Beshara B. Doumani - Family Life in The Ottoman Empire - A Social History-Cambridge University Press (2017) PDF

FAMILY LIFE IN THE OT TOMAN
MEDITERRANEAN
In writings about Islam, women, and modernity in the Middle East,

family and religion are frequently invoked but rarely historicized.
Accessibly written and based on a wide range of local sources spanning
two centuries (1660–1860), this book shows that there is no such thing
as a typical Muslim or Arab family. Rather, it reveals dramatic regional
differences, even within the same cultural zone, in the ways that family
is understood, organized, and reproduced. By concentrating on fam-
ily life in the Ottoman Mediterranean, in particular in what is now
Lebanon and Palestine, Beshara Doumani skilfully uses examples of
family waqf endowments, lawsuits between kin, and other cases from
the shariʿa courts to reconstruct the encounters between kin and court
and kin in court. Through his comparative examination of the trans-
formations of family, property, and gender regimes, Doumani offers
a ground-breaking examination of the stories and priorities of ordi-
nary people. By doing so, he challenges prevailing assumptions about
modern Middle Eastern societies.
beshara b. doumani is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Mod-

ern Middle East History and the Director of Middle East Studies at
Brown University. He is the author of Rediscovering Palestine: Mer-
chants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (1995) and the editor
of Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender
(2003).
FA MI LY L I FE I N T H E
OT TOMAN
MEDITERRANEAN
A Social History
BESHARA B. DOUMANI
Brown University
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doi: 10.1017/9780511989605

C Beshara Doumani 2017
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Contents
List of Figures page vii

List of Maps ix
List of Tables x
Preface and Acknowledgments xiii
1 Maryam’s Final Word 1

1.1 A Copper Pot with Its Lid 6
1.2 Why Should We Care About Maryam ʿAnklis? 16
1.3 Property Devolution and Family Life 21
1.4 The Geography of Modernity 24
1.5 The Political and Spiritual Economies of Difference 32
1.6 Historicizing the Encounter between Kin and Court 34
1.7 Methodological Choices 38
1.8 Chapter Overview 43
2 Hamida’s Children Come of Age: The Shariʿa Court and Its
Archives 47
2.1 The Shariʿa Court Registers as Communal Textual Memory 54
2.2 Hamida’s Children Go to Court 64
2.3 Lawsuit Narratives 73
2.4 The Centrality of Waqfs 83
2.5 Conclusion 100
3 Husayn’s and ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Designs: The Waqf as a Family
Charter 102
3.1 Husayn’s Design 105
3.2 ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Design 117
3.3 Waqf Preferences in the Absence of a Male Heir 129
3.4 Conclusion 132
4 Good Deeds: The Family Waqf as a Social Act 134
4.1 Who?: Class, Kinship, and Gender 141
4.2 Why?: Disciplinary, Supplemental, and Constitutive Waqfs 152
v
vi Contents
4.3 Rise of the Baraka Family: The Social Life of a Constitutive Waqf 166
4.4 Conclusion 185
5 Who’s In? Who’s Out?: The Waqf as a Boundary Marker 188
5.1 Four Patterns: No More, No Less 193
5.2 Pattern Two 199
5.3 Pattern One 208
5.4 Patterns Three and Four 213
5.5 Conclusion 222
6 Property and Gender: The Political Economy of Difference 224
6.1 Legal and Spiritual Economies 228
6.2 The Family Firm in Nablus 234
6.3 Urban Agriculture in Tripoli 238
6.4 The Tree and the Worm 248
6.5 Silk, Power, and Class 253
6.6 Co-cultivation Contracts 259
6.7 ʿAtika’s Options 264
6.8 Bustān vs. Dār 268
6.9 Conclusion 271
7 Fatima’s Determination 275
7.1 What if Fatima Lived in Nablus? 280
7.2 Endowing Family, Litigating Kinship 283
7.3 Understanding Fatima’s Determination 290
7.4 Challenges 294
Appendix: Note on the Tripoli Shariʿa Court Registers 301
Bibliography 312
Index 333
Figures
1.1 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of

appearance: family endowment (waqf dhurrı̄) page 8
appearance: acknowledgment (iqrār) 9
appearance: gift (hiba) 10
appearance: “auto-probate” (iqrār, hiba, mabarrāt) 11
1.5 Maryam ʿAnklis waqf (TICR 31:103) 12
1.6 Maryam ʿAnklis waqf (TICR 31:104) 13
2.1 First lawsuit between the Zaʿrur and Badawi families
(litigants in bold) 49
2.2 List of disputed properties inherited by the widower and
children of Hamida in 1706 (first lawsuit) 50
2.3 List of disputed properties in joint waqf by Nasir and
Ibrahim Zaʿrur in 1648 (second lawsuit) 51
2.4 Family tree of awlād (progeny of ) Zaʿrur (litigants in bold) 52
2.5 Original h.ujja: 1787 sale/purchase deed with additions 56
2.6 Original h.ujja: 1657 lawsuit 57
2.7 Copy of h.ujja: 1657 lawsuit 58
2.8 Notarized copy of a waqf (1638) 61
2.9 Notarized copy of a waqf endowed ten years earlier (1648/58) 62
2.10 Letter from Hasan Smadi to ‘Abd al-Fattāh Nimr, n.d. 75
3.1 Flow chart of the Husayni waqf, 1802 109
3.2 Husayni family tree according to the Husayni waqf, 1802 110
3.3 Khammāsh family tree 118
3.4 ʿAsbiyya lawsuit, 1857 130
4.1 Baraka family tree 168
4.2 Baraka double lawsuit 183
6.1 Nablus, circa 1898: view from the south 240
vii
viii List of Figures
6.2 Nablus, September 24, 1918: view from the west 241
6.3 Tripoli and environs, circa 1873 242
6.6 Orchards and olive groves: Tripoli, al-Mina, and Minya, circa
1925 245
6.7 Tripoli, circa 1930s: view to northwest from citadel 246
6.8 Tripoli, circa 1930s: view to southeast 247
6.9 Private musāqāt contract, Nablus, circa 1847 262
6.10 Tripoli, circa 1954: urban growth 272
6.11 Tripoli, circa 2015: urban growth 273
6.12 Nablus, circa 1994: urban growth 273
6.13 Nablus, circa 2000s: urban growth 274
7.1 Qalamoni family tree, according to an 1842 lawsuit 276
Maps
1 Ottoman atlas, 1803: lands of Palestine and Syria xxi

2 “Turkey in Asia,” 1851 xxi
3 Ottoman provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean, eighteenth
century xxii
4 Ottoman provinces and districts in the Eastern Mediterranean,
1896 xxiii
5 Ottoman administrative divisions in Bilad Al-Sham, 1914 xxiv
6 Shariʿa courts and qadi ranks in the Ottoman Empire,
eighteenth century xxv
ix
Tables
2.1 Types of lawsuits in the early eighteenth century page 63

2.2 Types of lawsuits in the first half of the nineteenth century 64
2.3 Types of cases registered in the Nablus and Tripoli shariʿa
court registers 76
2.4 Female participation in lawsuits during the early eighteenth
century 77
2.5 Lawsuits between kin during the first half of the nineteenth
century 78
2.6 Kinship relations between litigants in family lawsuits, early
eighteenth century 79
2.7 Kinship relations between litigants in family lawsuits,
1800–60 80
2.8 Types of lawsuits between kin in the early eighteenth century 80
2.9 Types of lawsuits between kin in the first half of nineteenth
century 81
2.10 Types of waqfs endowed in Nablus and Tripoli, 1660s–1730s,
1800–60 89
3.1 Differences in the waqfs of Nablus and Tripoli, 1660s–1730s,
1800–60 128
4.1 Status and male/female ratios of waqf endowers, 1660s–1730s 144
4.2 Male and female waqf endowers, 1660s–1730s, 1800–60 147
4.3 Holy days commonly listed in family waqfs for the
enactment of good deeds (mabarrāt) 154
4.4 Family waqf endowments by males and females according to
primary beneficiaries after and/or including self, 1800–60 162
5.1 Beneficiaries (aside from oneself ) in family waqf endowments 191
5.2 Basic patterns in designating beneficiaries in family waqfs 194
5.3 Incidence of beneficiary patterns in family waqfs endowed by
men and women in Tripoli and Nablus, 1660s–1730s 195
x
List of Tables xi
5.4 Incidence of beneficiary patterns in family waqfs endowed in
Tripoli and Nablus, 1800–60 196
6.1 Types of properties endowed in Tripoli and Nablus,
1660s–1730s 269
6.2 Types of properties endowed in Tripoli and Nablus, 1800–60 270
7.1 Qalamoni lawsuits 277
7.2 Qalamoni timeline 278
A.1 Comparison of original and photocopied registers of the
Tripoli shariʿa court 302
A.2 Tripoli shariʿa court registers: photocopy collection, Qasr
Nawfal 306
A.3 Nablus shariʿa court registers 310
Preface and Acknowledgments
Debates on Islam, women, and modernity routinely invoke notions of fam-

ily and shariʿa in support of this or that argument about the legacies of the
past and the possibilities of the future. But the more family and shariʿa are
ideologically mobilized, the less the relevance of historical knowledge to
what these concepts are tasked with explaining. This is why we know far
too little about the social history of family life and the instantiation of the
shariʿa in daily legal practices, especially for the early modern period. Thus,
the perennial questions in public discourse since the late nineteenth cen-
tury: How (or should) the Arab or Muslim family be modernized? How (or
should) the shariʿa be reformed? These questions assume the existence of
a typical traditional family and of an authentic or uncontaminated shariʿa
prior to the encounter with the “West.” By proving these assumptions false
through rigorous empirical research, historicizing family and the shariʿa
challenges positivist constructions of the past by the big “isms” (Orien-
talism, nationalism, and Islamism) and suggests new political possibilities.
But how would one go about writing family and the shariʿa into history for
the period before Western hegemony? And what larger narratives about the
past would such an act enable or foreclose? These are the two questions that
launched this project about eighteen years ago.
Once the journey began, it did not take long for a seemingly insur-
mountable hurdle to come into view: the centrality of the colonial
encounter with Europe to the very epistemological and institutional devel-
opments of Middle East, Ottoman, and Islamic studies. Akin to the
event horizon of a black hole, beyond which no light can escape, this
encounter is what most scholarly works and their conceptual vocabular-
ies revolve around, regardless of topic or approach. Is it possible, then, to
construct historical narratives of family and shariʿa that serve a purpose
other than to act as fodder for this or that argument about the promise or
calamity of modernity? And what critical approaches would enable alter-
native stories about peoples, places, and temporalities? As it developed, this
xiii
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments
project pressed against these two additional questions with increasing force.
Consequently, the book lives between two discordant desires: a commit-
ment to the emancipatory potential of materialist social history and its
roots in large movements for justice and a skepticism towards positivist
approaches to knowledge production, made all the more urgent by the
vicissitudes of late capitalism. Fed by this productive tension, the book
flourishes – to borrow a phrase from Cemal Kafadar – in the space between
sun and shade.
Not long after the publication of my first book, Rediscovering Palestine
(1995), Roger Owen said to me that some scholars are content to produce
a mediocre second monograph for the purposes of career advancement. I
resolved then and there to embark on a project more ambitious than my
first. Rediscovering Palestine had attempted to write Palestinians into history
prior to Zionist colonial settlement. Relying on locally generated sources,
such as registers of the shariʿa court and family papers, it reconstructed the
political economy and social transformations of the Nablus region during
the first half of the nineteenth century by narrating the social lives of four
things: textiles, cotton, olive oil, and soap. My second project, I decided,
would write family and shariʿa into history using the same kinds of sources.
But it would be expanded into a comparative analysis of two cities over a
period of two centuries. Like the first book, it would focus on marginal-
ized spaces, times, and actors: that is, propertied inhabitants in provincial
regions prior to the mid-nineteenth century. This required command of a
massive cache of unindexed and fragmented legal and personal documents
relating to communities at the heart of the Ottoman world, but peripheral
to its histories, most of which hover around the Empire’s large cosmopoli-
tan cities. The scale of labor involved is perhaps one reason why, to my
knowledge, such a comparative and long-term study based on local sources
has not before been carried out.
This book, consequently, has been a long time in the making. After two
summers of examining the shariʿa court registers of a dozen cities in the
Eastern Mediterranean, I settled on Tripoli (Lebanon) and Nablus (Pales-
tine) for my study, as they had a roughly comparable set of documents
for the years 1660–1860. This was followed by several years of immersive
reading and indexing of thousands of court cases, and of gathering family
papers and other local sources. Meanwhile, I wrote a couple of preliminary
articles and organized a conference, “Family History in Middle Eastern
Studies,” at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 2000. The first
of its kind in the United States, it resulted in an edited volume, Family His-
tory in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (2003). I thank the
Preface and Acknowledgments xv
participants in the conference – Iris Agmon, Soraya Altorki, Tulay Artan,
Jamila Bargach, Beth Baron, Donald Cole, Ken Cuno, Colette Establet,
Mary Ann Fay, Erika Friedl, Suad Joseph, Akram Khater, Lilia Labidi,
Linda Lewin, Annelies Moors, Martha Mundy, Tomoki Okawara, David
Powers, Barabara Ramusack, James Reilly, Martina Rieker, Reem Saad,
David Sabean, and Carol Stack – for expanding my horizons concerning
the possibilities of family history as I launched into this journey.
David Sabean, whose work has been an inspiration for this project
throughout, kindly agreed to be a commentator for the conference and
has been a generous and supportive colleague ever since. I only regret that
I have not been able to keep up with his tireless efforts to advance social
history and a global perspective on kinship via a variety of study groups,
panels, and workshops, some of which I was able to participate in. The
intellectual leadership, ethical stance, and principled political commitment
of two other participants in the family history conference, Martha Mundy
and Suad Joseph, continue to humble me. I have also learned from the
works of Ken Cuno, whose paper for the conference is now an important
book in the growing field of family history in the Middle East.
My point of entry for historicizing family and shariʿa was an examination
of property devolution practices, especially as enacted in two types of legal
transactions: family waqf endowments and lawsuits between kin. A pious
act of subject formation, the family waqf embodied specific ideals about the
self and the family in relation to God and the shariʿa. As such, it can be ana-
lyzed as a family charter that governs not only property relations between
kin, but also the moral-disciplinary order of kinship. Lawsuits were funda-
mental to the (re)alignment of gender, generational, and property relations
in light of changing economic realities, life cycles, and other circumstances.
My methodological approach combined a quantitative analysis of patterns
in waqfs and lawsuits over space and time with qualitative case studies of
ordinary propertied individuals determined to perpetuate their name, pass
their patrimony to the kin who counted, and secure a place in the afterlife.
The approach and methodology required more than a passing knowl-
edge of Islamic legal history, a field in which I have had no formal training.
Sensing some promise from an early paper I wrote on the family waqf,
Baber Johansen invited me to deliver three lectures for a graduate seminar
he taught at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in May 2000.
His rigorous and critical engagement with my work opened my eyes to
the possibilities of socially embedded and theoretically sophisticated legal
history. That this book has not engaged this field in a substantive way is
xvi Preface and Acknowledgments
entirely due to my own shortcomings. I would be remiss here not to men-
tion the sharp insights and warm hospitality of Maria-Pia Di Bella, who
transformed specialized conversations between Baber and myself about
contracts and juridical debates into broader and lingering conversations
that cultivated a lasting friendship between our families.
At first, it seemed obvious that property devolution practices in two
nearby cities within the same cultural zone of the Eastern Mediterranean
and under the same umbrella of Ottoman rule would be similar. The idea
was that data points from two urban centers would make for a more robust
historical narrative and a stronger argument. But it slowly became appar-
ent that instead of similarities, there were dramatic and systemic differences
between Nablus and Tripoli in the ways that family was understood, orga-
nized, and reproduced, particularly when it came to female children. How
can this be explained?
It is this puzzle that has animated and sustained this project despite
many detours. I argue that entrenched differences in regional political
economies and religious establishments account for the divergence in prop-
erty devolution practices. It really mattered, for example, if an economy
was based on privately owned urban agricultural lands facilitated by co-
cultivation contracts or on extraction – facilitated by moneylending con-
tracts – from the surplus of peasant cultivators of government-owned lands.
Differences in the encounters between kin and court also mattered, for
these were productive of local property and gender regimes over the cen-
turies of Ottoman rule. The systematic and long-term divergences between
Nablus and Tripoli challenge the notion of “typical” forms of family orga-
nization and property devolution. They also raise questions about narra-
tives that emphasize rupture in the transition to modern times. Indeed,
the more visible the diversity of pre- and subnational social spaces in the
Eastern Mediterranean, the more apparent the vital and counterintuitive
role these spaces played and continue to play in shaping the history of this
region.
That I speak with some confidence about these findings is due to my
long experience of working with the archives of shariʿa courts as both a
source and an object of study. Much of that experience is a solitary one
of reading, revelation, and reflection. After many years, a certain kind of
intimacy and an intuitive sense develop that are difficult to describe. It is as
if one can begin to see tiny imperfections in the fabric of the text that reveal
a great deal about its making. Needless to say, intimacy and intuition must
be balanced by equal measures of vigilance and skepticism. The latter, in
turn, are informed by an appreciation of the shariʿa court as an Ottoman
Preface and Acknowledgments xvii
state institution, of the power of Islamic legal traditions, and of the labor
of fellow historians and archival anthropologists who work with similar
texts.
The list of such scholars is long and distinguished. Brinkley Messick’s
innovative textual and visual analysis of legal documents, combined with
an intimate and historical understanding of place and people, opened vis-
tas and helped me sharpen my analytical tools. I would like to think that
we have benefited equally from our conversations over the past few years
on this and other topics, especially that of Palestinian studies, but I sus-
pect that I have gotten the better part of the bargain. Most helpful to
me were the papers and comments of participants in three workshops on
the shariʿa court organized by Cemal Kafadar and myself at Harvard Uni-
versity: “The Qadi Court” (2001), “Reading Strategies” (2008), and “The
Scholar and the Archive” (2009). The discussions ranged from comparative
histories of Ottoman shariʿa courts from the Balkans to Yemen, to theoret-
ical approaches and methodologies via detailed case studies. Cemal hosted
the first two and the Radcliffe Institute funded the last, as an Advanced
Studies Seminar. We learned a great deal from the participants, and planned
to publish an edited volume featuring essays by a core group of intrepid and
innovative readers of legal records: Boğaç Ergene, Khaled Fahmy, Zuhair
Ghazzal, Rossitsa Gradeva, Brinkley Messick, Martha Mundy, and Najwa
al-Qattan. But this project fell by the wayside, for most of my efforts since
the turn of the millennium have been dedicated to more pressing political
and institutional issues. For many years, I focused almost exclusively on
the academic freedom of scholars of the Middle East through scholarship
and activism. In 2004, I organized a conference on that topic at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, and published an anthology, Academic Freedom
after September 11 (2006). Starting in 2008, I devoted more than two years
to producing a development and strategic plan for the establishment of
the Palestine Museum. Then, in 2012, I joined Brown University with an
ambitious plan to establish a new kind of Middle East studies center. All
came at a price.
Several substantially different drafts of this book were completed over
this period, and the discerning reader may notice that this final version was
not built with a single set of tools and architectural plans. Both changed
over the years, and no amount of revisions can erase the traces of this book’s
many lives. The first draft was completed in 2008, but after a three-year
hiatus, my questions shifted, and I wrote a second in 2011–12. After I set-
tled at Brown, I decided that the manuscript needed more case studies, a
more robust argument about the relationship between political economy
xviii Preface and Acknowledgments
and family structures, and a history of Ottoman governance of the fam-
ily waqf. It took three more years to complete the additional research and
revisions. As it stood in early 2015, the manuscript was roughly 40 000
words longer than the present book. Over the past year, I made the diffi-
cult adjustments of removing a chapter and merging two others in order
to reduce the size and provide a better flow. Ottoman governance of the
waqf, the transformation of legal authority in the nineteenth century, and
diachronic narratives of the histories of Nablus and Tripoli in their larger
regional contexts are the three most important topics that were set aside. I
can only hope that what you have between your hands has benefitted more
than it has suffered from these detours and revisions.
It is impossible to account for all debts incurred over so many years. To
the many fellow researchers I met and broke bread with along the way; to
the employees in the shariʿa courts, archival institutions, libraries, and local
bookstores who facilitated my research; and to the numerous residents of
Nablus and Tripoli who shared memories, answered questions, and wel-
comed me into their homes –I offer sincere apologies for not listing all
your names and, more importantly, for not detailing the many different
ways that you made this book possible. To do so would take many pages.
Suffice it to say that it was through everyday interactions with you that this
book took shape.
Gabi Falakha, Huda Tawq, and their daughters Farah, Yara, and Reem
were my family in Tripoli. Their love and support is a great gift that I shall
always treasure. ʿAnan Atireh, Khaled Qadri, and their sons Yazan, Issam,
and Saʿd were my family in Nablus, as were ʿAnan and ʿIssmat’s siblings –
ʿAbd al-Illah, ʿIssam, ʿAdalah, ʿAdnan, and ʿAbd al-Nasir – and their fam-
ilies. We grew up together over the past thirty-five years and learned to see
the world through one another’s eyes.
Even though he had already moved on to greener pastures after many
years of research and writing on the Tripoli shariʿa court, Khaled Ziade
tolerated my endless questions on this topic and was unfailingly generous
in his time and advice. Saʿid al-Sayyid, head of the municipal library in
Qasr Nawfal, infected me with his passion for the city. In our many long
conversations, I learned from his ability to transform his deep sense of loss,
familiar to anyone who has seen a beautiful city mutilated in the name of
progress in the 1950s, into critical self-reflection and commitment to the
social good. In the summer of 2000, I shared with Bariʿa Daher the thrill of
“finding” five original registers, plus folio fragments of others, in the main
offices and storage rooms of the shariʿa court. None were included in the
photocopied collection that many researchers still rely on. As those who
Preface and Acknowledgments xix
work at the coalface of knowledge production know all too well, archiving
is a big part of what we do. Much of that summer was spent producing
and making available a master document that mapped out the originals
and compared them to copies at the Municipal Library and the Lebanese
University, Third Branch.
Residential fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Wis-
senschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Studies allowed me to concentrate on research and writing in genuinely
stimulating intellectual environments. Halim and Hayat Barakat hosted
me for countless dinners and nights in Washington, DC. Adonis, Marwan
Qassab Bashi, Angelika von Schwedes, and David Sabean made Berlin,
already a great city, even greater. Elizabeth Alexander, Nasser Hajo and
Kathryn Silver, Baber Johansen and Maria-Pia De Bella, Cemal Kafadar,
Gürlu Necipoğlu, Francis Kissling, and Judith and Gerard Vichniac did
the same in Cambridge.
I am also thankful to the colleagues who helped me think about the
larger stakes of my research on the political economy of family and
the shariʿa. In addition to those already mentioned, I sincerely thank
Abdul Rahim Abu-Husayn, Engin Akarlı, Mohammad Hamdouni Alami,
Stephan Astourian, Joel Beinin, Thomas A. Brady, Guy Burak, Judith But-
ler, Lee Cassanelli, Randi Deguilhem, Kate Gilhuly, Michael Gilsenan,
Chris Gratien, Rema Hammami, Charles Hirschkind, Lynn Hunt, Huri
Islamoğlu, the late Yusuf Khuri, Kerwin Klein, Zachary Lockman, David
Ludden, Saba Mahmood, Nada Moumtaz, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Stefania
Pandolfo, Dana Sajdi, Sara Scalenghe, Aleksandar Shopov, Ramya Sreeni-
vasan, Ann Stoler, Mayssoun Sukarieh, Salim Tamari, Fawaz Tarabulsi,
Meltem Toksöz, Judith Tucker, James Vernon, Stefan Weber, Max Weiss,
and Elizabeth Williams.
I owe a great debt to my graduate students, who formed the core of
the “sushi seminar” I hosted at UC Berkeley for many years: Faiz Ahmed,
Nora Barakat, Murat Dagli, Hilary Falb, Heather Ferguson, Julia Gettle,
Zoe Griffith, Amy Kallandar, Nick Kardahji, Osamah Khalil, Alan
Mikhail, Lena Salaymeh, Julia Shatz, Melanie Tanielian, and Malissa
Taylor. I learned from them more than they did from me, and I deeply
value the friendship that has bloomed with many of them since they grad-
uated. I especially thank Nora Barakat for her detailed comments on two
versions of the book and for her extensive research on Ottoman gov-
ernance of the waqf. Murat Dagli, Zoe Griffith, and Melanie Tanielian
helped with translations from Ottoman, Turkish, French, and German
sources.
xx Preface and Acknowledgments
The manuscript was much improved by the insights of those who read
earlier versions in whole or in part: Faiz Ahmed, Nora Barakat, Samuel
Dolbee, Chris Gratien, Zoe Griffith, Georgina Manok, Brinkley Messick,
Martha Mundy, David Sabean, and Elizabeth Williams. Samuel Dolbee
combed the book thoroughly for transliteration, assisted me with index-
ing, and made helpful copy-editing suggestions. His efficient and metic-
ulous work improved the book and hastened its completion. Georgina
Manok helped me with technical issues ranging from obtaining permis-
sions for illustrations to compiling the bibliography and key words, and
also made suggestions. Bruce Boucek helped in producing the maps. Two
of my undergraduate students at Berkeley, Yaman Salahi and Rayan Naw-
fal, spent a year working with me on a complicated archiving and digitizing
project that involved 300 kilos of documents, hand-written index cards,
and unpublished materials. Before that, I actually shipped all this mate-
rial from place to place, including to Berlin and back. Yaman and Rayan’s
professionalism, rigor, and technical savvy set me free. Nour Kibbi, my
undergraduate research assistant at the Radcliffe Institute, enthusiastically
engaged with both the technical and the intellectual aspects of this project.
Phil Lai helped design the cover and patiently worked with me on its many
iterations. Over a decade ago, Issam Nassar shared the whimsical photo-
graph we ultimately used for the cover and helped me locate the original.
Marigold Ackland’s friendship and patience drew me into the world of
Cambridge University Press. Maria Marsh, Robert Judkins, and Anamika
Singh oversaw the book’s transformation into a material object. The sharp
eye and gentle queries of Tim West made for a smooth and rewarding copy-
editing process.
Malihe Razazan and Shahram Aghamir, Ursula Beimann, George and
Jaleh Bisharat, Lee and Susan Cassanelli, Nasser Hajo and Kathryn Silver,
Rema Hammami, Cemal Kafadar, Wael Salameh, and Mayssoun Sukarieh
kept me grounded with their friendship and support during this long jour-
ney. My mother, Mounifa Barakat; my uncle and aunt, Halim and Hayat
Barakat; and my brothers, Amjad and John Doumani, have always been
there for me. Hanna Doumani’s absent presence has shaped who I am in
ways that I still do not understand. No one felt the burden of this project
more heavily than the loves of my life and sources of its meaning and sub-
stance: Issmat, Tala, and Yara.
c h a p ter 1
Maryam’s Final Word
That some people and things are absent from history, lost, as it were to
the possible world of knowledge, is much less relevant to [the] historical
practice than the fact that some people and things are absent in history, and
that this absence itself is constitutive of the process of historical production.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 19951
All I mentioned, in whole and in part, is articulated in accordance with
legal obligations of the shariʿa. Whoever opposes this [the terms of my
waqf endowment], the Prophet Muhammad himself, peace and blessings
of Allah be upon him, will be his antagonist on the Day of Judgment.
From the waqf endowment of Maryam ʿAnklis, Tripoli shariʿa court, 18402
Were it but possible to be present at the remarkable scene that unfolded

in the chambers of the shariʿa court qadi (judge) of Tripoli on February 5,
1840.3 Standing in front of a crowd of at least twenty distinguished male
witnesses of considerable social standing, an old woman, unveiled and well-
dressed, announced her intention to establish a family waqf.4 But what
started out as a mundane process of registering a specific legal transaction
turned into a passionate oral enunciation of what was effectively her last will
and testament – her final word, so to speak. Maryam’s performance must
have been so charismatic, her delivery so finely woven, and her stance so
1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1995), 48–49.
2 Tripoli shariʿa court registers (hereafter, TICR) 31:1103–1104, dated beginning of Dhu al-Hijja 1255. I
translated the phrase “mufas..salan h.ukm al-farı̄d.a al-sharʿı̄yya” as “articulated in accordance with legal
obligations of the shariʿa.”
3 TICR 31:103–104, dated beginning of Dhu al-Hijja, 1255. The word “qadi” will be used throughout
this book, because “judge” may too easily be associated with current practices and contexts in the
mind of the reader. Moreover, most scholars working with Ottoman-Turkish sources commonly use
the term “kadi court,” which emphasizes the relationship of the qadi to the state that appointed him.
4 The list of witnesses is dominated by religious figures such as Sayyid ʿUmar Effendi Karameh. Three
of the witnesses – Hasan ʿAllush, Sidi Shaykh Iʿrabi al-Zaylaʾ, and Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir Qawuqji –
stood to benefit financially, for Maryam ʿAnklis designated part of the revenues of the waqf as an
annual stipend for them.
1
2 Maryam’s Final Word
unyielding, that the qadi and the scribe produced a text the immediacy and
legal hybridity of which I have not seen in thirty years of reading shariʿa
court registers (s. sijill).
It is extremely rare to come across a case in the Ottoman shariʿa court
registers of the cities and towns of the Eastern Mediterranean in which the
voice of a litigant is directly transmitted in the first person.5 Phrases that
began with “I” violated the deeply entrenched protocol of rendering pro-
ceedings into a tightly structured third-person narrative. Here, however,
not only does Maryam ʿAnklis’s voice come through, but it unsettles the
entire document with unexpected verbatim statements and warnings aimed
at the reader. The vocabulary meanders between formal legal language and
the colorful vernacular of the local dialect, the handwriting moves in and
out of the official Diwani script, and the transitions are unpredictable, sud-
den, and jarring.
Even more unusually, Maryam’s appearance in court resulted in a hybrid
document that disrupted established legal norms by combining different
types of legal cases in a single narrative. Normally, each type constitutes
a separate legal transaction that generates its own record (h.ujja).6 Deter-
mined to impose her vision of how her properties were to be devolved in
whole legal cloth – who got what, how, when (before or after her death),
and in what order – Maryam ʿAnklis inserted within the waqf endow-
ment (inshāʾ waqf ) the legal instruments of gift (hiba), probate inventory
(h.as.r irth or tarika), will (was.ı̄ya), and acknowledgment (iqrār). This she
did by proceeding in a series of interlocked steps that matched different
types of properties (immoveable and moveable) and financial obligation
(loans and debts) with different legal mechanisms. All were targeted at two
orders of kinship: blood (agnates, in-laws, spouse, and children) and spir-
itual (Sufi shaykhs and scholars). More importantly, Maryam transgressed
legal bounds by combining two temporalities (before and after death) that
normally authorize mutually exclusive legal options. It is precisely this
5 This observation is based on close reading of all the registers for Nablus and Tripoli from the sev-
enteenth until the late nineteenth century, and an examination over several years of the registers of
Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Sidon, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama from the eighteenth
until the mid-nineteenth century. I refer to this region as the “Eastern Mediterranean” under the
assumption that a geographic designation carries less baggage than other familiar appellations: Lev-
ant, Fertile Crescent, Arab East (Mashriq). By the “Eastern Mediterranean” I mean the areas west of
the Syrian Desert and between Aleppo and Gaza in today’s Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, and Jor-
dan. I sometimes use the phrase interchangeably with “Bilad al-Sham” (Syrian Lands) and “Ottoman
Syria.” Historically, this is a highly integrated yet richly diverse economic, social, and cultural zone.
6 It is not so unusual to find a court document that combines a lawsuit over the legal status of a
property with a legal transaction, such as a sale or rental contract. This particular combination of
cases is, however, unique.
Maryam’s Final Word 3
unorthodox act that makes her motivations, intentions, and desires pro-
foundly clear.
For social historians interested in understanding the relations between
and transformations of family, property, and gender regimes (in both the
materialist and the discursive senses of the word), the intricate and passion-
ate personal vision that animates the waqf endowment of Maryam ʿAnklis
is akin to a sudden wind that disperses the gray fog of serialized legal docu-
ments hovering between the immutable terrain of the past and the critical
gaze of the historian.7 From this perspective, Maryam’s final word is to be
treasured for what it really is – a rare glimpse into the heart of a fundamen-
tal question: How did property devolution, as an accretion of conscious
and strategic social acts and forms of legal practice, reproduce and trans-
form family life during the transition from the early modern to the modern
period (the seventeenth to the nineteenth century)?
For scholars of Islamic jurisprudence, and for some archival anthropol-
ogists, however, Maryam’s waqf endowment is not to be treasured, but to
be treated with great suspicion and perhaps dismissed for what it also is –
an aberration of no weighty import. Legal historians can only shake their
heads in wonder at how the qadi and scribes of the Tripoli shariʿa court
in 1840 could authorize and register a document that wreaks such havoc
with legal norms and procedures. And they would be right to conclude
that it would easily collapse if legally challenged, even in the same court.
Consequently, this document cannot be considered evidence of Kadijustiz,
the Weberian view that Islamic jurisprudence is held hostage by the arbi-
trary authority of the qadi, as opposed to rational adjudication based on
substantive doctrine and judicial precedents, as in Western law.8
Archival anthropologists may find the outlier status of the document
useful for providing a rare perspective from the margins. But they can point
out, and justifiably so, that the waqf of Maryam ʿAnklis is the exception
7 By this, I do not mean to imply that formulaic passages cannot be a rich source of historical analysis.
The epistemological and discursive foundations of such texts, the vocabulary that haunts them, the
specific structure and shape they take, and how they change over space and time are all vital lines
of inquiry in sociolegal history and archival anthropology. But they are not the primary focus of
this book. A pathbreaking and canonical work is Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual
Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). For
a recent work that tackles waqf in this vein, see Nada Moumtaz, “Modernizing Charity, Remaking
Islamic Law” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2012). It is important to note here that there
were no dramatic changes in legal procedures, registration protocols, types of expertise brought to
bear, or authorizing legal vocabularies until after 1860. Iris Agmon, Family & Court: Legal Culture
and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006) provides a
study of the changing “protocols” of lawsuits.
8 For a brief discussion of this issue, see David Powers, “Kadijustiz or Qadi-Justice? A Paternity Dispute
from Fourteenth-Century Morocco,” Islamic Law and Society 1, no. 3 (1994): 332–366.
that proves the rule: a mere drop in a sea of court documents that adhere
far more closely to the letter and spirit, as well as the structure and scribal
conventions, of the Ottoman shariʿa courts. This case cannot, therefore,
be seen as a vindication of the highly influential argument by the leading
scholar of modern Orientalism in the twentieth century, Joseph Schacht,
that an unbridgeable gap between theory and practice has plagued Islamic
law from the beginning.9 The monolithic concept of “Islamic Law” can-
not reveal much about how a deeply embedded yet historically dynamic
Islamic tradition discursively constructs notions of sexual difference, kin-
ship, and property; nor does it accurately convey how these notions are
also disciplined through the bureaucratic conventions of an Ottoman state
institution and the local power dynamics that shape legal practices.
The preceding contrasts between theory and practice, text and context
are, of course, exaggerated binaries. They do not fully take into account
that it is precisely in the encounter between kin and court that law, soci-
ety, and the archives are simultaneously reproduced and transformed. After
all, Maryam’s choice to go to court was not born of pure free will: she felt
compelled to go. As we shall see later, she was hardly alone – women rou-
tinely resorted, both willingly and reluctantly, to the shariʿa court in large
numbers. This phenomenon has excited the imagination of scholars, many
of whom uncritically (although not entirely without reason) associate pres-
ence in the archives with social agency.10 Presence and agency are not the
same thing, and their relationship is complex and often counterintuitive.
Still, there is no doubt that one important reason for the court’s attraction
for women is that it provided their property devolution strategies with legal
tools that afforded them greater protection, legitimacy, and flexibility than
local customary practices.
9 Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). My views on this
are influenced by the arguments of Brinkley Messick on the shariʿa system and the relationship
between theory and practice, especially as laid out in his yet unpublished manuscript, The Book of
Flowers, an early version of which he shared with me. My views are also shaped by the work of the
legal historian Baber Johansen. Relevant to this discussion is his article “Casuistry: Between Legal
Concept and Social Praxis,” Islamic Law and Society 2, no. 2 (1995): 135–156.
10 The literature on this topic is fairly large. Four references, each roughly a decade apart, suffice
as examples. One of the earliest is Ronald Jennings, “Women in the Early Seventeenth Century
Ottoman Judicial Records: The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 18, no. 1 (1975): 53–114. A seminal work that shaped women’s stud-
ies through the use of shariʿa court registers is Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Annelies Moors, Women, Property and Islam: Pales-
tinian Experiences, 1920–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) provides a historically
informed anthropological approach based on marriage registers. Finally, Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales:
Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003)
provides a nuanced reading of women’s voices and cases in the early modern period.
Maryam’s Final Word 5
Maryam’s performance, therefore, combines the singularity of her cir-
cumstances and desires with a legal act of property devolution embedded
in a rooted and living Islamic tradition. On the one hand, it betrays a deep
familiarity with Islamic law, as well as a clear determination to bend it to
her purposes. On the other hand, her appearance before the qadi and her
mobilization of witnesses signal a fundamental acceptance of the court as a
state institution, of community members as active participants, and of the
perceived divine precepts of the shariʿa as framing devices for her existence
both on earth and in the afterlife. In short, despite her stubborn desire to
impose her choices in the form of a unitary utterance, Maryam ʿAnklis’s
strategy presupposed and worked within the broad confines of Ottoman
governance, Islamic legal tradition, and local social and power relations.
To this, she applied a form of knowledge of law and procedure that, judg-
ing from the shariʿa court registers, seems to have been easily available and
widely shared within the community. Indeed, the confusing mix of third-
and first-person narratives in the document resulting from Maryam’s per-
formance symbolizes the mutually constitutive nature of the relationship
between kin and court, etching, so to speak, the dynamic interplay between
structure and agency into the grammar of the historical record.
Maryam’s final word, as we shall see, maps out the social, economic,
legal, and cultural universe of property devolution as a set of practices
in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Bucking academic conventions,
this introductory chapter will postpone for the moment further discus-
sion of the stakes involved in investigating these practices through a com-
parative study of propertied classes in two urban centers, Nablus and
Tripoli, from 1660 to 1860; the challenges this book poses to the pres-
tige zones of academic knowledge production in the fields of Middle East,
Ottoman, and Islamic law and society studies; and the contributions it
hopes to make to an understanding of the larger themes of family, gen-
der, and property in modern times. What immediately follows, instead, is
a detailed micro-study of the document recorded as a result of Maryam’s
court appearance, so as to open a door for the reader to enter her world,
to understand her points of reference, and to feel the intimacy of her per-
sonal story. Such micro-studies, which require assembly from unforgiving
sources, serve a purpose more ambitious than the illustration of empirical
findings, methodological scaffolding, and theoretical insights; rather, their
immediacy and texture animate the spirit of the overall narrative and serve
as both the introduction to and the structural backbone of each chapter.
For me – and, I hope, for the reader – they are the most rewarding and
stimulating part of the book.
1.1 A Copper Pot with Its Lid
The hybrid document, which unfolded in a series of tightly choreographed
steps (see Figures 1.1 through 1.4), began as a pious endowment (waqf)
of two types of immovable properties: shares in mulberry orchards that
Maryam ʿAnklis inherited from her father and from her former husband;
and shares in storage cellars and a small shop on the ground floor of the
ʿAnklis residence, which she inherited from her father.11 The agricultural
and commercial properties were designated for the sole benefit of her two
daughters, Diba and Fatima, and their progeny, equally and in perpetuity,
with each daughter in charge of managing her own half.12 Maryam’s goal
was not to keep the ʿAnklis family patrimony intact, but rather to make
sure that everything devolved to her daughters by effectively disinheriting
two men: her current husband, ʿAli Tarah., and her paternal cousin, Hajj
Muhammad, the senior member of the ʿAnklis family. Both would have
otherwise been legally entitled, according to Islamic rules of inheritance
(ʿilm al-farāʾid), as practiced by the Hanafi school of jurisprudence at the
time, to one-fourth and one-third, respectively, of Maryam’s estate follow-
ing her death (Figure 1.1). In other words, she ensured that her daughters
would receive more than their legally stipulated share, since living daugh-
ters could receive no more than two-thirds of an estate in the absence of
male heirs.13
Maryam’s second step was to make a legal acknowledgment (iqrār) that a
large debt owed to her by her current husband had been repaid.14 This was
followed by a warning to her paternal cousin. Recorded as a transcription of
spoken colloquial, beginning with a resounding first-person “I,” the words
leap from the text:
I have at a previous time handed over to my cousin a promissory note [which
she renders in colloquial as a “paper” (waraqa)] I received from my husband
so he [cousin] can collect this debt from him [husband]. Since then, my
husband has repaid me and satisfied my legal claim; yet my cousin has kept
this paper. If, after my death, my cousin sues my husband in court [in an
11 Properties are classified as “bustān” composed of mulberry and other fruit trees (tūt wa-ghayrihi).
The storage cellars (qabw) and small shop (dukkāna) are in two (probably adjacent and co-
owned) ʿAnklis residences: dār al-Hajj Omar ʿAnklis, co-owned with Omar’s paternal cousin, al-Hajj
Muhammad ʿAnklis, and dār al-Hajj Muhammad ʿAnklis.
12 The appointment of each daughter as an independent superintendent over her share of the waqf
effectively made the endowment akin to devolvement of private property.
13 Or if there was only one living daughter, one-half. The rest was to be distributed to the nearest
agnates.
14 The debt was for the amount of 1,400 piasters.
A Copper Pot with its Lid 7
attempt to collect this money], his lawsuit should be considered illegal and the
paper null and void.15
Through the legal acknowledgment and the warning, Maryam launched
two pre-emptive strikes in anticipation of future challenges to the property
devolution strategy privileging her daughters: one to satisfy her husband
(by forgiving his debt), the other to block her paternal cousin (Figure 1.2).
Instead of returning to the endowment, Maryam continued in the court
by initiating a third type of legal transaction, a legal gift (hiba) for the pur-
pose of devolving her moveable properties. Of the seventeen personal items
she gifted (Figure 1.3), sixteen of them – including a gold necklace and
silk shirts – were to go to her younger, unmarried daughter, Fatima, most
likely as a trousseau in preparation for marriage. Diba, the older daugh-
ter from her first husband, already married, was to get “a large copper pot
with its lid.”16 Fatima got both a small and a large copper pot with their
lids. While a copper pot may seem to be a trivial household item, the fact
that Maryam made a special point of singling out this object can be read
as a pointed personal message to her daughters amid the long and compli-
cated legal maneuvering. “The copper pots,” she might have been saying to
them, “embody all the intangible dimensions of my experiences that I want
to pass on to you as a wife, mother, and household matriarch.” The copper
pot is symbolic of a woman’s power in the engine room, so to speak, of the
household. It is where the alchemy of food – combining and transforming
chemical elements over a fire – meets the alchemy of childbirth and the
continuity of life. And food, of course, is the supreme currency of power
relations, affective ties, and economic dynamics among and between fam-
ilies, households, and social networks. Maryam’s gift of cookware, there-
fore, can be viewed as a deliberate oral and textual act designed to express
the transfer of authority as mother and wife to her two daughters. Her act
signaled both pride and confidence in their readiness to take on responsi-
bilities not only for themselves and their families, but also for their mother
in her old age.
At this point, the sense of anticipation permeates the text once again, as
Maryam recounts all her personal moveable properties and communicates
to all present what should happen to them after her death. Visual clues
and procedural moves make it very clear that Maryam, ready to detach
15 My emphasis. In other words, she had authorized her cousin to collect the debt on her behalf by
handing over her husband’s promissory note. The transliteration for the italicized phrase is “fa-huwa
daʿwāhu ʿalayhi bāt.ila lā yuʿmal bi-daʿwāhi wa-la bi-l-waraqa haythu annahu was.ala li-haqqı̄.”
16 In Arabic: “tanjara kabı̄ra nuh.ās maʿa ghit.āʾhā.”
Grandfather
Hajj Omar X
Maryam Hajj Muhammad
First Husband (d.) Second Husband

