97 Customary LawFor Grabovskii, the great impediment to the proper historical de-
velopment of the mountaineers was not Russia’s long colonial war,
however, but Islam. Muslim traditions adopted by certain mountain-
eer princes, who, in the Russian view, were traitors to the genuine
folk traditions of the mountaineers, introduced Muslim law and left
judicial matters in the hands of the mulla.^46 Lilov also emphasized
the cultural authenticity of the adat and its eleven-century history in
the region, in contrast to the more recent intrusion of Islam and what
he portrayed as Shamil’s despotic efforts to replace the adat with the
shari’a.^47 The region’s genuine past, and hence proper future, was
one free of the influence of Islam. This was another variant of the
French “Kabyle myth” about the Berbers of the Maghrib. The ideas of
administrators and imperial educated society about Islam,
Orthodoxy, and customary law were shaped by a similar set of as-
sumptions about history and cultural authenticity. European colo-
nialism presumably meant the preservation or sometimes
resurrection of tradition itself. French administrators hoped to revive
and preserve a supposedly untainted Berber past, and they devoted
significant efforts toward the codification of Berber customary law.^48
Islamic judicial traditions challenged even the sporadic innova-
tions of the regime that dated from the eighteenth century. In 17 93
General Gudovich had established a “tribal court” for Kabard
princes, subordinate to a court founded in Mozdok that functioned
with the presence of Russian overseers.^49 In 1822 General Ermolov at-
tempted to revive this institution. One of the statutes for his court
proclaimed that all matters “shall be resolved according to ancient
customs and rites,” except in cases where they conflicted with
Russian rule. The courts disappointed both Russians and Kabards,
however. Ermolov complained that Kabards ignored the courts and
instead resolved matters “in the homes of the clergy,” and several
Kabard princes informed the administration that the destructive raids
so feared by the Russians in fact were provoked by the presence of
the Russian courts.^50
The primary contrast remained that between Islam and what the
Russians called “custom.” The latter began to emerge as a more im-
portant indicator of identity than “faith” in ethnographic texts in the
eighteenth century.^51 “Custom” in the Russian view was pure, histor-
ically authentic, and pre-existant to the arrival of Islam in the North
Caucasus, which, as the Russians emphasized, was brought by emis-
saries who were not native to the region. The adat belonged to the
realm of “custom,” and when properly chronicled (because peoples
possessed histories of law), it would serve as evidence that mountain-
eers themselves belonged to “peoples.” And “peoples,” in the