Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 12
presumably, his parents continued to live and work. 11 The father and the two sons
would then effectively have each obtained 1½ qirat.
It was the tradition in this family for a man to arrange the transfer of his
land as he wished, although he had an obligation to assist his son with marriage.
Thus, to go back one generation, had Salih not divided his land between his son
Hasan and his half-brother ‘Abdul-Karim, the literal application of the law would
have led to his half-brother, ‘Abdul-Karim, born the year the land was registered,
being entirely excluded. Furthermore, the 12 qirat of land would have been
divided between Salih’s surviving wife, each of his three daughters, and Hasan.
Pre mortem gifts were entirely within the law and in both cases permitted fathers
in this modest family to transfer land to sons as they wished during their lifetime
and to avoid its dispersal to daughters.
But let us return to Husna. She married into another small family of the same
farming section of the village, to Qasim the eldest son of Salah al-Qasim, a man
who at the time of his son’s marriage had two other sons and a daughter from
his first wife. Salah was later to take a second wife who bore him another three
sons. Husna’s mahr was two rumi olive trees and the plot of land on which they
stood. Doubtless Husna also received a little jewellery and a few clothes, and
perhaps the two mattresses and pillows which a father should ideally give his
daughter at her marriage. But the mahr of which Husna spoke was not silver or
clothing but the two olive trees. The trees and land went first to her father, Husna
explained, but after his death reverted to her. In 1884 her husband’s grandfather
Qasim had been registered as owner of three olive trees but not of the land on
which they stood (see Table 10.1). 12 The plot belonged to the owner of another
ten trees on the same plot, a farmer from the family into which Husna’s older
sister Hisna and her brother Hasan were to marry.
Husna’s husband Qasim was some three years older than herself, just over
twenty, and shortly after the marriage, they established themselves as independent
economically from Qasim’s father Salah. Yet the couple continued to live in the
same house with Qasim’s father and brothers for many years until, after Husna’s
father’s death, they finally built a small house on the land at the edge of the
village where the two olive trees stood. When Qasim established his economic
independence, his father gave him two qirat of land but as the young couple had
very few work animals, he worked more as a ploughman (harrath) for others
than as a farmer on his own land. In the original registration of 1884, Qasim’s
grandfather Qasim had farmed jointly with both his brother Musa (who was
later to pre-decease Qasim without surviving children and hence all of whose
land was to revert to Salah al-Qasim’s line) and with two brothers (Mansur and
Muhammad al-‘Ubaid) of the powerful larger family into which Husna’s brother
Hasan and sister Tamam were later to marry. 13 This suggests that Qasim’s family
had earlier worked in conjunction with a family far better endowed with livestock
and hence that Qasim’s dependence on the plough animals of others was not novel
to his family. Husna’s memory of how farming had been organized in former
times was that according to the number of animals a person had, so much land
212