Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

The complaint to Istanbul by the villagers of Hawwara was that, as a result of
influence in government circles, an outsider and his associates imposed themselves
on long-standing cultivators. It was a complaint of false representation; the
phrases praising a government initiative to establish facts on the ground are of
note. A second issue was the basis on which villagers were to obtain title, by
long-standing tenure and payment of tax (hakk-ı karar) or not (bedel-i misl).
According to this complaint Na’il Ibrahim al-Gharaiba had been recognized
as the sheikh responsible for tax payments in the village and had attempted,
perhaps with a view to acquiring tapu rights to land, to dispossess a number of
the other cultivators of their rights to plough land.
Hawwara boasts fine soil for the growing of wheat and lentils, both commercial
products. Today in the village the remains can still be seen of two vast compounds,
each with a reception divan, dwelling and agricultural storage rooms – that of
Na’il Ibrahim and his brothers and that of ‘Abdullah Ahmad Abu Kirsanna. These
were powerful commercial agricultural compound households. The şikayet makes
it clear that through commercial networks sheikh Na’il possessed contacts not
only with the mutasarrıf but also with others, presumably engaged in the grain
trade, who belonged to the political and economic elite of Damascus. Once the
complaint reached the Porte, however, it appears to have succeeded in opening an
investigation into the matter. Unfortunately the only source for the unfolding of
the case is the log of correspondence with the vilayet. 45 The details of the decision
are thus unknown; what is clear from the tapu registration is that sheikh Na’il
was denied any share in the land but equally that the village had to pay bedel-i
misl, ‘Abdullah Ahmad’s request for hakk-ı karar having been apparently refused.
In Chapter 9 we shall analyse the character of Hawwara’s registration and the
consequences inside the village of the costly legal contest.
Given this background, where control over land had been successfully challenged
in the months just before registration, it would have proved difficult
to define plots on the ground for the holders. 46 Thus the cultivators’ logic of
distributing land by shares, expressed in terms of ploughs (faddans), was accepted
by the tapu registrar. This appears to have provided a legal precedent, for, as we
shall see, land in many villages of the region was thereafter also to be registered
as shares.
Registration of land in shares
To understand the relation between earlier systems of recording and tapu
registration of land in shares we may turn to a few original documents submitted
in the course of the registration of the village of Makhraba a few years later. Exceptionally
we find bound into the registers of the tapu register three documents:
a statement concerning the village drawn up by local authorities; a note from the
tapu scribe to the finance director of ‘Ajlun; and the response from the finance
director. 47 In the case of Makhraba the attestations by local headmen appear to
have taken the place of yoklama procedures. Makhraba, unlike Hawwara, was a
small village where land rights were not obviously the object of contest.
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Introduction of bureaucratic registration