Dı̄b Raqaba Ali Tarah
Diba Fatima
Property
Type: Immoveable
• Agricultural (mulberry orchards)
• Commercial (storage cellars and
small shop)
Acquired:
• Inheritance from father and
husband
Strategy:
• Exclude husband and agnates
• Make daughters and their
progeny sole beneficiaries
Figure 1.1 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of appearance:

family endowment (waqf dhurrı̄)
herself from the material world, was conducting her own “auto-probate,”
as if she were already dead.17 That is, she initiated from within the
17 There are other instances where individuals appear before the court to draft what is essentially an
inheritance document, as if they were already dead. Having passed all their property on to their
children, they ask only that they be provided with a daily stipend. For example, see Nablus shariʿa
court registers (hereafter, NICR) 6:198.
Grandfather
Hajj Omar X
Maryam Hajj Muhammad
First Husband (d.) Second Husband

Diba Fatima
Property
• Cash loan to husband
Strategy:
• Neutralize husband and uncle
• Settle with husband through
acknowledging payment of debt
• Cut off uncle’s intervention by
invalidating promissory note

acknowledgment (Iqrār)
waqf document a fourth legal mechanism: a probate inventory (tarika)

(Figure 1.4).18 The probate inventory was not formally acknowledged in
the document, because such an inventory could only legally be drawn
up after one’s death. Nevertheless, and even though the word “tarika”
was never used, the procedure itself was enacted as Maryam transported
18 The visual feast of things and numbers typical of probate inventories never fails to attract scholars of
shariʿa court registers, myself included. In the mid-1980s, I abandoned a year’s work of quantifying
such inventories, convinced that no safe generalizations could be made from the data. The tables
and figures in this book may be numerous, but they were included after careful consideration as to
their veracity and usefulness.
Grandfather
Hajj Omar X
Hajj Muhammad
Maryam
Jewelry (gold, silver)

1. Qur arb sh fi a
First Husband (d.) Second Husband 2. Kird n Dhahab
Cloths/textiles
3. Qunb z kuhna
Diba Fatima 4. Qarmal yya amra
Large pot 5. Sh la zarqa
with its lid 6. Man d l isl mb l yya
7. Shaqafat kur sha
amr
8. Not clear
9. Not clear
10. Khdaydiyya
11. Sharshaf
12. Ni f kiswa
13. Qum n ar r
14. Qums n min ad
Property iy ka
• Moveable
• Sixteen personal items Cookware
15. Large copper pot
with its lid.
16. Small pot with its lid
Strategy:
• Prepare Fatima for marriage: wedding trousseau
• Symbolic transfer of authority and role of mother/wife: pot with lid

gift (hiba)
herself and her audience into a future temporal realm. The in-texting of
the visual and structural template of one type of h.ujja inside the template
of a different type sent a clear message about Maryam’s intentions and her
power of alchemy: transforming the different transactions into a single
legal pot, with its lid.
On a visual level, students of shariʿa court registers will immediately rec-
ognize how the itemization of moveable properties at the top of Figure 1.6
takes the form of a generic probate inventory document; specifically, the
Remainder of Maryam’s
personal property
Debt to Diba
1000 piasters Orchard expenses
• Taxes (m r )
• Rent ( ikr)
• Gardeners
Funeral and memorials
• Tajh z wa-takf n
• Third day
• Seventh day
• Fortieth day Remainder to daughters equally
“according to Islamic law”
One-third of total to trustee, Wahbi Qazzaz to

Distribute to ten Sufi Shaykhs:
1. Sidi al-Shaykh Mustafa al-Maliki
2. Sayyid al-Shaykh Rashid al-Miqati
3. Shaykh Mahmud al-Rafi i
4. Shaykh Ahmad al-Rafi i
5. Shaykh Ahmad al-Hamidi
6. Shaykh Mustafa al-Hamidi
7. Hasan Allush*
8. Sayyid Abdullah Mansuri
9. Sidi Shaykh I rabi al-Zayla *
10. Sayyid Abd al-Qadir Qawuqji*
Property: Cash
Strategy:
• Transition to afterlife
• Set example of agency, piety, and independence for daughters

“auto-probate” (iqrār, hiba, mabarrāt)
section that lists a deceased’s assets in a series of columns. Every item

within each category – jewelry, textiles, kitchenware – is identified, enu-
merated (if there is more than one of a kind), and given a market value
based on what it would sell for at auction (Figures 1.5, 1.6). The list-
ing of moveable assets and their conversion into cash through sale by
an auctioneer (dallāl) was the first of three procedural moves that follow
exactly the tripartite structure of probate inventories found in shariʿa court
Figure 1.5 Maryam ʿAnklis waqf (TICR 31:103)

Figure 1.6 Maryam ʿAnklis waqf (TICR 31:104)

registers during the Ottoman era. The deduction of expenses, beginning
with burial costs (tajhı̄z wa-takfı̄n), came second. Third was the distribu-
tion of the remainder to legal inheritors.19 But whereas these moves were
usually narrated in the third person, here we hear Maryam speak about her-
self as if she were already dead. Thus, she begins by stating “all that remains
of my personal belongings are to be sold in auction.” She then instructs that
the funerary (washing, dressing, burying) and commemoration expenses be
deducted. In line with local custom, still practiced today, she specifies that
the commemorations are to take place on the third, seventh, and fortieth
days after her death.
Maryam then shifts back to another acknowledgment. Ever since her
first husband, Dib Raqaba, died, she states, she has been holding in safe-
keeping Diba’s share of the inheritance. The amount, 1,000 piasters, is to
be given to Diba upon Maryam’s death. There is little doubt that this par-
ticular claim about the inheritance is fictitious, for the money was not to
be released until her death, despite the acknowledgment. Thus, Maryam’s
promissory note can be seen as an exchange for care in old age by Diba, her
firstborn, and probably her closest companion. Maryam could not count
on Fatima to take on this responsibility, as Fatima was unmarried at the
time, and the first few years of marriage were highly uncertain times. The
risk of death during childbirth was very real, and Fatima’s ability to manage
a household and make it peaceful and prosperous was not yet tested.
After carefully mapping out a property devolution strategy that provided
for her daughters, that settled accounts with males who had potential legal
claims, that arranged for care in old age, and that prepared for funerary and
other expenses associated with the disposal of her corporeal body, Maryam
finally turned her attention to the afterlife. This was not a sudden concern
triggered by old age, but the final installment in a lifelong investment in
spiritual cultivation. Maryam had been preparing for a comfortable spot in
the afterlife by financially supporting men whose religious authority and
expertise could guide her soul safely to heaven. In order to continue this
support after death, Maryam entered murky legal terrain by setting aside
a part of her property in a manner that fell somewhere between a will
(was.ı̄ya) and the designation of waqf revenues for annual enactments of
good deeds (mabarrāt; see Chapters 3 and 4 for detailed analysis). She stip-
ulated that one-third of the remainder of the revenues was to be given to a
19 For example, the moveable properties that Maryam itemizes for the gift – jewelry, textiles, kitchen-
ware – are archetypal of probate inventories of women, which are usually limited to these three
types, almost always in the order in which she lists them: precious metals and stones first and cop-
per kitchen implements last, with textiles in the middle.
trustee, Wahbi al-Qazzaz, as cash money “to distribute equally to the fol-
lowing persons that I have allocated (money) to throughout my life.”20 The
document then listed the names of ten Sufi shaykhs who, apparently, had
been the beneficiaries of her generosity for many years.21
Maryam concluded her lengthy testimony by emphasizing that all the
revenues of her waqf, aside from what had already been pledged, were to be
divided equally between her two daughters. To drive home the point that
her intricate yet unorthodox property devolution design was legitimate and
must be carried out, she issued a warning that affirmed the unity between
her personal intent as a legal subject and the divine precepts of Islamic law:
I have acknowledged and testified unto myself that all of what I mentioned,
in part and in whole, is articulated in accordance with legal obligations of
the shariʿa . . . whoever opposes this, the Prophet Muhammad himself, peace
and blessings of Allah be upon him, will be his antagonist on the Day of
Judgment.22
The document does not end at this point, however, as Maryam seems to
suddenly have remembered (or perhaps was reminded about) the taxes and
rent on the mulberry trees she endowed, as well as the salaries of the garden-
ers who she employed and managed. So she hurriedly (this was recorded
out of place at the end of the document) added that these expenses were to
be paid off from the waqf revenues on a regular basis.
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the fact that mulberry
trees began and ended this unusual shariʿa court case. Urban agriculture –
specifically, privately owned and irrigated mulberry and citrus orchards for
the silk industry and for commercial export, respectively – constituted the
material backbone of family life among the propertied classes of Tripoli.
The orchard, always the first property listed in waqf endowments, is key
to the city’s gendered property devolution strategies. In Nablus at the same
time, it was the family residence that lay at the core of such strategies.
The house was the headquarters of family firms, so to speak, whose mate-
rial backbone was a dense web of relations – primarily surplus extraction
20 In Arabic: “yufariqahu ʿala asmāʾ madhkūrı̄n ikhtas..sathum fı̄-h.ayatı̄ yaʿ.tı̄hum sawı̄ya laysa ziyāda wa-lā
nuqs.ān.”
21 They are: Sidi al-Shaykh Mustafa al-Maliki, Sayyid al-Shaykh Rashid al-Miqati, Shaykh Mahmud
al-Rafiʿi and his brother Shaykh Ahmad, Shaykh Ahmad al-Hamidi and his brother Shaykh Mustafa,
Hasan ʿAllush, Sayyid ʿAbdullah Mansuri, Sidi Shaykh Iʿrabi al-Zaylaʾ, and Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir
Qawuqji. ʿAllush and Qawuqji appear in the list of witnesses present at the time the document was
drawn up, as does the son of al-Zaylaʾ.
22 In Arabic: “haythu annanı̄ qarrartu wa-ashhaddtu ʿala nafsı̄ fı̄mā dhakartuhu min kullı̄ wa-juzʾı̄ fa-
huwa mufas..salan h.ukma al-farı̄d.a al-sharʿı̄yya wa-kullu man taʿarad.a dhalika fa-yakūn sayyiduna
Muhammad, .salla Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, khas.mahu yawm al-qiyāma.”
through moneylending – with peasant communities in a dry-farming hin-
terland. It is between house (dār) and orchard (bustān) that the diversity
and historical contingency of family life in the Ottoman Mediterranean
can most clearly be seen.
1.2 Why Should We Care About Maryam ʿAnklis?

No one in the ʿAnklis family I interviewed in Tripoli in 2008 knew about
the existence of Maryam ʿAnklis, but she was much more than a forgotten
name in a legal document.23 Maryam speaks emphatically about the most
fundamental issues pertaining to her existence as a living being: family as
the nexus of material and affective relations, the shariʿa as God’s law, and
spirituality as a path for salvation. Her devolution strategy reveals, in spe-
cific space and time, the mutually constitutive connections between polit-
ical economy and legal practices, on the one hand, and notions of kinship,
gender, and property, on the other. The initiative she took in going to court
and her well-informed and carefully calibrated legal performance played an
active role in producing and reproducing the society in which she lived. The
accretion of such cases in the court registers of scores of towns and cities
across the vast Ottoman domains, generation after generation over several
centuries, constitutes a richly diverse collection of ecologies of family life
whose existence and consequences are barely known and little understood
today. We should care about Maryam ʿAnklis, because her story (and many
like it) exposes the silences of dominant perspectives on this region’s past,
and brings to the surface the astounding range, dynamism, and contin-
gent historical trajectories of the provincial social spaces in the Ottoman
Empire. In so doing, these registers point to new scholarly horizons, ques-
tion assumptions about who we are and how we came to be, and make it
possible to imagine different possibilities for the future. They can be, in
the best sense of the word, subversive.
A puzzle animates this book. An examination of all waqfs established
in Tripoli (present-day Lebanon) and Nablus (present-day Palestine) over
a two-century period (1660–1860) produced a wholly unexpected finding:
the populations of these Arab urban centers, located in the same cultural
zone of Bilad al-Sham and under the same imperial umbrella of Ottoman
rule, pursued remarkably divergent property devolution practices. This
finding is most dramatically apparent when it comes to the ways females
are included in or excluded from property transmission, how various forms
23 For example, interview with Mohamed Fakher ʿAnklis and his son Talal, July 6, 2008.
Why Should We Care About Maryam ʿAnklis? 17
of property are gendered, and where the boundaries are drawn between and
within the conjugal and extended family worlds. To give but one example,
female children of waqf endowers in Tripoli were, with one or two rare
exceptions, always included as beneficiaries, and in one-third of cases, males
and females received equal shares. The opposite was true in Nablus during
the same period: female children were most often excluded to one degree
or another as beneficiaries, and this only became more severe over time, to
the point that females were excluded altogether. This suggests that there
existed a plurality of ways in which family life in general, and property
devolution in particular, were understood, organized, and enacted. This
finding calls into question the existence of the family types – Arab, Mus-
lim, Syrian, Mediterranean – on which Orientalist, modernization-theory,
nationalist, and Islamist constructions of this region’s past depend so heav-
ily. Based on voluminous collections of locally generated legal records,
family papers, fatwa collections, chronicles, and Ottoman government
archives, this book argues that this historically contingent diversity is inti-
mately linked to deeply entrenched differences, symbolized by the orchard
(Tripoli) and the house (Nablus), in local political and, to a lesser extent,
spiritual economies.24 The linkages complicate both modernization theory
and Foucauldian-inspired narratives about ruptures of modernity as the
frame by which to understand the transformations of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. They also pose difficult questions about what, exactly,
constitutes Islamic cultural, legal, and religious “traditions,” and about how
these traditions can be historicized.
In writings about the Middle East, family is frequently invoked but
rarely subjected to historical scrutiny, because that scrutiny would under-
mine its critical ideological role as the irreducible building block (and,
along with religion, the essence) of Arab and Muslim societies.25 Elsewhere,
24 These claims would not surprise scholars of European and US history working on gender and fam-
ily issues through legal records in the context of regional political economies and religious cultures.
Indeed, the field of family history was propelled by counterintuitive findings – such as the prevalence
of the nuclear family in the medieval period and the rise of extended kin relations with industri-
alization – that laid to rest the grand evolutionary and modernization schema that long governed
European history.
25 To my knowledge, this is only the second English-language monograph on the social history of
family life in the Eastern Mediterranean prior to the mid-nineteenth century. The first is Margaret
L. Meriwether, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1999). See also Colette Establet and Jean-Paul Pascual, Familes et fortunes à
Damas: 450 foyers damascains en 1700 (Damascus: Institute français d’études arabes). Works on family
history for the post-1850 period include Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage,
Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Agmon, Family &
Court; Kenneth M. Cuno, Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Century Egypt (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015); Hanan Kholoussy, For Better,
I have written in some detail on the developing field of Middle East family
history and how it differs from the rise of family history in Europe since the
1950s, especially in its relationship to gender studies.26 I have also explored
the promise and limitations of shariʿa court registers and other legal records
as sources for family history in Ottoman times, particularly when it comes
to waqf endowments and lawsuits between kin.27 Suffice it to say at this
point that modernization theory and other positivist evolutionary schema
still hold a commanding presence in the field of Middle Eastern studies. In
this regard, the findings in this book run counter to three pervasive assump-
tions that deeply inform most writings on Islam, gender, and modernity –
the major prestige zones of intellectual production in this field over the
past two generations.28 The first is that family and religion are the orga-
nizing principles of traditional Middle Eastern societies, the implication
being that modernity constitutes a leap forward into societies based on
secular relations between individuals. The second is that a specific family
type – made evident by the commonly used qualifying term “Arab,” “Mus-
lim,” or “Mediterranean” – captures the essence of each collectivity, and
that this type constituted the bedrock of Middle Eastern societies well into
the twentieth century. The third is that there is a linear evolution from the
patriarchal, patrilocal, extended family type to the modern nuclear family
unit. Moreover, this evolution, unless arrested or deformed, will inevitably
lead to more democratic relations between husband and wife, parents and
children, and the conjugal and extended family worlds.
The majority of monographs in Middle East studies concentrate on the
political and intellectual elites of large cosmopolitan cities after the mid-
nineteenth century. By understanding the actions of ordinary propertied
individuals such as Maryam ʿAnklis through deeply grounded studies of
Ottoman provincial regions from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth
century, social historians can challenge assumptions about the past shared
by the big “isms” – Orientalism, nationalism, and Islamism. These “isms”
for Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2010); and Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and
Liberating Egypt, 1805/1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
26 Beshara Doumani, ed. Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), ch. 1.
27 Ibid., ch. 8, “Adjudicating Family: The Islamic Court and Disputes Between Kin, 1700–1860.” See
also Beshara Doumani, “Endowing Family: Waqf, Property Devolution, and Gender in Greater
Syria, 1800–1860,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 1 (January 1998): 3–41.
28 I first encountered reference to “prestige zones” of knowledge production in Lila Abu-Lughod,
“Anthropology’s Orient: The Boundaries of Theory on the Arab World,” in Theory, Politics and
the Arab World: Critical Responses, ed. Hisham Sharabi (New York and London: Routledge, 1990),
81–131.
Why Should We Care About Maryam ʿAnklis? 19
continue to shape intellectual production in Middle East and Ottoman
history despite trenchantly critical scholarship over the past generation.29
The first, in the Edward Said sense of the word, views non-Western cultures
prior to the encounter with Europe as ossified monoliths held together by
rigidly authoritarian and misogynist religious traditions and family struc-
tures. The second assumes – indeed, insists – on a linguistic and cultural
homogeneity within recently constructed political communities, and con-
siders the family to be the indivisible building block of this homogeneity.
The third claims that prior to the calamities of Western intervention, there
prevailed a golden era of Islamic justice characterized by a harmonious bal-
ance in family life between cultural values and legal norms.30
These assumptions, like those that undergird the notions of the tradi-
tional joint Hindu family and traditional extended Chinese family, render
the past as a static backdrop against which the lively stories of moder-
nity can be narrated.31 Such stories are invariably about externally gener-
ated, top-down forces: structural transformations caused by an expanding
world capitalist economy, encounters with secular, individual-based West-
ern culture, and interventions by newly established (colonial and post-
independence) states. And in almost all of them, these forces come to
undermine the traditional family without bringing about the rise of a
genuine “modern” nuclear family, leaving behind a pathology of arrested
or mutated political, economic, and social development in the “Third
World.”32
29 A useful historiographical overview is Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East:
The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A critical
turning point for many in my generation was the publication of the first three issues of Review
of Middle East Studies, in which members of the so-called “Hull Group” wrote sharp critiques of
canonical works and paradigms. See, for example, Roger Owen, “The Middle East in the Eighteenth
Century – An ‘Islamic’ Society in Decline? A Critique of Gibb and Bowen’s Islamic Society and the
West,” Review of Middle East Studies 1, no. 1 (1975): 101–112.
30 This premise concerning the era of Islamic justice, often with reference to the shariʿa court and the
role of the qadi, explicitly challenged the secular Arab nationalist narrative about the Ottoman past
and led to a wave of Ottoman-era research, especially in Egypt and Jordan, in the 1960s and 70s.
See Beshara Doumani, “Palestinian Islamic Court Records: A Source for Socioeconomic History,”
MESA Bulletin 19, no. 2 (1985): 155–172.
31 See, for example, Indrani Chatterjee, ed. Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). For further discussion and bibliography, see
Doumani, Family History in the Middle East, ch. 1.
32 The classic argument in this regard for the Arab/Muslim world is Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy:
A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). This is
also a major theme in prize-winning literary production about life in the non-West. Perhaps out of
a guilty sense of superiority, the Nobel Prize committee seems compelled to shower its praise on
non-European authors who carry it forward. One example is The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz,
especially the first volume. Another is the oeuvre of Vidyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. John Leonard
put it best when he wrote that Naipaul is “downright contemptuous . . . of those ‘half-made societies’
In proposing an alternative framework, this book combines material-
ist analysis of local political economy with discursive approaches to read-
ing legal texts gleaned from archival anthropology.33 The empirical scaf-
folding on which it stands was laid by an increasing number of scholars
over the past generation, who relied primarily on legal documents to write
on the political economy of gender and legal history in Ottoman times.34
The emphasis is not on the meta debates – Ottoman reform and the
encounter with Europe, law and the formation of the modern state, capital-
ist transformation and the ruptures of modernity (be they economic, polit-
ical/military, or epistemic) – but on historicizing practices that question the
assumptions undergirding these debates. Why did Maryam ʿAnklis and so
many others choose to establish waqfs and conduct litigation in the shariʿa
court in order to manage their family affairs and devolve property from one
generation to the next? What informed ʿAnklis’s understandings of prop-
erty, kinship, and piety? How can we explain divergent and changing prop-
erty devolution practices across the grids of time and space? What is the
relationship between legal practices, regional political economies, and class?
These and other questions are explored through a comparative history of
the mutually constitutive relationship between kin and court, as well as the
social history of family life as seen in the encounters between kin in court.
This combined materialist and discursive approach focuses on two types of
legal transactions or cases (h.ujja) brought before the shariʿa court: lawsuits
of the Third World, no longer traditional and never to be truly modern.” John Leonard, “New
Books,” Harper’s Magazine (November 2008): 84.
33 I borrow this term from Brinkley Messick, who has paved the way for this approach in Islamic
studies. In his work on mid-twentieth-century Yemeni court archives, Messick draws on a variety
of theoretical and methodological sources, most prominently Bakhtin, Foucault, Derrida, and De
Certeau. The impulse to pursue an “anthropology of Islam” owes a great deal to the work of Talal
Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). The discursive approach, especially the insistence
on a Focauldian reading that assigns a singular importance to an epistemic shift in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, is most forcefully argued by Wael B. Hallaq, Sharīʻa: Theory, Practice,
Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
34 The list is too long to give in full. Judith Tucker has contributed most broadly to women’s history
and helped pioneer the use of shariʿa court registers in this regard. See, especially, Tucker, Women
in Nineteenth-Century Egypt; In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and
Palestine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). For the Ottoman period, I learned
the most from my students Alan Mikhail, Murat Dağlı, Heather Ferguson, Faiz Ahmed, Malissa
Taylor, Nora Barakat, and Zoe Griffith. The tentative steps I have taken towards gaining a deeper
understanding of Islamic legal history were made possible by conversations with Baber Johansen,
whose enthusiasm and guidance over the years have been crucial to the development of this book.
Two of his seminal works are Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim
Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 1999) and The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants’ Loss of Property
Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafite Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (London:
Croom Helm, 1988).
Property Devolution and Family Life 21
(sing. daʿwa) between relatives and pious family endowments (waqf ahlı̄ or
waqf dhurrı̄). These are analyzed through two methodologies of scale. On
the meta level, patterns in the archives over time and space – such as who
endowed waqfs for whom and who sued whom over what – constitute
a diachronic narrative attentive to connections between family life, legal
practices, and transformations in political economy. On the micro level,
in-depth case studies elucidate how family can be historicized as both the
crucible for and the product of socially, legally, and religiously constructed
notions of sexual difference, property, and kinship.
The rest of this introduction outlines the conceptual and structural
architecture of the book. Section 1.3 makes a case for property devolution
as an approach to the social history of family life in general, and for the
focus on waqfs and lawsuits between kin in particular. Sections 1.4 and 1.5
compare Nablus and Tripoli from a perspective critical of the coast/interior
binary that pervades the historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean, then
briefly map out the political and spiritual economies of difference between
these two social spaces. Sections 1.6 and 1.7 theorize the use of the shariʿa
court and its archives as both the source for and the object of analysis, then
reflect on the zones of visibility and invisibility produced by this work’s spe-
cific focus on propertied urban groups in two provincial cities during the
middle centuries of Ottoman rule. Finally, Section 1.8 provides an overview
of the remaining chapters.
1.3 Property Devolution and Family Life

Property devolution, as a set of practices, reveals a great deal about how
family is understood, organized, and reproduced. True, the science of
Islamic rules of inheritance (ʿilm al-farāʾid.) is quite detailed, but it gov-
erns property transmission only after death. Unwilling to cede their lever-
age on future generations or to be constrained by a formulaic and static
set of rules, most propertied individuals in Nablus and Tripoli preferred
to devolve some or all of what they owned during their lifetime.35 Just
like Maryam ʿAnklis, they did so through a variety of legal mechanisms,
of which the endowment of family waqfs and litigation through lawsuits
were two of the most vital.36 The word “waqf” usually evokes images of
large charitable foundations, and is normally framed by narratives about
35 David Powers makes this argument for the medieval and early modern periods. David Powers,
“The Islamic Inheritance System: A Socio-Historical Approach,” Arab Law Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1993):
13–29.
36 Others include nominal sales, gifts, and wills. A key element of property devolution strategies is the
marriage choice, the study of which is unfortunately not possible through the available sources.
the ambitions of dynasties, the formation of urban landscapes, and the
material underpinnings of religious establishments. This book shifts the
focus to the family waqf, which accounted for the overwhelming majority
of all endowments in Nablus and Tripoli. Indeed, the period from the sev-
enteenth to the nineteenth century was the golden age of the family waqf in
the Eastern Mediterranean, if not beyond, and it is difficult to overestimate
its centrality to social, economic, legal, and spiritual life in urban settings.
My core argument is that the family waqf is the most flexible, expressive,
and enduring legal instrument for governing long-term property relations
between kin, and that it can be viewed as a charter or mini-constitution
that also governs the moral-disciplinary order of kinship. Litigation in the
shariʿa court between family members related through blood or marriage
also constituted a fundamental legal mechanism for the alignment of kin-
ship and property relations, especially in terms of “fixing” the genealogy
of a legal persona, a set of kinship ties, the status of a property, and the
actual and potential forms of ownership or access rights. Kin were not shy
in suing one another in court, making it possible for the historian to recon-
struct internal family dynamics around property and gender.
The implications of these legal practices by kin in the shariʿa court
over the centuries and across the vast Ottoman domains are enormous,
especially when property is understood to be neither an object nor a
relationship between people and things, but rather a socially and legally
fabricated relationship between people about things.37 The rules of
property – especially the legal ones that organize transmission, access,
rights, obligations, and the like – are subject to contestation and negotia-
tions. They shape and are shaped by specific local configurations of power
relations and social organization. Thus, and as Jack Goody argued long ago,
property devolution is a process even the anticipation of which restructures
37 I first encountered this insight in David Warren Sabean, Property, Production and Family in
Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). He, in turn, based it on
a reading of Jean-Jacques Rosseau, who argued, as Sabean writes, that society and property are con-
stituted in the same act. Sabean does not refer to the dimension of “legal fabrication.” I came to
understand the role of legal techniques in the construction of this relationship from reading Alain
Pottage’s chapter, “Introduction: The Fabrication of persons and Things,” in Alain Pottage and
Martha Mundy, Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things,
Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). I should
add here that the debate on the meanings of property has long been dominated by a focus on land
and peasants, especially among historians of the family in Europe and Ottoman historians in gen-
eral. For an excellent overview of the Ottoman legal history of this concept, especially in relation
to land and the cultivator, see Part I of Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith, Governing
Property, Making the Modern State: Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London:
Tauris, 2007). This book is focused on urban life, which demands a somewhat different reading of
property, especially when it becomes the property of God through the mechanism of waqf.
Property Devolution and Family Life 23
interpersonal relationships.38 The process of property devolution exposes
the internal dynamics and tensions – both material and emotional – within
households and between kin (blood and non-blood), especially along gen-
der, class, and generational lines.39 That is, property devolution must be
seen as a system that organically links, reproduces, and transforms family
and society (in the larger and inclusive sense of the word).
A close examination of property devolution strategies can help us, in
the words of Tamara Hareven a generation ago, “recover an internal con-
temporary meaning for family as opposed to social science categories.”40
This study is mindful of the genealogy and deployment of these categories,
such as the use of “family” for the West and “kinship” for the rest.41 By
way of undermining this dichotomy, I use these two terms interchange-
ably. In addition, this book makes use, as far as possible, of the vocabulary
generated by the sources themselves, while also being mindful that they
are products of fluid Islamic legal and Ottoman imperial discursive for-
mations. Three other implications of the phrase “internal contemporary
meaning” are important to this book. First, it calls for historicizing a topic
that has long been and continues to be dominated by a modernization-
theory perspective that presupposes a taxonomy of family forms, as well
as a linear trajectory, steeped in a vocabulary of evolution and progress,
from the extended to the nuclear family.42 Second, it puts emphasis on
how propertied individuals imagined and legally constructed a gendered
view of family, property, and kinship relations (unfortunately, the sources
38 Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western
Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1.
39 Goody defines devolution as the “inclusive transactions that take place between the holder of rights
in property and those who have continuing interests in such rights.” Ibid. My use of the term is
somewhat different, in that there need not be direct transactions between holders and potential
beneficiaries. Waqf endowments, for example, are notarial legal transactions that are conducted
between the property owner and the court without formally involving other parties who stand to
benefit, either immediately or in the future.
40 Tamara K. Hareven, “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change,” The Amer-
ican Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 110.
41 I owe this insight to David Sabean. For extending the concept of kinship to Europe, see David
Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jan Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to the Long-
Term Development (1300–1900) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
42 Studies of the construction of categories in the social sciences and positive law in the context of
late Ottoman state formation and the the postcolonial state (in the discursive, not the temporal
sense) is a burgeoning field in Middle East studies. Due to the very nature of the topic, however,
these studies focus almost exclusively on Western educated intellectuals in post-1850s Cairo and are
primarily concerned with how European positivist and liberal thought became hegemonic. See, for
example, Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Post-
colonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity:
A Colonial History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising
Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).
do not allow for a comprehensive empirical account of the structure, size,
and form of family organization among the different social groups of each
city). Having said that, the focus is not on a purely subjective and ethi-
cal cultivation of the self, but rather on social acts and practices embed-
ded in property and power relations, in legal and state institutions, and in
local moral and spiritual economies. Third, it encourages an artisanal nuts-
and-bolts investigation of how, when, why, and to whom different types of
properties were transmitted, rather than a theorization of the nature of the
Ottoman governance from the perspective of family history.
1.4 The Geography of Modernity

