100 Orientalism and Empirecriminality also suggests that colonial officials viewed law, to borrow
from Antonio Gramsci, as a productive form of power, as an instru-
ment useful to the state in its “educative” function of cultural trans-
formation.^63
The self-destructive cycle of violence that accompanied the blood
feud was the chief expression of this lack of personal restraint that
characterized the mountaineers. Adil-Girei, of the village of
Kazanishchi in Temir-Khan-Shura okrug, shot and killed Abakar
Bamat, who four years earlier had killed Almakhsuta Makhmud, the
brother of Adil-Girei. He then approached the authorities with an ex-
planation for his action, noting that “he had run into Abakar, one of
his blood enemies,” and killed him, as “according to tradition, he had
the right to do this in vengeance for the blood of his brother.”^64 Also
in the village of Kazanishchi, Shuaib Khasai mistook a passerby on
the street for a “blood enemy” and killed him because he failed to
pay him proper respect according to the traditions of customary law.
Before the administration of North Dagestan, Shuaib explained his
“terrible mistake”; his intention to murder an “enemy,” however,
needed no explanation or apology.^65
Clearly, these interpretations were examples of the vastly different
ideas held by mountaineers about the proper means of resolving con-
flict – a different “custom.”^66 Shuaib did not realize that his explana-
tion was in fact what the Russians took to be a confession to a crime.
But for imperial administrators and ethnographers the blood feud was
a deviation from historic custom rather than custom itself. The diiat (a
payment to the family of a murder victim by the guilty party), for ex-
ample, was a customary law tradition that resolved a murder case.
Escalating violence and the perpetuation of a blood feud, such as
when Kuli Molla-oglu refused to recognize the diiat and murdered the
son of the man who fifteen years earlier had killed his own father, re-
sulted when mountaineers failed to recognize their own traditions.^67
What were officials and scholars to make of a people that did not
know its own customs? Mired in an impoverished intellectual tradi-
tion that left them unable to comprehend the individual “criminal
will” or to distinguish “between private and public interests,” the be-
nighted mountaineers savagely pursued the “eye for an eye, tooth for
a tooth” mentality of the Muslim.^68 “Pride and touchiness,” concluded
Grabovskii, coupled with a lack of respect for human life fostered by
centuries of conflict, “have given rise to their inclination to arguments
and fights, which originate from mere trifles and insignificant reasons
but which always conclude with a resort to the use of arms.”^69
Court proceedings illustrated numerous other examples of the
daily life of the unrestrained mountaineer. The tradition among