Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Figure 12.2 Marriage links of Ahmad Khalifa Sa`d al-Ahmad
the division of the crop was half-half. A condition of the tenure was that the
children would weed, especially his sister Fiddiya, who was six years older than
Ahmad, and would help in the harvest. The children would also glean (ghamar).
This arrangement continued until the time when Ahmad was 5 or 6 and all the
males of the family had to leave the village for a period of a year, staying in the
nearby village of Ausara, because a distant relative had killed a man of the other
half of the village and it was a year before the diya payment (jamal naum) was
agreed and accepted. 18
In the years just before Ahmad married, the family household had consisted
of his father, his father’s second wife, his brother Sa‘d who by then was married
and took care of the cows, his brother Muhammad who was married and took
care of the sheep and goats, his younger brother ‘Abdul-Rahman and himself.
Sa‘d had married Khadra al-Ahmad from the village of Ausara in an exchange
marriage with his sister Sa‘da. Muhammad had married ‘A’isha ‘Ali al-‘Awad
al-Mustafa, a cousin of ‘Ali Qasim whom we shall meet below, in an exchange
marriage with his sister Fiddiya marrying Sulaiman ‘Ali al-‘Awad.
Ahmad noted that he had been a qarut, having lost his mother. By the time he
was 13 or 14 in the early 1920s, Ahmad and his younger brother ‘Abdul-Rahman,
had come to tend a number of cows and to spend much of their time out of
the village grazing them. But there was a plague that decimated the herd, and so
for two years (1925–26) when he was 15 and 16 he had gone to Palestine and
worked at harvesting in the area of Nazareth and Mulabbas, earning about seven
qurush a day in cash.
When he was 19 Ahmad married his cousin (FFBD) Amina ‘Abdul-Rahman
al-Ahmad who was four years older than him. 19 Amina had earlier married
another cousin, Mahmud Musa Hamd al-Ahmad (her FBSS), but her first husband
appears to have died young. 20 Amina was the only child of the second marriage
of ‘Abdul-Rahman, Ahmad’s grandfather’s brother, who at the time of tapu
215
Kufr `Awan