83 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineersregion. Omarov understood his scholarly efforts to be for the benefit
of “Dagestan,” in contrast to the Sufi leaders, who were motivated by
religious fanaticism and hatred. The murids, he wrote, offered little to
those moved by “patriotic and national feelings.”^174 Imperial rule
was to include this form of respect for non-Russian “patriotism,” and
ethnographic representation was helping to turn Laks and Avars into
Dagestanis.
Omarov not only shared his own story but sought out those of
other mountaineers. Russian publications are interested in everything
“regarding the mountaineers of Dagestan,” he wrote to Mirza
Suleiman in 1868. Omarov suggested to Suleiman that he share the
story of his childhood and early education, his memories of Dagestan
before the arrival of the Russians, and his knowledge of mountain
customs, administration, and judicial traditions. “They [Russian
readers] genuinely do not know anything about our past,” Omarov
emphasized to Suleiman, and he promised to translate the story from
Arabic to Russian and bring it to the attention of the administra-
tion.^175 In another translation Omarov offered the work of Muheddin
Mahomed-Khanov, a mulla who denounced the teachings of the Sufi
orders as false interpretations of the Qur’an.^176 Berzhe introduced
with satisfaction the work of Shora Nogmov, an Adygei educator and
student of his people’s past.^177 “All peoples are preserved in the
memory of their historical legends,” wrote Nogmov, who thus
“greedily listened” to the stories of the elder generation.^178 Like
Russians who sought to clarify the relationship of Russian history
and culture to the global process of “universal history,” Omarov,
Khan-Girei, and Nogmov worked to place Dagestan and Adygei on
the map of the empire.
Literacy and education were again central to this cultivation of
custom and the past. The Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxy
adopted Uslar’s alphabet for its own efforts to transcribe mountain
languages such as Abkhaz and Svan. The Abkhaz Reader sponsored
by the society, published in 1865 by a trio that included
I.A.Bartolomei, the military general previously mentioned, con-
tained a mix of educational and practical admonitions for the “good
pupil” with occasional forays into the larger implications of literacy
and education.^179 When a learned elder (starik) advised his son of the
virtues of a serious and studious life, the son retorted that the older
generation had done just fine without schooling. The starik replied
that members of his generation had never been offered the opportu-
nity of reading or writing in their native language. “We had to refer
to someone who knew Georgian or Turkish,” he complained.^180
Other short vignettes taught the students about the evils of greed,