Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

acking as tax collectors. Ibrahim Efendi Sa‘d al-Din looms large in this story:
beyond his holdings in al-Rafid and Hubras, he owned olive and fruit trees
in Kufr Saum and Samar, and further grain land in Ibdar. Such widespread
ownership by a single person appears unparalleled elsewhere in the settled areas
of the district. 59 But underlying such differentiation was the very form of rights
to land. In al-Rafid and the other villages of the Kafarat, both land and olives
were held in shares, but by distinct groups of shareholders. Thus, many smaller
holders in the land did not hold shares in the olives; in other words, they were
contributing to tax paid on the land of olive groves but without owning a share
in the trees themselves. Second, the distribution of shares reveals three levels of
holders: regional leaders with several shares, dominant family clusters related to
such leaders with about half of the village shares, and a considerable number of
men unrelated to the dominant clusters holding smaller shares in the other half
of land in field crops. 60 In the Kafarat, then, the village does not always form a
self-contained unit, but men as individuals, or as members of a descent group,
may hold rights to land elsewhere.
Lastly, olive trees were held as shares in a common plantation; in some cases
both the number of trees and their total value are given in the register but in
others only the total value appears. This form of ownership of olives was found
in other villages, in the relatively open countryside of the northern part of the
district: the Kafarat villages of Saham, Samar, al-Rafid, Kufr Saum, Yubla and
Harta, and the Wustiya villages of Kufr Asad, Dauqara, Samma, al-Taiba and
Dair al-Si‘na. With the exception of the village of Halawa, it was not found,
however, in hilly areas of more ancient olive cultivation, such as the Kura and
Jabal ‘Ajlun. There trees were generally held as individual property, both on land
held in shares (musha‘) and on smaller, more individual plots of land.
It is unclear to what degree ownership of olives in shares resulted from arrangements
for financing the development of market-oriented plantations or from
evaluation of tax on olives as an imposition on total oil production rather than
on the sum of individual trees. Although there may be a developmental process
here, we should be wary of too neat a reconstruction given evidence of historical
variation in systems for the taxation of olives. 61 Although trees had long legally
been mulk property, prior to tapu registration the actual form of such rights may
also have reflected different forms of imposition.
The local political economic power exercised by the two major leaders of the
northern parts of the district, ‘Abd al-Qadir Yusuf al-Sharaida and Ibrahim Sa‘d
al-Din, differed markedly. Bearing in mind just how much more commercially
oriented the latter was than the former, we will not be surprised to learn in the
next chapter that over time the leaders of the Sharaida and the ‘Ubaidat were
to play rather different roles in relation to the administration in the growing
market town of Irbid.
95
Regional leadership