Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part two | 7
encountered with others in connection with ‘digging up buried objects’. The
village of Bait Ra’s stands astride the Hellenistic and Umayyad site of Capitolias;
after the issuance of an antiquities law in 1874 the Ottoman administration was
concerned to have the claims of the state to antiquities respected and Da’ud
‘Abbada appears to have played his part in that regard. 12
A fortnight later Hasan al-Sabbah is recalled and questioned more intensively. 13
He fails to produce written documentation of his appointment as headman.
Although he acknowledges that a headman is elected by the people of the village,
not simply appointed by the state, he defends his surprising statement that if a
headman is dismissed from his post, he is expelled from the house where he lives,
maintaining that this is ‘a custom’ of their villages. But in the course of al-Sabbah’s
testimony it appears that another man from the neighbouring village of Hakama
was also claiming the office of headman and that al-Sabbah had run foul of Da’ud
‘Abbada concerning his right to hold land in Bait Ra’s by hakk-ı karar. We shall
return to tapu registration in Bait Ra’s in Chapter 9, but a word is due concerning
what the court case indicates about tapu registration in 1878–79.
The Tanzimat reforms invited regional leaders to serve as elected officers for
two-year terms on formal juridical and administrative bodies, and recast village
government into the form of an elected council of elders (ihtiyar heyeti) and of
a headman with notary and administrative responsibilities. All of these legal
personae appear in the statements that certify the award of tapu right in the
registers of title kept in the district headquarters. During the years in question,
there were two basic statements attesting the entries for a village: one from
the village level and the second at the level of the administrative council of
the district. 14 Attestation (tasdik) to title provides a chart of the legal personae
whose relations frame property. This said, the statements in the register would
suggest that the yoklama scribe worked alone in these years. The depositions in
the court case reveal, however, that in 1878–79 the higher-level signatories on the
administrative council and other officials in the tapu administration were more
directly involved on the ground than the registers might lead us to believe.
Da’ud ‘Abbada counters Hasan al-Sabbah’s claims concerning the office of
headman by saying that he had opposed the granting of land rights to al-Sabbah
and his group by hakk-ı karar since the latter were outsiders (yabancı) to the
village. 15 He notes that he had refused verbally the registration done by an
official named ‘Ajaj Bey who, he implies, had recognized their rights to land by
hakk-ı karar. Because of his objection, the register was not transmitted to the
administrative council. Da’ud ‘Abbada thus implies that his own refusal of the
award of land right to al-Sabbah was the true cause of al-Sabbah’s hostility.
At the time the tapu officials in the village appear to be an official named ‘Ajaj
Bey and the tapu scribe of the district Mikha’il Bahri. 16 Asked about ‘Ajaj Bey,
Mikha’il Bahri states that he is uncertain as to whether the latter had been a
yoklama or a tapu scribe. Mikha’il Bahri states that when the mutasarrıf Salim
Bey came to the district, an order came from the tapu inspector of the vilayet
to hand over all papers and registers to the Hauran tapu office, from which ‘Abd
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