How can we account for the dramatic differences between Tripoli and
Nablus when it comes to the social composition of waqf endowers, the
beneficiary patterns of family waqfs, the types of properties endowed, and
other forms of difference in the social organization of family life and prop-
erty devolution strategies during the 1660s–1860s period? A comprehensive
explanation is difficult to find, for two obvious reasons. First, most arrange-
ments for property devolution took place outside the court’s purview.
Second, and more importantly, we still know remarkably little about the
peoples, economies, cultures, and social lives of provincial urban centers,
especially for the middle centuries of Ottoman rule.
But why bother looking for an explanation grounded in a fine-grained
history of these two regions? One powerfully influential argument about
the geography of modernity runs as follows: Tripoli is a heterogeneous
coastal city exposed to European influences through trade and mission-
ary activity, and is home to a large Christian population. Nablus, in con-
trast, is a homogeneous and insular interior city with an overwhelmingly
Sunni Muslim population clinging tenaciously to traditional customs and
religious values. Coastal cities were home to capitalist economies, liberal
political projects, and a secular cultural life. Interior urban centers, which
ran north to south along the Great Rift Valley separating the coast from the
desert, were home to local market-town economic exchange, clannish poli-
tics, and conservative worldviews. The geography of modernity was simple:
the mountain against the sea.43 One zone embraced modernity; the other
resisted it.44
43 Despite building his arguments on the basis of this binary, Salim Tamari’s essays on the pre-1948 “lost
modernity” of Jaffa and Haifa and the hegemony of conservative small-town culture are nuanced
and compelling. Salim Tamari, Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
44 For example, Charles Philip Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 82–92.
The Geography of Modernity 25
It is but one short step from this particular spatial construct of moder-
nity to further claims about family life. The coastal cities, it is presumed,
were characterized by a modern nuclear family structure that put a
premium on affective ties between husband/wife and parents/children
and in which there was a clear distinction between private and public
domains. Meanwhile, the interior regions were characterized by a patriar-
chal extended-family structure that repressed women and children and did
not tolerate individualized private space. One inhabited the new-fangled
three-arch house with a central hall and secluded bedrooms shaped around
the desires of the Victorian bourgeois family, while the other resided in the
old-fashioned Damascene-type courtyard house, whose roofless interior
space was ringed by adjacent but disconnected rooms, home to hierarchi-
cal conjugal units related by blood and marriage sharing a multi-nuclear
family space.45 In a study that pioneered the field of family history in the
Middle East, a similar analogy is drawn between family forms in Istanbul
(nuclear) and the Anatolian hinterland (extended).46
The coast/modern versus interior/traditional binary is a robust and
enduring construct for a host of reasons, the details of which are beyond
the scope of this study. Suffice it to say that most historians of the Eastern
Mediterranean organize their work around the encounter with Europe dur-
ing the long nineteenth century. The narrative stage is monopolized by the
rising cosmopolitan coastal cities (Alexandria, Jaffa, Haifa, Beirut, Izmir),
often portrayed as beachheads of modernity in contrast to the provincial
urban centers of the interior and the forgotten coastal cities of earlier fame
(Damietta, Rosetta, Acre, Sidon, Tripoli).47 In the case of Palestine, the
45 The co-existence of “old” and “new” architectural features in an “Islamic” city is a topic of endless
fascination for scholars, politicians, artists, and others. Bahjat and Tamimi, avid believers in the
scientific modernization ideology of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), note in a 1916
report the dual nature of the built environment of Tripoli: the “old fashioned Damascene” type that
reminded them of the “medieval ages” and the “modern Beiruti style.” Muhammad Rafiq Tamimi
and Muhammad Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, al-Qism al-Shamali: alwiyat Tarabulus wa al-Ladhiqiyya,
vol. 2 (Beirut: Lahd Khatir Press, 1987), 204. For a compelling set of studies on the three-arch
or central-hall house, see Michael F. Davie, La maison beyrouthine aux trois arcs: une architecture
bourgeoise du Levant (Beirut and Tours: Académie libanaise des beaux-arts and Centre de recherches
et d’études sur l’urbanisation du monde arabe, 2003). See also Anne Mollenhauer, “The Central
Hall House: Regional Commonalities and Local Specificities: A Comparison Between Beirut and
Al-Salt,” in The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, eds. Thomas
Philipp, Jens Hanssen, and Stefan Weber (Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2002).
46 Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households.
47 More critical studies unveil complex interactions between various forces of modernity (such as
Ottoman, local bourgeois, and colonial) in the production of urban space. For two examples of the-
oretically informed and rigorous studies that open new vistas for rethinking the question of moder-
nity in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century coastal cities, see Jens Hanssen, Fin De Siècle
Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mark
interior/coast distinction was important to nineteenth-century European
Biblical geographers of the “Holy Land” intent on retracing the steps of
Jesus Christ along the hilly spine from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It was also
critical to Zionists, who made a sharp distinction between the coast and
east–west plains, where they were able to secure large tracts of land, and
the hill areas dominated by a small landholding peasantry, where they were
unable to establish any significant colonies. In the case of Lebanon, Franco-
phone Orientalists stressed the uniqueness of Mount Lebanon as a Chris-
tian space, shaped by nature, religion, and the encounter with the West.48
Said to be difficult to rule because of its rugged terrain, it became cele-
brated as a stronghold of religious minorities, consisting largely of small
landholders who jealously guarded their independence and tended their
terraces, uncorrupted by the Muslim-dominated coast and desert regions.
It was these minorities, specifically Maronite and Greek Orthodox Chris-
tians, that populated the rising coastal cities (such as Beirut and Tripoli)
and pushed them towards modernity, in ways that Muslims were either
external to or could only mimic. According to the historical economist
Charles Issawi, whose pristine modernization perspective influenced an
entire generation of scholars, “In the Middle East the development that
took place before 1914 was achieved almost entirely by foreigners or mem-
bers of minority groups – Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Christian Lebanese
and Syrians.”49 “Until recently,” he claims elsewhere, “there was practically
no Muslim entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.”50
This spatial imaginary of coastal/interior and modern/traditional obfus-
cates more than it reveals. To begin with, Tripoli and Nablus have a great
deal in common. Only 250 kilometers apart as the crow flies, they were
LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948 (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2005).
48 Ussama Makdisi’s seminal study of the modernity of sectarianism challenges this construct, while
maintaining focus on the themes, groups, places, and periods that have dominated nationalist lit-
erature on Lebanon. See Ussama Samir Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History,
and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2000). See also Ussama Samir Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed
Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). For an alternative focus
on questions of sectarianism that brings in groups and places hitherto largely ignored in the scholar-
ship, see Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
49 Charles Philip Issawi, “Middle East Economic Development, 1815–1914: The General and the Spe-
cific,” in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day,
ed. M. A. Cook (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). Reprinted in Albert Hourani, Philip
Khoury, and Mary Wilson, eds., The Modern Middle East: A Reader (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993), 187.
50 Issawi, Economic History of the Middle East, 116. Beirut, in that sense, emerged as an extension of
Mount Lebanon.
both enmeshed in the cultural environment of the interior of Bilad al-
Sham, which Damascus has dominated since it served as the capital of the
Umayyad Empire in the eighth century. It is telling that the inhabitants
of Nablus and Tripoli have long referred to their respective cities as “Little
Damascus” (Dimāshq al-sughra) in order to convey a wide-ranging cul-
tural affinity, running from the built environment to taste in sweets.51 Like
Nablus, Tripoli was primarily a nexus for urban–rural networks, serving as
a capital for hundreds of villages.52 Olive trees dominated the hinterlands
of both, and, since soap was made out of olive oil, both were famous for
their soap factories. Both also were important centers of textile production,
and their merchant communities administered extensive regional trade net-
works radiating towards Cairo to the south and Aleppo and Istanbul to the
north.53
Second, the economy, social organization, and cultural life of Tripoli
are not usefully captured by the phrase “coastal city.” Tripoli was three to
four kilometers inland from the Mediterranean coast, and its inhabitants
perceived themselves as distinct from those who lived in the town of al-
Mina (Arabic for “port”), which is right on the water. Fishing and the sea
trade have strong purchase on al-Mina’s economy, but Tripoli, since at least
Mamluk times, has looked inwards to the east, towards a fan-shaped region
stretching from its immediate rural hinterland villages in the districts of
Kura and ʿAkkar all the way to its key regional trade nodes: Hama and
Homs to the east, and Lattakia to the north.54 A large area of several square
51 In Nablus, this phrase is still used among the older generation today. For Tripoli, see Tamimi and
Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 202, 204.
52 For a more detailed argument about Jabal Nablus as a social space, see Beshara Doumani, Redis-
covering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1995), 1–5.
53 Currently, both have the reputation of being conservative Sunni Muslim towns – like Homs, Hama,
and Hebron – with a strong sense of local identity and entrenched social customs (more than other
towns in Bilad al-Sham). In both, family politics remain just as important as party politics, if not
more so. Both were marginalized over the course of the nineteenth century by the rapid growth of the
formerly subservient coastal towns of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Beirut. Their faded glory goes a long way
towards explaining the passion with which their native sons and daughters pursue “pre-national”
local history and the pride they take in their distinct dialects and cuisines and in the preservation of
the “old city.” Both are also famous as the sweets capitals of Lebanon and Palestine, respectively; and
both have long been the object of numerous jokes about male–male sexual relations. For Tripoli,
see, for example, ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salam Tadmuri, Al-hayat al-thaqafiyya fi Tarabulus al-Sham khi-
lal al-ʿusur al-wusta (Beirut: Dar Filastin lil-Taʾlif wa al-Tarjama, 1972); Tarikh Tarabulus al-siyasi
wa al-hadari ʿabr al-ʿusur; al-jizʾ al-thani: ʿasr dawlat al-Mamalik (Beirut: Al-Muʾasasa al-ʿArabiyya
lil-Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 1981). See also the comprehensive website established by Ghazi ʿOmar Tad-
mouri: www.tripoli-city.org. For Nablus, see the four-volume work of Ihsan Nimr, Tarikh Jabal
Nabulus wa-al-Balqaʾ: hawadith ʿahd al-iqtaʿ (Damascus: Matbaʿat ibn Zaydun, 1938).
54 I like to think of this densely integrated socioeconomic and cultural space as the “Kingdom of
Shanklish,” after a poor person’s everyday cheese unique to this region. Shanklish is (in)famous
kilometers separated the city and its port town, which was almost entirely
devoted to irrigated orchards fed by three major canals and their tribu-
taries. Its primary orientation towards urban agriculture and the interior
hinterlands partially explains why another popular appellation for Tripoli
is “The Small Oasis” (al-fayh.āʾ al-sughrā) – again, a deliberate comparison
with Damascus, popularly called “The Large Oasis” (al-fayh.āʾ al-kubrā).55
A common perception is that the relations between the city of Tripoli
and the town of al-Mina were less than cordial and respectful during the
early modern and modern periods. According to Khaled Ziade, a historical
sociologist, essayist, and native of Tripoli:
The old town of al-Mina belongs to the Mediterranean Sea and its world
teeming with ships, journeys, and pirates who descended on its shores
era after era until the early nineteenth century. The city, meanwhile, was
attracted to the interior and formed a tight bond with the hinterland to
which it bound itself. It hosted the villagers, housed them at the edges of
her metropolis, and made them her own. The two miles then, separate two
enormously different worlds: that of the interior cities and their rural hinter-
lands; and that of the ports and the coast that are open to the languages and
peoples of the sea . . . It was not until new modes of transportation became
common that the city suddenly discovered the uniqueness and special use-
fulness of al-Mina. So it adopted it and called it its own after ignoring and
despising it for ages . . . But this new relationship . . . through which the city
sought to immerse itself in the goods, ideas, and destinies of the countries
of the world – did not erase the sins of the past. The people of al-Mina, the
sea town, emphasized the differences in attitude and in accent as if they are
of a different city, and they viewed the two-mile ride to Tripoli as a journey
to a faraway place.56
for its strong and distinctive smell, a product of the mold it gathers when buried underground to
mature in pottery jars. It has recently become a standard mezze item in Lebanon and Syria, a result
partly of a nostalgic trend for peasant fare and partly of the demographic trends associated with
migration from this region towards Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut.
55 “It is justly called fayh.āʾ due to the abundance of the sweet smell of flowers, especially in the spring
when it is drowning in flowers of citrus trees.” Nawfal Niʿmat Allah Tarabulusi, Sannajat al-tarab
fi taqaddumat al-ʿArab, 2nd edn. (Beirut: Dar al-Raʾid al-ʿArabi, 1982), 38. See also Ahmad Ghazi
Sharamand, “Dawr Tarabulus al-iqtisadi fi al-qurun al-thalatha al-ula min al-ʿahd al-ʿuthmani,” in
Al-Muʾtamar al-awwal li-tarikh wilayat Tarabulus ibbana al-haqba al-ʿuthmaniyya, 1516–1918, eds.
Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-ʿUlum al-Insaniyya, al-Jamiʿa al-Lubnaniyya, and Farʿ al-Thalith (Tripoli:
1995), 85. Unlike Nablus, which depends on springs for water, Tripoli and Damascus have small
rivers running through them (the Abu ʿAli and Barada, respectively), which irrigate a lush green
perimeter dominated by horticulture.
56 Khaled Ziade, Harat al-ahl, jaddat al-lahw (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, 1995), 48. Ziade’s
account is premised on the very trope of coastal/modern versus interior/traditional that is being
questioned in this section. But it serves as an apt reminder that there is enormous diversity within
the category of “coastal city,” not just in size and relations to other places, but also in historical
trajectories.
There are, of course, important differences between Nablus and Tripoli,
especially in terms of size, administrative status, degree of political
autonomy, and demographic composition. A cursory comparison of
panoramic views – one from the Citadel in Tripoli, the other from the
top of Mount Jerzim in Nablus – shows that the “old city” of the for-
mer is considerably larger than that of the latter, perhaps by more than a
third.57 In Ottoman times, Tripoli had at least twice as many neighbor-
hoods and Friday mosques as Nablus.58 There are no reliable statistics,
but a reasonable estimation is that roughly 35 000 people lived in Tripoli
in the late nineteenth century, compared to about 20 000–25 000 in
Nablus.59
Tripoli had a distinguished and rich administrative history during the
Fatimid, Crusader, and Mamluk periods. In 1579, it became the capital
of an Ottoman province, although it later waned in significance and was
attached to the province of Damascus, and then to the new province of
57 Of course, both cities were much smaller than Damascus and Aleppo, by several orders of magni-
tude.
58 Quarters were, partly, fiscal units; hence, they do not necessarily imply a specific population den-
sity. The number of quarters and mosques for Nablus remained roughly the same throughout the
Ottoman period, ranging from six to eight and from four to six, respectively. In mid-eighteenth-
century Tripoli, twenty-eight distinct quarter names and fifteen distinct mosques can be identified
in TSCR 10, but some were not really historic quarters, and not all of the mosques were Friday
mosques. See the index compiled by Ahmad Harrouk, “Tatbiq al-shariʿa wa dawr al-mufti min khi-
lal al-sijill al-ʿashar min sijillat al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya (1161–1162h/1748–1749): fahrasat wa tabwib,”
(master’s thesis, Lebanese University, Third Branch, Tripoli, 1985), 119–123. A century earlier, Ibn
Mahasin (d. 1053/1643) visited Tripoli and named eleven mosques: Al-Kabı̄r al-Mansūri, Tinal, Taw-
bah, ʿAttar, Yunisiyyeh, Birtasiyye, Mahmudiyya, Tah.h.am, Yagan Shah, Tuffah, and Qalʿa. Yahya
ibn Abi al-Safa Ibn Mahasin and Muhammad ʿAdnan Bakhit, Al-manazil al-mahasiniyya fi al-rihla
al-tarabulusiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah, 1981), 81–84. Bahjat and Tamimi mention that in
1916–17, Tripoli had fourteen Friday mosques (although they only name twelve) and twenty regular
mosques for daily prayer. They also mention eleven major quarters. Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat
Beirut, 206, 208.
59 About 20 000 people lived in Nablus around 1850. Their numbers grew very slowly after that date.
See Beshara Doumani, “The Political Economy of Census Counts: Jabal Nablus, Circa 1850,” Inter-
national Journal of Middle East Studies 26, no. 1 (1994): 1–17. The information for Tripoli includes
al-Mina (located about three kilometers from the center of Tripoli proper) and is taken from the
figures provided by Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 191–192. Also on Tripoli, see Table 1 in John
Gulick, Tripoli: A Modern Arab City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 31. None of
the figures can be considered accurate, but they suffice as rough approximations. We cannot even
begin to guess the size of the population around 1800, other than that it was probably smaller, as
there was a general increase in population throughout the region during the nineteenth century.
The process and pace of demographic change were not the same everywhere, however. As a general
rule, the populations of hill cities were historically stable and changed at a slow pace, while those
of coastal cities witnessed radical and rapid fluctuations. It is probably not a coincidence that the
number of waqf endowments in Tripoli is larger than that in Nablus, in about the same proportion
as the difference in population. It is not possible to project backwards with any accuracy, but a
population ratio of 1.5 : 1.0 seems reasonable.
Beirut in 1864.60 Military garrisons in the Citadel and in the cannon-laden
towers of al-Mina (the port) were a permanent part of Tripoli’s landscape,
and a Turkish-speaking military contingent symbolized the city’s close con-
nections to the central Ottoman administrative apparatus. Tripoli’s sar-
torial fashions mimicked trends among the elite of Istanbul, rather than
Paris.61 With few exceptions, non-native governors appointed and fre-
quently rotated by the central government in Istanbul ruled Tripoli. The
same was true for the position of qadi, at least until the end of the eigh-
teenth century.62 In contrast, Nablus, ensconced within the folding hills of
the Palestinian interior, never achieved a political status higher than that
of district (sanjaq) throughout the Ottoman period.63 It did not have a
citadel or fortifications of any kind, and, remarkably, no Ottoman military
garrison was stationed there until after 1860. Unlike in Tripoli, native sons
practically ruled the city without interruption for almost all of the four
centuries of Ottoman rule, and almost always held the position of qadi of
the Islamic court.64
The population of Nablus was almost exclusively Sunni Muslim. The
city was home to a miniscule community of Christians and an equally small
community of Samaritans; roughly 200 individuals in the latter case.65 The
countryside was even more homogeneous, with only a handful of Christian
and mixed villages, such as Rafidiya and Sebastia. Tripoli’s hinterland, in
60 On the basis of mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman Tapu defter, the province of Tripoli stretched from
Wadi Qandil, north of Latakia, to Jisr al-Muʿamalatayn, north of Beirut. This area included thirty
subdistricts (nāh.ı̄ya or clusters of villages that constitute a fiscal and administrative unit), comprising
751 villages. Sharamand, “Dawr Tarabulus al-iqtisadi,” 189–190. During the First World War, the
district of Tripoli contained 802 villages. Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 184.
61 For a detailed study of fashion in Tripoli and the close connections to the Istanbuli elite culture,
see Maha Kayyal, “Al-libas al-tarabulusi fi madinat Tarabulus fi al-nisf al-thani min al-qarn al-tasiʿ
ʿashar,” in Al-Muʾtamar al-awwal li-tarikh wilayat Tarabulus ibbana al-haqba al-ʿuthmaniyya, 1516–
1918, eds. Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-ʿUlum al-Insaniyya, al-Jamiʿa al-Lubnaniyya, and Farʿ al-Thalith
(Tripoli: 1995), 273–308.
62 In both cities, a native son held the important post of mufti.
63 Nablus served as the capital of between 250 and 300 villages in an area that stretched from the
Mediterranean in the west to the eastern bank of the Jordan River in the east, and from the districts
of Acre and Nazareth in the north to those of Jerusalem in the south.
64 Of course, relations with strongmen in rural areas and with larger regional powers like the governor
of Damascus and the rulers of Acre often determined which alliances triumphed within Nablus,
but the point remains that the only options available for outside manipulators were local ones. The
few and very temporary exceptions during the period under study, when members of the ʿAlami
and Khalidi families of Jerusalem provided a few qadis, prove the rule.
65 According to official Ottoman figures from the year 1905, eighty per cent of the Christian commu-
nity of Tripoli was composed of Greek Orthodox, about seventeen per cent of Maronites, and the
rest was distributed between Latins, Greek Catholics, and Protestants. There were also seventy-two
Jews. Details can be found in Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 192. See also Table 4 in Gulick,
Tripoli, 45.
contrast, included dozens of Christian (Maronite and Greek Orthodox)
and Alawite villages, as well as several Druze and Shiʿite ones. At least
a fifth of Tripoli’s population in the early twentieth century was Chris-
tian (Greek Orthodox, Maronite Catholic, and, later, Armenian). It also
included smaller communities of Jews and Alawites. Tripoli’s inhabitants
had numerous and prolonged contacts with European, Greek, Cypriot, and
other non-Arab communities that either lived in or frequented the city,
especially the port district.66 Moreover, European missionary activity was
vigorous in the Tripoli region, especially after the 1830s, as attested to by the
large number of missionary-run schools, orphanages, and churches, both
in the city and in the villages.67 In the Nablus region, this activity was
minimal.68
As important as these differences were, they do not warrant causally link-
ing the coastal/modern and interior/traditional binary to specific configu-
rations of kinship, property, and gender relations. The differences in waqf
beneficiary patterns between Tripoli and Nablus were deeply rooted, and
were in place long before any meaningful Western influence, or the large
growth in Christian population in Tripoli. And if the degree of inclusion
or exclusion of women was a measure of modernity, how can one explain
that the Christians of Tripoli during the period under study were more,
not less, “conservative” than the Muslims, especially when it came to prop-
erty devolution?69 Indeed, the only family waqfs in Tripoli to completely
exclude females were endowed by a Christian and by a recent female immi-
grant connected to the Ottoman military.70 Instead, the differences in size,
66 Al-Mina is physically separated from Tripoli by the vast irrigated orchards, and in the minds of its
long-time residents, the port has its own identity, social atmosphere, and even dialect. For all intents
and purposes, however, the people of al-Mina were completely integrated into the urban sphere of
Tripoli and resorted to its court for their legal transactions.
67 For example, of the seventy-six schools in Tripoli at the turn of the twentieth century, only thirty-
one were government-run, while the rest were privately funded, mostly by missionary organizations
and local churches. Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 192, 238.
68 The Christian Missionary Society established a Protestant missionary school and St. Luke’s Hospi-
tal in Nablus. For the former, see John Mill, Three Months Residence in Nablus and an Account of
the Modern Samaritans (London: 1864). For the latter, see Philippe Bourmaud, “Public Space and
Private Spheres: The Foundation of St Luke’s Hospital of Nablus by the CMS (1891–1901),” in New
Faith in Ancient Lands: Western Missions in the Middle East in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries, ed. Heleen Murre-van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 133–151.
69 Based on registers kept by the Capuchin Fathers in Tripoli, Joseph Labaki notes that in the mid-
eighteenth century, Christian women, young and old, were not allowed to go to church to attend
mass. Joseph Labaki, “Tarabulus min khilal arshif al-abaʾ al-Capuchiyeen,” in Al-muʾtamar al-awwal
li-tarikh wilayat Tarabulus ibbana al-haqba al-ʿtthmaniyya, 1516–1918, ed. Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-
70
ʿUlum al-Insaniyya, al-Jamiʿa al-Lubnaniyya, and Farʿ al-Thalith (Tripoli: 1995), 329.
For a waqf by Philip Khallat, see TICR 47:54. For waqfs by Fansa, daughter of Husayn Agha, see
TICR 57:8; 57:9–10; and 57:13–14. The concentration of family patrimony in male hands among
demography, and connections to Ottoman rule are better understood when
linked to property regimes, regional political economy, and local religious
establishments. This is not to say that location did not matter. In fact, it is
precisely the argument of this book that the divergence in contemporary
perceptions of family, property, and gender between Tripoli and Nablus is
directly related to how their different ecologies (such as the irrigated urban
agriculture of the latter) articulated with specific historical contexts (rules
of property, economic dynamics, and so on) to produce political, moral,
and spiritual economies of difference.
1.5 The Political and Spiritual Economies of Difference

Drawing on the toolboxes of political economy, historical sociology, and
social anthropology, this book proposes two sets of tentative explanations
for these divergences and their implications for our understanding of the
social history of the early modern and modern Middle East. The first set,
on the level of political economy, seeks to link devolution strategies to
differences in the material base of propertied families. Tripoli’s propertied
middle and working classes generally invested their time and energy in the
vast “green zone” of irrigated orchards between the city and the coast.71 The
merchant and artisanal classes of Nablus, in contrast, worked tirelessly to
establish strong relations with peasant clans so as to secure consistent deliv-
ery of raw materials for industry and trade at the lowest possible prices.
In Tripoli, we find a large middling class of urban “farmers” who manage
through co-cultivation contracts the privately owned (milk) and/or leased
waqf lands attached to the city and devoted primarily to irrigated horti-
culture. The large green zone of Tripoli was a highly commodified forest
of cash-crop trees – primarily mulberry (for the silk industry), citrus (for
export), and olive (for consumption and the soap industry). In Nablus, we
some Christian families could partly be the result of their strong rural roots in the mountain villages,
where land was passed on only to males and where cousin marriage seems to have been exceptionally
prevalent. It could also stem from their vulnerable minority position in the city prior to the large
increase in numbers during the late nineteenth century, as well as the intense competition among
Christian families, for they had fewer political and cultural channels for action in the wider com-
munity. All these factors, one can speculate, put a premium on concentrating power and material
resources in the hands of older males, and on adopting marriage strategies and domestic arrange-
ments that tightly controlled the female population.
71 Abdul-Karim Rafeq uses the term “green area” (al-mint.aqa al-khad.rāʾ) to refer to the agricultural
areas immediately outside the city of Damascus and in nearby villages where irrigated horticulture
on privately owned or waqf land was prevalent. Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Al-ʿAlaqat al-ziraʿiyya fi Bilad
al-Sham fi al-ʿahd al-ʿuthmani bayna al-madhahib al-fiqhiyya wa al-waqiʿ.” Dirasat Tarikhiyya 43–44
(1992): 120–139.
Political and Spiritual Economies of Difference 33
find intensely competitive surplus-extraction networks linking urban mer-
chant families to semi-autonomous outlying villages in the folding hills of
the interior, whose rain-fed lands were legally government-owned (mı̄rı̄)
and devoted primarily to grains, legumes, and olive trees.
The political economy of Tripoli encouraged strategies that favored the
conjugal family unit, that attached great importance to affective ties, and
that allowed women much greater access to and management of commer-
cially productive property, especially the irrigated orchards that were the
main livelihood of the middling social groups in the city. The political
economy of Nablus favored the formation of patrilineal, multi-nuclear,
multigenerational households. The property portfolio of the patriline, the
integrity of the residential compound as a male-defined social space, the
geographical fixity and permanence of this space, and the hierarchical rela-
tions based on gender and age were all aggressively pursued and policed.
At critical moments in the alternating life cycle of division and reconsol-
idation, discipline and continuity were often achieved at the expense of
females and the young.72
On the level of spiritual economies, the explanations propose a link
between the social and cultural role of religious institutions and networks,
or what one might call the local religious and legal establishment, and
the formation of discrete regional traditions in how the normative fam-
ily was imagined and how property devolution strategies were designed.
In Tripoli, we find a large religious establishment in control of a wide
range of well-funded and semi-autonomous institutions and character-
ized by strong imperial links. In Nablus, we find a small religious estab-
lishment confined to a few local families whose fortunes are directly
connected to the internal power struggles, economic competition, and
political factions within the city itself. Tripoli’s religious establishment
deeply influenced the spiritual and moral order of the city, inculcating
a moral environment conducive to female participation in key economic
sectors, gender-inclusive property devolution strategies, and waqf endow-
ments that generously funded good deeds (mabarrāt) in pursuit of both
earthly and heavenly rewards. Aside from the greater percentage of chari-
table (khayrı̄) waqfs endowed in Tripoli compared to Nablus, the numer-
ous family waqfs in the former routinely set aside considerable sums for
ʿulamaʾ-managed and -controlled activities and rituals in what amounted
to a voluntary self-imposed cultural tax on the part of the population. In
72 There are countervailing social practices, especially in the form of ritual visits and gifts, that serve
to soften the impact, at least on the symbolic level, of the disciplinary practices. See Chapter 5.
Nablus, by contrast, family waqfs ignored the funding of charitable and
religious projects, with the occasional exception for narrowly defined pur-
poses, and only ever in a tightly controlled manner. In this latter city, prop-
erty devolution strategies allocated all revenues to one’s own progeny, and
attached conditions that transgressed the spirit – although not necessar-
ily the letter – of Islamic rules of inheritance. These conditions were not
softened, much less resisted, by the ʿulamaʾ of Nablus in the interest of nor-
mative consistency. On the contrary, members of leading religious families
often initiated the formulation of new (and ever more restrictive) practices
over time. Unlike in Tripoli, where the religious establishment reinforced
consistency and continuity, property devolution practices in Nablus were
characterized by abrupt changes over time, which clearly corresponded to
the rise of a new ruling elite, the centralization of wealth, and the rapid
integration of the rural sphere under urban control.
1.6 Historicizing the Encounter between Kin and Court

The differences between Nablus and Tripoli when it comes to waqf endow-
ments and notions of kinship, gender, and property are all the more surpris-
ing given they are revealed by the archives of the same legal and administra-
tive institution: the shariʿa court. If the role of the court, the composition
of its personnel, and the protocols that it used to produce documents were
fairly standardized throughout the vast Ottoman domains, why would we
find such dramatically different patterns in the registers? If the encounter
between kin and court is to be historicized, then the registers of the shariʿa
court and the institution that produced them become the objects of this
study, not just its sources.73 The second main concern of this book, there-
fore, is a study of the court’s archives as constituted by discursive traditions
of Islamic legal norms, imperatives of Ottoman imperial governance, and
the dynamics of local political economies and cultural milieus.
Shariʿa courts operated in all cities and most towns of the Ottoman
Empire, from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula, and from North Africa
to the borders of Persia (see Map 6). The registers of shariʿa courts are
widely recognized as the richest archival resource for the social, cultural,
73 This introduction is informed by, but does not directly engage, the theoretical debates on what
constitutes an “archive” or a “document.” A key concern of the questions that follow is to under-
stand the archives as a “system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” Michel
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), 129. “Event” is the
exact translation of the word (h.āditha) that is used in the Islamic court registers to refer to the
moment that gives birth to a document.
Historicizing the Encounter between Kin and Court 35
and, to a lesser extent, legal history of regions under Ottoman rule. As the
state’s only official legal institution in charge of matters relating to personal
status and property, and as a public records office of sorts, the shariʿa court
was turned to daily by countless Ottoman subjects: rich and poor, man and
woman, young and old, Muslim and non-Muslim, powerful and weak, and
everything in between. They registered the purchase and sale of property,
the endowment of waqfs, the particulars of marriage contracts, divorces,
probate inventories, commercial dealings, custody of children, and so on.
The court also adjudicated in civil and criminal lawsuits and made official
legal settlements of all kinds, including the division of properties and pay-
ments of debts. This is but a sampling of what could often be a daily record
of the extensive interactions between people, as well as the principal legal
arena for negotiating property access rights, kinship relations, and lines of
authority both within and between (mostly propertied) urban families. It is
difficult to overestimate, therefore, the importance of the shariʿa court and
its archives to the history of family life in the urban centers of the Ottoman
Empire.
The encounter between kin and court was a mutually constitutive one.74
Neither can be understood apart from the other. By routinely resorting to
the shariʿa court to perform legally sophisticated property devolution prac-
tices, such as the establishment of family endowments or the use of litiga-
tion to align relations between people around property, kin defined the role
of the court as a social institution and thus shaped its archives. At the same
time, in order to perform before the court, kin were required to compress
complex and messy family circumstances into a limited number of available
legal channels, which were further bound by rules of presentation and evi-
dence. Meanwhile, the qadi could shape outcomes by deciding what issue
was at stake and which party was positioned as the plaintiff and which as
the defendant. Moreover, the court documents that the historian reads are
but brief summaries in which a few relevant details of the case are disaggre-
gated and plugged into templates in terms of structure and legal language.75
74 Of course, the relationship between kin and court is but a part of a larger legal matrix which includes
the discrete fields of Ottoman legal and administrative decrees, customary law (ʿurf), fatwa rulings
by jurisconsults (muftis), conflict resolution through Sufi brotherhoods, and so on. For an overview
of this matrix, see Tucker, In the House of the Law. For reasons that will be made clear, the shariʿa
court was by far the most important legal institution in the towns and cities of the Ottoman Empire.
75 In using the word “template,” I do not mean to make light of the legal language, which repeats
itself in highly structured bundles of quotes and phrases, with each bundle specific to a particular
type of document (for example, a waqf deed or a contractual agreement). A systematic historical
and textual analysis of this language – the bundles, after all, are not there by accident, and they do
change over time – is crucial to understanding the court registers as an archive, but that lies beyond
the scope of this book.
There is no denying, therefore, the structuring discursive power of Islamic
legal norms, the procedural imperatives of a state-sanctioned institution,
or the active authority of the qadi in setting the parameters and the ground
rules for negotiations of power and property relations between kin in court,
or for the construction of kinship as a set of legal and cultural understand-
ings. That is, notions of family, property, and sexual difference – the core
set of understandings that govern relations between kin – were not simply
brought in by litigants and then deposited or reflected in the archives of the
shariʿa courts. Rather, these notions were constituted and transformed in
the very process of the encounter between kin and court. Indeed, the con-
ceptualization of property devolution as a social act takes into account what
is required legally and institutionally to make these performances possible
in the first place.
Since the shariʿa court is a historically contingent sociolegal and admin-
istrative institution, the form and contents of a particular court’s registers
are deeply influenced by the specific political economy and demographic
composition (for example, class and sex) of the population that used it. A
city’s cultural currents and its degree of integration into the imperial cen-
ter also had an effect, as did the issue of whether the qadis were native
sons with local knowledge and axes to grind or foreign appointees rotated
on an annual basis. Indeed, how often, by whom, and for what purpose
the court was used constantly changed, as did its personnel and the way
they perceived and carried out their tasks. This holds especially true dur-
ing periods of intense local conflict, foreign invasion, and the successive
waves of Ottoman bureaucratic, legal, and political reforms. The divergent
patterns in property devolution practices are best understood, therefore,
not so much as a passive reflection in the documents of external social real-
ities, but as the product of a complex articulation of historical contingency
and individual agency with the structural imperatives of an Ottoman state
institution and a deeply rooted and living Islamic legal tradition, all of
which are sifted and reshaped through the labor of the historian.
The analysis in this book thus constantly shifts back and forth between
what court documents can tell us about family life in these two cities and
what they reveal about the stories that are likely to be authorized by the
shariʿa court registers as a specific kind of archive. This is not to say that
it is possible or even desirable to separate the two, but for our purposes
it is useful to imagine them as two ends of a spectrum.76 A fundamental
76 This is also not to elide the role of the historian in imposing violence on the archives. There is no
substitute for a critical awareness of the consequential decisions made by the historian who delves
Historicizing the Encounter between Kin and Court 37
underlying question, therefore, is how one can historicize deeply embedded
tradition while at the same time crafting a narrative of social change over
time, especially when these two objectives inhabit very different concep-
tual and temporal registers. If critical analysis is a search for beginnings,
not origins – of how, for example, notions of sexual difference and kin-
ship are historically contingent and constructed rather than a natural or
timeless feature of a culture and civilization – then I think it possible to
argue that both materialist and discursive approaches are profoundly sub-
versive of the dominant discourses that have shaped the field of Middle
East studies since at least the nineteenth century.77 A difficult challenge
is to find an analytical vocabulary that allows a conversation between two
epistemological edifices,78 for there is no elegant theoretical solution that
I know of that seamlessly integrates materialist and discursive analytical
frameworks in the construction of historical narratives. This can only be
done on the level of praxis, one specific project at a time.
One of the ambitions of this book is to take seriously insights from polit-
ical economy, sociolegal history, cultural anthropology, and literary textual
criticism through a cohesive and multilayered set of arguments.79 Poring
over the dozens of shariʿa court registers, one becomes keenly aware of how
the elaborate discursive architecture inhabiting the tens of thousands of
court cases recorded inside them can channel lines of inquiry in particular
directions and generally shape the historian’s knowledge of that past.
At the same time, and in the shadow of that architecture, there exists
what one might call the “topography of imperfections”: scattered clues
into these voluminous sources in search of patterns and case studies. The labor of the historian is
discussed in Chapter 2.
77 The word “difference” carries enormous theoretical baggage, as it has become a key concept asso-
ciated with the postmodern turn from Claude Levi-Strauss to Jacques Derrida. Discursive analy-
ses using theories of difference are very useful in deconstructing epistemological edifices, tracing
conceptual genealogies, and revealing the power relations underlying essentialist and universalist
claims about, in this case, Islamic/Arab societies. But this is not my aim. Rather, I am using “dif-
ference” in a very limited sense to denote the diversity of political economies, social formations,
cultural dynamics, and, ultimately, historical trajectories of discrete social spaces and regions under
the overall umbrella of Ottoman imperial rule. For a succinct, albeit less than charitable, summary
of the influence of the Theory of Difference in the US academy, see Masao Miyoshi, “Ivory Tower
in Escrow,” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, eds. Masao Miyoshi and Harry D.
Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 39–47.
78 In walking this tightrope, I take heed of Joan Scott’s warning against a profoundly conservative
eclecticism that abandons critique in favor of balance. See Joan Wallach Scott, “Against Eclecticism,”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16, no. 5 (2005): 114–137. Scott’s concern grows
mostly out of an immersion in the historiography of late modern European studies and of the
institutional and political forces affecting the US academy.
79 I try to follow the example of Martha Mundy and David Sabean in this regard – two scholars
who produced seminal works characterized by empirical robustness, interdisciplinary elegance, and
theoretical sophistication.
visible to those who have spent years reading the voluminous registers and
closely unpacking bundles of documents involving the same people and
events over a period of time. This topography consists of unexpected devi-
ations from textual structures, unexplained omissions, and outright incon-
sistencies, as well as interventions in the visual field of the document or
register, such as violent scratching. These anomalies, or “anxieties” as Ann
Stoler might call them, betray a residue of the events that precipitated the
legal performances which produced certain documents and marked each
one in some unique and indelible manner.80 The waqf of Maryam ʿAnklis
is a clear, if unusual, example. Somewhat akin to arguments about how
reproduction of power relations creates opportunities for resistance and
transformation, the production of the court’s archives can be seen as a
fraught process that betrays the signature, however slight, of the context
and singular events that created it in the first place. These signatures are
also clearly present in the fatwa collections that constitute an important
source for the book (fatwas are juridical opinions on questions brought to
the attention of muftis).81
1.7 Methodological Choices

