Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

in descending rank order by size in Tibna. The holdings, even of ‘Abd al-Qadir
Sharaida, belong to a pattern of long-established olive cultivation, unlike the olive
plantations developed by Ibrahim Sa‘d al-Din. This pattern includes women owners,
of whom there are none in the Kafarat. Thus ‘Abd al-Qadir’s son Muhammad
Sa‘id owns fourteen olive trees together with Muhra bint Khamis, most probably
his mother or else his wife. 53 Likewise Mahmud Yusuf Sharaida owns ten olive
trees jointly with Amira bint Mustafa Sharaida. Mustafa Sharaida has his house
and grain land in another village but owns 65 olive trees in Tibna. Amira may
thus have acquired her olive trees as mahr on her marriage to Mahmud Yusuf
Sharaida. 54 Lastly a son of Mustafa Sharaida, Hamdan, holds thirteen trees with
Amira bint Faris al-Dhib.
In Tibna women are present in 18 per cent of all holdings but hold only 7
per cent of all olive trees. They do not always hold with male relatives; cases
are found of three sisters holding together and of a mother and daughter. Most
often, women hold as individuals. Women also own some of the private plots
and, exceptional for the ‘Ajlun tapu registers, women are listed as owners of
four houses in the village. In other words, olive production was bound into the
domestic and marital economy in a manner very distinct from the commercial
development of olive production in the Kafarat. This is true for the Sharaida as
for other families of Tibna.
Ibrahim Sa‘d al-Din and Muflih al-Jabr of the Kafarat
The Kafarat region forms the only evident exception in the registers to the
general dominance of field crops and grain in the production mix. See Map 5.4.
Oral tradition in the area of Saham and Samar suggests that in the 1880s such
development was relatively new and bound up with Kurdish financiers from
Damascus. 55 Taken alone, the registers indicate the following: in Saham both
olive trees and land were first registered in April 1882 in the names of villagers,
but only two months later, one-half of all the shares were sold to Rifatlu Tahir,
presumably Rifatlu Tahir Badr Khan, a Damascene of Kurdish origin appointed
governor of ‘Ajlun in that year. 56 In Samar the transfer of property was less brutal,
but there, too, some five years after first registration, a significant proportion of
both trees and land were sold to Muhammad Efendi Sa‘dun. In the relatively poor
lands of Saham and Samar, development of large-scale olive cultivation came to
entail indebtedness for villagers and the rapid alienation of property rights.
Elsewhere in the Kafarat, commercial development of olive cultivation appears
more the work of insiders, notably the various family lines known today as the
‘Ubaidat.
The only village of the Kafarat where land was registered in the years before the
appointment of Da’ud ‘Abbada was Hubras; 1,679 dönüms of land were registered
in December 1876 in a somewhat anomalous form: while the scribe ‘Umar noted
that normal fees were collected, these equalled 10 per cent of the value declared,
the level for bedel-i misl not hakk-ı karar; furthermore, as the land use is not
defined, we cannot tell whether Hubras had olive plantations. What is clear,
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Regional leadership