103 Customary Lawlover) by stabbing her with his kinzhal fifteen times. Eight of the
wounds were to the head.^84 In similar circumstances, Akhmed-khan
Shikhali killed his wife, Kistaman Safi-kum, with a kinzhal.^85 Geidar
Bek Gasan, of Kaitago-Tabasaranskii district (Dagestan), murdered
his sister for marrying against the wishes of the men of the family.^86
Unfortunately, these gruesome stories could be endlessly compiled.
In most cases, women suffered the most.
Both Russians and Georgians were quick to portray these events as
a product of Muslim and mountain savagery, and they conceived of
imperial expansion as a source of stability and support to domesticity
and the family. Georgia’s new nativists recognized the centrality of
women to the making of a progressive and enlightened future, but
only because they were “personally responsible for children and fam-
ily.”^87 Muslim families, however, faced significant impediments to
progress, in the common imperial conception. Travellers, ethnogra-
phers, and administrators throughout the nineteenth century fre-
quently noted the abuse endured by Muslim women, the “genuine
slave[s]” and “working cattle” of the Muslim family, as several
Russian commentators put it.^88 In “criminal statistics” documents
women were all too often the primary victims of mountaineer cul-
tural practices and traditions. The compilers of these reports impli-
cated the mountaineer extended family in this repression of women,
making it clear that women faced the prospect of kidnapping and
rape if they declined a marriage proposal. In one case, relatives them-
selves participated in such a rape because they supported the family
mariage alliance.^89 Women were not entirely helpless, however. Par-
ida, from the village of Bakhlukh in Avar okrug, where she was raped
by three men, managed to kill each of them with a dagger, one at a
time, as she stalked them through the woods. Apparently in her de-
fence, the published recounting of the event recorded her pain as a re-
sult of the rape, noting her “terrible dreams” and poor appetite
during the month following the event.^90 Parida challenged her male
persecutors, and in veiled terms, imperial educated society ap-
plauded her efforts.
Officials were doing the same thing in the courts. In numerous
cases the regime was in effect prosecuting the male perpetrators and
exonerating the women, even against the wishes of families and even
entire villages. Rape victim Leila Magomed-Gusein saw her persecu-
tor sent into administrative exile in spite of written support for the
rapist from his influential family as well as from 160 people from the
village of Maza in Samursk district (Dagestan).^91 The intervention of
the higher-level oblast court in the workings of the district courts was
often in response to these miscarriages of justice at the local level.