Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Figure 11.7 Holdings of `Abdul-Ghani al-Shahada’s descendants in 1933
tion of the land for the various members of the Baibars family from whom they
perhaps borrowed money to finance their part of the purchases. 71
Perhaps the most remarkable of all the sales is that by the major leader of the
Gharaiba, Qasim Muhammad al-Ibrahim, of all his land to the sons of Khalaf
Shahada. The explanation of the family is that he was generous (karim al-nafs)
and gave to all; he represented the interests of the most disparate of persons,
acting as a true leader and an educated man, an efendi as the scribe of the
shar‘i court termed him in one entry. This sale by Qasim al-Muhammad, who
represented the political honour of the Gharaiba to those who stood out for their
trading wealth, may seem inauspicious, even scandalous. Qasim had no surviving
sons, although his daughter, married into the family, enjoyed particular respect.
The prominence of land transactions within the village and of sales to the
Baibars during the First World War raises questions concerning the role of access
to money and credit in land transactions in Hawwara. Separate registers for
mortgage debts (faragh bi-’l-wafa’) exist only from 1913 for ‘Ajlun. Before this
time we can but guess to what degree the members of prosperous households lent
money to other cultivators of the village in the decades before the First World
War, although we have seen Badra, wife of Mufaddi, obtain land in return for a
debt. Impressionistic evidence suggests a shift from long-distance trade with the
ports of Palestine to development of shops in the village and individual debt to
financiers such as Sa‘d ‘Ali Basha and his wife in al-Bariha and a variety of traders
in Irbid and al-Husn. 72 With the exception of the Shahada line, by the 1920s the
Gharaiba, likewise, appear more as borrowers than as lenders.
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Hawwara