Vladimir Bobrovnikov’s Russian book The Muslims of the Northern Caucasus: Custom, Law and Power is an outstanding piece of scholarship. It is the result of almost ten years of work on and in Daghestan, a country which the author calls a “testing ground” (Russian poligon) for legal transformations since the 18th century (p. 98). The book focuses on the interrelationship between customary law (Arabic adat), Shari’a, and secular State law over a considerable span of time. It is based on an abundance of local sources on legal practice, including epigraphica of the 14th century, unpublished adat booklets of the 18th and 19th centuries, legal documents of the 19th and early 20th centuries (all in Arabic), historical accounts and first-hand oral information from the author’s fieldwork (partly in the North Caucasian Avar language), as well as Russian legal codes and protocols of the Soviet era; last not least Bobrovnikov also analyzes interviews with Chechen rebels of the late 1990’s.
At the same time, it is a very personal book. The author criticizes Russian (Imperial, Soviet as well as post-Soviet) ethnological scholarship for its ideological stands and its theoretical shortcomings. Too often the ethnographer functioned as a “mediator” between the Muslim population and the State, thus exerting a considerable influence on the development of law (p. 289). Although Edward Said’s Orientalism is not mentioned in the book, Bobrovnikov makes a serious contribution to dismantle Russian and Soviet Orientalism (cf. pp. 103-108; 268). Localizing his own approach within the contemporary Western ethnological debate on legal pluralism, his aim is to deliver a picture of the actual legal practice in the North Caucasus in historical perspective, not to theorize on the character of legal systems. He criticizes the evolutionist view of legal development which is inherent in Caucasian ethnography since the 19th century and still vividly discussed in the Russian and Daghestani media today. In Bobrovnikov’s view, there is no point in determining which legal system, customary law or Islamic law, was more authentic, more “civilized” or more adaptable to modernity; what he observes is that since at least the 14th century, the time of the oldest inscriptions on adat regulations in Daghestan, both legal systems existed side by side in a process of interpenetration (p. 118). This process was full of ruptures and re-definitions; one of these took place during the reign of the three famous Imams in Daghestan and Chechnia (ca. 1828-59) who proclaimed the abolition of customary law and the implementation of Islamic law. From Bobrovnikov’s short sketch of legal practice in the Imamate it becomes clear that in contrast to their claims, the Imams (among them the famous Imam Shamil, reg. 1834-59) also followed and even produced adat law as well (p. 139). After the Caucasian War, when the Imamate was subdued and the legal situation in Daghestan was in full confusion, the Russian colonial power created a new customary law which deviated widely from pre-colonial indigenous adat law (pp. 142-166). Another major rupture took place during the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the following Civil War which caused great havoc to the region, splitting the Muslim population into factions. While some leading Naqshbandi shaykhs and scholars stubbornly fought the Red Army, others sided with the Bolsheviks. The Soviets perceived customary law as the law of the class enemy and were ready to support Islamic law, and the 1920’s saw the establishment of official Shari’a courts in Daghestan. The paradox was complete when Stalin pronounced that the Shari’a was “the peoples’ real customary law” (p. 218). However, the Shari’a courts were abolished as soon as the Bolsheviks were in firm control of the region, and the following decades were characterized by the ruthless repression of the Mullahs, Qadis and the Muslim intelligentsia. Bobrovnikov’s numerous case studies show that the new Kolkhoz organization grew out of the old village community, and that in spite of all propaganda against adat as worthless “remnants of the past”, the Kolkhoz inherited a great deal of adat (p. 234ff). In the 1960’s, the authorities began to discover that besides the “harmful” adat (like blood revenge, which was persecuted as a heavy crime in the Imperial as well as in the Soviet period but continued to be practiced all the time) there were “useful” adat which could be integrated into the legal practice (like the allegedly traditional peaceful settlement of legal disputes by mediators). Since the late 1970’s, Islamic movements pursued the implementation of Islamic Law in Daghestan. During the Islamic boom after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990’s fundamentalist groups (often called “Wahhabis”) gained control over some villages in Daghestan. Bobrovnikov dismisses their concepts of Shari’a as a “myth”, or as a “political bluff” (pp. 264, 275). He shows that the protagonists of the new discourse on Shari’a are no experts on Islamic law, but have hardly any idea of Muslim jurisprudence. This lack of training and understanding is most obvious from the example of the short-lived Islamic Republic of Ichkeria (Chechnia) whose new Constitution was a questionable copy of the Sudanese legal code which followed the Maliki legal school of Islam, not the Shafii one which is the most widespread madhhab in Chechnia and Daghestan (p. 273f). Thus today we find a wide array of “invented traditions” of adat as well as of Islamic law in the North Caucasus; from the perspective of the ethnographer, the big political conflicts on state-sponsored “traditional Caucasian way of live” and opposition “Islamic fundamentalism” dissolve when the concepts of both sides turn out to be fiction. In practice, and this is Bobrovnikov’s main message, there are no clear-cut boundaries between adat and Islamic law; “today one and the same person can at the same time be the head of the village administration, of the Mediator commission acting according to adat, and of the Shari’a Court” (p. 290).
Bobrovnikov always tries to concentrate on what he calls the “microphysic” (with reference to Foucault, see p. 110), i.e. the rich documentary evidence from the actual legal practice on the spot. Although he does not openly claim to be “post-modern”, Bobrovnikov’s study dismisses all experiences of the so-called legal modernization in the Caucasus as well as modernization theories in general (cf. p. 101). As for the legal development in Daghestan, the author does not always intend to present a coherent historical line but often focusses on the image of history and on historical memory instead. Additionally, the first part of the book is obviously intended as a separate study which provides an alternative reading of the genealogy of violence in Daghestan, for it deals with Daghestani village youth confederations of the late 18th – early 19th centuries and their transformation into organized banditry (the so-called abreks, “outlaws/bandits”) in the 19th and 20th centuries (pp. 16-97). Sometimes sources are presented without much background information on their historical context, so that a reader who is not familiar with North Caucasian history might feel the need to consult additional literature on the turbulent political history of that region. This, however, is the price one has to pay for this very concise and interesting study which sheds valuable new light on many aspects of the Caucasian legal practice. The book is provided with numerous illustrations (including several photos of Arabic manuscripts), a very useful glossary of local Arabic terms of customary law, a list of literature, two indices and an English summary. As Bobrovnikov draws many parallels to the development in other parts of the Caucasus, Central Asia and even Algeria, his book must be recommended not only to experts in Caucasian legal history but also to everybody interested in comparative and colonial legal anthropology.