Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

to 31, and in 14 of the mutations there were supposedly no daughters. A tapu
mutation did not yet require a certificate from the shar‘i court, nor of course
from the civil registry whose registers were only prepared in 1910.
The absence of all tapu mutations of inheritance for twenty-six years from
1913 to 1939 indicates a policy of laissez-faire towards the sub-district of the Kura
from the last years of Ottoman rule through the period of the British Mandate
during the 1920s and 1930s. There were incidents of revolt in the Kura during
the Faisali period and the 1920s. 41 The virtual absence of sales during the same
period is equally extraordinary. The consequence of this official dereliction was
that at the cadastral settlement of Khanzira in 1939 there was a large backlog
of claims to land.
The tax register was maintained over the same period with similar inconstancy.
Entries were added in respect of the tapu sales and the two cases registered in the
tapu office of a new plot of land and of a holding being abandoned, but only
in one case (number 199) in respect of inheritance. Five new entries in the tax
register (numbers 194–8) resulted from tapu sales up to 1912, entry number 193
relating to a new house. Thereafter 26 entries were added in 1923, of which 19
were of new houses or rooms (and one cave) and six were of new gardens. The
final two entries, numbers 226 and 227, corresponded to the two tapu mutations
of 1926 and 1930.
There is some evidence that the tax register was used for registering changes
in the possession of individually held plots that had occurred independently of
tapu mutations. Entry number 195, dated 1907, concerned the joint tapu holding
of three brothers and a fourth brother’s son, which in the 1895 tax list had been
registered as four separate holdings. The fourth brother’s son died leaving an only
daughter who sold her share to the son of one of her father’s uncles at the same
time as that uncle sold his share to someone else of the village. 42 Entry 195 was of
the uncle’s son’s four plots of plough land, transferred from his deceased cousin’s
holding (number 48) which in turn showed a corresponding deduction of those
plots. But the house and two olive-tree plots in holding 48 were not transferred
to holding 195. Instead, the new entry 195 had parts of arable plots transferred
from two other holdings belonging to people unrelated to the four brothers,
which did not correspond to an official transfer of title in the tapu registers. 43 It
appears that there may have been a division of labour between the two offices of
tax and tapu, whereby the latter concerned musha‘ holdings of common plough
land while the former registered changes in individually held plots. None of the
26 new entries of 1923 in the tax register, whether of gardens or houses, had
corresponding tapu mutations. As in Hawwara, the different ways of registering
holdings of plough land also caused difficulties. 44
Enough was said concerning Kufr ‘Awan to give an idea of the kinds of claims
to land made at the cadastral settlement of 1939. In Khanzira too a large number
of claims to land were made as part of the process of the 1939 cadastre. But to
enter into the details of these claims would require knowing the actors better
than we do.
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Two hill villages