Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

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fetwa concerning a cultivator who has his home in one village where he threshes
the grain from land he cultivates in a second village, Isma‘il al-Ha’ik (d. 1702)
recognizes the right of the administrator to collect fees or rent, the term used
being ujra, for the land on which the cultivator has built his house and for his
use of the village grounds to thresh his grain. 37 The fetwa is noteworthy for a
slight archaism of idiom, the village being described as in the iqtita‘ of Zaid, but
more so for the power given to Zaid not only to collect a fee for the house plot
and use of the threshing grounds but also to prevent the cultivator from placing
his grain without permission on the threshing grounds of the village where he
lives but does not cultivate.
Elsewhere in the fetwa collections, the terms designating authorities in the
villages often do not refer to officials of the state. While the term za‘im al-qariya
indicates a tax collector, ustadh al-qariya and shaikh al-qariya denote village
headmen rather than government administrators. In one fetwa, ‘Ali al-‘Imadi (d.
1706) judges that having no legal document to prove his exemption from tax the
shaikh al-qariya like other villagers has to contribute his part of the tax (qism)
to the administrator. 38
The fetwas grapple with two issues: first, which taxes a landholder who does
not live in a village is liable to pay, and second, how to avoid injustice in tax
collection when there is substantial inequality in landholdings between persons
in a village.
The two issues come together in a fetwa of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-‘Imadi (d.
1641) where he supports the custom of a village distributing capitation taxes
according to wealth including the property of persons who do not live in the
village. ‘Abd al-Rahman likewise rules that Christian weavers, resident but without
any property, should not pay any part of the exceptional taxes (takalif ‘urfiya). 39
Al-Ha’ik also judges that ‘the people of a village’ should apportion exceptional
taxes on the basis of wealth, not a head count, and the fee for village watchmen
on the basis of a mixed criterion of landholding and head count. 40
Village-level leaders are described as trying to haul a cultivator back to a village
or to extract back taxes from the son of a man who had fled the village. 41 In several
fetwas the corporate ‘people of the village’ (ahl al-qariya) demand compliance
concerning tax payment and size of contributions. Moreover, the mufti rules
against the people of a village who demanded that Zaid contribute an excessive
amount in relation to the ploughs of land (faddans) he cultivates. 42
These fetwas suggest that governance did not end with the relations sketched
in the classical kanuns where a grant holder dealt with individual cultivators
unmediated save by the record of the register and the overseeing eye of the judge.
Government entailed more layered structures: ‘the people of the village’ and the
‘village head’ played central roles, and corporate village interest often acted long
before a higher-level administrator in disciplining cultivators. 43 This is a power of
self-governance that the muftis on occasion commended. Al-Nabulusi supported
the right of the people of a village to expel a man who failed to contribute his
portion of the tax burden. For him this collective interest was valid whereas a
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