that criminalised blood revenge, ishklI and other local practices. Changes in social relationships which concerned the violence activities were reflected in the cultural odyssey of the notion of abrek. In the pre-colonial period it had referred to a free stranger expelled from his native community for the blood revenge. By the tum of the 20th century it became the synonym of a noble and pious bandit.

Semantically, violence of the highlanders was interpreted by imperial image-makers so that the term abrek acquired the meaning of the ‘criminal’ even for Muslim highlanders themselves. By the mid-19th century a discourse on Muslim banditry (khishchnichestvo) had been formed. It dominated the public mind of both colonisers and colonised peoples up to the late 20th century. This discourse much influenced ‘pacification’ activities of the state powers in different Muslim peripheries of the late imperial and socialist Russia.

The second and the third parts of the book deal with the development of judicious practices of Muslim villagers incorporated in social and legal networks of the Shamil’s state, imperial, socialist and post-socialist Russia. They look in particular at the language, procedures and social applications of law. The second part begins with a short outline of the medieval history of the Dagestani village courts of the customary and Islamic laws basing on unique materials of the Arabic epigraphies and palaeography dating back to the 14th - 18th centuries. My methodology is based on a well- known approach of legal pluralism which was fruitfully applied in a great deal of anthropological and historical studies including some works related to the Islamic law. Such an approach gives a deeper awareness of a complicated network of legal customs (adat), Shari'a and state laws that operated in the Dagestani village before and after modern legal reforms.

The focus of the study is on the semi-autonomous social field of village community. From the mid-19th century it was an object of anthropology and, at the same time, of anthropologically influenced state reformers. Orientalist approaches of the Russian ethnographers who used to consider the North Caucasus ‘a wild Islamic periphery of the civilised world’ considerably influenced a series of reforms started in the mid-19th century and continued under the Soviet rule. A comparative analysis of the regime of ‘military people’s administration’ established in Dagestan in the 1860s and that of the ‘Arabic bureaux’ in Algeria after its French occupation demonstrates striking similarities in colonial policies toward the Islamic and customary law as they were applied in the greatest colonial empires of the 19th century.

Special attention is paid to the ideology of the legal reforms in Russia in the 1860s, which was influenced by the Russian school of ethnography. One finds in it opposing ethnographic notions of ‘wildness’ and ‘civilisation’, as well as those of ‘primitive folk law’ and ‘clan community’. The third part of the book continues with the related topic of legal reforms conceived under the impact of positivist ethnographic theories. It deals with the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. It analyses how a new legal discourse of relative ‘class justice’ has caused a deep degradation of law all over Soviet Russia and a growing criminalisation of situation in the North Caucasus. It examines the administrative ‘invention of national traditions’ in collective farms. Paradoxically, these institutions have been gradually transformed into local Muslim communities which have prepared a rapid islamisation of Highland Dagestan in the early 1990s.

The discourse on Islamic wildness and highlanders’ backwardness changed much under the Soviet rule in the North Caucasus. Late imperial reformers of the Muslim village community attempted to civilise highlanders by eradicating their ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ customs, with their vision of the Islamic law as a natural antagonist of the Russian state. After the Caucasian war of the 19th century, the possibility of Islamic uprisings haunted the mind of top-level state officials such as S.M. Dukhovsky, Govemor-General of the Turkestan Province, or K.P. Pobedonostsev, Procurator-General of the Saint Synod. This fear lead the state to restrict the use of Shari'a norms for the Russian Muslims and to keep Muslim clergy of the North Caucasus under strict control.

In tum, Soviet lawmakers tried to free Muslim highlanders from the Tsarist and feudal oppression’.

Public debates on and attempts at introducing Islamic law have become characteristic of post-socialist Muslim and non-Muslim areas, and are especially vivid in the North Caucasus. In recent years, the so-called 'Shari'a courts’ (mahaklm shar'iyya) were established de facto by reopening mosques in a number of villages and towns in Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia-Alania. The majority of mosques are located in Northern Dagestan and Southern Chechnya. They settle small inheritance and criminal cases including divorce, theft, drinking alcoholic beverages, and the like. The decisions of these courts are final and not subject to appeal. They usually impose both fixed Shari'a and non-Islamic penalties. Dagestani chairmen of village and district administrations often call upon local qadis to settle family and land trials. Today the discourse on Shari'a is embodied in the post-Soviet flesh and is fraught with all its negative effects due to the degradation of Islamic legal culture and growing crimi- nalisation of power and society in the region.

What are the Soviet ‘roots’ of a stormy Islamic movement in the region? First, it is mosque congregation 0'ama'at) which was formed within the borders of collective farm. Second, the collectivisation turned former communal lands into collective or state property and therefore expanded them at the expense of private lands and livestock.

The book’s appendix carries a substantial historical dictionary of the most important legal and social terms. It includes more than a 100 words and phrases of the Arabic, Iranian and Turkic origin. They concem North Caucasian regional forms of Shari'a and customary law norms and practices. I collected them in Arabic inscriptions and manuscripts from Dagestan dating from the 14th to the first third of the 20th century. This is the first attempt of such a dictionary. The book also contains a detailed bibliography of sources and scholarly works on the Dagestani customary law, state reforms and violence practices as well as a complete list of oriental terms and notions used in the monograph.