Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 12
old and, although the 12 qirat were registered in the name of his father, family
memory recalls an informal partition between father and son with each holding
a zalama (6q). Although Ibrahim was to inherit all 12q of land, he and his sons
specialized in breeding and trading of cattle and thoroughbred horses in the
Jordan Valley; he knew well conditions in the çiftlik lands between Baisan and
Tall al-Arba‘in. Mahmud said that his father had owned two hundred head of
cattle, which remained in the Ghaur under a herdsman named ‘Ali ‘al-Ghawarni’
Muhammad al-Mufdi. But Ibrahim al-Husain’s greater fame was to have had 14
thoroughbred horses. Horses were not owned in the manner of cows or sheep.
While Ibrahim had fully owned a stallion ‘Shain’, his mares were owned in shares.
The principle was that if there were two partners (sharik) the first foal went to
the person who fed the mare (and the foal until 16 months of age) and the second
foal to the co-sharer, after which the partnership (shirka) would be disbanded;
similarly with three or four co-sharers. Pedigree in horses followed the mare in
the legal tradition. Thus, Ibrahim’s 14 horses entailed a skein of relations across
the villages of the Ghaur and the Kura. 35
This successful network of relations is mirrored in Ibrahim’s almost legendary
marital history (Figure 12.4). His first marriage followed family paths: to Baika
an inheriting daughter of his uncle Hasan who bore him a daughter ‘Adhra in
1882. 36 A few years later he married Sa‘diya, known as al-Dabbakhiya, from Kufr
Abil who bore a son and a daughter Dalla; family legend has it that Sa‘diya stole
a pot of money from Hasan’s house but they fetched her back on horseback
whereupon she threw herself into a well while her relatives were there; she was
fished out alive with a rope before nightfall and was divorced along with another
wife on the spot. 37 The other wife at the time may have been the woman whose
name neither Mahmud al-Ibrahim nor Ni‘ma al-Muhammad could remember, but
who was said to have had a mahr of an impossible size (6 açhiya), the beautiful
(masjuna) married woman whom Ibrahim met, persuaded to leave her husband,
and then married for forty kis. 38 Doubtless to calm the household, and in a move
certainly not against his mother’s wishes, Ibrahim was then to marry his mother’s
brother’s daughter Ni‘ma ‘Ali ‘Ubaid in a lasting marriage producing at least five
children, three of whom survived their parents. Thereafter Ibrahim took as wife
Manifa As‘ad al-‘Abdul-‘Aziz of Rihaba whose only child Muhra was to marry
a man in Baisan. A few years later Ibrahim was to marry Subha Salih al-Muqbil
in what appears an exchange marriage with his eldest daughter ‘Adhra marrying
Subha’s brother Muhammad Salih. This family marriage was also to last, with
Subha bearing Mahmud and Husain (who was to die young). Ibrahim again remarried,
taking Hana Salih al-Ahmad of Bait Idis (who bore him two sons). Thus
in 1910 Ibrahim’s household comprised 16 persons but was of limited complexity:
his mother Filwa (aged 80), himself (aged 46), his wives Ni‘ma (aged 41), Subha
(aged 30), Manifa (aged 30) and Hana (aged 27) and their ten young children. 39
Mahmud did not have very clear memories of the workings of his father’s
household. This was for two reasons. First, in his youth and for many years after
his father’s death, Mahmud worked as a trader (jallab) in cattle largely in the
220