Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

It appears that at the time land was registered in ‘Abdullah’s name, his father
Muhammad was still alive. This is rather exceptional: the more usual pattern was
for fathers to endow older sons with land but to retain legal control over the
rest, often privileging a younger son, who might be from a second wife. As we
saw in the case of ‘Abdul-Rahman Tannash above, households tended to divide
according to wives/mothers of sons. That the brothers continued to farm together
for many years may reflect the links with the ‘Assaf family of Yafat al-Nasira,
orchestrated by Hasun, the senior wife and mother of ‘Abdullah. Three of the
four sons of Muhammad married women who were relatives of Hasun; only
Salih married a woman from a family of Hawwara, the ‘Ubini, from whom his
father Muhammad had taken his second wife.
Exchange with families in Yafa of Nazareth was not repeated in the marriages
of the children of the four sons. Indeed one of the marriages, that of Hamad
with Warda al-‘Assaf, ended in divorce in 1908 although the couple had four
children. In 1913 Warda sued her former husband. In the court case, Warda
was identified as from Yafat al-Nasira but she noted that she lived in a house
in Hawwara from where her grandfather hailed; with the support of testimony
from ‘Abdul-Rahman Muhammad, her husband’s half-brother, and from a relative
of her daughter Fiddiya’s husband, she demanded and received two of the four
milk cows, three of the four goats, and the six kids she claimed Hamad owed her
and three hundred qurush still due from her prompt dower (mahr muqaddam). 24
Warda’s daughter Fiddiya was married to Sulaiman al-Rujub in an exchange
marriage whereby her father Hamad obtained a second wife, Naufa al-Rujub. 25
This marriage, where Hamad gave their daughter in return for a new wife, was
unlikely to have pleased Warda, although it is not clear whether it preceded or
followed her divorce. In any case the marriage did not end in good long-term
relations with the Rujub family. Early in 1921, following Hamad’s death, Fiddiya
formally sold her 1½q of the 9q inherited from Hamad to her brother Yusuf along
with any rights in the family house of three rooms and the two wells. 26 This was
followed immediately by a claim to inheritance against Yusuf and his four sisters
made by Naufa Muslih Rujub as wife and mother of Ibrahim al-Hamad. 27 In this
Hamad is said to have left 6q of land, a camel, a horse and a three-room house.
Naufa settled for the sum of 2,000 common piasters (qurush ra’ij al-balad), no
grain and no animals. The sum is tiny when one compares it with dowries; in
earlier years these could reach 10,000 common piasters. But it too suggests a real
break between the Jammal and the Rujub, from which Naufa hailed and into
which Fiddiya had married, or, at the very least, a resistance by all the women
concerned to Yusuf al-Hamad’s appropriation of all the inheritance on which
five women had a claim. Only eighteen months later, Yusuf’s wife Thurayya,
daughter of his uncle Salih al-Muhammad, was to appear in court to obtain a
khul‘ divorce by giving up the 42 majidi riyals due in prompt mahr and the 300
common piasters in deferred mahr. 28
When we interviewed Khadija, she made no secret about preferring her husband
and his household to that of her brother; later in life Khadija was known by
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Hawwara