Historical practice is imperial and expansive: it claims a monopoly over the
past and insists on its right to appropriate the methodological resources of
any other discipline in order to write purposeful narratives about it. At the
same time, historical practice is primarily one of specialization and exclu-
sion. How else, it is argued, can one construct purposeful narratives, given
the immensity of the past and the limitations to what can be known? This
question, of course, elides the relationship between narrative and power
80 The shariʿa court registers reveal a great many anxieties on the part of the court, litigants, and
witnesses. For a related set of arguments about colonial archives, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the
Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
81 In Bilad al-Sham, the two key muftis for the early modern and modern periods were Khayr al-Din
Ramli (1585–1671) and Ibn ʿAbidin (1784–1836). This book is also informed by the fatwas who served
as a mufti of Tripoli in the eighteenth century. See ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili, “Fatawa al-Shaykh ʿAbd
Allah al-Khalili al-Tarabulusi al-Hanafi mufti Tarabulus al-Sham,” ed. Muhammad Ibn Muham-
mad (Tripoli: end of Shaʿban 1175 Hijri/March 26, 1762). The collection was compiled shortly before
al-Khalili died. I am indebted to Sara Scalenghe for bringing this rare manuscript to my attention
and for providing me with a digital copy. One of the amazing experiences of reading this collection
was discovering that many of the questions al-Khalili answers are clearly products of actual cases
I read in the shariʿa court registers. See, for example, the discussion of the waqf dispute between
the children of Hasan Husayni in Chapter 3. For a judicious and insightful discussion of what the
fatwas of Ramli and Ibn ʿAbidin can tell us about what it means to be male or female, husband or
wife, see Tucker, In the House of the Law.
Methodological Choices 39
that produces areas of visibility and invisibility in the fabric of the past
through the three-dimensional triangulation of space, time, and agent.82
The specialized pinpricks of historians focus the eye on points of light,
like stars in the sky, rendering everything else as areas of invisibility. Some-
what akin to the “dark matter” of physics, these areas constitute the soup in
which visible units of analysis are held in place. This book explores the dark
matter of the Eastern Mediterranean sky by focusing on three of the areas
usually ignored in the scholarship: provincial regions, the middle centuries
of Ottoman rule, and middling propertied urban groups.83 With this in
mind, a key decision heavily burdened this project in terms of the method-
ological challenges and labor involved: to make it a comparative analysis
based primarily on the shariʿa court registers.
On a synchronic spatial grid, I chose provincial regions, because the
notion of “region” is crucial to escaping the telos of three concepts – civ-
ilization, empire, and nation – whose dominance as spatial constructs is
directly related to their usefulness for powerful political projects. It is also
ethically responsive to actual self-identification of discrete communities in
the Eastern Mediterranean, where “regional identities” are deeply rooted
in centuries of daily practices of social reproduction. Most such regions
consist of interior towns and their hinterlands along the hills and valleys
of the north–south Great Rift Valley that separates the thin coastal strip in
the west from the desert expanses of the east. These include Jabal al-Khalil
(Hebron region), Jabal al-Quds (Jerusalem region), Jabal Nablus, Galilee,
Jabal ʿAmil (or Bilad Bishara in South Lebanon), Mount Lebanon, and
Jabal al-Nusayra (Alawite region). From a materialist perspective, regions
can be viewed as zones of dense social relations embedded in the produc-
tion and circulation of things. From a discursive perspective, they are spatial
constructs of belonging that share a thin cultural cohesion, such as dialect,
food, or memory. These landscapes of belonging – an amalgamation of
82 The rise of history as a professional academic discipline took place in a context where the Enlighten-
ment view of time as linear and the Newtonian view of space as a neutral container dominated the
perceptions of its major practitioners. World wars, genocide, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the
dominance of financial capital, advances in quantum mechanics, and the time/space compression
of globalization and the Information Age are some of the factors that paved the way for the cultural
and spatial turns that denaturalized time and space and broke them, like Humpty Dumpty, into
many co-existing synchronic fragments, all socially constructed. Linear temporality, in particular, no
longer monopolized the historian’s prism, and space became multidimensional and relational. The
same period also witnessed a veritable revolution, very much connected to social and anti-colonial
movements, in terms of what social groups and actors qualified as historical agents.
83 It would be only fair to admit that focusing on zones of invisibility is also a purposeful narrative not
bereft of ethical challenges. But at least this approach does not elide the intellectual and political
stakes of the question: How, why, and for whom do we construct historical knowledge?
many mini-regions and localities tied together via marriage strategies, prop-
erty relations, business networks, fictive kinship, moneylending, supply
and production chains, transportation routes, local political cultures, and
so on – are akin to durable bedrock honed over the centuries by the waves
of history. Even in the intense and rapid transformations of the modern
period, they did not simply dissipate with the strong winds of Ottoman
centralization and reform (tanzimat) or disappear upon the arrival of colo-
nial rule and the institution of nation states.
The durability and flexibility of regional social spaces invite an anal-
ogy: they can be thought of as ancient families or kinship networks that
have developed common material interests, affective relations, and deeply
shared memories over the centuries. Just like families, they can be histori-
cized in ways that do not romanticize, naturalize, or fix them in a tem-
poral cul-de-sac like the Shire in The Hobbit: a place of endless repetitions
that produces texture, not meaningful change. Far from idyllic, these social
spaces were sites of constant power struggles and social transformation; of
inequality and violence; and of class, social, religious, and ethnic hierar-
chies. In the Eastern Mediterranean, by the eighteenth century, they were
no strangers to commercial production for overseas markets, to commodi-
tization of land, or to large-scale circulation of capital, ideas, and people.84
They are not easily digested by the overarching concepts of civilization,
empire, and nation.
On a diachronic temporal grid, I chose a period of two centuries, because
family life is best measured by generations, not decades. Notions of gender,
kinship, and property have deep roots and usually change at a snail’s pace.
The period 1660–1860 makes possible not only a long-term view, but also
one that bridges the early modern and modern periods. The dynamics of
family life and property devolution strategies as revealed in legal practices
do not neatly conform to the periodization schema produced during this
past generation of explosive growth in Ottoman studies. The patterns in
the archives insist on their own temporal rhythm.85 The extant registers
84 Analytical scale is malleable. See the argument by Cem Emrence that the late nineteenth-century
Ottoman Empire can be thought of as consisting of three regions: coastal areas dominated by market
relations, interior areas subject to imperial bureaucracy, and frontier regions in the Arabia Peninsula
shaped by Islamic Trusts. Cem Emrence, Remapping the Ottoman Middle East: Modernity, Imperial
Bureaucracy, and the Islamic State (London: Tauris, 2012).
85 Closely following developments in European historiography, early modernist and modernist
Ottoman historians constructed discrete intellectual hothouses – in terms of topics, theoretical
approaches, and lines of inquiry – bounded by clearly demarcated political, institutional, economic,
and epistemic moments of rupture. Some of the more common are Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt
in 1798 and the destruction of the Janissaries in 1826.
Methodological Choices 41
of Tripoli and Nablus begin in the 1660s and, for Tripoli at least, con-
tinue uninterrupted until the end of Ottoman rule. Unfortunately, there
are no extant records for Nablus from the 1730s to 1798.86 Throughout the
book, therefore, diachronic arguments frequently compare two periods,
sometimes using the terms “Early Period” (1660s–1730s) and “Late Period”
(1800–60).87 The Late Period has the virtue of having a before/after per-
spective on the seminal decade of Egyptian rule over Bilad al-Sham (1831–
40), conventionally viewed as the watershed moment that ushered in the
modern era, in much the same way that Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in
1798 is seen as the rupture of modernity for the Middle East in general. I
chose 1860 as the end date partly because it was only then that the wave of
Ottoman reforms formally initiated in 1839 began to have a major impact
on the administrative, fiscal, and legal dimensions of Ottoman governance
in Greater Syria. After the 1860s, the very role of the court in the Ottoman
Empire began substantively to change, as did the methods of archival
production.
I chose to do a comparative study in order to make my generalizations
more robust and to add to our knowledge of neglected regions that played a
more prominent political and economic role before the late nineteenth cen-
tury than after.88 Of course, the primary importance of in-depth regional
or local studies lies not in how typical they may or may not be, but in the
new questions and insights they can lead to in terms of what it means to
do history.89 Indeed, a study of a single individual can transform an entire
field, rearranging earlier puzzles and adding many new ones.90 I needed
only to select two cities to compare. Since relatively little is known about
provincial history in the Ottoman domains, Nablus had to be one, for I was
already well acquainted with its history and court registers.91 I had therefore
86 The years missing for Nablus from 1516 to 1917 are: 1516–1654, 1659–84, 1693–1721, and 1730–97. For
Tripoli, they are: 1516–1666, 1669–76, 1796–1800, 1811–12, 1820–22, 1828–30, 1863–64, and 1867–70.
87 Nablus register (sijill) No. 1, which covers the years 1655–58, is roughly ten years earlier than Tripoli
No. 1 (1667) and No. 2 (1668, 1677–79). Nablus Nos. 2 and 3 (1685–92) partially coincide with
Tripoli No. 3 (1684–86). Nablus Nos. 4 and 5 (1722–30) intersect with Tripoli Nos. 4, 5, and 6
(1715–23, 1728–29, and 1730–32, respectively).
88 I say “in part” because adding to knowledge has limited utility as an approach, for the past is not a
static puzzle that historians can complete by connecting all the right pieces.
89 David Warren Sabean strongly argues this point in his introduction to the first volume of his mon-
umental study of a small village in Germany: “In the study of Neckarhausen,” he writes, “the search
for singularity, for particular coherence, for the contextual logics of performance suggests that signif-
icance does not lie in generalization or the extension of a particular paradigm or a plea for typicality.”
Sabean, Property, Production and Family, 12.
90 A classic example is the rise of “micro-history” following the publication of Carlo Ginzburg, The
Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980).
91 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.
to find a city with a comparable set. After a year of sampling the registers
of Homs, Hama, Beirut, Sidon, and others, Tripoli emerged as the best
choice, not least because its court registers cover roughly the same periods
as those of Nablus. In addition, there is a substantial but very uneven body
of Arabic-language scholarship on Tripoli (where there is not for Nablus),
written almost exclusively by the city’s native sons and daughters, much of
it based on the registers of the shariʿa court.92 When I started systematically
reading the registers of Tripoli and Nablus, I had no idea that I would find
dramatic differences between them.
To my knowledge, this is the first study primarily based on a comparative
analysis of two collections of shariʿa court registers over such an extended
period of time. Unlike most methods, which focus on a single year, or a
single type of case, or a sample register every so many years, this book
is based on reading the approximately 15 000 documents in the dozens
of unindexed and digitally unsearchable registers that have survived from
the period under study.93 This immersive method required years of labor-
intensive research, but it is the only way to identify robust archival pat-
terns and to locate bundles of related documents that allow for the recon-
struction of the histories of specific persons, families, or properties over
decades and centuries.94 When put into a conversation, these macro- and
92 The following, in chronological order, are examples of such works: Samih Wajih al-Zayn, Tarikh
Trabulus qadiman wa hadithan mundhu aqdam al-azmina hatta ʿasruna al-hadir (Beirut: Dar al-
Andulus lil-Tibaʿa wa al-Nashr, 1969); Tadmuri, Al-hayat al-thaqafiyya fi Tarabulus al-Sham; Harun
ʿIssa al-Khoury, Malamih min al-harakat al-thaqafiyya fi Trabulus khilal al-qarn al-tasiʿʿashar, 2nd
edn. (Tripoli: Jarrous Press, 1983); Khaled Ziade, Al-sura al-taqlidiyya li al-mujtamaʿ al-madini:
qiraʾa manhajiyya fi sijiilat mahkamat Tarabulus al-sharʿiyya fi al-qarn al-sabiʿʿashar wa-bidayat al-
qarn al-thamin ʿashar (Tripoli: Lebanese University, 1983) and Arkiyoloia al-mustalah al-wathaʾiqi
(Tripoli: Lebanese University, 1986); Anis al-Abyad, Al-hayat al-ʿilmiyya wa marakiz al-ʿilm fi Tarab-
ulus khilal al-qarn al-tasiʿʿashar (Tripoli: Jarrous Press, 1985); Nahdi Subhi Homsi, Tarikh Tarab-
ulus min khilal wathaʾiq al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya fi al-nisf al-thani min al-qarn al-sabiʿʿashar al-
miladi (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risala, 1986) and Al-tatawwur al-iqtisadi wa-al-ijtimaʿi fi Lubnan wa-
al-bilad al-ʿarabiyya (Beirut: Dar Lubnan lil-Tibaʿa wa-al-Nashr, 2003); Maha Kayyal and ʿAtif
ʿAtiyya, Tahawwulat al-zaman al-akhir (Beirut: Mukhtarat, 2001); Hala Sulayman, Athar al-hamla
al-misriyya ʿala Bilad al-Sham (1831–1840): wilayat Tarabulus namudhajan (Tripoli: Al-Muʾassasa
al-Haditha lil-Kitab, 2001); ʿAbd al-Ghani ʿImad, Mujtamaʿ Tarabulus fi zaman al-tahawwulat al-
ʿuthmaniyya, 1st edn. (Tarablus: Dar al-Inshaʾ lil-Sihafa wa-al-Tibaʿa wa-al-Nashr). The appreciation
for the importance of these registers was such that many of these scholars banded together shortly
after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 to undertake a massive project of orga-
nizing and photocopying them. This locally produced scholarship tended to be concerned with
different sets of questions from the ones I had in mind, and the methodologies of research differed
in some important respects as well. This has led me to constantly question why I am pursuing
certain lines of historical inquiry and not others.
93 For example, Peirce, Morality Tales and James Grehan, Everyday Life & Consumer Culture in 18th-
Century Damascus (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007).
94 Reading for content, analyzing form, and indexing all at the same time requires transparent rule-
making, taxonomic consistency, and ethical discipline. The chances that someone will cross-check
the sources in this kind of research are nil, while the temptation to find what one is looking for is
great.
Chapter Overview 43
micro-methodologies of scale allow for both a broad contextual and a fine-
grained understanding of property devolution practices. Drawing on the
tools of quantitative historical sociology and qualitative legal anthropology,
we begin to see the transformative power of Maryam’s performance, albeit
in tiny measures that can only become apparent through repetitive encoun-
ters between kin in court and between kin and court over long periods of
time.
1.8 Chapter Overview

One of the most rewarding consequences of the decision to undertake a
labor-intensive and long-term comparative analysis is the unexpected find-
ing that property devolution practices between the two cities are dramat-
ically different, especially when it comes to which family members are
included or excluded as beneficiaries of family waqf endowments. The
reasons for these differences were not immediately obvious, and are still
not fully clear. My pursuit of that puzzle has shaped how this book is
structured.
Chapter 2 sets the stage for the rest of the book by exploring the mutu-
ally constitutive encounter between kin and court through a close read-
ing of the structure and content of the court registers and the power rela-
tions embedded in them. By providing a fairly stable environment for the
legal pursuit of property devolution strategies under its auspices, the shariʿa
court Ottomanized property relations in Bilad al-Sham and became the
cauldron for the construction of family life. The key argument is that
these registers constitute what I call the “communal textual memory” of
the inhabitants (ahālı̄) of Tripoli and Nablus. Chapter 2 also historically
contextualizes the two most expressive and revealing types of documents
in this living archive: lawsuits between kin and family waqf endowments.
Family members related by blood or marriage frequently sued one another
in court in anticipation of or in response to the tensions generated by prop-
erty devolution practices and unforeseen situations such as the premature
death of a head of household or the lack of a male heir. In order to under-
stand how the encounter between kin in court and the encounter between
kin and court are productive of notions of kinship, gender, and property,
Chapter 2 asks who sued whom, when, how, over what, and why. The
seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, at least in Bilad al-Sham, can
be considered the golden age of the family waqf. This chapter locates the
family waqf within the overall waqf system in Ottoman times, identifies the
key differences in types of waqf endowments between Tripoli and Nablus,
and examines the crucial role of the shariʿa court in the governance of waqf
on the local level.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are devoted to a detailed comparative analysis of the
family waqf, which accounted for over ninety-eight and seventy-five per
cent of all waqfs established in Nablus and Tripoli, respectively, during the
1660–1860 period. As the only form of perpetuity in Islamic law and the
mostly widely used inter vivos mechanism for property devolution in urban
areas, it is difficult to overestimate the centrality of this dynamic, flexible,
and capacious institution. The common use of the word “mortmain” to
describe the waqf as effectively “dead” property could not be more mis-
leading. Chapter 3 introduces the argument that the family waqf is akin
to a family charter or mini-constitution that governs not only property
relations between kin, but also the spiritual-disciplinary order of kinship.
Case studies looking at the Husayni and Khammāsh families in Tripoli
and Nablus, respectively, demonstrate how the waqf is a sensitive barome-
ter of contemporary understandings of what family is and how it should be
organized, especially when it comes to the relationship between the conju-
gal and extended family forms, between parents and children, and between
the temporal world and the afterlife.
Chapter 4 argues that establishing a family waqf can be analyzed as
a social act with grave spiritual, legal, and material implications for the
endower, her kin, and the community at large. To understand this act,
the chapter asks two seemingly simple questions: Who endowed waqfs?
And why? Despite some fundamental similarities, there is a wide diver-
gence between Tripoli and Nablus when it comes to what this chapter calls
the “gender and agnate gaps.” In Tripoli, throughout the two centuries
under study, women consistently endowed half of all waqfs. Meanwhile, in
Nablus, women endowed roughly ten per cent until the 1830s, after which
the number falls to zero, and only men appear as waqf endowers. Broth-
ers and paternal cousins emerge as a major group of endowers in Nablus,
compared to virtually none in Tripoli. The middle rungs of propertied indi-
viduals are well represented in Tripoli, while elite males have a stronger
presence in Nablus. Chapter 4 also introduces three overarching types of
motivations – constitutive, supplementary, and disciplinary – which high-
light important differences between the two cities. Constitutive waqfs, the
cornerstones of families as corporate units in communal life, are key to both
cities, but in Tripoli we see a strong emphasis on family waqfs as a social
safety net (supplemental), as well as a way to endow the performance of
good deeds in order to secure heavenly rewards (disciplinary). Deepening
capitalist relations in Nablus lead to a greater emphasis on the extended
Chapter Overview 45
family and the joint household, while in Tripoli the conjugal family is cen-
tral to kinship relations throughout the entire period.
The primary focus of the family waqf is on instantiating the future in
the present. Properties are endowed to provide revenues in perpetuity only
to those categories of individuals and kin groups whose specific configu-
ration is chosen by the endower. Once legally set, the customized design
of “rightful beneficiaries” cannot be changed, which unleashes dynamics –
some anticipated and some that cannot be – that shape current and future
kin relations. Chapter 5 takes a close look at the patterns of who is included
and who excluded from the waqf beneficiaries, and identifies a fundamen-
tal similarity and a dramatic difference between Tripoli and Nablus. In
both cities, family waqfs focus almost exclusively on the conjugal family
and/or the offspring of the endower. At the same time, it is nothing short
of remarkable that in Nablus, the overwhelming majority of family waqfs
(over ninety per cent) exclude females, and increasingly so over time. In
Tripoli, meanwhile, over ninety-eight per cent of all family waqfs include
females consistently through both periods under study. Indeed, a third of
Tripoli’s family waqfs divide the distribution of revenues equally between
males and females. Even more intriguing, the historical trajectories of the
two cities move in opposite directions: as the restrictions on females became
more severe in Nablus, the tendency in Tripoli was for more participation
by women and for greater equality.
Chapter 6 offers tentative explanations for the divergence in property
devolution strategies by looking closely at the political and, to a lesser
extent, the spiritual economies of Tripoli and Nablus. Most of the chap-
ter is devoted to urban agriculture (irrigated mulberry orchards and co-
cultivation contracts) in Tripoli and to surplus extraction from rain-fed
hinterlands (trade and moneylending networks) in Nablus. The former
militates, among other things, for the inclusion of females, while the lat-
ter militates for their exclusion. Of course, it is difficult to disentangle the
techniques and relationships of production from politics, law, and spiritual
life. They constitute a system that shapes kinship dynamics and strategies
of property devolution. This chapter therefore begins with legal debates
in Bilad al-Sham, the basic thrust of which challenged the position of the
central Ottoman establishment, which considered this region’s lands mı̄rı̄
(state-owned), not milk (privately owned). Chapter 6 also looks at how
the differences in the religious establishments in Nablus and Tripoli – in
terms of composition, power, sources of funding, and relations to Istan-
bul – helped shape the divergent property devolution strategies in these
two cities.
The fruit of years of archival and field research, and much soul searching
on what it means to do social history at a time when the popular and intel-
lectual movements that gave rise to it seem to have dissipated, this project
seeks to shape the emerging field of the family history of the Middle East
by suggesting new lines of inquiry into the relationship between family,
Islamic law, and political economy. The diversity of and counterintuitive
developments in the organization of family life deserve closer scrutiny if
we are to sustain informed and grounded discussions on the Middle East
and its peoples in modern times.
c h a p ter 2
Hamida’s Children Come of Age

The Shariʿa Court and Its Archives
When the muftis and courts handled matters pertaining to “family” law,
they were mediating a set of social relations that shaped the distribution
of wealth and power in the society at large.
Judith Tucker, 19981
The defendants appealed to the qadi to consult the archived registers of

the shariʿa court in order to locate a waqf deed dated January 11, 1648
and authorized by . . . Ahmad Effendi Khalifa . . . former qadi of Nablus.
The qadi consented, found the deed that matches the aforementioned date
and, in the presence of the plaintiffs, he read it aloud in its entirety, letter
by letter. The qadi found from its content [the information he needed to
enunciate his ruling].
From a lawsuit in Nablus, November 6, 17252
After giving birth to four boys and one girl in quick succession, Hamida
died in late November 1706, perhaps due to complications of yet another
pregnancy. It must have been difficult for her prepubescent children to
face their first winter season without their mother. Most kids in Nablus
at the time spent the long succession of wet and chilly days huddled
with their parents in one-room abodes (bayt) located inside large two- or
three-story courtyard residences (dār). They usually sat around braziers,
listening to stories and watching chestnuts slowly roast inside the mound
of sparkling embers of jift – crushed and dried olive pits that burned
1 Tucker, In the House of the Law, 183. This point flows from Tucker’s claim that Bilad al-Sham was
a “kin-based society” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ibid., 182. This book seeks to his-
toricize kinship and gender relations in the larger contexts of Ottoman imperial rule, the structuring
forces of Islamic legal traditions, and the specificities of local political economies.
2 “ . . . fa-iltamasa al-muddaʿi ʿalayhuma mina al-h.ākim al-sharı̄ kashf al-sijill al-mah.fūz, fa-ajabihima
li-dhalik wa-kashafa al-sijill al-marqūm wa-quriya kitāb al-waqf al-mah.kı̄ tarı̄khı̄ aʿlāh bi-l-majlis sharı̄
qirāʾa kāmila ʿala wajhi al-mudaʿı̄yyı̄n al-mazbūrı̄n h.arfan h.arfan, fa-wajada min mad.mūnihi.” NICR
4:281, end of Safar 1138.
47
48 Hamida’s Children Come of Age
slowly like coal. For Hamida’s children, the long winter days gave them
plenty of time to dwell on the intimacies and tragedies of their family
life, and to consider their place in the kin network of their father and
deceased mother. Their conclusions come to our attention in the form
of two lawsuits they initiated, nineteen years later, against their maternal
uncles.
On November 6, 1725, Hamida’s three surviving sons – Dawud,
Mustafa, and Hamad – walked into the shariʿa court of Nablus. They
were now mature men in their twenties, apparently successful in life, and
recently empowered inheritors of the Badawi family patrimony. Their
father, Khalid al-Badawi, had just died, and they were finally free to settle
accounts with their mother’s two brothers, Hijazi and ʿAwad, the ranking
members of the Zaʿrur family (Figures 2.1–2.4). In two lawsuits adjudicated
that day, Hamida’s sons accused their maternal uncles of illegally appropri-
ating properties and revenues that should have passed to them on their
mother’s death in 1706. The first lawsuit was over the many small shares
of properties they would normally have received according to post-mortem
Islamic rules of inheritance (ʿilm al-farāʾid.). The second, vastly more conse-
quential, was over a key component of the overall Zaʿrur family patrimony:
their mother’s share of revenues from a waqf jointly endowed in 1648, three
generations earlier, by her grandfather, Ibrahim, and his brother, Nasir
(Figures 2.3 and 2.4).3
The allegorical intention of the chapter title, “Hamida’s Children Come
of Age,” lies in the fact that Hamida’s sons’ passage to maturity coincided
with a historical moment during which the shariʿa court and its archives,
and in particular the legal mechanisms of lawsuits and waqf endowments,
became widespread forms of legal practice in the Ottoman Mediterranean.
They were fundamental to producing, regulating, and transforming house-
hold structures, kinship relations around property and gender, and the
meanings of family in Bilad al-Sham. They would continue to be funda-
mental for at least another two centuries. The two lawsuits by Hamida’s
sons also illustrate the critical role of litigation and waqf endowments in
animating the mutually constitutive relationship between kin and court.
The registers of the courts, I argue, are akin to a depository of the tex-
tual memory of urban communities. The interaction between the “peo-
ple” (ahālı̄) and their local court over the centuries produced a living and
active archive that both mediated and constituted a discrete sociolegal
space whose inhabitants, especially propertied individuals, came to share a
3 NICR 4:277, 281. Both are dated end of Safar 1138.

Hamida’s Children Come of Age 49
Za rur Badawi
Family Family
Ahmad Nasir Ibrahim
Joint waqf (1648)
Khater Musa
waqf, 1656 (d. 1714)
Sale by
Khalid of Hamida’s
Properties to Awad
and
Hijazi (1706)
Hijazi Awad Abd al-Jawwad Hamida

Khalid
(d. 1729) (d.< 1714) (d. 1706) (d. 1725?)
Defendants
Uthman Umar Musa
(F) Sayima Alqam Hamad Mustafa Dawud

(d. < 1725) Plaintiffs
Younger Older
Figure 2.1 First lawsuit between the Zaʿrur and Badawi families (litigants in bold)
common sense of community and territorial belonging.4 Attempts by mod-

ern states to cultivate a territorially based national identity through the
4 The word ahālı̄ is ubiquitous in Ottoman records, both local and central. Roughly, it defines the
boundaries of a specific population according to space, whether for fiscal, administrative, or political
reasons. Over time, the word developed an array of meanings, and it is deserving of a monograph
itself. For an in-depth discussion of what ahālı̄ means on the village level in terms of taxation power
and agency, see Malissa Taylor, “Fragrant Gardens and Converging Waters: Ottoman Governance
in Seventeenth-Century Damascus” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010), ch. 1.
Shops (all previously rented):
1.2 qir (five per cent) of shop, Gharb Quarter, previously occupied by al-Kharmandi.
1.2 qir (five per cent) of shop, Gharb Quarter, adjacent to previous one, near al-
Sha r family residence.
9/16 of one qir (two per cent) of shop, Gharb Quarter, previously occupied by Abd
al-Jawwad, near Al-Qamla family residence, co-owned by Abi-Majnuna Sons
3/10 of one qir (one-quarter of one per cent) of shop, occupied by son of Maslam ni
1/20 qir (one-fifth of one per cent) of shop, occupied by son of Asfur
Residential:
3/5 of one qir (two and one-half per cent) of room inside Za rur family residence,
Gharb Quarter, previously and long-ago occupied by Abd al-Jawwad
3/5 of one qir (two and one-half per cent) of room inside Za rur family residence,
Gharb Quarter, built by Hajj Musa Za rur
3/20 of one qir (two-thirds of one per cent) of Za rur family residence, the rest
owned by the defendants and other partners
Agricultural (all inside city):
1.2 qir (five per cent) of k ra (vegetable garden) known as Fasfus
1.2 qir (five per cent) of k ra known as al-Laymuna (lemon)
1.2 qir (five per cent) of k ra known as al-Dayri
2/3 of one qir (two and three-quarters of one per cent) of olives in grove known as
al-Muqaysara
1/8+1/10 qir (one-tenth of one per cent) of karm (vineyard) known as al-Gharabili
Figure 2.2 List of disputed properties inherited by the widower and children of Hamida
in 1706 (first lawsuit)
Agricultural (all outside city wall to the west):
12 qir (one-half) of olive trees known as Nasab Faza co-owned by Faza al- Alami
sons
18 qir (two-thirds), both land and trees, in k ra known as Kafayif al-Zabb l
13.5 qir (roughly one-half) in karm known as Al-Gharabili
Residential:
18 qir (two-thirds) of a family residence, originally grand but at the time of the
lawsuit in shambles, in Gharb Quarter
Shops:
9 qir (roughly one-third) of shop in Gharb Quarter, near al-Qamla family residence,
previously co-owned by Qutayfan sons
6 qir (one-quarter) of shop in Gharb Quarter, previously co-owned by al-Taww h
sons, near al-Qamla family residence
Figure 2.3 List of disputed properties in joint waqf by Nasir and Ibrahim Zaʿrur in 1648
(second lawsuit)
establishment of a state archive can be seen as a top-down version of the

largely bottom-up phenomenon of creating Ottoman subjects, primarily
through the shariʿa court.5 In Nablus and Tripoli, the development of dis-
crete communal textual memories via the recording and archiving proto-
cols of a locally embedded Ottoman state institution began in the early six-
teenth century and continued until the end of the nineteenth, after which a
variety of other legal and governance institutions became more dominant.6
The registers betray a keen awareness by the ahālı̄ of Nablus, Tripoli,
and other regional social spaces under the umbrella of Ottoman rule at the
time of the role of the shariʿa court as a public records office and of the
power of its archives as evidence for the authorization (hence, the adjec-
tives “living” and “active”) of specific configurations of kinship, property,
5 Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century
Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
6 This transformation is a primary concern of most works on law and society in the modern period.
Few, however, are based on a systematic and long-term study of Islamic legal practices on the ground.
Hajj Mansur
Ahmad Ibrahim Nasir
Joint waqf 1648

Khater
(Endowed waqf , 1656)
Hajj Khalaf Musa al-Qandol
(d. 1714)
Muhammad Isma il Ali

(d. < 1703)
Hasan (F)Hakima
(F) Hamida Hijazi Awad Abd al-Jawwad

(d. 1706) (d. 1729) (d.< 1714)
Isa Uthman Umar Musa
Figure 2.4 Family tree of awlād (progeny of ) Zaʿrur (litigants in bold)
and power relations in a local setting.7 There are numerous references in

court cases, for instance, to the qadi reading aloud court-issued documents
(h.ujja) during court sessions, whether privately owned originals or copies
recorded and collated in an “archived register” (al-sijill al-mah.fūz.), as per
the epigraphs to this chapter. This is why this book is primarily based on
readings of the shariʿa court registers, especially waqfs and lawsuits. Such
readings provide a ground-level view of the social history and family life
7 For a discussion of Nablus and similar regions as a social space, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine,
2–5.
of Bilad al-Sham. It is also why the court’s archives are both the object of
study and the source of information about family life.
Shifting the focus away from large charitable endowments, the book
focuses on the average family waqf, such as that of Hijazi and ʿAwad’s
grandparents, from the beginning of its golden age in the early seventeenth
century, to the time it became the object of derision, hostility, and new
forms of control by the Ottoman government and colonial powers in the
second half of the nineteenth century.8 Although they are usually small in
size, family waqfs were many in number. They accounted for about ninety-
eight per cent of all waqfs endowed in Nablus during this period, and over
seventy-five per cent of those in Tripoli.9 Their accretion over time is
such that most residential, commercial, and agricultural properties became
enmeshed in their web. For the middling propertied classes in provin-
cial regions, who are the primary concern of this study, the family waqf
thoroughly permeated the everyday dynamics of interest and emotion –
material and affective relations, respectively – around property and kinship
within and between households. More than any other legal institution, the
family waqf structured interactions between male/female, old/young, and
agnates/in-laws. Along with charitable waqfs, it undergirded local prop-
erty relations and social hierarchies. It was also the primary mechanism for
organizing and sustaining the institutions of religious and spiritual life.
Lawsuits constituted a vigorous set of legal practices, and most revolved
around the challenges and tensions of property devolution. During this
period, kin related by blood and/or marriage were not shy about suing one
another in the shariʿa court. Indeed, they depended heavily on this practice
for the management of the reconfiguration and alignment of kinship and
property relations in light of changing demographic and power relations.
Lawsuits were key to establishing the legal status and genealogy of persons
and properties, to regulating the contractual relations between persons over
things, and to resolving complex disputes about actual and potential forms
of access rights to properties. The two lawsuits by Hamida’s sons are typical
of the great majority: they are between kin over matters of inheritance and
waqf shares.
8 This is not to suggest that there was a sudden rupture in the governance of the family waqf by
the 1860s. Rather, and as argued in Chapter 7, this decade constituted a moment of transition in
terms of policies and perceptions by state officials of the waqf institution in general. Still, until the
waning days of Ottoman rule, and despite many changes in administrative policies, the family waqf
continued to be largely governed on the local level through the shariʿa court.
9 The figure for Tripoli rises to an average of ninety per cent if mixed waqfs (which combine features of
both the family and the charitable waqf types) are included. A discussion of waqf types is presented
later.
In Chapter 3, I argue that the family waqf can be seen as a family charter.
Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, map out its social uses and analyze diver-
gences and changes in beneficiary patterns over time and space. This chap-
ter lays the groundwork by historically contextualizing the shariʿa court in
its local settings, by analyzing the ways in which the relationship between
kin and court was mutually constitutive, and by identifying the patterns
of interaction between kin in court over a two-century period. On the
diachronic meta level, the chapter locates waqfs and lawsuits in relation
to other types of cases registered in the shariʿa court archives. It then asks:
What types of waqfs were endowed and what changes, if any, took place
over time? Who sued whom, over what, why, and when?10 On the syn-
chronic micro level, case studies, such as that of Hamida’s children and
their maternal uncles, analyze the nuts and bolts of the mutually consti-
tutive encounter between kin and court and how everyday legal practices
produce and transform family life.
2.1 The Shariʿa Court Registers as Communal Textual Memory

