Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 11
Ahmad al-Qallab. 66 In the 1895 tax register, finalized before the sale, Khalaf was
registered with only a house (holding 41); indeed it was not until 1920, after
his death, that the land was entered in the tax register in the names of his sons
(holding 120). His cousin Muhammad ‘Ali Shahada also had a house in 1895
(holding 40), see Figures 11.5 and 11.7. Khalaf was to die in 1912 followed by
his unmarried son Muhammad in 1917. 67 His four surviving sons made three
major purchases in the difficult years for cultivators after the First World War.
Purchases totalling 20½ qirat were registered in their names in tapu mutations
of January, March and November 1919, mostly from the Ghanaim family (13½q)
which had first bought two half-shares of land in 1892 and 1893 but by 1933
had nothing. 68 In 1925 Khalaf’s sons bought a further six qirat from Qasim
Muhammad al-Gharaiba. 69 Between 1895 and 1925 the family bought a total
of 38½q of land traceable in the tapu registers; at the 1933 cadastre the four
brothers held 44q between them.
Unlike so many other households of farmers that were subdividing, shrinking
in size, and struggling with debt over the same years, the household of the four
sons of Khalaf was flourishing. The son of Falih Khalaf described the household
of his youth as composed of the four brothers with four camels, two horses, a
workhorse (kadish), two mules, eight oxen and between 150 and 300 sheep. They
owned, he remembered, 40q of land, for which they hired four ploughmen from
the village for a quarter of the crop. Of the marriages of the children of the four
brothers, four of their daughters married cousins (one girl ‘Aliya Falih al-Khalaf
married two cousins, whether following divorce or widowhood is unclear).
As the number of transport animals suggests, the family was as much in trade
as in cultivation. Their purchases of land represented the investment of trading
capital. Khalid Falih Khalaf al-Shahada, after study in the Technical School in
‘Amman, was to open a family shop for building materials in Irbid in the 1930s.
But shopkeeping like trading not being a noble profession in the eyes of the
village, Khalid did not mention his father’s village shop of which we have a
record in the civil court records from 1922 and which presumably had existed
for some years before that date. 70
The purchases by the sons of Khalaf al-Shahada follow a preceding series of
purchases by a Syrian trading family of Irbid, the Baibars, during the First World
War. This was the first time in the records of Hawwara that non-resident traders
acquired title to land, doing so from several farming families: Rumi, Jammal,
Shar‘, Gharaiba and Abu Nasir between September 1914 and June 1916. Each
of these purchases was in conjunction with a branch of the Sabbah line of the
Gharaiba, the four sons of Muhammad Hamd al-Sabbah, in a kind of partnership
of 50 per cent to the Baibars and 50 per cent to the sons of Muhammad Hamd.
The Sabbah were established cultivators of Hawwara, with two houses in the
names of Muhammad and ‘Ali al-Sabbah’s sons in 1883, the sons of Muhammad
having purchased land in 1882 from Yusuf Suwaidan, and the sons of Hamd from
Ibrahim ‘Uthman al-Husain in 1893 (see Chapter 9). Presumably the Sabbah, who
acquired 15q of land in the course of the First World War, assured the cultiva-
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