Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 12
This however did not happen; the household did not divide. Mahra died five
years later in 1915 followed in 1918 by her daughter Fatima. Ahmad al-Nimr
was conscripted into the Ottoman army in the First World War never to return.
Ahmad’s daughter Khadra grew up in the household, her mother ‘A’isha remarrying
her deceased husband’s brother Mustafa, whose first wife Fiddiya had died
young before the beginning of the World War leaving her small daughters, Yumna
and Waliya. Nimr himself died in 1920 at the age of 56. In 1922, Mustafa al-Nimr
died at the age of 34. And then three years later Muhammad al-Nimr died aged
35 leaving his wife ‘A’isha and daughters Ni‘ma and Fiddiya, his daughter Hamda
having died many years earlier.
Thus, by 1925, of the four sons of Nimr only the youngest, Khalil, survived to
head the household composed of his own wife and children and the two widows
of three brothers and their young female children. Khalil was then not yet thirty.
Yumna remembers that she was little over three when her mother died. Her father
Mustafa having remarried, she went to live in her mother’s brother’s house. It was
only when she became marriageable that Yumna returned to her uncle Khalil’s
house. Within two years she was married to a relative on her father’s side, who
was, more importantly, the son of her paternal great-aunt (FFZ) Tamam. Tamam,
Yumna implied, lived as much in Khalil’s household, where she would have been
the most senior woman, as in her marital house during those years.
Yumna’s mahr was written up in a document (wasl al-mahr) by the imam of
the village. It consisted of a qirat of common land (‘qirat watat’) and 12 old olive
trees (‘irq zaitun rumi) lying just below the village on the east in the field called
khallat Hammad. 65 Yumna noted, however, that as a result of squabbling between
the two sides at the time of the wedding only one sheep had been slaughtered
for the guests; likewise it turned out that the ‘urja headband decorated with gold
coins was but a loan. 66
The household into which Yumna married was small, comprising her husband
Muhammad and his mother Tamam. Muhammad’s brother Ahmad had gone to
serve in the Ottoman army during the First World War and like Ahmad al-Nimr
never returned. His sister Khadra had married Nimr’s half-brother Muhammad’s
son Ahmad several years earlier.
The household farmed some five qirat of land of their own with two working
oxen; 67 besides the oxen, they had two milk-cows and many chickens but no
sheep or goats. Yumna recalled that all she ever did in farming was to take food
out to her husband in the fields and only with summer crops drill-sown in rows,
rather than broadcast, did she or her mother-in-law help her husband with the
cultivation.
The house into which Yumna had married was still standing in 1992, on one
side of the compound where the modern house in which we were sitting had been
built. It was composed of one very large room, the back part consisting of a raised
platform about a metre from the floor. The whole structure had three cross-arches
running back to front, between which had been laid branches supporting the
mud roof. Across the back wall was a double semi-enclosed whitewashed ledge,
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