Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 11
her husband’s name, ‘Ifnan, not by her family name Jammal. It would seem that
Fiddiya had made something of the same choice: once Fiddiya received payment
from her brother for her share in her father’s estate, the terms of the statement
in the court make clear that she no longer had the slightest claim on her family
house. As one woman of Hawwara who, like Naufa, claimed rights of inheritance
against her husband’s sons remarked to the land registration commission in 1933:
‘… since it was not the custom at that time for women to take their inheritance,
I was unable to obtain from the courts (amam al-‘adala) my manifest rights
even though I never [formally] relinquished those rights’. 29 It was not until the
mid-1920s that village authorities and families in this plains village felt obliged to
declare female heirs to government offices, and this in spite of the great volume of
interaction with government offices. Sisters were encouraged, doubtless pressured,
to give their rights in inheritance to their brothers, and so, too, widows to their
sons or to their husband’s sons by other wives. Even in the case of women gifting
their inheritance to their brothers, as in the case of two sisters Fatima and ‘Aziza
to their two adult brothers Husain and Hasan and minor brother ‘Ali, sons of
Salih al-Bakr in 1913, the terms in which the head scribe and the judge attest the
sisters to have declared the gift are harsh: Fatima and ‘Aziza state ‘that our two
[brothers] have of ours neither gold nor silver, neither copper nor lead, neither
estate nor inheritance, neither accounting nor error in accounting, neither cow
nor horse, donkey, mule, 30 camel, sheep or goat, neither land nor standing crop,
neither plough nor grain, neither debt nor anything in kind, neither trade item,
mattress, furnishing or seed, neither fee nor rent, neither little nor much, neither
whole nor part, nor anything at all that may form the object of litigation – to
this we swear to Allah the Almighty, the Magnificent’. 31
In this competitive and commercial economy of plough agriculture and animal
raising, land passed between men and only very rarely to women. As Warda al-
‘Assaf’s case suggests, women’s only uncontested right was to their mahr, which
at the outset was frequently set high and in cash terms, although it is less clear
that it was all paid, let alone to the bride. It was difficult to obtain straightforward
answers to questions about mahr from older people in Hawwara: mahr was
generally evaluated in cash but might also include animals and grain. 32 But one
reason for the reticence may reflect what the divorce cases from Hawwara in the
shar‘i court records suggest: that all the prompt dower had often not been paid
at marriage. Unlike women’s claim to inherit land, the mahr remained due in
local tradition as in law. It may be that women like Warda were able to obtain
household animals against the sum due them as mahr. Furthermore, a way round
the high price of mahr was to arrange for exchange marriages – usually of sons
and daughters but occasionally, as in the case of Fiddiya and Naufa, of a daughter
for a second wife, or even, albeit rarely, two daughters as wives for their fathers.
Thus Hamad gave Fiddiya for a wife from the Rujub and married his son Yusuf
and daughter Hadiya to the son and daughter of his brother ‘Abdullah. And
‘Abdullah’s son Rashid and daughter Khadija married a daughter and a son of
‘Ifnan Abu Tair. Here again we find a change in marriage forms between the first
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