The shariʿa court registers can be seen as the communal textual memory
of provincial social spaces in imperial domains. They are a product of oral
performances and testimonies by the ahālı̄, driven by local power and social
relations, on the one hand, and a regime of governance that created doc-
uments based on the legal and imperial imperatives of a state institution
informed by the shariʿa, on the other. The juxtaposition of the words “text”
and “memory” evokes the mutually constitutive relationship between kin
and court, between oral testimony and archival production, and between
normative authority and historical contingency.
The transformation of memory into text and text into memory in the
daily operations of the court requires a separate study. Suffice it to say that
in the case of the shariʿa court registers, memory and text are intertwined
elements of a single archive. To add a layer of complexity, each encounter
between kin and court produces two seemingly identical texts – an original
and a copy – that are separated at birth and lead different social lives. The
original exists as a single sheet of paper in the possession of the person who
paid for it, and its power depends on who wields and/or hides it. It looks
10 Critical to both sets of questions is a consideration of the history of the shariʿa court and the changing
governance of the waqf. Due to space constraints and the flow of argumentation, however, a chapter
on these topics was removed from this book. This has the unfortunate effect of making the Ottoman
Empire seem more distant in this narrative than it really is, and explains why the central Ottoman
archives are not in much evidence.
Shariʿa Court Registers as Collective Memory 55
like a framed portrait: the text is written on only on one side of the paper,
in the form of a vertical rectangle with generous margins. The blank space
allows the recording of future events that involve the same property, liti-
gants, or initial legal transaction. Over time, the sheet of paper can become
its own archive; a palimpsest of several related cases, each of which involves
oral testimony and the production of a discrete legal record. For example,
Figure 2.5 is an image of an original sale/purchase deed written in 1787, to
which five additional legal notations were later added. These included a
lawsuit, a legal acknowledgment, and a validation by the mufti of Nablus
at the time, Ibrahim al-Jawhari.11
Only the original includes the seal and name of the presiding qadi,
located in the upper left-hand corner, as well as the names and seals of
all the witnesses, located at the bottom. The name of the qadi and the
date are the two archival keys to finding the copy in the registers. Copies
have the opposite features of the originals. They are packed like sardines
on the front and back sides of a folded folio of four pages, hundreds of
which constitute a single register (sijill). The cases on each page are usu-
ally arranged in chronological order and separated by a thin line. The text
fills the entire page so as to leave no white space, either horizontally or
vertically. Any empty space inadvertently left is crossed by straight lines of
ink in a manner that represents prison bars over the word “bayād.” (white
empty space). The purpose is to prevent tampering through the insertion
of text that is not authorized by the qadi. The copy is also a poor cousin
of the original in other ways: it lacks the seal (and, usually, the name) of
the qadi, has a reduced list of witnesses (also sans the seals), sometimes
omits certain descriptive details, and is marked by sloppier handwriting.
For example, Figure 2.6 is the original of a 1657 lawsuit case, and Figure 2.7
is the copy of the same case found in the Nablus shariʿa court registers.12
Over the Ottoman centuries, the enactment of property devolution prac-
tices presupposed repeated encounters between kin and court involving
oral testimony, resulting in original deeds and their copies. These legal
texts, in turn, were productive of the very notions of kinship, gender, and
property.13
11 Smadi Family Papers, 1.2.3, dated end of Rabiʿ II 1201/mid-February 1787. It is a complex purchase
by Mustafa al-Khammāsh on behalf of three siblings (Muhammad, Ahmad, and Fatima), in the
presence of their father, Sulayman al-Smadi.
12 Smadi Family Papers, 1.1.7 and NICR 1:195.a. Dated end of Shawwal 1067/mid-August 1657.
13 The moment of the oral testimony that initiates a legal case can be considered an “event” (h.āditha),
a singular encounter between specific individuals over specific properties in the context of local
political economy and kinship relations. The archival moment, on the other hand, signifies the
Figure 2.5 Original h.ujja: 1787 sale/purchase deed with additions

Figure 2.6 Original h.ujja: 1657 lawsuit

Figure 2.7 Copy of h.ujja: 1657 lawsuit

It is important to emphasize here that the court had no line of sight
other than what was brought into its view by the litigants themselves. The
qadi was neither empowered to investigate nor obliged to challenge the
alleged legal statuses of persons and properties before the court as long as
these were not under dispute and/or were established through legal means –
primarily, witnesses.14 This made the court highly sensitive to local class
and power dynamics, the imprint of which was unique to each collection of
registers. The registers, in turn, existed independently of any specific qadi
or court employee. They were not meant as reports to central government
bureaucrats, but rather as a locally housed record of transactions that were
legally valid anywhere in the Ottoman domains, if not the Islamic umma
as a whole. To my knowledge, the Ottoman state never once attempted to
collect and store all court registers in one central location (as some states did
after the First World War). Rather, the registers were physically kept on the
premises of each city’s shariʿa court.15 They were organized chronologically
according to specific scribal rules that allowed retrieval upon the request of
the qadi or litigants who possessed “archival keys.”
Waqfs and waqf-related documents enjoyed a privileged place in the
record-keeping of the shariʿa court. Virtually every waqf endowment was
registered at court, making possible a robust quantitative analysis of pat-
terns in the archives.16 Many were recertified through a formal process of
“structure,” Islamic legal norms, and imperial rule as the discursive field that encodes the event and
authorizes the language of the legal text. Different notions of time and causality underpin these two
moments. The former is friendly to questions about the whys of continuity and change, while the
latter is better at answering the when of rupture and the how of subject formation. Both lines of
inquiry are necessary. For instance, since there were a limited number of legal doors that kin could
enter when they appeared at court, certain regularities become inevitable, regardless of the unique
and complex circumstances that precipitated each event.
14 I owe this insight to Baber Johansen. This situation would change in the late nineteenth century
with the introduction of new protocols for adjudication and the establishment of the Nizamiye
courts. See Agmon, Family & Court; and Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
15 As of this writing, the registers of both Nablus and Tripoli remain inside gray metal cabinets on the
premises of the actual offices of the still functioning shariʿa courts of the two cities. The destruction
of Palestine in 1948 and the weak government in Lebanon are the reasons why the locality still rules.
In countries with strong central governments, such as Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, the registers were
physically moved to the capital.
16 Whenever a waqf was mentioned in court cases, such as lawsuits and waqf exchange (istibdāl), I
would go back to the register for that year and look for it. Almost always, I would find the endow-
ment in question (see, for example, NICR 17:774, 11:72–74, 104–105). There is one exception: a
reference for a waqf established in 1220 Hijri, which I could not find in the register for that year:
TICR 30:147. For a waqf to be considered valid and complete (munjizan), the shariʿa court qadi
had to authorize it (yah.kum, lit. “rule”). This left a paper trail that makes statistical claims possible.
Qadis routinely accessed copies of waqfs in the court’s registers in the event of lawsuits, and the
notarization at regular intervals of waqf deeds was common, due to concern that the original could
be lost, tampered with, or purposefully destroyed (see NICR 6:181–184).
notarization at regular ten-year intervals.17 For example, the first line of a
privately held waqf deed – in itself a certified replica of a recorded copy of
an original waqf deed dated early March 1638 (Figure 2.8) – begins as fol-
lows: “When it became necessary to issue this replica [of the original deed]
produced by mawlana ʿAlaʾ al-Dı̄n, the previous qadi of the city of Nablus,
it was extracted from the archived register and copied with no addition
to what was [originally] uttered . . . ”18 Another example (Figure 2.9) is an
image of a copy of a waqf deed composed in the beginning of Muharram
1058 Hijri (end of January 1648) and recorded in a register, which was then
re-copied and notarized exactly ten years later, at the beginning of Rabiʿ II
1068 Hijri (beginning of January 1658).19 The certified and notarized copies
are legally identical to privately held original deeds – telling examples of
the court registers as a living and active archive. A keen consciousness of
the registers as the textual memory of oral utterances is evident in the two
notes on the top of the document in Figure 2.9. The first reads: “an image
of that which was uttered” (s.ūrat ma huwa al-malfūz.); the second: “trans-
ferred from the archived register” (nuqila min al-sijill al-mah.fūz.). The key
meanings of the root of the word al-mah.fūz., h.-f-z., are “to memorize” and
“to safeguard or protect.”
Two primary reasons account for the careful and consistent documenta-
tion of the family waqf. First, the Ottoman government tasked the shariʿa
court with the governance of family and small local charitable waqfs, a
responsibility that qadis and local inhabitants took very seriously, as a waqf
was the ultimate pious act, as well as a foundational material and dis-
cursive act. The administrators (mutawallı̄) of local charitable waqfs, for
example, submitted annual accounts of income and distribution, of repairs
17 Endowers in Tripoli – far more so than those in Nablus – took special care in making sure their
waqfs were notarized. For example, Hajj Ahmad Çavuş included a condition in his rather large
endowment – registered in the shariʿa court of Tripoli on January 13, 1729 – that the deed should be
renewed every ten years by the serving qadi in Tripoli at the time. The qadi, he instructed, was to
sign the deed before trustworthy Muslim witnesses, and was to be paid two piasters for his signature.
One piaster was also set aside for the scribe (TICR 5:4–7, dated Jamadi II 12, 1141 Hijri). The same
condition was included in the waqf of Sayyid ʿAbdullah Qawwaf (TICR 45:235–236, dated February
20, 1817/Rabiʿ II 11, 1232). A similar condition was attached to a waqf endowed by three siblings (two
brothers and a sister) from the Tabı̄kh family, in which it was stipulated that the qadi was to be paid
three piasters annually to protect and preserve the waqf (li-h.imāyatihi wa-s.iyānatihi) (TICR 10:205,
dated Safar 7, 1162/January 27, 1749). In a similar vein, the Pride of Protected Women of the Veil,
Sayyida Hawwaʾ, daughter of the deceased Sayyid Hajj Ahmad ʿAbd al-Wahid, instructed that prior
to the distribution of revenues to the beneficiaries, the administrator must meet all the expenses for
the “upkeep and enhancement of the waqf [ʿamāratahu: lit. “building up”]; plowing [of orchards],
inspection, re-registration [of the waqf deed in the shariʿa court of Tripoli] once every three years,
and payment of taxes and long-term lease rent” (TICR 42:40–41, dated Jamadi II 24, 1228).
18 Smadi Family Papers 1.1.3, dated mid-Shawwāl 1047 Hijri. “Lamma daʿat al-d.arūra li-ikhrāj hadhihi
al-s.ūra al-s.ād.ira lada mawlāna ʿAlaʾ al-Dı̄n al-nāʾib bi madinat Nablus sābiqan, ukhrijat min al-sijill
al-mah.fūz. min ghayr ziyāda fi al-malfūz..”
19 Smadi Family Papers, 1.1.5.
Figure 2.8 Notarized copy of a waqf (1638)
and investments, and of taxes and wages. Administrators of family waqf

were under no such obligation, but the qadi had supervisory and regula-
tory powers to ensure proper registration, implementation, and adminis-
tration. This included appointing administrators, granting permission for
waqf exchange (istibdāl), and, of course, adjudicating waqf disputes, such
as the case of Hamida’s children.
Second, meticulous documentation was important because of the ten-
sion between the two temporalities that straddled the material and the spir-
itual worlds: human time and God’s time. Humans endowed an entity
that, theoretically, was of infinite duration. For mortal humans, there is no
escape from the chaos and unpredictability of time’s long march. With each
generation, innumerable conflicts arise from accidents of birth and death,
fluctuating economic resources of various family branches, disputes over
the collection and distribution of revenues, actions relating to the man-
agement and upkeep of endowed properties, decisions about rental and
Figure 2.9 Notarized copy of a waqf endowed ten years earlier (1648/58)
Table 2.1 Types of lawsuits in the early eighteenth century
Tripoli no. 4
Nablus no. 4 Nablus no. 5 1715–16 Tripoli no. 5
Category 1723–26 1728–30 1724–25 1728–30
Inheritance 54 (26%) 31 (23%) 15 (17%) 13 (28%)

Waqf 25 (12%) 9 18 (20%) 6 (13%)
Debt 32 20 15 9
Ownership 21 19 4 1
Criminal 27 14 6 1
Land Disputes 6 1 6 6
Validity of Sale 14 8 8 7
Space 12 14 5 1
Divorce 13 5
Marriage 2 6 4 1
Miscellaneous 4 6 5 2
Total 210 133 89 47
lease contracts, strategies of investment in waqf properties, and so on. As

the property of God in perpetuity, it was of paramount importance, for
both pious and worldly reasons, for the court to protect waqfs from tam-
pering, illegal sale, and mismanagement. Kin who were either beneficia-
ries or potential beneficiaries of waqf revenues relentlessly demanded that
the court adjudicate and regulate family waqfs in order to make sure that
administrators stayed true to the specific wording of an endowment.
Waqf disputes were frequent and complex. Lawsuits concerning waqfs
were more likely to result in a court appearance than other type of dis-
pute, except over inheritance (see Tables 2.1 and 2.2). They were also far
more likely to involve the formal solicitation of a mufti’s opinion. Conse-
quently, the institution of waqf represented the largest legal and economic
terrain for interactions between propertied classes, the religious establish-
ment, and the Ottoman state through the shariʿa court. It is not surpris-
ing that legal queries concerning the waqf dwarfed all others categories
in the fatwa collections of the two most famous muftis in Bilad al-Sham
during this period: Khayr al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) and Ibn ʿAbidin
(1783–1836).20 As detailed in the case study on Hamida’s children, the
20 Kitab al-Waqf (“Chapter on Waqf”) occupies almost one-half of the first volume of the fatwa collec-
tion of Khayr al-Din al-Ramli (pp. 115–219, out of a total of 250 pages). None of the other forty-seven
chapters comes remotely close in terms of size. The chapter on marriage, for instance, is three pages,
while that on tithes and taxes is seven. Khayr al-Din ibn Ahmad Ramli, Al-fatawa al-khayriyya li-
nafʿ al-bariyya ʿala madhhab al-imam Abi Hanifa al-Nuʿman, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Cairo: Bulaq, 1974).
The same is true for Ibn ʿAbidin’s fatwa collection, in which the chapter on waqf in volume I is
Table 2.2 Types of lawsuits in the first half of the nineteenth century
Nablus nos. 6–12 Tripoli no. 44 Tripoli no. 57

Category 1798–1860 1815–16 1841–44
Inheritance 70 (25%) 14 (39%) 5

Waqf 41 (15%) 9 21 (33%)
Debt 42 2 5
Ownership 32 1
Criminal 27 9
Land Disputes 22 1 11 (17%)
Validity of Sale 27 4 8
Space 1
Divorce 7 1 2
Marriage 1 1
Miscellaneous 6 3 1
Total 275 36 63
kin–court–waqf symbiosis was a central component of the social life of

urban communities in the Eastern Mediterranean.
2.2 Hamida’s Children Go to Court

The following case study on Hamida’s children in early eighteenth-century
Nablus unpacks the connections between communal textual memory,
property devolution strategies, and litigation over the most common types
of disputes: post-mortem inheritance and inter vivos waqf endowments.
The first section, focusing on the initial lawsuit by Hamida’s children,
explores common legal practices for reconsolidating family patrimony as
defined by the male line, as well as the tensions between kin that these
practices precipitated. The second section, based on the second lawsuit, is
about the frequent use of the family waqf in Nablus to prevent property
fragmentation in the first place. The third section reconstructs the chain
of events that led to the lawsuits, explores what Hamida’s sons hoped to
accomplish, and analyzes what all this tells us about the question of author-
ity within and between families.
the largest by far, occupying pages 97–211 out of 322 pages. Ibn ʿAbidin, Al-ʿuqud al-duriyya fi tan-
qih al-fatawa al-hamidiyya, 2 vols. (Cairo: Bulaq, 1270 Hijri). In the relatively small collection of
ʿAbdullah al-Khalili, mufti of Tripoli in the mid-eighteenth century, the chapter on waqf is second
only to that on lawsuits, but the latter contains several cases of waqf lawsuits, and waqf also comes
up in several other chapters. al-Khalili, Fatawa al-Shaykh ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili.
Hamida’s Children Go to Court 65
Fragmentation and Reconsolidation
The majority of lawsuits in Nablus and Tripoli revolved around inheritance
disputes; not unusual considering that Islamic rules of inheritance consti-
tuted a partible system in which spouses and children, including females,
were legal inheritors. In Nablus, the sources betray a deep concern about
the splintering of a patriline’s patrimony and suggest that the access of
females and children to property was highly contested by vigilant property
reconsolidation practices. This can be seen in numerous deeds of sale and
legal acknowledgments whereby females, younger brothers, and custodians
of children in their legal minority transferred recently inherited properties
to agnates of the deceased, such as brothers, uncles, and cousins.21 ʿAwad
and Hijazi, Hamida’s brothers, spent most of their adult life engaged in
such reconsolidation practices – although this would come to haunt them
later, as can be seen in the two lawsuits by Hamida’s sons.
Having carefully prepared the legal groundwork for months, Hamida’s
sons stood before the qadi on November 6, 1725 and accused their uncles
of appropriating, almost nineteen years earlier, the properties that they, the
plaintiffs, should have inherited from their mother via her father, Musa
Qandul of the Zaʿrur male line (min awlād Zaʿrur) (Figures 2.1, 2.2).
ʿAwad and Hijazi countered that they purchased these properties from their
brother-in-law, Khalid Badawi, on December 7, 1706, immediately after
his wife, Hamida, died. They brandished the original sales deed in court,
which showed that Khalid Badawi sold both his and his children’s legal
inheritance of these properties for the sum of thirty piasters. The sales deed
also showed that ʿAwad and Hijazi anticipated future challenges by making
two pre-emptive legal maneuvers, both of which are specifically cited in the
1706 sales deed.
First, no doubt aware that protecting the rights of minors (and, to a lesser
extent, females) was considered a fundamental part of the court’s function
in society, they arranged for Khalid al-Badawi to obtain a legal finding
from the court that the sale was justified because he needed the proceeds
in order to meet the cost (nafaqa) of raising his five children, all of whom
were then in their legal minority. Second, they obtained a ruling stating
that it was “legally established prior to the sale that the children’s shares of
the inherited property are of no benefit to them (the children).”22 This last
21 No doubt, only a tiny percentage of all instances of “repatriation” by females was recorded in the
shariʿa court registers.
22 “Baʿda an thabata anna al-h.is.as. al-marqūma laysa fı̄ha nafʿun li-l-qāsirı̄n.” The sales deed is dated
end of Shaʿban 1118.
point seems obvious considering that Hamida’s shares, already miniscule,
would be further divided among her five children and her husband.23
The most important point, however, was not mentioned. Namely, that
Hamida’s inheritance included shares in the principal Zaʿrur family res-
idence: the place that symbolized and embodied the family as a cor-
porate unit in the social and physical topography of the city. Hamida’s
brothers needed to protect the integrity and viability of their ancestral
home. Indeed, the most frequent and hard-fought lawsuits between kin in
both cities, but especially in Nablus, were over a family’s residence. We also
know from the description of the agricultural properties in the lawsuits that
the parcels were either jointly owned or under long-term lease by commer-
cial partners and/or tenants of the Zaʿrur family. That is, Hamida’s shares
were already enmeshed in a web of access rights that would make it very
difficult for members of other families, such as Khalid Badawi and his five
children, to establish a foothold. Khalid Badawi, moreover, was no doubt
aware that ʿAwad and Hijazi had quite a reputation for aggressive recon-
solidation strategies, as indicated by the many lawsuits they were involved
in (see later).
Hamida’s sons countered with a sophisticated and two-pronged argu-
ment. They began by acknowledging that the sale by their father of his
share of the inheritance (one-quarter of the shares of the disputed prop-
erties) was lawful. But, they continued, the same was not true of his sale
of the shares of his five children, for two reasons. First, the sale consti-
tuted criminal fraud (ghabn fāh.ish), because the price that their maternal
23 Typical of the portfolio of a middling family in Nablus at the time, the thirteen disputed properties
were almost evenly split between commercial, residential, and agricultural forms of real estate. They
included shares in four shops, all rented, in three parts of the Zaʿrur family residence, and in three
vegetable gardens, an olive grove, and a vineyard, all inside the city (see Figure 2.2). When Musa
Qandul died, the remainder of the Zaʿrur patrimony was in the possession of Hamida’s paternal
uncles and three male siblings, each of whom was allocated twice her share. Consequently, her actual
inheritance was miniscule, ranging from one-tenth of one per cent to five per cent of each prop-
erty. It is important to note here that very few people owned whole properties outright. Most key
urban properties, moreover, were endowed as family waqfs, whose revenues had to be distributed
to an ever-changing configuration of beneficiaries. This was further complicated by the fact that
properties, whether privately owned or endowed, were often enmeshed in a variety of rental, lease,
and investment contracts subject to a bewildering array of claims. This is why the vocabulary of
shares – which also applied to joint ownership of private properties and revenue shares for benefi-
ciaries of waqf endowments – completely saturated the archives of the shariʿa court records and was
a central feature of the web of kinship and legal relations between people. Shares, calculated on a
scale of twenty-four qirāt., were of two types: one that was held in common (h.is..sa shāʾiʿa), akin to
a share of stock; and one that had a specific physical space (for immoveable properties) designated
to it (h.is..sa mafrūza). The latter usually was an outcome of a property division agreement (h.ujjat
muqāsama) or a mutually agreed separation (takharruj), both of which commonly took place when
a joint household or a plot of land was divided after the death of the principal owner. For example,
see TICR 45:388.
uncles paid for the properties was substantially less than the fair market
value. Second, there was no legal justification for the sale, because their
mother had also left them sufficient moveable properties and other liq-
uid assets to provide for their needs and upbringing until they attained
their legal majority.24 The legal aggressiveness of Hamida’s children is pro-
nounced. They initiated the lawsuits almost two decades after the fact; they
took their maternal uncles to task for a fairly common practice in Nablus
at the time; and, disturbingly, their lawsuit implied that their father had
betrayed them.
Hijazi and ʿAwad denied both allegations and demanded proof.
Hamida’s sons presented two agnatic relatives – Salim and ʿAli, sons of
Salama Badawi – who corroborated their claims. The qadi accepted the
credibility of the witnesses and the validity of their testimony. He then
ruled that the father’s sale of his own share of the disputed property was
legal, but that his sale of his children’s share had no legal justification and,
moreover, constituted criminal fraud. He ordered the defendants to pay the
proper cash compensation, along with the rental income, and to deposit
the money into the inheritance estate of Khalid al-Badawi, the plaintiffs’
father, who had died shortly prior to these court appearances. The deci-
sion to deposit the cash into the inheritance pool was important, because
it showed the qadi’s awareness of his legal duty to protect the rights of
Sayima, Hamida’s daughter, who was not an official party to either lawsuit
even though all that applied to her brothers applied to her as well. In laying
out the legal grounds for his decision, the qadi cited a complex and care-
fully prepared fatwa, no doubt solicited by Hamida’s sons, which addressed
myriad legal issues: how to determine whether the size of a share in a prop-
erty was small enough to be considered “without benefit”, what constituted
fair compensation for these properties after eighteen years, how to calculate
the rent revenues, and whether the charge of criminal fraud should have
precedence over other legal issues.25
Waqf and Patrimony

Although ultimately unsuccessful as pre-emptive strikes against possible
future objections to the 1706 sale, the legal maneuvers by ʿAwad and Hijazi
illustrate the great importance attached to erecting legal barriers in order
to protect a family’s patrimony from unwelcome intruders. In this regard,
24 “ . . . wa-anna walı̄datahum khallafat lahum athathan wa-tarika takfı̄him li-munatihim wa-li-
taribı̄yyatihim ila hina bulūghihim.”
25 It is unusual that the name of the mufti is not mentioned.
there was no stronger legal mechanism for maintaining the viability and
cohesiveness of the core properties that define a family’s patrimony than the
endowment of these properties as a family waqf. This was precisely what
Hijazi and ʿAwad’s paternal grandfather and his two brothers did three gen-
erations earlier when they endowed waqfs in 1648 and 1656.26 Both were
designed to channel property devolution through the male line with con-
ditional clauses of inclusion and exclusion, including the most popular one
in Nablus during the early modern period: daughters of the endowers were
allowed a share in the waqf revenue only so long as they remained unmar-
ried. Hijazi and ʿAwad’s paternal grandfather and granduncle – Ibrahim
and Nasir, respectively – inserted precisely such a clause when they jointly
endowed the 1648 waqf.
Nonetheless, on the same day as their first lawsuit, Hamida’s sons
initiated a second and far more serious one against their maternal uncles,
claiming that they had illegally withheld from them their mother’s share
of the revenues of the 1648 waqf (Figures 2.3, 2.4).27 This constituted
a real threat to the patrimony of the Zaʿrur family as a corporate unit
in Nablus (see Figure 2.3). On the face of it, the second lawsuit makes
little sense. Hamida’s sons must have been aware of the specific condition
that excluded their mother. They also knew that the Zaʿrur family had
successfully, for at least three generations, managed to pass this patrimony
intact within the male line. This required a strong commitment to a
particular vision of family and property, as well as persistence and skill in
maneuvering through the legal terrain.28
ʿAwad and Hijazi countered that the plaintiffs were not entitled to any
revenues from these endowed properties, because one of the conditions
of the waqf stated that the children of the endowers’ female descendants
(awlād al-but.ūn) were to be excluded as beneficiaries. When the plaintiffs
challenged the existence of this condition, the defendants were asked by
the qadi to produce proof. Usually, this meant the oral testimony of wit-
nesses, which was impossible considering that the waqf had been endowed
26 In other words, this generation of the Zaʿrurs made a conscious decision to lay the cornerstone, so
to speak, of the extended Zaʿrur family’s place as an important group in Nablus. The 1656 waqf,
endowed by Khater b. Ahmad on March 26 of that year, was one of the rare few that designated
horizontal beneficiaries (cousins), as opposed to vertical (children). The endowed property was one-
eighth of a large residence in which the endower lived, presumably alongside his cousins. NICR 1:19,
end of Jamadi I 1066.
27 NICR 4:281. The date is the same as the previous case: end of Safar 1138/early November 1725.
28 The two brothers who first accumulated these properties, and who endowed one-third to over
one-half of each as a family waqf in 1648, had laid a solid foundation. This action proved decisive
in keeping key revenue-producing properties within the Zaʿrur male line and in beating back a
challenge from the al-Badawi family three generations later.
seventy-seven years earlier. In such circumstances, it was not unusual for
the qadi to be satisfied with the original deed as evidence, but in this case
the original had been lost.29 Normally, this would put the defendants in
a fatally weak legal position, but ʿAwad and Hijazi, like most propertied
Ottoman subjects at the time, were keenly aware not only of the funda-
mental importance of the shariʿa court to property devolution practices,
but also of the ways that its textual memory could be used as evidence.
They thus requested that the qadi examine the court’s own registers, and
they provided the two archival keys needed: the exact date of the endow-
ment (January 11, 1648) and the name of the qadi who had validated it with
his seal (Ahmad effendi). The qadi proceeded to do so and, after retrieving
the court’s copy of the waqf endowment, read the entire document aloud,
word for word.30 He then noted that the content accorded with the claims
of the defendants. Without calling witnesses, he ruled in their favor.
Legal scholars may find it puzzling that a judgment was rendered with-
out resorting to the oral testimony of credible witnesses: documents,
by themselves, do not constitute legally sufficient proof. For example,
ʿAbdullah Khalili, the mufti of Tripoli in the early 1760s, ruled in a simi-
lar case that “a waqf deed does not constitute, by itself, sufficient proof.”31
At the same time, however, he also ruled in another case that oral testi-
mony by witnesses regarding a condition in a waqf that is generations old
(and whose text is unavailable) is not permissible. Memory through hearsay
(samaʿ), he explained, is not sufficient as the chain of knowledge is impos-
sible to prove.32 This is why the qadi read the copy of the deed aloud in
the present case, substituting for both the original deed and witnesses in
both an aural and a visual sense. Indeed, it was not unusual, even if an
original deed was available, for a qadi to search the court’s own archival
records for the copy in order to make sure not only that the original was
not a fake, but also that none of its words had been changed after the fact,
on the basis that the court’s records were less likely to have been tampered
with.33
29 As has been discussed, it was common practice to notarize the validity of a waqf every ten years or
so – an act that had the additional virtue of creating new witnesses. Apparently, this was not done
in this case.
30 Unfortunately, the register consulted in 1725 is now missing, like most eighteenth-century registers,
due to a flood in Nablus.
31 “La yuʿmal bi-mujarrad kitāb al-waqf.” al-Khalili, Fatawa al-Shaykh Abdullah al-Khalili, 23.
32 “Laysa hadha al-amr . . . min al-umūr allatı̄ tuthbat bi-l-samaʿ.” Ibid., 24–26.
33 For example, see NICR 11:94–97. On the court registers as valid evidence, see Guy Burak, “Evi-
dentiary Truth Claims, Imperial Registers, and the Ottoman Archive: Contending Legal Views of
Archival and Record-Keeping Practices in Ottoman Greater Syria (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Cen-
turies).” Bulletin of School of Oriental and African Studies 79, no. 2 (2016): 1–22.
This particular oral performance, however, was just that: a performance,
whose outcome was already known. The easy win by ʿAwad and Hijazi was
almost certainly due not to a weak legal challenge or a sympathetic qadi, but
rather to an out-of-court settlement with their nephews prior to its initia-
tion. This does not mean that the second lawsuit is not as “real” as the first.
In fact, most lawsuits were formalities, but they did important work. The
second lawsuit did double duty for the Zaʿrur family: it validated an old
waqf and produced a document that contained a qadi ruling in their favor
regarding the critical clause excluding married females. Together, the two
lawsuits resolved tensions in post-mortem and inter vivos property devolu-
tion through inheritance and waqf, respectively. They established the legal
status and relationships between the litigants, identified the genealogy and
status of specific properties, and validated the property consolidation and
reconsolidation practices of the Zaʿrur brothers.
Blowback: Law as a Double-Edged Sword

Why did Hamida’s sons wait almost nineteen years before initiating the
lawsuits against their maternal uncles? And what did they hope to accom-
plish by going through the shariʿa court? A search for all documents involv-
ing ʿAwad and Hijazi suggests that their efforts to centralize power and
property within the Zaʿrur family as a corporate unit came at a high cost in
terms of their relations to kin, both in-laws and agnates. Resistance to their
hold over the Zaʿrur family patrimony increased over time, reaching a tip-
ping point as old age caught up with them. The family firm they had ruled
for so long was breaking apart via similar legal practices to the ones they
had used to build it in the first place; hence, the title of this section. The
most important clue in this regard is that when Hamida’s sons chose to go
to court in 1725, they did so with the knowledge that their uncles’ agnates
within the Zaʿrur family had already subjected ʿAwad and Hijazi to several
debilitating lawsuits, all triggered by their aggressive property reconsolida-
tion practices. Three lawsuits by Hasan and Hakima Zaʿrur against their
paternal cousins, ʿAwad and Hijazi, are a case in point (Figure 2.4).34
On September 12, 1703 (before Hamida died), Hasan and Hakima
accused their cousins of illegally appropriating the property they had inher-
ited from their father, ʿAli. Their story is similar to that of Hamida’s
34 TICR 4:15–16 is dated September 21, 1723/Dhu al-Hijja 20, 1135. The information on the previous
lawsuits is culled from this one.
children, in that Hasan and Hakima were in their legal minority when their
father died and thus unable to mount a challenge to the move by ʿAwad
and Hijazi to concentrate the family property in their hands. As noted ear-
lier, and as we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5, concentration of wealth within
merchant families in Nablus often came at the expense of women, chil-
dren, younger brothers, and the weaker branches of the extended family.
Initially, Hasan and Hakima were unable to prove their allegations to the
satisfaction of the court, as their older cousins were still at the peak of their
influence. They sued again fourteen years later, on October 17, 1717, but
lost again. It was not until the third lawsuit, dated September 21, 1723, that
they finally prevailed. This particular lawsuit was long and complicated.
It included oral recitations of several court documents by the qadi, who
read them out loud “word for word and letter by letter.”35 It also included
a description of a field visit to the disputed property by the qadi, who was
“accompanied by a large number of learned scholars along with a crowd
of people, both elites and commoners, whose names are signed below as
witnesses.”36 Both actions speak to the fact that Hasan and Hakima were
able to mobilize the communal textual memory of the registers, the full
participation of the qadi, and the support of a wide range of actors from
the family, the community, and the religious establishment. Also signif-
icant to their victory in this case were four strategic moves preceding the
lawsuit. First, they carefully presented a legal narrative buttressed by a string
of original court deeds orally performed during the court session. Second,
they secured a fatwa by ʿAbd al-Ghani, the mufti of Nablus, which sup-
ported their legal position. Third, they waited until a new qadi arrived in
Nablus and took advantage of the fact that he, exceptional among Nablus
qadis, was not a native son.37 Finally, they chose as witnesses men from the
ʿAlami family of Jerusalem, which happened to be the family to which the
35 “Fardan fardan wa-h.arfan h.arfan.”

