Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

demand by the tax collector that a cultivator must live in a particular village
was not. 44
By the middle of the eighteenth century the muftis begin to oppose constraints
on the movement of cultivators and the imposition of double taxes on them.
But the counterpart to individual freedom was collective responsibility or autogovernance
by the village. The practical reasons for this are made clear in a discussion
by the mufti ‘Ali al-‘Imadi (d. 1706) of the principles and practice governing
the distribution of taxes within a village, an issue on which his son Hamid ibn
‘Ali (d. 1758) will also comment. 45 ‘Ali al-‘Imadi attempts to distinguish between
taxes by head or by wealth, and notably what the imposition by head should
be, imagining a village without landed property on the model of the taxation of
bedouins or Kurds. But his son Hamid throws up his hands at the attempt:
most of the taxes imposed on the villages in this day are neither for the preservation
of property nor that of bodies, indeed they are simply injustice and aggression,
and most of the expenses of the governor and his followers, the buildings
he uses and those of his soldiers, and what is paid to the envoys of the sultan,
God Almighty preserve him, who come with orders, bans and suchlike, all of that
is taken from the villages and they call it provisions. In our lands this is taken
twice a year and, on top of that, money and bribes to the aides and followers of
the local notables; so it has become the custom to divide all this according to the
number of ploughs (faddans) in the village or sometimes according to the units
of water in irrigated land. Thus the person who has a faddan or an hour of irrigation
will pay accordingly, regardless of whether a man, woman or youth. The
[older] principles … do not apply since none of these are for the preservation of
properties or persons. The only exceptions are … [penal taxes and blood-money
payments] and what is taken for soldiers sent by the commander to some villages
to protect crops and herds from bedouins and thieves … 46
Hamid ibn ‘Ali winds up his argument by saying that since the level of imposition
is so excessive and its legitimation so unclear, then it is logical to follow
the principle enunciated by Qadi Khan that the distribution of taxes by property
has priority. The custom of village people should stand. This discussion suggests
that, by the mid-eighteenth century, the distribution of taxes was a matter of
village management, with scarcely any reference to names of individuals in a
government tax register. A continuing tension between the emerging legal freedom
of the cultivator and village management of tax imposition and resources is
evident. 47
The counterpart to such village administration of tax distribution was monetarization
of tax payments organized through tax farming. Although Baber
Johansen has stated that the ulema condemned tax-farming, 48 the Damascene
muftis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rarely address the issue and
when they do, they appear less categorical. It is true that jurists such as Khair
al-Din al-Ramli and Ibn ‘Abidin denounce such practices. 49 So, too, the official
muftis Muhibb al-Din (d. 1602), ‘Abd al-Rahman (d. 1641), ‘Ali (d. 1706) and
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Debate in the 17th and 18th centuries