Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Introduction | 1
Disputes over property are the bread and butter of courts and lawyers, banal
yet central to social relations. The two short notices concerning the judgment
of this case reveal certain of the terms of ownership of land in late Ottoman
southern Syria. They may thus serve to introduce the conceptual and historical
issues explored in this book.
Persons and things
Anthropological analyses have long considered property as a social relation
between persons concerning material or immaterial ‘things’. 2 How then are the
persons and the objects in the social relationship of ownership defined in the
notices above?
The persons are of two kinds: institutional personae and individual persons.
Anthropology generally focuses on the second, but let us begin with the first.
Central to the making of property here are the court, the tapu office, and the
governor’s office above them. The court issues the basic notice of the judgment
in Arabic, dated in the Ottoman financial calendar, whereas the notice sent to
the tapu office is in Turkish with the date of the decision in the hijri calendar.
The institutional personae have defined responsibilities: the court to judge by the
law on the challenge mounted against the original sale, the tapu office to amend
the title registers and issue new deeds accordingly, and the governor’s office to
oversee implementation of the judgment, all the more so as the challengers to
the sale were refusing to hand over the deeds they had received for the land.
The language of the court is formal and technical in both Ottoman Turkish
and Arabic, the latter the mother tongue of the villagers. The double forms of
dating reflect the court’s character as part of Ottoman government as well as its
august Islamic genealogy.
Before the institutional personae framing property relations stand the individual
parties to the dispute. Although all are men from the same village, they have
different statuses in the court case. The original owner of the 1½ shares, Yusuf
al-Suwaidan, appears in the register but not in the court where he is represented by
sheikh Na’il al-Gharaiba. Sheikh Na’il is the only individual granted an honorific
designation, a political distinction coherent with his capacity to act for another
villager before the court. Lastly, those to whom Yusuf al-Suwaidan is judged to
have transferred the land appear formally as two individuals; the notice to the
registry, however, reveals that they stand for other kin in the transaction, one
brother for four brothers and a father for himself and his son.
The dispute did not question the status of Yusuf al-Suwaidan as owner nor his
power to transfer his land. Rather the six challengers argued, and their argument
was at first accepted by the registry, that they had sufficient common interest in
the land to contest its alienation to a third party. In the end, their claim to a right
to challenge the transfer was overridden by the judgment of the court.
On what basis was the judgment made? Essentially, the definition of common
interest, indicated by the term halit ve şerik, had been narrowed to co-ownership.
We return to this below.
2