36 “Wa-s.uh.abatihi jamʿan ghafiran mina al-ʿulamaʾ al-aʿlam wa jamʿan . . . min al-khās. wa-l-ʿam min
man satuktab rasma shahadatihim adnah.”
37 Sometimes litigants who were not satisfied with the results of a lawsuit took the case to a different
court or raised the same issue again but on different legal grounds by hiding some things and
foregrounding others, depending on the circumstances. For example, see NICR 4:123–124; 5:169;
and 5:7, 63, respectively. Others took advantage of the arrival of a new qadi to reinitiate legal action.
In some instances, soon after a qadi was replaced, one can see a rise in the frequency of lawsuits, as
well as in the re-litigation of previously decided lawsuits. This is especially true if the new qadi was
an outsider replacing a native son. See, for example, NICR 4:260–270. This practice was frequent
enough that a mufti of Tripoli, shaykh ʿAbdullah al-Khalili, repeatedly ruled that newly arrived
qadis had no authority to reverse the rulings of their predecessors. al-Khalili, Fatawa al-Shaykh ʿAbd
Allah al-Khalili, 21, 25–27.
qadi presiding over the case belonged.38 Simply put, they outmaneuvered
their experienced cousins.
The string of lawsuits against Hijazi and ʿAwad did not end in 1725. Just
four years later, in 1729, they were defendants in no less than six other
lawsuits, all initiated by the next generation in line to lead the Zaʿrur
family: their paternal nephews from their deceased older brother, ʿAbd al-
Jawwad.39 Unlike in the other cases, the claim was not that Hijazi and
ʿAwad had appropriated their legal inheritance when their father died.
They, in fact, continued the business partnership that was in place between
their father and their paternal uncles, and even entered into new ones.
Rather, the lawsuits can be seen as a realignment of the relationship between
kin and property within the family. The timing suggests as much: the string
of lawsuits followed the death of ʿAwad, the older brother, probably the
ranking senior member of the family. With ʿAwad’s death, Hijazi lost his
lifelong partner and was left alone to feel the brunt of property devolu-
tion and (re)consolidation strategies by his nephews – strategies that were
indeed quite similar to the ones that he and his brother had pursued over
several decades.
What this case study further shows is how difficult it is to overestimate
the degree to which the death of a family leader can enmesh ever widening
circles of kin in numerous court cases, sometimes stretching over decades.40
Indeed, the death of a principal was what determined the timing of the law-
suits by Hamida’s sons. Even though they had reached their legal major-
ity several years earlier, it was not until their father died in 1725 that the
brothers took their maternal uncles to court. Until then, Hamida’s sons did
not have the legal or moral authority or the opportunity to challenge an
injustice they claimed had been committed against them in the
38 The witnesses included men from three nearby villages, Burin, Bayt Ozan, and Bayt Iba, who prob-
ably worked the lands in question and knew its boundaries. In yet another illustration of the calcu-
lated nature of lawsuits, the plaintiffs made it very clear that although they had no hope of wining
in 1717, they nevertheless sued at that time in order to remain within the legal fifteen-year window
for land disputes as set out in Ottoman secular law.
39 NICR 5:128–129, dated end of Dhu al-Hijja 1141 (July 27, 1729); NICR 5:139, dated early Safar 1142
(August 26, 1729); NICR 5:139, dated Safar 7, 1142 (September 1, 1729); NICR 5:152, dated Rabiʿ I
21, 1142 (October 14, 1729); NICR 5:154, dated early Rabiʿ II 1142 (October 24, 1729); NICR 5:158,
dated early Rabiʿ II 1142 (October 24, 1729). The last two were against Hijazi alone, as ʿAwad had
died in early October 1729.
40 See, for example, the numerous lawsuits enacted following the sudden death of a rich merchant
and scion of the Zamzami family – better known by his nickname “Abi Jaybayn” (“two-pockets”) –
without surviving male heirs in their legal majority. The lawsuits came to involve an ever-widening
circle of related individuals over matters such as inheritance, the validity of kinship ties, debt, and
the contested ownership of residential properties. NICR 4:278, 280, 285, 289, 289–290, 291, 292,
293, 295; and NICR 5:59, 61, 72–73.
Lawsuit Narratives 73
distant past.41 And even if they had had the authority, it was not in
their interest to drag their father to court and accuse him of criminal
fraud.
The death of the father signaled a change in the lines of authority within
the Badawi family and created an opportunity for the sons to redefine their
place in wider social circles. Their motivations, therefore, went far deeper
than simple material gain and the opportunity to seek justice at a time
when their maternal uncles were becoming weaker. After all, the effort and
expense involved – forming a united front, designing a rather intricate legal
strategy, and paying more than a little money to secure a favorable fatwa
in advance, not to mention court fees – were greater than any possible
monetary compensation. Through these two lawsuits, one can argue, the
three brothers consolidated their power within the Badawi family and made
it clear to all, now that the patriarch was dead, that this family was under
new management. The lawsuits showed that they could act in concert, that
they could rise to a challenge, and that they could marshal both material
and political capital to pursue their objectives.
Most important for our purposes, the stories of the Badawi and Zaʿrur
families demonstrate the centrality of the shariʿa court to property devolu-
tion and reconsolidation practices, especially through waqfs and lawsuits.
In that sense, the litigants from the Badawi and Zaʿrur families were all
playing by the same rules. These rules, themselves a historical and con-
tingent product of the mutually constitutive relationship between kin and
court, were neither monolithic nor unchanging. How waqfs and lawsuits
were deployed, by whom, and for what differed depending on such factors
as class, gender, power, regional context, and change over time. The next
two sections examine the patterns of difference in the archives, or what
one might call the changing narratives of lawsuits and waqf endowments.
Section 2.4 will also examine the centrality of the family waqf and the role
of the shariʿa court in its governance.
2.3 Lawsuit Narratives

“And do with me as you wish, for from your doorstep there is no retreat or
departure.” Thus reads the second line in a short poem located at the top of
41 Even if they did, the father had a legal right to declare that one or more of his children had not
reached the stage of rushd, or legal maturity. According to Hanafi law, this prerogative remained in
the father’s hand indefinitely. Besides, they might not have been able to persuade the two witnesses,
both agnates from the al-Badawi family, to testify if their father, one of the senior members of the
family, had objected.
a personal letter sent by Hasan Smadi, a member of a distinguished family
of scholars and Sufis in Nablus since at least the sixteenth century, to ʿAbd
al-Fattah ağa Nimr, then scion of one of the oldest political/military fam-
ilies of the city (Figure 2.10).42 Both families lived in the Habala Quarter,
still a distinct part of the old city of Nablus, and were connected by a thick
web of patronage, business, and religious ties. After showering further effu-
sive praise on ʿAbd al-Fattah, who is addressed as “our father,” Hasan asks
him to intervene in an inheritance dispute internal to the Smadi family.
Hasan’s paternal cousins, it seems, effected a fifty–fifty division (twelve out
of twenty-four qirāt.) of the properties even though, according to Hasan, he
and his brother (then in his legal minority) were rightfully due seventeen
out of the twenty-four qirāt.. Adding insult to injury, the division (qisma)
was made while Hasan was out of town. He asks ʿAbd al-Fattah to become
his legal representative and to nullify this division. If his paternal cousins
do not back down, Hasan adds, then ʿAbd al-Fattah is authorized to appro-
priate the revenues of the properties until he returns to Nablus. Hasan con-
cludes by reminding ʿAbd al-Fattāh of his love for Hasan’s father as well for
himself and his brother, and by extolling the good deeds of ʿAbd al-Fattāh
for religious workers like himself. Hasan must have been in Cairo, per-
haps studying in al-Azhar, for he concludes by assuring ʿAbd al-Fattāh that
his name is always invoked in Hasan’s prayers when he visits the tombs of
Sayyidna Husayn and al-imam al-Shafiʿi.43
We do not know from this letter whether Hasan was asking ʿAbd al-
Fattah to intervene directly with his cousins or to legally represent him
in court. Perhaps he envisioned an informal settlement enforced by the
power of the Nimr family. After all, the court was far from the only forum
for adjudication, and registered lawsuits do not reflect all the types or the
total frequency of disputes in the society as a whole. The unpredictability
of the life cycle, changing economic circumstances, fluctuating personal
relationships, and the exigencies of political and military developments,
among other things, generated a vast and complex ecosystem of disputes.
Most, no doubt, were largely resolved within and between families and/or
through various intermediaries such as neighborhood leaders, members of
42 “Fa ifʿal bı̄ mā tashāʾ fa laysa lı̄ ʿan bāb baytika mahrabu wa barāh.u.” Nimr Family Papers, 4.1.8. The
letter was composed on Shawwal 26, but no year is mentioned. ʿAbd al-Fattah was leader of the
Nimr family during the 1840s and 50s. See Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 210–211. For another
example of a poem by a villager from Rafidya written to solicit a favor from ʿAbd al-Fattah, see
Nimr, Tarikh Jabal Nabulus wa-l-Balqaʾ, 504–506.
43 Many Sunni Muslims believe that the head of Husayn ibn ʿAli, the Prophet’s grandson, is buried in
the grounds of the al-Husayn Mosque, originally built in the twelfth century.
Figure 2.10 Letter from Hasan Smadi to ‘Abd Al-Fattah Nimr, n.d.
Table 2.3 Types of cases registered in the Nablus and Tripoli shariʿa
court registers44
Tripoli Tripoli Tripoli

Nablus Nablus no. 4 no. 5 Nablus no. 44
no. 4 no. 5 1715–16 1728–30 nos. 6–12 1815–16
1723–26 1728–30 1724–25 186 1798–1860 230
Type of case 377 pages 186 pages 258 pages pages 2503 pages pages
Purchase/sale 408 246 162 102 90

(39%) (41%) (31%) (31%)
Lawsuit 210 133 91 47 275 36
(20%) (22%) (17%) (14%) (<10%) (10.5%)
Acknowledgment 85 57 65 30 30
deeds
Waqf 63 50 44 22 44
Administrative 75 48 87 43 24
correspondence (8%) (16%) (13%)
Personal status 79 30 50 35 88
Appointment 63 18 46 29 15
Miscellaneous 57 24 32 22 16
Total 1040 606 531 330 1000s 343
the religious establishment, and powerful officials. 45 If a dispute went to

court at all, more likely than not it would be in order to formally perform
the settlement, rather than leave it to the qadi to adjudicate as he saw fit.
Still, one can learn a great deal from the disputes that did (or did not) end
up in court, and the performance of court formalities is no less real than
are nail-biting confrontations.46
There is no shortage of lawsuits in the shariʿa court registers of Nablus
and Tripoli. After the sale and purchase of urban real estate, they are the
most frequent type of case, accounting for about a fifth of all entries
(Table 2.3). Participation is wide across the social spectrum of proper-
tied urban individuals: male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich
44 The category Acknowledgments includes iqrār, ʿibra and muqāsama cases. Waqf includes endow-
ments, annual reports of some charitable waqfs, rent, h.ikr, and istibdāl. Personal Status includes
probate inventories, marriage, divorce, nafaqa, custody, hiba and other related cases such as appoint-
ment of legal agents (tawkı̄l).
45 See, for example, two dissertations on this topic: Yavuz Aykan, “Les acteurs de la justice à
Amid et dans la province du Diyarbekir d’après les sicil provinciaux du 18e siècle” (PhD diss.,
EHESS/College de France, 2012); James E. Baldwin, “Islamic Law in an Ottoman Context: Resolv-
ing Disputes in Late 17th/Early 18th-Century Cairo” (PhD diss., New York University, 2010).
46 A key work about lawsuits is Boğaç Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society, and Justice in the Ottoman
Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–1744) (Leiden: Brill,
2003).
Table 2.4 Female participation in lawsuits during the early
eighteenth century
Tripoli no. 4
Nablus no. 4 Nablus no. 5 1715–16 Tripoli no. 5
Type of case 1723–26 1728–30 1724–25 1728–30
Lawsuits between kin 82 (39%) 48 (36%) 29 (33%) 20 (43%)

Female litigant 85 (40%) 49 (37%) 44 (49%) 26 (55%)
Female between kin 43 27 18 19
Female plaintiff 60 38 32 18
Female defendant 33 22 21 13
Total 210 133 89 47
and barely scraping by. Most important, and as is evident in the case of
Hamida’s children, kin frequently sued one another in court. They resorted
to it on a regular basis in order to initiate, adjudicate, and/or enter into
the record new configurations of property access rights and to pave new
legal paths for property devolution. In Nablus and Tripoli during the early
eighteenth century, the incidence of lawsuits between kin was remarkably
similar, averaging exactly thirty-seven and a half per cent of the total num-
ber of lawsuits in both cities (Table 2.4). For Nablus during the 1798–
1860 period, the rate was about the same at thirty-eight per cent.47 As
for Tripoli, the two sample registers for the 1815–16 and 1841–44 periods
yield the very high figures of sixty-one and forty-four per cent, respectively
(Table 2.5).48
Based on a close examination of who sues whom, over what, when, and
how, this section argues that disputes over inheritance and waqf consti-
tuted the main faultlines within families, especially when it came to in-laws
and devolution through females.49 Indeed, the construction of gendered
47 It is difficult to explain the striking consistency over time in Nablus when it comes to lawsuits
between kin, especially since most other patterns for Nablus exhibit clear, if not radical shifts over
time.
48 It remains to be seen whether these high rates for Tripoli were part of a general pattern.
49 Prior to the 1860s, a typical lawsuit registered in the shariʿa court registers of Nablus and Tripoli
is a brief summary, told in the third person, of the relevant legal matter to be decided and of the
qadi’s decision. The variables are the litigants, witnesses, and contested properties and/or access
rights to property and revenues. Although lawsuits often involved several sessions, as witnesses were
marshaled and vetted, legal counsel approved, and documents retrieved, the actual text makes no
reference to these sessions or the period of time involved. It is as if all legal disputes were adjudi-
cated in one quick sitting. By the 1870s, in contrast, new protocols recorded first-person testimony,
minutes of all court sessions regarding a specific case, interventions by lawyers, and so on. The end
result is the kind of detailed information that historians of earlier periods, like myself, could only
dream about having. The changes in recording protocols are instantly recognizable on the visual
Table 2.5 Lawsuits between kin during the first half of the nineteenth century

Type of case 1798–1860 1815–16 1841–44
Between kin 105 (38%) 22 (61%) 28 (44%)

Female litigant 91 (33%) 20 (55%) 36 (57%)
Female between kin 58 16 29
Female plaintiff 72 13
Female defendant 28 12
Total 275 36 63
property genealogies and their devolution among kin is the bread and but-
ter of lawsuits in the court of Tripoli and Nablus.50 In both cities, females
were heavily involved in lawsuits, particularly those between kin, and par-
ticularly in the role of plaintiff. Within these general parameters (as detailed
later), there are important differences between Nablus and Tripoli in terms
of who sues whom over what, as well as dramatic changes over time in
terms of the role of the shariʿa court as a forum of adjudication between
kin.
The two lawsuits by Hamida’s children are typical examples of ingrained
narrative structures that repeat themselves. Whether the parties to litiga-
tion are in-laws, cousins, brothers, husbands and wives, mothers and sons,
or uncles and nieces, the key issue is the transmission of property through
inheritance or waqf (Tables 2.6 and 2.7). Such cases accounted for about
forty per cent of all lawsuits consistently across both space and time.51 The
level as one scans the metal cabinets of the shariʿa courts of Nablus and Tripoli: the registers lining
the shelves double and triple in thickness even though each covers increasingly short periods of
time. See Iris Agmon, “Text, Court, and Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Palestine.” In Family
History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender, ed. Beshara Doumani (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2003), 201–228. Another reason for the expanding size of the
registers is that villagers started resorting to the court in large numbers after the 1860s.
50 The remaining lawsuits – those revolving around debt, crime (mostly theft, but also murder), space,
divorce, and claims of shufʿa (right of purchase) between neighbors – persisted over time, but always
in small albeit fluctuating numbers. Criminal investigations and commercial disputes (aside from a
few relating to debt) are rare.
51 It is remarkable that the percentages of lawsuits between kin relating to inheritance and waqf are
quite similar for Nablus (1800–60) and a random sampling of register no. 44 for Tripoli (1815–16),
at sixty-six (inheritance) and fifteen per cent (waqf ) for Nablus, and sixty-four and fifteen per cent,
respectively, for Tripoli. However, the ratios differ over time and space. For Nablus during the early
eighteenth century, fifty-six per cent of lawsuits between kin concerned inheritance matters, com-
pared to only fourteen per cent for matters relating to waqf. For Tripoli during the same period, the
numbers are fifty-one and twenty-five per cent, respectively. A similar configuration occurred in the
first six decades of the nineteenth century, but with two important differences. First, inheritance
Table 2.6 Kinship relations between litigants in family
lawsuits, early eighteenth century
Tripoli nos. 4, 5
Nablus nos. 4, 5 1715–16, 1724–25,
Relation 1723–26, 1728–30 1728–30
In-laws 44 (34%) 22 (45%)

Cousins 34 9
Uncle/nephew 13 1
Siblings 13 4
Spouses 13 4
Parent/child 8 4
Other 5 2
Total 130 49
lawsuits by Hamida’s children are also typical in that the most common
source of tension was the right and access of women and their descendants
to property.52 In roughly half of all inheritance disputes in Nablus (fifty-two
per cent) and Tripoli (forty-four per cent) from the 1660s–1730s period, the
defendants claimed that the property in question was already sold to them
before or shortly after the death of the person (usually a female) whom
the plaintiffs were the legal inheritors of.53 Also, in most lawsuits claim-
ing inclusion as waqf beneficiaries, the counter-claim (very much so in
and waqf came to constitute a significantly higher percentage of lawsuits between kin (seventy to
eighty per cent). Second, waqf-related lawsuits in Tripoli during the 1841–44 period were signifi-
cantly higher, reaching half of all lawsuits between kin.
52 Matters relating to inheritance, especially through the female line, are also a factor in three other
types of common lawsuits: ownership disputes, quarrels over land, and challenges to a previous sale
of an immoveable property. For example, a common lawsuit was that of a woman claiming that a
property she owned (usually through inheritance) was sold (usually by her husband) without her
knowledge. Although the legal issue was the validity of sale, gender and property devolution are in
the background of most such lawsuits.
53 Of the seventy-three lawsuits between kin over inheritance in early eighteenth-century Nablus,
thirty-three (or thirty-eight depending on whether one also includes those that do not specify when
and from whom the property was purchased) follow this pattern. For the former, see NICR 4:13,
15–16, 32, 34, 41, 47, 53, 64, 64, 97, 104, 107, 109, 128, 129, 197, 199, 228, 230, 236 237, 270–271,
277, 290–291, 309–310, 323, 344, 349–350 and 5:2, 68–69, 77–78, 90,122, 162, 165. For the latter, see
NICR 4:236, 278, 288, 289–290, 123–124 and 5:3. The same holds true for Tripoli, albeit at a slightly
lower rate (TICR 4:38, 44, 72–73, 175–176, 225 and 5:10–11, 117, 127, 158, 168–169, 171, 172–173).
Other common rebuttals include the following: that the property was transferred as a will (hiba)
(NICR 4:105, 110, 111, 274 and 5:158); that it was endowed as waqf (NICR 4:257 and 5:48); and
that the plaintiffs had previously made a legal acknowledgment that the property belonged to the
defendants (NICR 4:83, 150).
Table 2.7 Kinship relations between litigants in family lawsuits, 1800–60

Relation 1798–1860 1815–16 1841–44
In-laws 21 (20%) 8 (36%) 3 (11%)

Cousins 24 6 6 (22%)
Uncle/nephew 20 3
Siblings 17 3 3
Spouses 6 1 3
Parent/child 10 2 4
Other 7 1 6
Total 105 22 28
Nablus, less in Tripoli) was that the waqf endowment specifically excluded
the descendants of the female children of the endower (Tables 2.8 and 2.9).
Women dominate in lawsuits between kin. In Nablus, a consistent fifty-
five per cent of such lawsuits involved female litigants. In Tripoli, the per-
centage was higher still, averaging eighty per cent in the early eighteenth
century and seventy-five per cent for the two sample registers in the nine-
teenth century. The higher incidence in Tripoli reflects the centrality of
women in Tripoli’s urban agricultural sector, the main source of wealth.
Women, in addition, were the primary instigators of legal action in dis-
putes between kin. In both cities, women were more likely to appear as
Table 2.8 Types of lawsuits between kin in the early eighteenth century
Tripoli nos. 4, 5
Nablus nos. 4, 5 1715–16
1723–26 1724–25
Category 1728–30 1728–30
Inheritance total 73 (56%) 25 (51%)

sale counter-claim 38 11
Waqf 17 12
Debt 11 6
Marriage 8 2
Milk 6
Sale 6
Criminal 3 1
Divorce 2
Space 3
Custody 1 3
Total 130 49
Table 2.9 Types of lawsuits between kin in the first half of nineteenth century

Category 1798–1860 1815–16 1841–44
Inheritance total 69 (66%) 14 (64%) 5 (19%)

sale counter-claim 6
Waqf 20 3 14 (50%)
Debt 6 1 2
Marriage 1 1
Ownership 1 1
Validity of sale 2 1 3
Criminal 3 1
Divorce 4 1 2
Space
Custody
Total 105 22 28
plaintiffs than as defendants. This indicates that the court was perceived as
an important forum for affirming the legal rights of women, especially to
inheritance.54 This does not mean, necessarily, that women took the lead in
initiating lawsuits. Their husbands, sons, brothers, and other male relatives
may have had a stake in pursuing legal action. Still, it is striking that women
in Nablus were at least twice as likely to sue men in court as the other way
around. In Tripoli, the ratio of female plaintiffs to female defendants was
somewhat more balanced (three to two). The general impression is that
women had to be more proactive in using legal action to secure their rights
in Nablus than in Tripoli, especially when it came to inheritance disputes.
A third and related pattern is that marriage strategies seem to have pro-
duced the most tension between kin, especially for those property rights
that passed through the female as inheritor or testator, as in the case of
Hamida’s children. Lawsuits between in-laws were the most common in
both Tripoli (forty-five per cent) and Nablus (thirty-four per cent) during
the early eighteenth century (Figures 2.8 and 2.9).
A key difference between the two cities was the larger presence of women
in Tripoli on just about every level of comparison. As can be seen in
54 There is an over-representation of women in the court registers, because they had a strong incentive
to go to court in the first place. Generally speaking, both Islamic and Ottoman state laws, which
constituted the juridical underpinnings of the shariʿa court, were more protective of the legal rights
of women to own, control, and transmit property than was local custom. This is especially apparent
in cases where the absence of male heirs – or, as was the case with Hamida’s children, the absence
of male heirs in their legal majority – opened a door for agnates to press their claims.
Figures 2.6 and 2.7, the majority of lawsuits in Tripoli (fifty to sixty per
cent) involved one or more female litigants, and this was consistent over
time. In Nablus, by contrast, the percentages began at forty per cent in
the early eighteenth century and declined throughout much of the nine-
teenth, in much the same way that women disappeared from the ranks of
waqf endowers. A related pattern, very much present in Nablus and vir-
tually non-existent in Tripoli, is the frequency of lawsuits between pater-
nal cousins.55 If this category is combined with that of lawsuits pitting
uncles against their nephews, then the classic dynamic of father’s-brother
and father’s-brother’s-son emerges strongly for Nablus for both periods –
especially the latter, where they account for forty-four per cent of all law-
suits between kin. The same pattern is true, as we shall see in Chapter 4, for
the incidence of agnates as founders of waqfs, which is high in Nablus and
almost zero in Tripoli. The key implication here is that extended house-
holds and/or shared property portfolios over a wider degree of separation
between male agnates were more ubiquitous in Nablus; hence, the con-
stant interplay of consolidation and reconsolidation strategies. Consoli-
dation aimed at stopping the hemorrhaging of the male-gendered family
property through exogamous marriage by female children. Reconsolida-
tion aimed at re-centralizing the family patrimony as households divided
and recombined after the death of a patriarch or oldest brother.
The difference in lawsuit frequency and pattern reflects larger differences
in the political economies of the two cities, as do the social profile of those
who appeared before the court and the perceived role of the qadi and court.
First, more often than not, lawsuits in Nablus – especially those between
siblings, cousins, and uncles/nephews – were about the family house (dār).
The house was largely inseparable from the family business, just as relations
of power and authority in the household were inseparable from control over
resources and trade networks. Lawsuits between male agnates in Nablus,
in other words, revolved around keeping the “family house” and the “fam-
ily business” as vertically concentrated male domains. In contrast, the vast
majority of legal disputes in Tripoli concerned access rights to mulberry,
citrus, and olive trees, with men and women appearing almost equally on
the pages of its registers.
Second, the Nablus court was an arena largely dominated by well-off
men, mostly merchants, who depended heavily on it for the configuration,
55 In terms of frequency in relation to types of lawsuits between kin, those between (mostly paternal)
cousins in Nablus are a close second for the 1660s–1730s, and emerge as the most frequent for the
1800–60 period.
The Centrality of Waqfs 83
regulation, and legitimization of the organization of their households, kin-
ship relations, and businesses. In Tripoli, the social profile of court clients
is dominated by a large “middle class” of owners and renters of privately
owned irrigated orchards.
Third, the court of Tripoli may have been perceived as a largely neu-
tral legal space because of the annual rotation of foreign qadis. Not so in
Nablus, especially when Mustafa Khammāsh and his son, ʿAbd al-Wahid,
held this position for most of the 1800–60 period. Both were actively
engaged in the highly polarized politics of the city, and both used their posi-
tion of power to amass considerable wealth. The perception of the court
as partisan may explain why the percentage of lawsuits in relation to other
types of documents declined markedly in Nablus – so much so, in fact,
that the absolute number of lawsuits in Nablus for a six-year period in the
1720s is actually more than that for the first six decades of the nineteenth
century (Table 2.3), even though the city’s population had significantly
increased.56
2.4 The Centrality of Waqfs

The waqf is a pious and legal act lying at the core, in terms of both con-
stitution and governance, of an enormous range of economic, social, and
cultural institutions, as well as kinship (blood or otherwise) groups and
organizations. As the sole legal form of perpetuity in Islam, it is produc-
tive of regimes of temporality that span the here and the hereafter.57 The
act of endowment, if it meets all legal conditions (including a challenge
to its validity at the time of registration in Hanafi courts58 ), represents
56 The decline is not related to the increasing marginalization of the shariʿa court. The downward
trend is clear well before the second half of the nineteenth century, and although there was also a
decline in Tripoli, it is slight in comparison.
57 According to Hanafi doctrine, the dominant legal school of thought in the Ottoman imperial capital
and state institutions, the endowment of waqf is a pious act that declares one’s private property as the
property of God and dedicates its use and revenues for a charitable purpose. Once legally ratified,
the endowed properties in a waqf are taken out of the normal circulation of privately owned objects.
That is, they can no longer be sold, bought, inherited, or given.
58 No student of family waqf documents for this region in Ottoman times can fail to notice the extra
legal step at the tail end of each waqf, which involves a formal legal challenge to the endowment. In
1987, when I asked Nazih al-Sayih, the head scribe (bāsh kātib) of the Nablus shariʿa court, about the
purpose of the legal challenge, he explained that the “older and more traditional” qadis or endowers
insist on it in order to validate the waqf’s inalienability and existence in perpetuity. I understood
that to mean that endowers attached supreme importance to the waqf as a way of consolidating
family patrimony, usually at the expense of women, and they did not want to leave any openings
for legal challenges or opportunities for intervention by the long arm of the state. Nada Moumtaz
reinforces this explanation by persuasively showing that the legal challenge is best understood not
an irreversible material and temporal rupture whereby the founder cedes
her privately owned property to God in perpetuity. As such, it allows a
complex interface between al-dunyā and al-dı̄n (the temporal and the
divine worlds, or the world of humans and the world of God). As Baber
Johansen argues, the waqf powerfully connects two general sets of relation-
ships: those between humans and God (ʿibādāt, or acts of worship) and
those between humans and humans (muʿāmalāt, or transactions).59
These unique attributes of the waqf, in addition to its flexibility and
adaptability, made it the most consequential institution throughout the
history of Muslim societies, especially in urban settings.60 The historic sig-
nificance of the waqf is evident in its continuity over the past millennium
and a half, in the economic and political forces it facilitated, in its cen-
trality to religious establishments and institutions, in the legal and intel-
lectual debates it engendered, in the public works and people supported
by its revenues, in the social orders it underpinned, and in the thick web
with which it enmeshed kinship relations. The lives of most inhabitants of
Muslim communities were touched by it, and no government could afford
to ignore it. The stories of the waqf are, in many ways, the stories of the
histories of Muslim societies.
The flexibility and adaptability of waqfs also mean that they cannot be
understood apart from their historical contexts. Although the use of waqf
in Egypt and Bilad al-Sham can be traced back to Umayyad times, it was
during the Mamluk and Ottoman eras (thirteenth to twentieth centuries)
that the waqf fully permeated the social, economic, cultural, legal, and reli-
gious dimensions of everyday life. The turning point for this region was the
rule of Salah al-Din, who defeated the Crusaders and founded the Ayyu-
bid dynasty (1171–1260). In order to meet the challenge of invasions from
Europe and to effect a transition from the Shiʿi Fatimid dynasty (909–1171)
to a Sunni polity, he endowed state lands to fund religious, educational,
social, and other institutions and to bolster Sunni Muslim communities
as a fiction, but as a surviving discursive practice that echoes the continuing relevance of the debate
between Abu Hanifa and his students as to whether the waqf can be revoked and turned into
private property. For a detailed and insightful discussion, see Moumtaz, “Modernizing Charity,”
66–68.
59 Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 60. See also Moumtaz, “Modernizing Charity,” 160.
60 According to Randi Deguilhem, “the three most striking traits of the Ottoman waqf were its
widespread vertical and horizontal use throughout all socioeconomic strata of society; its capac-
ity to adapt to individual, group and state needs . . . and, finally, in its longevity – not only of the
institution itself but also of the abundant individual waqfs.” R. Peters, Doris Behrens Abouseif,
D.S. Powers, et al. “Wak.f.” In Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 11, eds. P. J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E.
Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 2002): 88.
and scholarly networks.61 It was the Mamluks who first used the waqf insti-
tution on a massive scale to build up their empire, legitimize their rule, and
channel income to themselves and their servants.62 The numerous mosques
and schools that Tripoli is famous for were mostly founded via waqfs dur-
ing the Mamluk period.63
The centrality of waqfs was not lost on the Ottoman ruling dynasty.
Particularly from the fifteenth to the late sixteenth centuries, the Ottoman
household and senior government officials established numerous imperial
waqfs that managed a wide range of agricultural, commercial, and residen-
tial properties scattered throughout the Ottoman domains. They also reg-
ulated and expanded a number of massive charitable waqfs they inherited
from the Mamluks, such as the Waqf al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn (Waqf of
the Two Noble Sanctuaries) of Mecca and Medina.64 They did so in order
to, among other things, consolidate and expand power, knit the regions of
the Ottoman lands together, gain legitimacy and authority, invigorate eco-
nomic development, transform the built environment, construct patronage
networks, and, ultimately, carve a space in communal memory on earth and
claim a comfortable spot in heaven. The revenues were dedicated for the
building and maintenance of mosques, schools, soup kitchens, hospitals,
hostels for travelers, markets for merchants, orphanages, Sufi lodges, and a
dizzying array of religious sites. They also supported public works such as
bridges, irrigation canals, water fountains, aqueducts, and fortifications.65
61 Ibid., 10. Technically speaking, the endowments were based on irsad., not waqf, as they involved
state, not private lands. Van Leeuwen makes the argument that this was the first instance of state-
owned land being turned into waqf. Richard van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures: The Case
of Ottoman Damascus (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 87.
62 According to Muhammad Muhammad Amin, a leading authority on waqf and social history in
Mamluk times, “most residences, shops, and buildings of Egypt and Cairo were endowed, not to
mention one-half of all agricultural lands.” Muhammad Muhammad Amin, Al-awqaf wa al-hayat
al-ijitimaʿiyya fi Misr, 1250–1517: dirasa tarikhiyya wathaʾiqiyya (Cairo: Dar al-Nahda al-ʿArabiyya,
1980).
63 The first detailed study of Mamluk Tripoli is Tadmuri, Al-hayat al-thaqafiyya fi Trabulus al-
Sham. See also Ilyas al-Qattar, Niyabat Tarabulus fi ʿahd al-Mamalik, 688–922h/1289–1516m (Beirut:
Lebanese University, 1998). Al-Qattar argues that the majority of the mosques, schools, market-
places, bathhouses, hospitals, irrigation works, and other structures constituting Mamluk Tripoli
were built between 1290 and 1350.
64 For Waqf al-Haramayn, see Miriam Hoexter, Endowments, Rulers, and Community: Waqf al-
Haramayn in Ottoman Algiers (Leiden: Brill, 1998) and Husam ʿAbd al-Muʿti, “Piety and Profit:
The Haramayn Ednowments in Egypt (1517–1814),” in Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World, ed.
Pascale Ghazaleh (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011): 41–72.
65 One of the most celebrated and longest-lasting of these imperial waqfs is the Haseki Sultan complex
of Jerusalem. Established in the 1550s by the wife of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, known in
the West as Roxana, it housed, fed, and educated hundreds of thousands of people throughout its
long history. It is still operating as of the publication of this book. The waqf drew on the revenues
of village lands and urban properties scattered across the Ottoman Empire to support a variety of
As a system, the waqf carved deep furrows in urban life and the built envi-
ronment and formed the building blocks of local, regional, and imperial
networks. These, in turn, produced what can be described, with only a lit-
tle exaggeration, as the Ottoman-ness of the Ottoman Empire, as well as
the specific characteristics of provincial spaces in imperial domains.66
The significance of the waqf is such that no other Islamic institution has
been as intensively and widely studied by historians.67 Overly simplified,
the key distinction is between the large imperial and charitable waqf foun-
dations on the one hand and the locally bounded small family and char-
itable waqfs on the other. The golden age of the former was in Mamluk
through early Ottoman times, while the latter flourished in Bilad al-Sham
during the period under study (1660s–1860s). The former were massive
enterprises, centrally administered from Istanbul, which managed dozens
of major properties, such as entire villages and commercial establishments,
widely scattered across large swaths of imperial domain. Not surprisingly,
they drew the attention of modernization and postcolonial historians, who
are primarily concerned with the rupture of modernity in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, the rise of the modern state, and the demise of the
shariʿa as it had existed for a millennium. Less studied are the local small
family and charitable waqfs, which were far more numerous in number,
and which were founded by a wide range of propertied individuals and
supervised by the local shariʿa court. For centuries, these waqfs, despite
their enormous significance to daily life, also remained under the radar of
the central Ottoman bureaucracy. In the Eastern Mediterranean, the first
serious attempt to regulate and/or ban them was undertaken by post-First
World War colonial regimes. Highly informative, family waqfs attracted
institutions. These include a masjid (mosque), medrese (school), ʿimāret (soup kitchen), bı̄mārhāne
(hospital), hostel, and caravanserai. Amy Singer, in a comprehensive and nuanced study of the
Haseki Sultana complex, shows how the endowment of waqfs by members of the Ottoman ruling
dynasty became a a unique feature of Ottoman imperial culture, especially during the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, with enormous and enduring consequences for both urban and rural areas of
the empire. Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002).
66 In a case study of Damascus during Ottoman times, for instance, Richard van Leeuwen persuasively
demonstrates that waqf endowments can be analyzed as a system: a critical integrative mechanism
that structured the material, spiritual, and cultural environments of urban life and interfaced them
with larger economic and political changes. Van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures.
67 For example, see John Robert Barnes, An Introduction to Religious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire
(Leiden: Brill, 1986); Randi Deguilhem and André Raymond, Le waqf dans l’espace islamique: outil
de pouvoir socio-politique (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1995); Miriam Hoexter, “Waqf
Studies in the Twentieth Century: The State of the Art,” Journal of the Economic and Social History
of the Orient 41, no. 4 (1998): 474–495; Faruk Bilici, Le waqf dans le monde musulman contemporain
(XIXe–XXe siècles): fonctions sociales, économiques et politiques: actes de la table ronde d’Istanbul, 13–14
Novembre 1992. Varia Turcica (Istanbul: Institut français d’études anatoliennes, 1994).
the attention of social and cultural historians, who are primarily concerned
with local histories and gender relations.68
Technically, and ultimately, all waqfs are charitable. Still, one can speak
of three major types other than imperial waqfs during the period under
study: charitable (khayrı̄), family (dhurrı̄, ahlı̄), and mixed (mushtarak).
The first two are long-established categories, while the third is a designa-
tion of convenience that captures the fairly sizable gray area in between.
By “charitable,” I mean those waqf endowments in which the proper-
ties are immediately and directly transferred from the hands of the owner
to a non-related waqf administrator or supervisor (mutawallı̄ or nāz.ir)
of the charitable end in question.69 By “family,” I mean endowments in
which the endower and her descendants are designated as the direct and
only beneficiaries until biological “extinction” (inqirād.). Only then are
the revenues to revert to charitable purposes designated at the time of
the endowment.70 Thus, instead of a direct and immediate transfer of
the revenues of the endowed properties to the ultimate charitable pur-
pose, a long, circuitous, and theoretically infinite detour was inserted.
During this detour, the control of the collection and distribution of the
revenues, as well as all decisions over upkeep, rental, lease, and pay-
ment of taxes of the revenue-producing properties, were in the hands of
the endower, followed by her most senior and/or capable of beneficiaries
(al-arshad).
The term “mixed” flags those endowments that combine elements of
family and charitable waqfs. Usually, this happened in one of three ways.
First, the transfer to the designated charitable purpose was not immedi-
ate, with the delay a finite period of time fixed beforehand. In most such
cases, the transfer was to take place only after the death of the endower.
Second, the transfer was immediate, but a condition was attached that
68 Legal anthropologists, who combine what Brinkley Messick calls the “Library” (such as legal com-
mentaries) and the “Archive,” (such as court documents) have opened new vistas for the study
of late nineteenth- to twentieth-century Muslim communities in ways that overcome the standard
trope of theory versus practice noted in Chapter 1. Messick kindly provided drafts of his new work
on this topic. This book does not engage directly the relationship between the Library and the
Archive. Rather, it eschews legal history and combines discursive and quantitative methodologies
of reading the Archives with social history and political economy. The best book that seamlessly
combines the Library and the Archives with political economy and in-depth local studies is Mundy
and Smith, Governing Property.
69 In Tripoli and Nablus, mutawallı̄ was common and nāz.ir appeared infrequently. Usually, the latter
would be associated with a larger charitable waqf, such as for the central mosque of the city (jāmiʿ
al-kabı̄r).
70 In the case of endowments made by the residents of Nablus and Tripoli, the designated charitable
end was usually a local mosque, or a group of them. If the mosque no longer existed, then the
revenues would go to the “poor,” which usually meant religious workers.
designated the endower and her progeny as administrators. An example
is the endowment by the Mufti of Tripoli, Kamil Effendi Zeini zade, of a
shop immediately adjacent to another shop endowed by his grandfather in
the Aqturuq Quarter. The revenues were dedicated to Argon Shah Mosque,
but the position of administrator was to remain with the mufti through-
out his life and then to transfer to the most capable of his descendants, one
generation after another.71 Third, a portion of the property was transferred
to the endower’s descendants and another portion directly to a charitable
purpose. The case of Maryam ʿAnklis in Chapter 1 and that of Husayn al-
Husayni in Chapter 3 are good examples. Put differently, the mixed waqf
is best seen as a family waqf with some limitations, the most important of
which is that the endower’s descendants were not legal beneficiaries and did
not have a legal claim to the revenues. Consequently, I have not included
mixed waqfs in the pool of family waqfs that I used to determine patterns
of inclusion and exclusion.
The shariʿa court governed all three forms of local waqf.72 As the cat-
egory “mixed” indicates, it is very difficult to separate the act of worship
from the act of property devolution. Thus, the charitable/family distinc-
tion is not intended to imply that those who endowed the former were
altruistic or that those who endowed the latter were only concerned with
providing for their own descendants. For instance, many charitable waqfs
were designed for the benefit of family members with positions in religious
institutions. On March 15, 1851, Athanasius son of Hanna, a priest from the
village of Bishmizzin, endowed an olive grove to the “poor of Dayr Bikfitin
monastery” and handed over this property to the monastery’s waqf super-
visor, who was none other than himself.73 At the same time, a family waqf
is a perfectly legitimate act of worship. As Lev notes, it could “ensure the
well being of one’s family while manifesting piety by supporting virtuous
causes.”74 The next two subsections map out the incidence of these local
waqfs, changes over time, and their relationship to the shariʿa court as an
Ottoman state institution.
71 TICR 31:18, dated Shaʿban 3, 1255.

