Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

ut would appear to have come together only to make up the third group in the
Gharaiba half.
A second key to the contrasting forms of incorporation arises from differences
in the gap between title and possession in the two halves of the village. In the
Gharaiba half, apart from the four half-share holders incorporated into different
sub-groups who have just been considered, it was the big shareholders whose measure
of possession in 1895 did not match their entitlement – Na’il Gharaiba, his
brother Muhammad, his cousin ‘Abdullah al-Ahmad and Muhammad Ghazlan, all
of whose holdings would be redistributed among their heirs in 1921 after special
ruling of the Administrative Council. For all the other shareholders the measure of
their possession in 1895 matched their tapu entitlement. Here, property title and
the financial ability to manage cultivation lay behind the distinctness of the subgroups.
By contrast, for only nine of the twenty-five shareholders in the Shatnawi
half (including 88–92) did their tax holdings agree with their entitlement, while
two (nos 3 and 47) did not hold a tapu title. 60 It is as if rights to land depended
on membership in a group which reallotted land regularly among its members
according to their circumstances. Such an arrangement adapted to the changing
capabilities of its members as their households grew or diminished and as their
farming stock altered. But the group required collective discipline, not only to
manage reallotment of plots and holdings – for holding sizes too could vary in
this older system of fair-sharing – but also in harvesting and pooling resources.
The idiom of such a group was not of owning so much land, but of sharing
common resources and common demands according to the labour, animal and
human, which each member commanded. As stated at the end of the original
list of shareholders in 1876: ‘cultivation has always been joint; the distribution
has been made justly’. 61 Although legally any landholder of the village could
claim priority over outsiders wishing to buy land, the spirit of halit ve şerik was
more than that.
The different patterns of allotment thus express the basic conflict behind the
acquisition of land in Hawwara from the beginning of tapu registration, the
difference between a commercial idiom of property and an idiom of collectively
sharing burdens and resources. Both involved the formation of groups. But in
the one, necessarily more individualistic, the strongest ties were to relations of
kin and clan; in the other, to partners in cultivation.
Land allotment in 1933
We end the section on Hawwara by referring to the 1933 field map (colour
plate Map 9.1) to illustrate the principle of synchronic equalization. The map
depicts the allotment of fields to different subsections of the village.
Field maps were not prepared by the Ottoman administration in ‘Ajlun to
accompany the tapu registers. Plots were described in terms of their borders to
south, east, north and west, while the borders of villages might be described more
minutely in terms of landmarks. Where landholdings were registered in the form
of shares in a few large blocks of land, there was no call for field maps, since
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Two plains villages