Few questions vexed tsarist observers of the Kazakh steppe more than religion: the extent to which Kazakhs were properly Muslim (as administrators understood it) or essentially shamanists under an Islamic veneer. This fundamental issue had ramifications for multiple administrative concerns, including attempts to understand Kazakh legal practices and bring them under imperial control. Establishing the precise content of Kazakhs’ adat, or customary law, and its relationship to sharia law, seemed a vital first step towards transforming, or simply managing, the steppe.

Paolo Sartori and Pavel Shablei's book explores tsarist efforts to produce knowledge about Kazakh legal culture, both through codification and ethnographic observation. Drawing on a wealth of regional archival sources, and inspired by theoretical frameworks ranging from Saidian Orientalism to frontier history, they advance a complex argument. Most tsarist observers failed to understand that they were asking the wrong questions: the bifurcation between adat and sharia that they assumed must exist actually did not, dooming efforts to codify adat and exclude sharia from it. The steppe, rather, was a zone of legal hybridity (15), where adat and sharia existed as part of a single legal field with substantial local variations, and interacted with the unpredicted consequences of various tsarist reforms. In some areas, political and ideological considerations militated against understanding this; at the frontier, though, pragmatism trumped ideology, and administrators who favored a less rigid approach to legal culture could see their ideas put into practice.

The hero of the story is Iosif Iakovlevich Osmolovskii (1820–1862), a serving orientalist who made a career in the east—first in Orenburg, later at the empire's southern edge along the Syr-Darya River. Sent by from St. Petersburg to Orenburg in 1848 to work at the Orenburg Frontier Commission, responsible for affairs among Kazakhs of the Junior Horde, Osmolovskii assumed multiple duties. One of his tasks was an attempt to codify Kazakh customary law. Tsarist administrators had been attempting to do this for nearly half a century, and had not succeeded. Previous codifiers “had not been able to sort out the particularities of adat and sharia, were not able to distinguish modern legal norms from those that had already fallen out of use” (51). They proceeded from flawed assumptions: that since Kazakhs were only superficially Muslims, sharia was alien to the steppe; that adat and sharia could be easily distinguished from one another; that a single set of legal norms or a single relationship between adat and sharia would be applicable everywhere. Osmolovskii, though he shared many of his fellow administrators’ convictions, used his field experience and formidable philological skills to draw different conclusions. He discovered important regional variations in the application of adat and sharia, distinguished new practices from archaic ones, and concluded that adat and sharia were not easily separable.

Although Osmolovskii's superiors were initially impressed by the work, the arrival in 1854 of a new boss at the Frontier Commission, the orientalist Vasilii Vasil΄evich Grigor΄ev, doomed it. Grigor’ev viewed adat and sharia as inherently separate, and considered Islam both alien to the steppe and an obstacle to the cultural transformation of the Kazakhs he desired. To publish Osmolovskii's findings would be both factually and politically inexpedient. His opposition to the project extended so far that he physically removed it from the Orenburg archives and—probably—destroyed the remaining drafts and copies (131). Subsequent efforts to collect common law, in the second half of the 1800s, had little to do with formal codification. The assumptions from which most would-be codifiers worked could not produce a useful compendium of common law; to move away from these assumptions and produce a more accurate and useful collection was politically untenable.

Yet after the failure of his project, Osmolovskii was able to realize his views at the imperial frontier, along the Syr-Darya. Serving here as administrator of all Kazakhs in the region, far from the prying eyes of his superiors, Osmolovskii had significant authority to act on his own. He was also deeply dependent on the good will and trust of locals in an ethnically diverse region where Russian power was weak. The circumstances dictated a pragmatic approach to law and governance, for which Osmolovskii's experiences had prepared him. He was therefore often able to move fluidly between norms of adat and sharia as the situation dictated, and his superiors had to make peace with it. His death in 1862, and the subsequent advance of the imperial frontier further forward, spelled the end of this phase of frontier governance.

This is a work of fine-grained research, one that does not offer easy answers. Knowledge brought Osmolovskii little power in Orenburg, but was a crucial resource on which he could draw at the Syr. The steppe was a space of legal hybridity, but the nature of the blend varied in time and space, without a single trajectory of change; the use that administrative and local actors could make of such hybridity was similarly changeable. One begins to despair of building a broader narrative, or constructing new theoretical models, in the face of such complexity. But this is, perhaps, the point: the regional archives, explored with the appropriate methodological tools, hold a variety and a texture that we have still only begun to grasp.