72 An 1850 decree regarding mosque waqfs in Tripoli and Beirut transferred some of the qadi pow-
ers to appoint administrators to the central state, but this did not affect family waqfs. Moumtaz,
“Modernizing Charity,” 138–144.
73 TICR 61:40, dated Jamadi I 20, 1267. Ruth Roded provides a similar example from Aleppo con-
cerning a member from the Amiri family who added an endowment to a public waqf that he
already controlled. Ruth Roded, “The Waqf and the Social Elite of Aleppo in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries.” Turcica: revue d’études turques 20 (1988):78.
74 Yaacov Lev, Charity, Endowments, and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam (Gainesville, FL:
University of Florida Press, 2005): 73.
Table 2.10 Types of waqfs endowed in Nablus and Tripoli, 1660s–1730s,
1800–6075
Nablus Nablus Tripoli Tripoli

Type of waqf 1660s–1730s 1800–60 1660s–1730s 1800–60
Family 36 138 27 176

73% 96% 77% 76.5%
Mixed 2 3 2 40
6% 17%
Charitable 11 3 6 14
22.5% 17% 6%
Total 49 144 35 230
Waqf in Provincial Space and Time

The overwhelming majority of endowments in Nablus and Tripoli were
family waqfs established by propertied individuals, from the most humble
to the most wealthy. If waqf endowers were arranged in a social pyramid,
with the imperial household and high-ranking officials at the top and the
provincial elites just below them, it was ordinary men and women, Muslims
and non-Muslims, who occupied the large space at the bottom. The sheer
volume and accretion over time of these relatively small waqfs had a great
impact on the local economy, social structures, and family life. In read-
ing the shariʿa court records, one gets the strong impression that almost all
revenue-producing properties in both Nablus and Tripoli were endowed
as waqf by the mid-nineteenth century, especially warehouses, factories,
baths, shops, orchards, and residences. It is fair to say that most of the pop-
ulation of these and other cities were entangled in an intricate and multilay-
ered system of waqf-related access rights, such as rent and long-term lease. 76
Progeny were at the front of the mind of individuals who endowed waqfs
in Nablus and Tripoli during the period under study (Table 2.10). With the
exception of a statistical fluke for Nablus during the early modern period,
75 These are absolute numbers of waqfs endowed found in existing sijills. It is not known how many
waqfs were actually endowed, for there are gaps for the 1660s–1730s and, to a much lesser extent,
for the 1800–60. Still, the roughly 450 waqfs for those periods is a large enough number to allow
for generalizations.
76 An in-depth quantitative analysis would need to be carried out to confirm this impression, but it
is one shared by many researchers. Randi Deguilhem estimates, for instance, that three-quarters
of buildings and arable lands in the Ottoman Empire were endowed as waqf by the late Ottoman
period. Peters, “Wak.f,” 90; Doris Behrens-Abuseif, Egypt’s Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions,
Waqf, and Architecture in Cairo, 16th and 17th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Ömer Lütfi Barkan
cites foreign observers who estimate that two-thirds to three-fourths of the land of the Ottoman
charitable and mixed waqfs were virtually non-existent in that city.77 If
that statistical fluke is put aside, family waqfs account for a remarkable
ninety-six and ninety-eight per cent for the 1660s–1730s and 1800–60 peri-
ods, respectively.78 In Tripoli, the percentage of family waqfs was exactly
the same for both periods: seventy-seven per cent.79 If mixed waqfs are
included, then family waqfs in Tripoli for the two periods account for
eight-three and ninety-four per cent, respectively, of all waqfs endowed.80
While there is clearly a significantly higher percentage of charitable waqfs
in Tripoli, the act of endowing charitable waqfs became rare in both cities
with the passage of time. In Tripoli, it dropped from seventeen to six per
cent. The difference was made up by a rise in the endowment of mixed
waqfs, whose percentages for both periods were exactly the reverse of those
for charitable waqfs.
There is no evidence that the imperial household, provincial governors,
or other high-ranking Ottoman officials endowed a single charitable waqf
for the benefit of institutions or people in Nablus or Tripoli during the peri-
ods under study.81 Instead, properties in and around Nablus and Tripoli
were endowed for the benefit of imperial institutions in the major cos-
mopolitan cities and holy sites of the empire, such as Istanbul, Cairo,
Empire was formally considered waqf by the nineteenth century (cited by Barnes, An Introduction
to Religious Foundations, 42).
77 For that period, a wave of charitable cash waqfs, perhaps triggered by the millennial year of 1100
Hijri (1688), cut down the percentage of family waqfs to three-quarters of all waqfs endowed. Until
the end of Ottoman rule over two centuries later, no further cash waqfs were endowed in Nablus
after that time.
78 Over the 1800–60 period, only three charitable waqfs were endowed in Nablus. All three were very
small and of symbolic rather than economic consequence. Two were clearly politically motivated
and related to the specific circumstances of the ʿAbd al-Hadi family in the late 1830s (see later). The
third was made by two brothers who, in a fit of piety upon their safe return from the pilgrimage
in 1799, endowed two-thirds of two rooms and one-third of another for the benefit of the Great
Mosque of Nablus. NICR 6:128, dated Shawwal 1213 (March 1799). As mentioned previously, the
year 1799 is included in the Nablus sample as it occurs within the first few pages of sijill no. 6.
79 The numbers are 27 out of 35 and 176 out of 230, respectively. For the 1660s–1730s period, the
remaining eight (twenty-three per cent) consist of six charitable and two mixed waqfs. For the
1800–60 period, the remaining fifty-three are eighteen charitable and thirty-five mixed.
80 The numbers are 36 out of 49 and 138 out of 144, respectively. For the former, all are charitable
except for one mixed waqf. For the latter, khayrı̄ and mixed are evenly divided. By way of compar-
ison, in the Salhiyya Quarter of Damascus soon after the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth
century, cadastral surveys show that thirty-three per cent of existing waqf endowments surveyed
and registered as valid by Ottoman-appointed qadi (a total of 402) were charitable, twenty per cent
were mixed, and forty-seven and a half per cent were family. Toru Miura, “The Salihiyya Quarter
of Damascus at the Beginning of Ottoman Rule: Ambiguous Relations between Religious Insti-
tutions and Waqf Properties.” In Syria and Bilad al-Sham under Ottoman Rule: Essays in Honor of
Abdul-Karim Rafeq, eds. Peter Sluglett and Stefan Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2010): 269–291. In Beirut
between 1843 and 1912, family waqf accounted for fifty-six per cent of all waqfs endowed. Moumtaz,
“Modernizing Charity,” 231.
81 The situation may have differed before the late seventeenth century, but no court registers for these
two cities have been found for that period.
Jerusalem, and, of course, Mecca and Medina.82 The only exception is a
small waqf endowed in 1667 by the governor of Tripoli, the revenues of
which were dedicated to his memory in the form of a mausoleum and
Qurʾanic recitations by ʿulamaʾ.83
Equally striking is the dearth of charitable waqfs by “notable” families in
both cities. One would assume that high-ranking military officers, leading
ʿulamaʾ, provincial administrators, and wealthy merchants – all of whom
had a deep stake in the fiscal and political machinery of the Ottoman
state – would endow charitable waqfs for the same general ends as the
imperial household. In fact, however, the surviving records show only two
such waqfs for Tripoli and three for Nablus, all too small to be of any
significance.84 In Tripoli, Mustafa Agha Barbar, a local who intermittently
ruled the city during the first three decades of the nineteenth century,
endowed on August 19, 1813 a small amount of property for the upkeep
82 The most important imperial waqf in both Tripoli and Nablus was Waqf al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn
(Waqf of the Two Noble Sanctuaries) of Mecca and Medina. In Tripoli, another imperial waqf
with a major presence was the aforementioned Waqf al-Sadat al-Misriyyin (Waqf of the Egyptian
Descendants of the Prophet), which dated back to Mamluk times. Minya village, an economic
powerhouse of irrigated orchards, was part of this waqf. In partnership with the Ottoman state
and the religious establishment, the elites of Tripoli invested heavily in this village and reaped great
benefits (see Chapter 6). A 1720 document refers to three villages, a mill, a piece of land, and a souk,
with a total annual rent of 2200 piasters. Leeuwen refers to properties of this waqf in Damascus when
discussing a waqf lawsuit about whether rent dies with the death of the renter. Van Leeuwen, Waqfs
and Urban Structures, 164.
83 TICR 1:116–118, dated Jamadi II 18, 1078. The endowment was actually registered post mortem. On
December 5, 1667, the vice-governor of the province of Tripoli, Hasan Agha, appeared before the
city’s qadi and leading ʿulamaʾ (including the mufti and naqı̄b al-ishrāf), Sufi shaykhs, and merchants
of the city. He testified in court that his superior, the now-deceased governor of Tripoli, Ahmad
Pasha, had summoned him to his quarters shortly before he died, handed him the large sum of
1000 qirsh Asadi, and instructed him to exchange it for a space in the cemetery of Owaysiyya
Mosque so that he could be buried there. Hasan Agha was to build a mausoleum (qubba bi-ʿaqd)
on top of the grave and then, with whatever was left of the money, buy immovable properties to
be endowed as a waqf, the proceeds of which were to be used for “charitable purposes and good
deeds for his mausoleum.” Hasan Agha did as instructed and now stood in court to endow the
waqf. First, he referred the qadi to the purchase deeds deposited in the court’s register, listed the
properties – one-half of a bakery, an adjacent piece of land with two mulberry trees, one-half each of
four shops, a storage area, and five other shops, three of them used by ironsmiths and two by barbers.
He then specified in detail how the revenues were to be spent. Expenses included the purchase of
lighting oil and, most importantly, salaries for reciters of the Qurʾan (the rewards of which were to
be dedicated to Ahmad Pasha’s soul) and for the staff of the Owaysiyya Mosque (the imam, khat.ı̄b,
qadi, and servants). The supervisor of the mosque and the qadi also benefitted. Had this gesture
been multiplied many times over the decades, it would be possible to point to memorial waqfs as
generative of political authority and an imperial cultural order on the local level. But it is the only
case of its kind.
84 It is important to reiterate here that this study does not examine waqfs endowed from the 1730s to
1800, a period for which, unfortunately, no court records for Nablus exist. This was an important
period for the emergence of local notables as powerful political and economic actors on the local
and regional levels.
of two public water fountains that he had built.85 Almost exactly two years
later, a relative of his, Sayyid Shakir al-Qaraq, endowed a shop for the ben-
efit of the same two public water fountains and requested that his waqf be
added to that of Mustafa Agha Barbar.86 In a similar gesture, in Nablus,
Husayn beik al-Yunisi, a relative and supporter of Shaykh Sulayman ʿAbd
al-Hadi, the strongman of Palestine at the time and an ally of the Egyptian
government during its rule over Bilad al-Sham (1831–40), endowed on July
27, 1835 two small properties for the upkeep of a public water fountain that
ʿAbd al-Hadi had recently built.87 The only charitable waqf by the pow-
erful ʿAbd al-Hadis was not even based in Nablus, nor was it for a public
purpose. On August 21, 1838, Shaykh Sulayman ʿAbd al-Hadi endowed a
charitable waqf to have two reciters of the Qurʾan read the Ya-Sin verse con-
tinuously in order to memorialize his father, himself, and two of his most
important supporters in Nablus: Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghani Zayd al-Qadri, a
Sufi leader and rich merchant and landowner, and Shaykh Mustafa Effendi
al-Khammash, a former qadi and father of the long-serving qadi of Nablus,
Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wahid al-Khammash.88
The elite of Nablus and Tripoli established numerous endowments, but
they were what I call “constitutive” family waqfs that laid the cornerstone
for the consolidation of a kinship group around the endower and his or
her descendants, all of whom would from that moment on enjoy a stable
surname, with all that implied for local power relations and the naming of
properties and boundaries (see Chapter 4). For instance, the same leaders of
Nablus and Tripoli already mentioned, Mustafa Agha Barbar and Shaykh
Sulayman ʿAbd al-Hadi, endowed huge family waqfs with a diverse portfo-
lio of properties designed primarily to establish their families as corporate
units in the community. Since they were political leaders at the mercy of
higher authorities, their endowments were also established in order to pro-
vide a certain measure of protection against political confiscation and legal
85 TICR 42:72–73, dated Shaʿban 21, 1228. The properties are two storage basements and the floors
above them, as well as half of a house.
86 TICR 44:67, dated Shaʿban 2, 1230 (July 10, 1815).
87 NICR 9:155, dated early Rabiʿ II 1251. The properties are one-twelfth of a number of trees and
one-sixth of a plot of land on which these trees are located.
88 NICR 9:385–386, dated end of Jamadi I 1254. Again, this was a very small waqf, and its revenues
were dedicated to two religious figures from Hebron and their progeny on the condition that they
read surat Ya-Sin eight times a day and gift the rewards at the rate of three–three–one–one (three for
ʿAbd al-Hadi’s father, three for himself, and one each for Shaykh Qadri and Shaykh Khammāsh).
The property endowed was one-half of a plot of land in Hebron planted with grape vines and fig
trees and containing a cave and some stone walls. The readers were two brothers from the Tahbub
family and their progeny, until they passed away. The waqf then devolved to whoever could read
among the staff of the Ibrahimi Mosque in al-Khalil.
challenges to the less than savory manner in which they had accumulated
their properties. For example, Mustafa Agha Barbar endowed the vast bulk
of his properties for the benefit of his wives, relatives, and slaves (mamluks)
in the 1810s, shortly after his grip on power had been seriously challenged.89
Similarly, the leading members of the ʿAbd al-Hadi family translated their
rise to political stardom during the period of Egyptian rule over the East-
ern Mediterranean into large purchases of prime urban real estate, which
they endowed as family waqfs in the late 1830s when it became clear that
the Egyptian armies would be forced to withdraw.90
The family waqf was key to the emergence and consolidation of “notable
families” in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth,
especially among those involved in trade, manufacturing, urban agricul-
ture, and real estate. For them, family waqfs were like saplings planted and
nursed to strike strong roots in the ground.91 Each region experienced this
process in locally specific ways, but central to all was a system of succes-
sion (tawāruth), at the heart of which lies the family waqf. Crystalized by
the early eighteenth century, provincial elites played a prominent role in
Ottoman governance, especially on the local level during the era of reforms
in the nineteenth century.92 Driving the process of production and repro-
duction of kinship networks, social class, and the religious establishment
were legal strategies of property devolution through inheritance, marriage
alliances, waqf endowments, and the passing of religious positions (them-
selves a form of property) from father to son.93 According to Khaled Ziade,
89 See TICR 42:70–72; 43:189–90; and 45:44–46, 384–386. Barbar ruled during 1800–08, 1810–20,
and 1821–35. For details, see Ignace Tannous, Mustafa Agha Barbar: Hakim iyalat Tarabulus wa Al-
Ladhiqiyya: 1767–1834, 2nd edn. (Tripoli: Jarrous Press, 1984).
90 NICR 9:50–51, 311–315, 385 and 10:4, 48.
91 The relationship between waqf and the production and reproduction of “notable” families has
received a great deal of scholarly attention. See, for example, Khaled Ziade, “Takawwun al-ʿaʾilat
fi Tarabulus,” in Lubnan fi al-qarn al-thamin ʿashar, ed. Al-Jamʿiyya al-Lubnaniyya lil-Dirasat al-
Tarikhiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Muntakhab al-ʿArabi, 1996); Marco Salati, “Urban Notables, Private
Waqf and Capital Investment: The Case of the 17th Century Zuhrawi Family of Aleppo.” In Le
waqf dans l’espace islamique: outil de pouvoir socio-politique, eds. Randi Deguilhem and Andre Ray-
mond (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1995); Aharon Layish, “The Maliki Family Waqf
According to Wills and Waqfiyyat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 46, no. 1
(1983): 1–32 and “The Family Waqf and the Sharʿi Law of Succession in Modern Times,” Islamic Law
and Society 4, no. 3 (1997): 352–388; Yitzhak Reiter, “Family Waqf Entitlements in British Palestine
(1917–1948),” Islamic Law and Society 2, no. 2 (1995): 174–193.
92 For a concise study of notables in the larger Ottoman context, see Ali Yaycıoğlu, “The Provincial
Challenge: Regionalism, Crisis, and Integration in the Late Ottoman Empire (1792–1812)” (PhD
diss., Harvard University, 2008).
93 Religious positions were often seen as private property that could be inherited, sometimes regardless
of qualifications, from pre-Ottoman times into at least the late nineteenth century. This certainly
held true in Nablus and Tripoli, as can be seen in letters of appointment to these positions by the
the waqf system privileged relations based on lineage and provided the reli-
gious establishment the material resources needed to expand, creating a
symbiosis between the local merchant class and the ʿulamaʾ during the early
modern era. As he puts it:
The waqf system . . . played a critical role in creating a structure of devolu-
tion of revenues that helped to expand, generation after generation, the net-
work of family and kinship relations, due to the expansion of the number
of beneficiaries through marriage and musahara [linkages between male lin-
eages through the exchange via marriage of sisters and daughters]. And just
like the succession [within the family] of positions in the religious establish-
ment, the waqf system grounded the rule of succession that produced local
notables who became administrators of waqfs.94
Access to endowed properties was a key pathway to integration into
Tripoli’s social and economic fabric for military officers and their fami-
lies following their arrival in Bilad al-Sham in punitive military campaigns
during the seventeenth century (1630s, 60s, and 80s).95 This is attested to
by the numerous purchase, lawsuit, endowments, and other cases relating
to orchards and, to a lesser extent, commercial real estate by members of
the military (ʿaskarı̄) class recorded in the first three volumes of Tripoli’s
shariʿa court records, covering parts of the late seventeenth century.96 As
judge and by numerous compilations of ʿulamaʾ biographies. In a study of the first ten shariʿa court
registers for Tripoli covering the period (with substantial gaps) between 1666 and 1749, ʿAbd al-
Ghani ʿImad shows that nine families controlled the top ninety-five religious positions in the city
(aside from judge) and managed to keep these positions within the family. See ʿAbd al-Ghani ʿImad,
Al-jihaz al-dini wa al-ʿaʾilat al-diniyya fi Tarabulus (Tripoli: Lebanese University, Center for Social
Sciences, Third Branch: 1986), 87–97. In another book, ʿImad demonstrates the “inheritance” of
positions for the same period in a table listing roughly 150 religious positions, their salaries, who
occupied them, and from whom each was inherited. See ʿImad, Mujtamaʿ Tarabulus fi zaman al-
tahawwulat al-ʿuthmaniyya, 240–245.
94 Ziade, “Takawwun al-ʿaʾilat fi Tarabulus,” 318.
95 The turning point seems to be the destruction of Sayfa power in 1635. The Sayfas had ruled the
province of Tripoli since 1579. For a detailed political history based on central Ottoman archives, see
Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn, Provincial Leaderships in Syria, 1575–1650 (Beirut: American University
of Beirut, 1985). This reassertion of central Ottoman control during the rule of the Köprülü grand
viziers also witnessed the Hanafization of the hitherto mostly Shafiʿi religious establishment of Bilad
al-Sham. This was not, by the way, the result of government enforcement of an official madhhab, but
rather the extension of central legal administration from an increasingly influential class of scholars
and bureaucrats in Istanbul, as well as eagerness from below to integrate into the Ottoman power
structure by cultivating close relations with this overwhelmingly Hanafi class. At the heart of this
shift was the establishment of shariʿa courts throughout the Ottoman domains and the consolidation
of a system during the sixteenth century in which the top-ranking qadis (mollas) always came from
the center and the second-tier positions were filled by locals.
96 These sijills cover the years 1667, 1677–79, and 1685–87. See, for example, TSCR 2. This volume is
actually a combination of two sijills covering the periods February 20, 1668 to December 22, 1668
and May 7, 1677 to June 23, 1679 (Shaʿban 26, 1078 to Rajab 19, 1079 and Rabiʿ I 5, 1090 to Jamadi
I 14, 1090 Hijri). Some of the cases involving men identified by the military rank of çavuş can be
these cases suggest, the paths often began with outright purchase or, more
often, rental of endowed orchards, and led to alliances with the religious
establishment, membership merchant networks, and connections to the
central administration in Istanbul.
In the 1650s, for instance, the head of the local Janissaries in Tripoli, a
certain Mehmet Çavuş, was able to secure a contract to rent the properties
of the imperial waqf of al-Sadat al-Misriyyun in the province of Tripoli –
which included the numerous orchards, agricultural lands, and mills in
Minya and Bakfetin villages – for the incredibly low amount of 800 piasters
a year. He agreed, in return, to invest in the repair of the villages and the
irrigation canals and to pay the outstanding waqf and mı̄rı̄ taxes. Accord-
ing to a document dated February 23, 1688, Çavuş was subsequently able
to renew the rental contract for ten years, at which point the administra-
tor of the al-Misriyyun waqf sought to raise the rent and find other inter-
ested parties. Unwilling to abandon his cash cow, Çavuş used his contacts
in Istanbul to secure an imperial order from the chief Black Eunuch, the
nāz.ir of all sultanic waqfs at the time, instructing the mutawallı̄s not to
rent these properties to anyone else. In exchange, the rent would be raised
to 1500 piasters annually and Çavuş agreed to repair (and then rent) yet
another part of the waqf: the Sendamur market in the city (built in the
Mamluk period), with numerous shops on the first floor and rooms on
the second.97 This arrangement was formalized at the shariʿa court seven
months later. On September 27, 1668, the chief of builders (miʿmār basha –
mıʿmār bāşı), Master (ustādh – ustāz.) ʿAbd al-Qadir, and the chief carpenter
(najjār basha – najjār bāşı), Hajj Yusuf, testified before the qadi that Çavuş
had repaired the market for a total cost of 778.5 piasters. A legal docu-
ment was drawn by a high-ranking religious leader, the pride of teachers
(mawlana fakhr al-mudarrisı̄n) Qadri Effendi, confirming that the market
would continue to be rented to Mehmet Çavuş and that his rent would not
be raised.98
Effectively, Mehmet Çavuş became part of the propertied elite of Tripoli
by establishing a network that connected the imperial center and the shariʿa
court with local religious leaders acting as mutawallı̄s, scholarly and mer-
chant families who rented the orchards and shops, and other local figures
of importance to the property regime, such as guild bosses. The waqf, as
found on pages 3–7, 9–11, 25, 50, 62, 65, 80, 87, 98, 121, 163–165, 168, 170, 172, 181, 218, 244, 253,
265, 269, 273, 276, 277, 304, 305, 310, 314, 326, 335, 343, and 347.
97 TSCR 2:65, dated Ramadan 10, 1078.
98 TSCR 2:127–128, dated Rabiʿ II 20, 1079. I thank Zoe Griffith for assistance in translating these two
documents from Ottoman Turkish.
instantiated in legal transactions in the court, can be seen, therefore, as
a capacious institution that allowed economic investment, social mobility,
and the reproduction of power relations on the local, regional, and imperial
levels. The key test is not simply the ability to acquire property access rights,
but also the possibility of devolving these access rights to family and kin (in
both the biological and non-biological senses, including household follow-
ers and manumitted slaves) through inheritance and/or endowment. The
“native sons” of Tripoli, as well as newcomers such as Mehmet Çavuş, were
able to navigate a multi-ethnic imperial setting characterized by mobility
and morphing.99 None of this would have been possible were it not for the
shariʿa court and the waqf.
Waqf and the Shariʿa Court

The production of family through waqf is one of the clearest examples of
the mutually constitutive relationship between kin and court. Crucial here
is that governance of the family waqf throughout the centuries of Ottoman
rule was conducted through the local shariʿa courts. This allowed waqf
endowers and administrators great flexibility and a strong voice in integrat-
ing this legal mechanism into locally specific social formations, economic
structures, and cultural dynamics.
The shariʿa court was already a mature Ottoman state institution at the
time of the conquest of Bilad al-Sham in 1516. It played a central role in
linking power, property, and the legal formation of the Ottoman subject
in a new imperial context, making it one of the primary vehicles for the
production and reproduction of Ottoman rule, a role it would continue
to play until the late nineteenth century. This was especially true when it
came to the regulation and governance of waqf practices in the provinces.100
Unlike Anatolia and Eastern Europe before the Ottoman conquests, Bilad
al-Sham had long been an overwhelmingly Muslim space, where the waqf
system was highly developed and pervasive, especially during the Mamluk
99 Leading military personnel were especially dependent on this vocabulary because they kept families
both in Istanbul and locally, as can be seen from disputes over the inheritance of their properties.
See, for example, the court cases between the Istanbul- and Tripoli-based families of Mehmet Agha,
the former kapıkulu kethüdası of Tripoli. TICR 2:136–140, 142–145. Zoe Griffith, in an unpublished
study, persuasively argues that the shariʿa court “created a discursive space within which we see
actors separated by factors of location, gender, life-cycle and socio-political influence drawing upon
legal conceptions of the rights and obligations of family to contest and negotiate their share of
Mehmed Aga’s provincial property.” Zoe Griffith, “Family Trees: Law, Political Economy, and the
Roots and Branches of ʿAskeri Kin in Mid-Seventeenth Century Ottoman Tripoli” (unpublished
paper, University of California, Berkeley, 2012), 24–25.
100 Van Leeuwen, Waqfs and Urban Structures, 101.
period. Hence, the driving need by the Ottoman rulers to learn and absorb
the property relations embedded in and reproduced by this waqf system.
Not surprisingly, one of the Ottoman Empire’s first acts was to survey tax-
able immoveable properties, lumping together waqfs and privately owned
lands (milk) as a single category, ostensibly because the remainder could
be considered state land (mı̄rı̄) that could then be parceled out to cavalry
officers as annually renewed tı̄mār and zaʿāma grants.101
It is a truism that surveys are acts of sovereignty. In addition to provid-
ing an opportunity to reshape the rule of property, they create new political
environments and establish discursive categories that name and count peo-
ple, goods, and places. Surveys also bring to the attention of the imperial
machinery specific actors and interlocutors in individual localities. In short,
they bind communities into new frameworks of imperial time and space.
The act of sovereignty begins and culminates with putting ink to paper;
thus, the Ottoman Empire’s obsessive record-keeping through a variety
of institutional venues, each with its specific variation in the vocabulary
of rule and the protocols of document production. Of these, the shariʿa
court was the most important, because it was the only state institution that
operated continuously on the local (urban) level from the very beginning
of Ottoman era until its end. This is why it produced the most volumi-
nous, detailed, and regionally diverse genre of Ottoman archives. Sensi-
tive to local dynamics, it specifically named and fixed the legal personas of
millions of Ottoman subjects and many more millions of specific proper-
ties, places, and objects. The centuries-long uninterrupted production of
these archives testifies to the court’s pivotal role in mediating and produc-
ing Ottoman imperial space on the ground. It is, in a manner of speaking,
the place where the imperial rubber hit the road.
When it comes to the survey of waqf endowments in Bilad al-Sham
following the conquest in 1516, the Ottomans first turned their attention
to the largest and most symbolic waqf complexes, such as the Al-Umayyad
Mosque in Damascus. These were immediately put under the direct control
of the state, as indicated by the centralized appointment of waqf personnel.
101 According to Michael Winter, the procedures followed when inspecting waqf properties were iden-
tical to those used when surveying private properties (milk). Winter analyzes a register that lists
waqf and milk properties (in Arabic) alongside decisions regarding their status and validity, some-
times after a short discussion. For more detail, see Michael Winter, “Mamluks and Their House-
holds in Late Mamluk Damascus: A Waqf Study,” in The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics
and Society, eds. Michael Winter and Amalia Levanoni (Leiden: Brill, 2004): 297–316. See also
Michael Winter, “Ottoman Qadis in Damascus in the 16th–18th Centuries,” in Law, Custom and
Statute in the Muslim World: Studies in Honor of Aharon Layish, ed. Ron Shaham (Leiden: Brill,
2007): 87–109.
Beyond that, the validity of existing waqfs in Bilad al-Sham and Egypt was
suspended pending a careful examination of documents and calling of wit-
nesses, usually to the offices of the shariʿa court. A list of approved waqfs was
then compiled.102 This watershed moment provided an opportunity for the
Ottoman state to punish and reward, to appropriate and regulate. This it
did by dissolving or revalidating existing waqfs, by appointing administra-
tors and supervisors, and by setting up procedures for the annual review of
income and expenses, again primarily through the shariʿa court. As a result,
the security of property claims depended on allegiance to Ottoman state
institutions.
Toru Miura’s study of waqfs in the Salihiyya Quarter of Damascus, for
instance, shows that the Islamic court went into action immediately follow-
ing the conquest, and that every waqf considered legitimate was given two
dates: the original date of endowment and the date of its re-recording in the
court register, marking the beginning of Ottoman imperial time.103 As can
be easily imagined, the inspection and registration lists of valid waqf and
private properties undermined the status quo of power and privilege that
existed prior to the Ottoman state’s arrival on the scene. Every decision on
how to categorize lands and urban properties had enormous consequences
for specific individuals, families, religious institutions, political networks,
and entire social groups. Consequently, this was a contested process, not
only on the local/imperial level, but also in terms of competing religious
and political authorities.104 The drama and stakes involved can be glimpsed
in the writings of Ibn Tulun, an observer of this process, who described
both the inspection and the tensions it generated as the newly appointed
Ottoman qadi of Damascus went about collecting documentation, calling
people to court, and visiting various waqf locations.105 Transactions regard-
ing waqfs were also monitored by the central state through the local shariʿa
court qadis, with difficult cases referred to Istanbul.
102 This was not a one-time procedure. Similar surveys were carried out later, and the first set of sur-
viving records dates to 1543. Winter, “Mamluks and Their Households.” References to such inspec-
tions and compilations can be found in various Kanuname compiled by Ahmet Akgündüz, İslam
Hukukunda ve Osmanlı Tatbikatında Vakıf Müessesesi, 2nd edn. (Ankara: Osmanlı Araştırmaları
Vakfı, 1996). The actual surveys can be found mostly in the Tapu Tahrir Defteri at the Archives of
the Prime Minister’s Office in Istanbul, as well as in Ankara’s Tapu Kadastro archives.
103 See Miura, “The Salihiyya Quarter of Damascus.”
104 Doris Behrens Abouseif describes some of these conflicts, especially over taxes, in detail. Behrens-
Abuseif, Egypt’s Adjustment to Ottoman Rule, 147, 149.
105 Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn ʿAli Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat al-khillan fi hawadith al-zaman, tarikh
Misr wa-al-Sham, vol. 2 (Cairo: al-Muʾassasa al-Misriyya al-ʿAmma lil-Taʾlif wa-al-Tarjama wa-al-
Tibaʿa wa-al-Nashr, 1962), 31, 36, 37, 62, 68, 73–75.
The central role of the shariʿa court in this massive effort to Ottomanize
property relations in Bilad al-Sham provided a very conducive climate for
the growth in use of the waqf. After all, the legal language and religious
legitimacy of the shariʿa was the filter through which properties and per-
sons were processed.106 Since the waqf already had a long history as a highly
flexible Islamic legal instrument for the configuration of access rights to
properties and their revenues, it is not surprising that the recording, super-
vision, and regulation of family, charitable, and mixed waqfs became a fun-
damental part of the court’s business. In Nablus and Tripoli, the number
of waqf-related cases in the shariʿa court registers was second only to the
number of cases relating to the purchase and sale of privately owned prop-
erty. The most informative are waqf endowments (inshaʾ) and lawsuits.
Cases of rental (ı̄jār) and long-term lease (h.ikr) of waqf properties, which
required the permission of the qadi, are numerous. These were notarized
and registered, as were requests for permission to build on and/or invest
in waqf property, the costs of which could be deducted from future rev-
enues. In certain periods of rapid economic or political changes, such as in
Nablus during the 1830s, cases of waqf exchange (istibdāl) became ubiqui-
tous. Since all key urban properties were already endowed, emerging elites,
unable to buy them outright, used the legal instrument of waqf exchange
to take them over. Waqf exchange can, in this regard, be seen as a sensi-
tive barometer of the rapid rise or grafting of a new elite on to the existing
power structure.107 The role of the court was crucial, because as a neces-
sary precondition for the approval of a waqf exchange the qadi would either
personally survey the properties in question or appoint experts to do so, in
order to evaluate claims that they were no longer-revenue producing. The
same is true of the ebb and flow of rent and long-term lease, as these were
popular means – especially for a newly arrived military officer corps – of
tapping into the major sources of wealth in a particular locale.
The fate of the family waqf and of the shariʿa court are intertwined to
such a degree that they have come to constitute the two major tropes for
discussions of modernity and modernization in Muslim societies, along
with women and the family, with which they were directly associated. Pub-
lic debates on the shariʿa and the waqf since the mid-nineteenth century
are vigorous and enduring, the political and intellectual stakes are high,
106 For the most part, this meant serving a notarial role, perhaps recording the purchase and sale of
urban real estate, the registration of probate inventories, or the validation of waqf endowments. It
also entailed a certain level of intervention and governance, for example through the adjudication
of lawsuits and the making of appointments in the religious establishment.
107 For a detailed discussion, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, ch. 5.
and the scholarship is voluminous. A detailed analysis of Ottoman gover-
nance of the waqf and of the history of the shariʿa courts is outside the
purview of this book. Suffice it to say that during the 1660–1860 period,
there was no fundamental change in how the family waqf was governed by
the shariʿa court, or in the significance of the court in Nablus and Tripoli.
Rapid changes were visible on the immediate horizon, however, with the
1860s as the tipping point. By 1875, more and more transactions having to
do with waqf property were transferred from the jurisdiction of the shariʿa
court and awqaf mudurs (administrators) to that of the Land Registry. In
1912, Young Turk legislation required all waqf and mı̄rı̄ land proceedings to
be recorded in the defter-i hakani (land register) and waqf administrators
to have documented permission from the land office before they could per-
form transactions for the waqf.108 This regulation was opposed by Dam-
ascene ʿulamaʾ and not implemented under the Young Turks, but it was
implemented later by the French authorities when they colonized Syria.
Around the same time, the rise of Republican Turkey from the ashes of
the Ottoman Empire lowered the curtains on both the shariʿa court and
the Imperial Waqf Ministry, long the two key institutions for managing
the waqf system in the Ottoman Empire. In 1922, both the shariʿa and the
waqf courts were abolished, and their duties were transferred to the regular
courts. Two years later, the Ministry was abolished with the founding of the
Turkish Republic. As to postcolonial Syria, the largest country to emerge
in Bilad al-Sham following the First World War, the government of Husni
al-Zaʿim further reinforced the French colonial measures by destroying the
last bastion and the historical backbone of the waqf system: in 1949, it
ordered the mandatory dissolution of all family waqfs.109
2.5 Conclusion
As detailed in the case study of Hamida’s children, individuals and kin
groups relied heavily on the shariʿa court as a forum in which to enact
property devolution and consolidation strategies, as well as to deal with
the unanticipated consequences of such strategies years and often decades
down the line. The crafting of waqf endowments and legal acknowledg-
ment deeds and the enactments of lawsuits reveal a certain sophistication
108 Randi Deguilhem, “History of Waqf and Case Studies from Damascus in Late Ottoman and
French Mandatory Times” (PhD diss., New York University, 1986), 114.
109 Ibid., 250. The family waqf was not outlawed in what would become Lebanon, Palestine, and
Jordan.
Conclusion 101
on the part of most litigants (or their representatives) regarding the intri-
cacies of the shariʿa, the rules of evidence, and the forms of legal represen-
tation. In using the court for their own purposes, litigants did take into
account the institutional and political frameworks within which the court
operated and translated their objectives into the legal language and codes
of Islamic law.
During the centuries of Ottoman rule, the relationship between kin and
court as a locally embedded state institution was a central dynamic in the
formation of urban communities, families, and property relations. The
documents generated by the court – both the originals held by individuals
and the copies recorded in locally archived registers – came to constitute the
communal textual memory of kinship and property relations in Ottoman
cities and towns. The propertied classes in Nablus and Tripoli attached
enormous importance to the production and preservation of documents
and the power relations they embodied.
In no other type of shariʿa court case was the mutually constitutive rela-
tionship between kin and court so apparent as in the family waqf. As we
shall see in the next chapter, family waqfs were flexible legal instruments
that could be designed for a wide variety of purposes. They were also
amenable to adjustments over time in terms of management of properties
and distribution of revenues through a variety of conditions (shurūt.). Waqfs
could interface with a variety of economic arrangements, including short-
and long-term rental agreements and the private ownership of structures
and trees on waqf lands. There were also highly developed legal mecha-
nisms for rewarding investment, for allowing de facto division among ben-
eficiaries, for exchanging of privately owned properties, and for providing
access to economic resources for large groups of people – all of which made
waqfs a highly dynamic institution. It is to the waqf as a family charter that
we now turn.
c h a p ter 3
Husayn’s and ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Designs

