Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

ecame standardized across large areas and nowhere very high by comparison
with earlier years. The Special Commission accepted the registration of rights in
shares, on the model of Hawwara and Makhraba. Where land was registered as
individual plots, notably in hilly areas, it would appear, unlike the earlier case
of al-Nu‘aima, to have been so held in practice. Lastly, the pace of registration
increased dramatically.
In 1883 the Special Commission was composed of a head, Ahmad Na’ila
Efendi, an employee of the property registry of liva Hauran, Ahmad Shams
al-Din, the district tapu scribe, al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Fattah, and two civil members,
‘Abd al-Ra’uf and Ispir Acemi. 6 In the first eighteen months of work the members
of the commission would stamp a second paragraph of attestation, between the
first signed by the headman, village council and tapu scribe, and the third signed
by the members of the district administrative council. The second statement
of the commission noted that it was formed on the order of the vilayet in correspondence
with the imperial vergi administration, and in accordance with the
instructions of January 1883; the delegation (heyet) meeting in the village called
and questioned the landholders one by one; the names of the holders were then
written individually by the yoklama scribe alongside their entitlement to the land
by hakk-ı karar. 7 But, by the end of the second year of work of the commission,
there is no longer an attestation from the village authorities, but the commission
and administrative council jointly attest the registration of several villages at a
time. Thus, by the middle of the 1880s the contract between the village estate of
administration and the state, expressed in the tri-partite attestations of the first
eight years of land registration, disappears from the registers.
The year when this small but expressive shift in the form of attestation was
introduced, 1301AH (1883–84), proved a turning point in administrative institutionalization.
It witnessed the appointment of a supervisor for a distinct office
of correspondence and the formation of a municipal council of the town of
Irbid. 8 From the outset, the members elected to the municipal council, which had
social and economic welfare as part of its brief, cut a different figure from the
regional rural leaders, the Fraihat of Kufrinja, the Sharaida of al-Kura, and the
‘Ubaidat of al-Kafarat, who during these years served continuously as members
on the two major councils. The men elected to the municipal council came from
Irbid and its surroundings, most belonging to leading families of what was still
a very small town. The distinction of these men appears in good part a product,
or through the service, of the new complex of government in Irbid. One such
person was Na’il al-Gharaiba from Hawwara, who joined the municipal council
in 1884–87. 9
The year 1884 was also the last in which the two great rural leaders, ‘Abd
al-Qadir Yusuf al-Sharaida and Husain Barakat Fraihat, served simultaneously
on the administrative council. 10 This did not mark the end of the election of a
Sharaida or a Fraihat to this council or to the court, but it did of the absolute
centrality of the leaders of the Kura and Kufrinja on such councils. 11 By contrast,
men from each of the major families of the ‘Ubaidat of the Kafarat, from the
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The later Tanzimat