Colin Hunt
Active Member
The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria began as a secular state. The adoption of Sharia after the first war with Russia was partly a top-down political manoeuvre by the outgoing president (trying to back the incoming president into a corner), and partly due to bottom-up demands for Sharia by the populace who were fed up of post-war lawlessness and saw Islam as providing a way of tempering the violence without resorting to customary blood feuds.
In any case, the law that was applied in Sharia courts was a mixture of customary adat and Soviet law. It's magical thinking to suggest that Sharia could suddenly become the law of the land in a place where there were no mosques until the 1980s and where knowledge of Islam, let alone Sharia, was virtually nil even among the educated. To give an example, the Chechen Sharia code was entirely copied from Sudan's, and so compensation was supposed to be paid in camels; Chechnya has no camels, so people ignored the code and laughed about it while so-called Sharia courts continued applying Soviet law.
With regard to dress-codes for women, of course this was a bad thing. However, it's more an example of neotraditionalism being used in a time of conflict to put women back in their place (at a time when Chechen women were the primary providers for their families while men were fighting, and so had more power than at any other point in history). The same neotraditionalism is used today by Kadyrov and his mates to keep women from enforcing their legal rights. It's a lazy oversimplification to lay the blame for this on the initial separatists (or even on Sharia).
I appreciate that this isn't the thread for this, so I won't be replying further, but you're welcome to PM me if you fancy a discussion on this stuff.
Yeah I pretty much agree. You may be interested in this PhD thesis which discusses the historic interplay between Sharia, customary law, and Russian/Soviet law in post-war Chechnya.
