The article is an attempt at a concise historical-legal dictionary of legal custom or 'adat practiced by Muslim highlanders in the North-East Caucasus in the 14th-20th centuries. It contains 107 dictionary and phraseology units gathered in documents, normative and narrative sources including inscriptions. They share characteristic inaccuracies in Arabic morphology and peculiar semantics. The author argues that it was the result of cultural translation of historical realities of non-Arab

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... Its legal vocabulary was created by relatively competent Shari'a judges, teachers and students of madrasahs for members of their own rural communities and confederacies. The translation into Arabic aimed at legitimizing agreements concluded at meetings of the confederations. The glossary should help readers of local Arabic-speaking sources from the North-East Caucasus. At the same time, it elucidates controversies of Islamic discourse based on the Dagestani 'adat that was a changing legal custom in the framework of first Islamic and then Russian imperial and early Soviet law. Historians know better the discourse of Muhammad of Kututl, Dawud of Usisha, Murtada-'Ali of Urada who took part in the 17th-19th centuries Shari'ah movement against non-Islamic local customs. In judicial practice, however, these scholars had to refer to different 'adat norms and procedures reflecting the early modern society they lived in. At the same time, they Islamized legal custom gradually as we can see from changing meanings of the terms presented in the paper.