Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

each being registered as owning 1½q in the cadastral records in a joint holding.
Amina was to die before she reached 45, leaving her one son to inherit the two
olive trees she had received as mahr and her 1½ qirat of common land.
Family histories of Hasan and Husain ‘Abdul-Rahman ‘Amaira
At the time of the 1884 tapu registration two brothers, Hasan and Husain
al-‘Abdul-Rahman, were registered as owners, the first with a full 24 qirat and
the second with 12. 27 Specialized in farming (li-’l-shadad), Hasan was to leave
his land to six sons and four daughters, whereas Husain, specialized in cattle
herding, was to leave only one son. 28 But the men of both families were known
as ‘cowboys’ – according to Ni‘ma Muhammad Mahmud al-‘Abid who married
a grandson of Hasan ‘Abdul-Rahman – quite unlike other men of the ‘Amaira
such as ‘Abdul-Rahim ‘Ali ‘Ubaid, who was religiously learned and had a shop
selling clothes, sweets and brass utensils from early in the twentieth century with
regular deliveries via Dar‘a on a 3 per cent commission from a trader in Damascus.
Ni‘ma recounted the tales of Husain ‘Abdul-Rahman’s clashes with the ‘Adwan
bedouin of the Jordan Valley. And she remembered that years later when the first
truck was purchased by Ibrahim Muhammad al-Dahun (family-6) and Jamil and
‘Ali al-‘Abdul-Rahim (family-28), the grandsons of Hasan commandeered it and
drove it all round the village. 29
We here consider in turn the family history of the line of Hasan, into which
Ni‘ma married, and that of Husain ‘Abdul-Rahman, through the words of his
grandson Mahmud al-Ibrahim.
Ni‘ma Muhammad Mahmud al-‘Abid: cattle raising
Ni‘ma Muhammad Mahmud al-‘Abid was born in 1906 and so was 12 when
the Ottoman Empire fell. Around that time her father died, although her mother
was to live until almost 90, dying in 1954. Ni‘ma’s father’s share in the land was
14⁄5q as was that of his full brother Musa and each of the three sons of their
father’s second wife. Following her father’s death the children’s life was hard
– Ni‘ma remembers having to glean after the harvest. Her mother’s brother
Ahmad Muhammad al-Da’ud (family-4) took care of them but as they were considered
orphans they also received alms (zakat) from her maternal grandmother’s
relatives, the Nawasira (family-6).
A few years after the end of the First World War Ni‘ma married Falih Mahmud
al-Hasan in an exchange marriage where her brother ‘Ali married her husband’s
sister Khadra. Her husband’s father Mahmud al-Hasan had never returned from
his military service in the Ottoman army in World War I, one of at least twentyfive
men of the village to die in the war. 30 When Ni‘ma married after the First
World War, conditions were difficult; she proudly remembers participating in
two parties from the village that crossed the river to scavenge guns and supplies
abandoned by the Turkish soldiers before they crossed the Jordan River fleeing
towards Damascus. 31 In those years there was ‘absolutely nothing’, and so her
mahr was non-existent though she wore her mother’s headdress of gold coins
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Kufr `Awan