Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

in 1880, 1895 and 1921. The table’s division into two sections follows the 1921
register, no such division having been made in either 1880 or 1895. Although
holdings of only a few families remained exactly the same between 1895 and
1921, ‘Ali al-Hamuri’s stands out. That branch of the Hamuris already had a
large holding in 1880 by the standards of others, enlarged by the two shares
which came from ‘Ali being headman. By 1895 this had become 5½ out of 36,
and remained the branch’s share in 1921. The remarks in the third and fourth
statement of 1922, that the Hamuri headman objected to paying dues for registration
by haqq al-qarar which had been paid forty years previously, confirm that
the resettlement of rights was not without some tension. Two of ‘Ali’s sons were
among the particular individuals accused in the criminal case.
Transfers of land between 1880 and 1921
The inference that, in conditions of conflicting claims to land rights in Bait
Ra’s, it was the tax register of 1895 that formed the basis of entitlement in
1921/22 has important implications for our understanding of property under late
Ottoman rule of Arab lands. Private property in land was not created outright
by tapu registration in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It took time for
disputes to be settled and for people to adjust to the new institutions. Despite the
internal disagreement evident when tapu registration first commenced in the late
1870s, Bait Ra’s was not a village which experienced great change in the cultivating
population from 1880 to 1930. On the contrary there seems to have been continuity
in the cultivating population, whatever the discontinuities in official record.
Hasan al-Sabbah’s heirs were eventually given land title forty years after he had
claimed to be a headman of the village. The other principal families of the Bani
Ta‘an – those of Matar and ‘Umar al-‘Uwaida, of ‘Abdul-‘Aziz and of Jum‘a
– surely could not have entered the village through purchase, for the diversity and
extent of their taxable holdings in 1895 was as great as those of any tapu holder
of 1880. Apart from the heirs of Hasan and Salih al-Sabbah and a person named
Qaftan ‘Alaiyan from al-Bariha no new landholders were registered in 1921; and
there was only one shareholder of 1880 who was given rights in 1921 despite not
having held an arable plot in 1895, Yusuf Abu Salim. The 1921 resettlement thus
looks like an official attempt to give title to those who had already long been in
possession and had paid the relevant taxes. Ironically it was not until Ottoman
rule had ended that rights to land were finally officially settled and the authority
of the tapu land registry was accepted by the landholders.
In the meantime the authority of other offices of government was accepted.
Sales of land, in the form of a share in plough land, occurred through the shar‘i
courts, even if they were not registered officially in the tapu office. Most of these
sales referred to holdings that can be identified in the 1895 tax register, although
no explicit mention of that register is made in the court summaries. Of the
thirteen shar‘i court cases concerning Bait Ra’s between 1912 and 1920 which
we have come across in the record, six concerned sales of land. 24
It goes without saying that those transfers registered in the shar‘i court whose
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Two plains villages