The Waqf as a Family Charter
Truly pious is he who spends his substance on his near of kin

Qurʾan (2:177)1
He must balance his desires to perpetuate his name against the future of
his children.
John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf, 19742
The endower stipulates . . . that every ten years his waqf deed will be re-
notarized by the qadi of Tripoli at the time who will sign it in the presence
of credible Muslim witnesses. A fee of two piasters (from the revenues of
the waqf ) will be paid to the qadi for his signature, and one piaster to the
scribe for recording it.
Waqf endowment, Tripoli, 17293
The family waqf can be approached in a myriad of ways, not the least of
which is as a pious practice of subject formation: an enactment of specific
ideals about the self and the family in relation to God and the shariʿa. For
almost all individuals, the act of endowing a family waqf involved serious
thinking and planning, for this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and
the stakes were high. As Maryam ʿAnklis emphatically stated, her (rather
unconventional) waqf design was “articulated in accordance with . . . the
shariʿa. Whoever opposes [the terms of my waqf endowment], the Prophet
Muhammad himself, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, will be his
1 Although near of kin are central, the verse casts a wide net that truly captures the spirit of what
Chapter 4 calls “supplementary” waqfs, which are especially important in Tripoli. In Muhammad
Asad’s translation, the longer quote reads, “but truly pious is he who believes in God, and the Last
Day; and the angels, and revelation, and the prophets; and spends his substance – however much
he himself may cherish it – upon his near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer,
and the beggars, and for the freeing of human beings from bondage; and is constant in prayer, and
renders the purifying dues.” This spirit also suffuses the waqf of Husayn al-Husyani (see later).
2 John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (New
York: Academic Press, 1974). I first saw this quote in Goody et al., Family and Inheritance, 5.
3 “Kul ʿashar sinı̄n yujaddad kitāb waqfihi hadha wa-yunafidhahu al-qād.ı̄ hı̄naʾidh bi-T . arābulus wa-
yamd.ı̄hi wa-yashhad ʿalayhi thiqat al-muslimı̄n wa-yudfaʿ li-l-qād.ı̄ ujrat imd.āʾihi ghirshayn wa-li-l-
kātib ujrat kitābatihi ghirsh wāh.id.” TICR 5:4–7, dated Jamadi II 12, 1141/January 13, 1729.
102
Husayn’s and ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Designs 103
antagonist on the Day of Judgment.”4 She, like so many thousands of oth-
ers in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, viewed the family waqf as the
most expressive, legitimate, and historically enduring of all the religiously
sanctioned legal instruments available for use in structuring and regulat-
ing long-term property relations between kin, and between the self and
God. Critical here is the fact that the family waqf was governed by a locally
embedded state institution, the shariʿa court.
During its golden age from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth cen-
turies, the family waqf in Bilad al-Sham was a key component of strategies
to secure a stable, secure, and dignified existence; to pursue power, wealth,
and status; to express piety and contribute materially and spiritually to
the general welfare of the community; and, most important, to establish a
patrimony and set up mechanisms for its devolvement to one’s biological
descendants and nearest kin. This and the next chapter will examine waqf
as a social act and a primary vehicle for gendered property devolution prac-
tices. Through two detailed case studies, this chapter argues that the family
waqf during this period can be viewed as a family charter that governs not
only property relations between kin, but also the moral-disciplinary order
of kinship.5
The family waqf is a sensitive barometer of historically contingent,
socially diverse, and regionally varied notions of kinship, gender, and prop-
erty within the larger contexts of Islamic legal traditions and modes of
imperial governance. The pervasiveness of its use was made possible by the
shariʿa court and by its built-in toolbox of options and preferences, which
allowed individuals to custom-design, so to speak, the waqf endowment.
Choices included the timing and purpose of the endowment, the types and
amounts of property to endow, whom to include or exclude as beneficiaries
of the revenues generated by the endowed properties, the particular con-
ditions (shurūt.) that govern the distribution of revenues, the setting aside
of funds for annual enactments of specific pious rituals, the designation of
charitable venues following the extinction of the endower’s progeny, and
a hierarchy of preferences in terms of who was to administer the waqf.6
4 TICR 31:1103–1104, dated beginning of Dhu al-Hijja 1255. I translated the phrase “mufas..salan h.ukm
al-farı̄d.a al-sharʿı̄yya” as “articulated in accordance with legal obligations of the shariʿa.”
5 This insight crystallized in my mind during a conversation with Sheila Jasanoff in 2007, when we
were both fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.
6 Even after an endowment was registered and made legally binding, endowers had the flexibility to add
or remove properties, reconfigure the pool of beneficiaries, and make several other changes as often
as they liked during their lifetime. Available evidence suggests that endowers rarely took advantage
of options usually phrased as “lahu al-h.aqq fi al-idkhāl wa-l-ikhrāj.” A few such instances are found
in the shariʿa court registers of Nablus, and none in those of Tripoli, for the period under study.
104 Husayn’s and ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Designs
Taken together, these choices express, among other things, the endower’s
vision of what constituted family, how it should be reproduced, and its
proper place in the material and spiritual worlds.
Each of the choices had serious ramifications for family life. The
endower could decide which properties to take out of circulation and which
to leave as freehold private property. This decision shaped her descendants’
material and cultural patrimony in a variety of gendered ways, depending
on the forms of access to the specific mix of endowed properties (residen-
tial, commercial, and/or agricultural), the genealogy of ownership (whether
acquired through inheritance, purchase, or construction), and the com-
munal memories embedded in the chain of possession (to whom it had
belonged in the past, why it changed hands, and how it was used). The
timing of the endowment in the life cycle made explicit certain assump-
tions about family life. Was it the final act of a long life of cultivating a
family patrimony? Was it a foundation laid early in life, soon after mar-
riage and the birth of a couple of children, as a way to structure the rela-
tionship between kinship and the organization of domestic space? Was it
to cultivate specific expectations about rights and responsibilities embodied
in one’s position(s) (for example, father/mother, aunt/uncle, brother/sister,
daughter/son) within the kin network?
The endower could choose what individuals or lines of descent were
to benefit from the waqf and could commit beneficiaries to follow a pre-
determined formula and set of conditions for sharing the revenues or for
using the endowed properties.7 The power of inclusion or exclusion was
an important feature of family waqfs because it directly influenced the
structure and dynamics of current and future household(s). The patterns
of transmission, for instance, reveal the boundaries imposed by endow-
ers between the conjugal and extended family worlds, between male and
female children, and between natal and agnatic kin. The endower could
choose to attach conditions governing the distribution of revenues that had
different consequences depending on the beneficiary’s status – on whether,
for example, they were married or unmarried or of one generation or
another – thereby creating an internal and, often, gender-specific hierar-
chy and lines of authority.
The endower could decide whether to set aside revenues to fund spe-
cific memorial rituals, pious works, or alms-giving on a predetermined
schedule, such as specific days of the year, repeated on an annual basis.
7 Of course, regardless of the degree of clarity, foresight, and detailed instructions in the conditions
imposed by the endower, not everything could be anticipated. The conditions, therefore, can be as
much a force for unity as they are for division. Similarily, the social life of waqf endowments could,
depending on circumstances, be long or short, stable or hotly contested.
Husayn’s Design 105
These mabarrāt (good deeds) served several purposes simultaneously. They
generated rewards (thawāb: recompense, compensation, or requital for
human actions from God) in the afterlife, and they established an infras-
tructure of obligations and performances that connected family members
one to another long after the death of the endower.8 They also constituted
a spiritual and cultural interface within the family and between it and soci-
ety at large, especially the many religious workers (reciters of the Qurʾan,
mosque employees, Sufi leaders, and so on) who were entrusted with orga-
nizing and performing the annual rituals.
The family waqf was further implicated in the political economy of local,
regional, and imperial religious establishments, because the endower could
specify the charitable sites where the revenues were to go once her line
of descent was extinct. In Tripoli and Nablus, like in most other urban
centers, the popular choices were local mosques, the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina, Sufi shaykhs and their progeny, and, always at the end, the
“poor,”whether of a particular neighborhood, the city as whole, or the Mus-
lim world in general.9
The following two cases studies, regarding the waqf endowments of two
wealthy and highly respected religious scholars – Sayyid Husayn al-Husayni
of Tripoli and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh of Nablus (who were
contemporaries) – illustrate the careful thought that informed the design
of endowments as family charters. They also lay bare substantive differences
between the two cities, especially when it comes to gender and the funding
of good deeds. The chapter concludes by mapping, then highlighting the
diverging patterns in the waqf endowments of the two cities through a
brief narrative of two waqf lawsuits by contemporaries, one in Nablus and
one in Tripoli, who responded in opposite ways when faced with the same
quandary of the absence of male heirs.
3.1 Husayn’s Design

The endowment by Sayyid Hajj Husayn Çelebi al-Husayni on August 2,
1802 nicely illustrates the possibilities of the waqf as a family charter.10
Various clues internal to the waqf document itself suggest that Sayyid
8 On the term and the centrality of this theme in the Qurʾan, see Wim Ravin, “Reward and Punish-
ment,” in Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Washington, DC: Brill, 2007).
9 “Poor” is not a socioeconomic category only, for it also denotes those who dedicate their lives to
God on earth, such as religious scholars and Sufi shaykhs. Members of the religious establishment
(ʿulamaʾ, imams, students, the qadi of the shariʿa court, and so on) often became the stewards of
institutions funded by waqf revenues, and they were considered to belong to the ranks of the “poor”
regardless of their personal wealth.
10 TICR 29:122–123.
Husayn was a well-to-do merchant, urban landlord, and entrepreneur in
the soap trade and in the commercial production of olive oil and citrus.11
He had strong connections with leading political and religious figures, and
seems to have been well known throughout the various quarters of the city,
as well as in the Zawiya and Kura rural districts outside of it.12 Advanced
in years, he had already experienced the pain of outliving his oldest son,
and was committed to taking care of his deceased son’s daughters, both of
whom were in their legal majority at the time of the endowment. In fact,
he seems to have been a devoted family man determined to provide a pat-
rimony large enough to secure comfortable lives not only for his orphaned
granddaughters, but also for his wife, his remaining children (a son and a
daughter), and his sister’s son, for whom he felt a special affinity or respon-
sibility. The structure of the endowment strongly suggests that Sayyid
Husayn was also a deeply pious man who assiduously observed his religious
duties, especially those of prayer, the pilgrimage (hajj), and charity (s.adaqa).
Due to his age and status and the fact that the process of formalizing
his large and intricately designed waqf could easily consume several gruel-
ing hours, Sayyid Husayn had no intention of spending what must surely
have been a hot and humid August day in the normally crowded, loud,
and unbecoming social space of the shariʿa court of Tripoli. His prepara-
tions for the event of enacting and registering the waqf, therefore, were as
elaborate as its details. He first secured the qadi’s permission to hold the
11 In listing properties, waqf endowers in Tripoli almost always started with orchards, as they were the
most important source of revenue. At the time of the endowment, citrus trees were beginning to
replace mulberry trees (crucial to the silk trade) as the most important cash crop among the irrigated
orchards in Tripoli’s green belt (for more details, see Chapter 6). That Sayyid Husayn was engaged
in the soap trade is merely an educated guess, but it is hard to imagine why else he would invest so
much of his resources in purchasing over a dozen olive groves, considering that most of the olive
oil not consumed as food was used to make soap, an important industry in Tripoli. As to being an
urban landlord, the endowment included six shops and four residences, some of which were rented
by other people.
12 Sayyid Husayn made it a point to contribute money to all the mosques of Tripoli, not just those
in his neighborhood, and he favored the key ones which served as the social headquarters and soap
boxes for the city’s elite, including Kabir, Tawbah, Tah.h.am, Argon Shah, and Tinal. The mutawallı̄
of Kabir and Tawbah mosques was one of the persons in Sayyid Husayn’s house when the waqf
was established; as befitted his position as head of the most important mosques, he acted as official
representatives of the other mutawallı̄s. Also present was Husayn Haddad, a property landowner
who had lands adjacent to those of Sayyid Husayn. Those who also owned adjacent properties
included al-Wazir Hajj Saʿd al-Din Pasha, ʿAbd al-Qadir ʿAzm, and members of the well-known
Ghalati, Dhawq, Sarut, Sammani, Sameen, Nawfal, Gharib, Sahyuni, Jazmati, Shakaʿa, ʿAbidi, bani
Janda, Sankari, Kamali, Karama, Hur, and Wahba families. Specific neighbors were not limited to a
single location, but appeared in different places, suggesting network connections and coordination,
whether in pooling of resources for investment of in property purchases or in sharing water and
labor resources. Marriage strategies no doubt played an important role in creating and reinforcing
these networks.
proceedings in his own house, located in Bani al-Sameen Street (zuqāq) in
the al-Rummani Quarter at the heart of the city.13 He then contracted the
services of the court’s most senior scribe, the Pride of Respected Scribes
(fakhr al-muh.arrirı̄n al-kirām) Sayyid ʿUmar Effendi Tadmuri, to draw up
the most consequential legal, religious, social, and economic transaction of
his entire life.
To make sure that all the technical details and legal processes were
scrupulously followed, Sayyid Husayn also procured the services of an
aspiring young member of the city’s ʿulamaʾ, the Pride of Students and
Descendants of the Prophet (fakhr al-t.alaba wa-l-sāda) Sayyid ʿAli Çelebi
Miʿmari zade, as his legal representative (wakı̄l).14 He provided Sayyid ʿAli
Miʿmari with numerous carefully preserved court documents and official
receipts as proof of his private ownership and/or legal h.ikr (long-term lease
of waqf property) of twenty-one properties of various types. Most of these
were acquired through purchase, not inheritance, and five were long-term
leases of waqf properties belonging to the mosques of Kabir and Tawba
and endowments of the Haramayn (holy cities of Mecca and Medina),
Qadioğlu school, and Bani al-Mustawfi.
Together, these properties amount to what I have called a “constitutive”
waqf; that is, an endowment rich and diverse enough to promote and sus-
tain a particular vision of what family is and how it ought to be organized
and reproduced (see Chapter 4). The documents were ordered such that
the highly profitable citrus groves in the irrigated belt of orchards dividing
Tripoli from the sea were listed first, followed by the residential and com-
mercial properties inside the city, and then a dozen olive groves located
higher above sea level in the Kura and Zawiya districts, famous until today
for their oil production. The documents described the essential charac-
teristics of each of the properties: Sayyid Husayn’s share (e.g., full, half, a
third), the property type (e.g., house, grove, field, shop), the productive
assets (e.g., the kind and number of trees), the name of the property, the
property’s location, and the names of any co-owners. They also specified the
amount of annual rent and taxes due on each property and to what party
they should be paid. Finally, for each property, the documents described
the adjacent properties to the south, east, north, and west, always in that
order, giving their names, productive assets, and the names of their owners
and/or renters. The estate is detailed and transparent.
13 It was not unusual for court sessions to be held in private homes, and in some cases the qadi himself
attended.
14 Both the endower and his representative shared the titles of “sayyid” and “çelebi,” signifying descent
from the Prophet and a strong engagement in trade.
It is important to note here that Sayyid Husayn chose not to endow
his own residence. The fact that the waqf endowment specifically noted
the exclusion of the residence indicates that most of what he possessed
ended up in the waqf. An important difference between the two cities
was that residences anchored family waqfs in Nablus, as if a patrimony
were primarily territorial in essence (the headquarters, so to speak, of the
family as a corporate unit in society), while most waqf endowers in Tripoli
chose not to endow the houses in which they lived, focusing instead on
endowing orchards. The image that comes to mind is of a conjugal family
that floats in a sea of rent versus an extended family anchored to a bounded
corporate space.
It should be evident by now that this was an elaborately choreographed
affair, and most likely a memorable performance as well. Sayyid Husayn’s
house was transformed into a theater in which his legal representative and
the scribe occupied center stage. Other participants included over a dozen
influential residents of Tripoli, acting as legal witnesses to the official roles
of Sayyid ʿUmar Effendi Tadmuri and Sayyid ʿAli Çelebi Mʿimari, as well
as witnesses who put their signatures at the bottom of the finely written
endowment.15 If practices of hospitality on such occasions were similar
then to what they are in Tripoli today, then the proceedings would have
been inaugurated with an offering of sharāb (sweetened essence of fruit
diluted with cold water) and capped by a sumptuous early-afternoon meal,
followed by tea and coffee service.
The pace throughout must have been cautious and deliberate. As the
patriarch of his extended family, Sayyid Husayn viewed this step as the
culminating moment of a long life of patient accumulation of properties,
piety, emotional and material investments in marriage and household, and
moral debts to the friends and relatives who had stood by him. At the time
of the endowment, his father and uncles were all dead and he had only
female siblings. The challenge he faced was how to integrate all of these
dimensions of his life – social/material capital, kinship and affective ties,
and piety/spirituality – and transform them into an institutionalized legacy
that expressed his beliefs, values, and vision of family. The seriousness with
which he faced this challenge is abundantly evident in the waqf’s complex
and mathematically elegant structure, which flows in cascades of twos and
threes (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2).
15 As is still the practice today, the document was notarized by the qadi (through a seal and sign on
the upper left corner) and given to the endower, and a copy was made and entered into the registers
of the shariʿa court.
All Properties
(21)
Charitable waqf (mosques) Family waqf
1
20
1/3 1/3 1/3
Kabir & Tawba Tahham Argon Shah
Each Other
Self
Poor Muslims
2 1
17
Tinal Mosque Nephew
Family Waqf Progeny 1:2
Family Waqf
1/3 1/3 1/3
Daughter Wife Son Granddaughter Granddaughter
Daughter Progeny 1:2 Progeny 1:2 Progeny 1:2
Progeny 1:2
Progeny of Nephew
Progeny of Progency of
1/3 sister 1/3 sister 1/3 sister uncle uncle
Each Other
Haramayn
Poor Muslims of Tripoli
Figure 3.1 Flow chart of the Husayni waqf, 1802

Figure 3.2 Husayni family tree according to the Husayni waqf, 1802∗
∗
All had the title of sayyid/sayyida, except for the granddaughters.
To begin with, Sayyid Husayn’s endowment encompassed two separate

waqfs: a small charitable one and a large family one. The large family waqf,
in turn, morphed into several discrete mini-waqfs over time, in the sense
that several channels from the revenue pool flowed into different sets of
beneficiaries, then back into the pool to wait for another set of beneficiaries
to emerge (see Figure 3.1). Thus, after all twenty-one properties were listed,
the first – one-third of a large and profitable orchard of citrus trees fed
by the western irrigation canal – was set aside as a charitable waqf.16 The
revenues of this waqf were subdivided into three equal shares: one-third
for Tahhām Mosque, one-third for Argon Shah Mosque, and one-third for
the Kabı̄r and Tawba Mosques (to be divided evenly between them). Ten
per cent of each share was to go to the administrator (mutawallı̄) of each
mosque as a salary, and the rest went towards the purchase of reed mats
from Egypt to furnish the mosques. This charitable waqf was completely
distinct and separate from the family one, in two particular ways. First,
control over the citrus garden was immediately transferred into the hands
of the administrators of the four mosques. Second, it was stated that if and
when all four mosques no longer existed, the revenues were not to return
to the endowment, but rather were to go to “poor Muslims.”
The remaining twenty properties were endowed as a family waqf whose
sole beneficiary was the endower himself. After his death, three discrete
sub-waqfs were designated: two small and one large. One of the twenty
properties, a large house (minus the shop on the ground floor), was to go
the endower’s maternal nephew, Sayyid Hajj Yusuf Salim, and his progeny,
male and female. Two other properties, consisting of a total of forty-four
olive trees, were set aside for Tinal Mosque. The revenues of the remain-
ing seventeen properties were to be divided into three equal shares. One-
third was for Sayyid Husayn’s wife, Sayyida Halima b. ʿAbd al-Jalil, and
his daughter, Sayyida Amina, to be divided equally between them until
the wife’s death, after which her share would revert only to the daughter.
Considering the age of the mother, the daughter was effectively receiving
a third of the revenues. The second third was for Sayyid Husayn’s son,
Sayyid Mustafa. The remaining third was to be divided evenly between his
two granddaughters from his deceased son, Ahmad: Fatima and Khadija.
In effect, Sayyid Husayn designed a transmission strategy that differed sig-
nificantly from the one prescribed by Islamic rules of inheritance (ʿilm al-
farāʾid.), which would have automatically unfolded after his death. The two
most important differences were, first, the inclusion of his granddaughters
and nephew, who normally would not have inherited any properties, and,
second, the allocation of equal shares to his daughter and son, even though
the normative ratio entitled a male to twice the share of a female sibling.
16 The other two-thirds were owned by the inheritors of Iʿrabi al-Tabbal. The land itself is a waqf
belonging to the endowments of Kabı̄r and Tawba mosques and is leased at the rate of two-thirds
of a piaster a year.
In the event of the extinction or end of the preceding lines of benefi-
ciaries (including Tinal Mosque), the revenues were to go back into the
family waqf pool, making possible the emergence of new lines of ben-
eficiaries, beginning with the progeny of the nephew. After the extinction
of the nephew’s biological line, the revenues were again to be split into
two equal parts. The first was to be divided into three equal shares, one
for the progeny of each of the endower’s sister and his two granddaugh-
ters; the second into two equal shares, one for the progeny of each of the
endower’s two paternal uncles, Sayyid Yahya and Sayyid Muhammad.17
After the extinction of all bloodlines, the revenues were to go to the Hara-
mayn waqf, then to the poor Muslims of Tripoli. Although it was possible
that the waqf could fall into ruins or be somehow dissolved long before the
progeny of the endower’s sisters and uncles came to benefit from its rev-
enues, it is nonetheless telling that Sayyid Husayn once again showed no
preference for males over females or for patrilineal over matrilineal lines.
Sayyid Husayn included his sister and granddaughters equally alongside
the progeny of his paternal uncles. Indeed, special privilege was given to
the son of a sister who, as was the custom then, and still is now, carried the
surname of his father and was considered a member of the Salem, not the
Husayni family.
In addition to the revenue-generating properties that he allocated for
four mosques and the space he created within the family waqf for the ben-
efit of a fifth, the Tinal Mosque, Sayyid Husayn took one further and very
important step. He stipulated that a significant sum of money, 155 piasters,
be deducted annually from the pool of revenues in order to finance five
separate charitable purposes that, like the rest of the endowment, were
arranged in a symmetrical structure.18 First, a recitation of the entire Qurʾan
17 Reconstructing the Husayni family tree through the court documents has revealed an inconsistency
in the waqf document. The endowment states at one point that the endower had three sisters,
Tahira, Khadija, and Fatima. We know, however, from other parts of the endowment, that Khadija
and Fatima are his granddaughters. Moreover, the probate inventory of his father, Sayyid ʿAbdullah,
registered fifty years earlier on December 12, 1748, clearly stated that only two children survived him:
Sayyid Husayn, who was in his legal minority at the time, and Tahira, who was in her legal majority.
There was no mention of a mother, who was either dead or divorced, or of any other siblings (TICR
10:123, dated Dhu al-Hijja 21, 1161). Sayyid Husayn could not have acquired two other sisters. This
interpretation is further bolstered by the fact that the endower’s nephew, Hajj Sayyid Yusuf Salim,
is simply referred to as “his sister’s son,” suggesting that there was only one sister – otherwise, the
name of the sister would normally be mentioned. Nevertheless, I kept the family tree illustration
in Figure 3.2 in the exact form suggested by the waqf endowment, partly in order to be faithful
to it, even if it is inaccurate. In any case, the flow of revenues was designed purposefully as if his
granddaughters were equal to his sister.
18 It is not clear why waqf endowments always specify amounts instead of percentages or shares when
it comes to the mabarrāt section. After all, endowers must have been aware of the fluctuations and
was to be completed every Friday of the year (for a total of fifty-four Fri-
days) at the rate of one piaster per recitation.19 Another fifty-four piasters
were allocated for the purchase of bread to be distributed to beneficiaries
every single Friday of the year. A further twenty-five piasters were to be
divided into five equal sums of five piasters to compensate the administra-
tor of the waqf for preparing food for the waqf’s beneficiaries on five holy
nights during the year: Mawlid al-Nabawı̄ (the Prophet’s birthday), Rajab
29, mid-Shaʿban, and the two nights of the ʿEid. It is as if the soul of the
endower –through the weekly recitation and annual distribution of food –
was to hover more visibly over the existing group of beneficiaries and serve
to remind them of the waqf as the source of their physical and spiritual
nourishment.
Four piasters were also put aside for the recitation of the popular verse
thirty-six of the Qurʾan (sūrat Yāʾ Sı̄n) once per day for each day of the
year.20 The remaining eighteen piasters were to be divided into three equal
lots. Six piasters were allocated for the purchase of reed mats for ʿAttar
Mosque, and six to cover the cost of lighting (olive oil) for the same
mosque. The final six piasters were to be spent on all the mosques of Tripoli,
including Tinal Mosque, which was outside of the city. If one thinks of the
annual distribution of revenues to the beneficiaries of Sayyid Husayn’s waqf
as the heart of a living will with a theoretically infinite timeline, then the
dates set for recitations of the Qurʾan and sūrat Yāʾ Sı̄n and for distribu-
tions of bread and food represented the heartbeat, keeping alive not only
the memory of the endower but also the family charter that he designed.
The compassion and elegance that permeated Sayyid Husayn’s waqf led
me, after writing the preceding portrait, to spend several weeks combing
through eighteenth-century registers for clues about Sayyid Husayn and
his family that might shed light on his background, motivations, and pur-
poses. The findings ultimately raise more questions than answers, but they
do clarify some important issues. First of all, there seems to be a good rea-
son why Sayyid Husayn took the unusual step of including the progeny of
general trends in the rise of costs of wheat, olive oil, reed mats, and other goods that needed to be
purchased.
19 The important place of Qurʾan recitations in family life is discussed in the mabarrāt section on the
social uses of waqf.
20 The reason for the popularity of sūrat Yāʾ Sı̄n is the widely held belief in a hadith that reports the
Prophet as saying that Yāʾ Sı̄n is the heart of the Qurʾan and should be read on behalf of the dead,
and that reading it can lead to the forgiveness of sins. Family waqf endowments in Tripoli routinely
set aside revenues for a reader to recite sūrat Yāʾ Sı̄n, thereby generating sinecures that constituted an
important part of the material base of the educated classes. The shariʿa court qadi was responsible
for appointing readers to fill positions whose holders had either died or voluntarily stepped down.
See, for example, TICR 9:44.
his uncles as well as his sister’s son: he was orphaned at a young age and
they had taken care of him. Sayyid Husayn was still in his legal minority
when his father, Sayyid ʿAbdullah, died in December 1748. The probate
document does not mention a mother or any younger siblings, with the
implication that his mother probably died, like so many women did at the
time, in the process of giving birth to her son. The only other survivor from
the conjugal family was his older sister, Tahira, who probably became his
primary caregiver. Tahira’s son, Hajj Sayyid Yusuf Salim, would, therefore,
be effectively like Sayyid Husayn’s younger brother; hence, the provision
in the waqf that leaves him and his progeny with a house.
By the same token, Sayyid Husayn’s uncle Yahya became like his sur-
rogate father, a relationship that was formalized when the shariʿa court
judge appointed him Sayyid Husayn’s legal guardian within days of Sayyid
ʿAbdullah’s death.21 The appointment allowed Sayyid Yahya to take con-
trol of his nephew’s financial and legal affairs, which included the collec-
tion of a considerable amount of debts owed to Sayyid ʿAbdullah and the
management of a valuable agricultural property, not to mention running
a retail shop and making business investments.22 It seems reasonable to
argue, therefore, that the inclusion of his uncles, especially Sayyid Yahya,
as well as his sister, Tahira, was a way of recognizing and repaying their
kindness and support as surrogate parents. In that sense, Sayyid Husayn
Husayni embodied the social and religious ideal of material comfort and
moral rectitude.
The bundle of documents related to Sayyid Husayn also helps explain
why the elegant geometric and mathematical rendering of beneficiary
flows in the waqf (illustrated in visual form in Figure 3.1) blends so well
with the legal logic of the document, as well as with the religious text:
Sayyid Husayn had seamlessly integrated the multiple roles of scholar, busi-
nessman, and lawyer into his own life.23 He may have been primarily a
21 The probate inventory of Sayyid ʿAbdullah was registered on December 12, 1748. TICR 10:123,
dated Dhu al-Hijja 21, 1161. The appointment of Sayyid Yahya as Sayyid Husayn’s legal guardian
is registered on December 18, 1748. TICR 10:124, dated Dhu al-Hijja 27, 1161. I could not find
evidence that Sayyid Yahya had male children – or any children, for that matter. If that was the
case, then Sayyid Husayn’s position as heir apparent to the leadership of the family would have
been strengthened. In any case, and if Sayyid Husayn’s successes in life are any indication, Sayyid
Yahya took good care of his nephew.
22 The estimated worth of the plot of land planted with trees, referred to as “bustān shajarı̄,” was 750
piasters. Sayyid ʿAbdullah was owed three large sums of money by men who had most likely bought
lands from him earlier. See the probate inventory, TICR 10:123.
23 It is pointless, except for heuristic purposes, to divide into arbitrary sociological categories the cohe-
sive scholar/businessman/lawyer social group (well represented by Sayyid Husayn) that embodied
and reproduced the moral and economic order of Muslim urban centers in Bilad al-Sham and
businessman who invested in agricultural lands, soap production, and the
retail trade, but he was rooted in a family of educated ashrāf (descendants
of the Prophet Muhammad) who were actively involved in the nitty-gritty
of the religious and legal affairs of the city.24 Judging from the contexts in
which they appeared on the pages of the shariʿa court registers, the Husay-
nis were educated, upright, and pious men who seem to have carefully
cultivated a reputation as moral guides, spiritual workers, and trustworthy
witnesses. In addition, they played a role as authoritative repositories of
local memory when it came to having detailed knowledge of and active
participation in the highly fluid relations of property holdings and access
rights through waqf rental in irrigated agricultural properties both inside
and outside of the city.
The first act by Husayn’s uncle after Husayn was orphaned, for example,
was to make sure that Husayn would inherit his father’s lifetime position
as a Qurʾan reader, funded by a waqf endowment of a house that gener-
ated a salary of eight piasters a year.25 Like uncle, like son: the appointment
letter referred to Sayyid Husayn as “the Pride of Students,” an appellation
that Sayyid Yahya himself proudly carried when he was a young man.26
Schooled in the value of literacy at an early age, Sayyid Husayn was hardly
unfamiliar with the power and significance of daily readings of the Qurʾan,
both as a spiritual force that aligned the temporal with the everlasting
worlds, and as a material one that provided a source of income for mem-
bers of the ʿulamaʾ in the community. Indeed, he used his own resources
to endow positions of Qurʾan readers similar to the one he inherited, thus
doing his part to keep this tradition alive.
beyond. The seamless integration was especially apparent in the mabarrāt section, where good deeds
were enumerated, divided into specific repetitive events in time, and funded in precise quantities of
capital. Needless to say, waqfs are a superb textual site for a discursive analysis of the genealogical
intermingling of mathematics, law, religion, and economics. But this is beyond the scope of this
study.
24 That said, Husayn’s grandfather, after whom he was named, also sported the title çelebi, which
denotes a merchant. His full title in 1729 was fakhr al-sādāt sayyid Husayn çelebi al-Husayni. See
TICR 5:56, 160.
25 Due to the damaged condition of the register, I could not make out the name of endowment that
created this position, but it could have been that of a relative or neighbor, as the house was located in
his own neighborhood of Bab al-Hadid (Iron Gate). As was common at that time, these permanent
positions passed from father to son. TICR 10:123, dated Dhu al-Hijja 27, 1161.
26 In 1729 for instance, almost three-quarters of a century before Sayyid Husayn endowed his waqf,
we meet his father’s older brother as a young witness to a court case in which he is referred to as the
Pride of Students (fakhr al-t.alaba). TICR 5:55. He was already married at the time, as he appears,
four pages earlier, as a witness to the identity of his wife, Maryam, the daughter of a land dealer,
Hajj ʿUmar b. ʿAbdullah, known as the land broker (simsār). TICR 5:51, dated Dhu al-Hijja 10, 1141
(July 7, 1729).
Sayyid Husayn was also very familiar with the importance of the shariʿa
court as fountain of legitimacy, guardian of property, and cornerstone of
wealth accumulation and property devolution strategies.27 For example, his
mentor and legal guardian, uncle Yahya, was appointed as a scribe (kātib)
in the shariʿa court of Tripoli on February 25, 1747.28 Fifteen years earlier,
the same uncle Yahya, then a young man in his teens, was appointed as
the prayer leader (imam), caller to prayer (muezzin), caretaker (khādim),
and waqf surpervisor of Zubala Mosque, on the eastern border of the old
city.29 Sayyid Yahya held this position for at least twenty-six years.30 More-
over, the names of his grandfather, uncles, nephews, and other relatives
regularly appeared in the court registers as professional witnesses to a vari-
ety of cases.31 Many, if not most of these cases revolved around agricultural
properties in Minya village, whose lands were part of Waqf al-Sadat al-
Misriyyin that dated back to the Mamluk period (see Chapter 6). These
lands became much more valuable after the governor of Tripoli invested
in building a canal from the Abu ʿAli River to the village. As befitting a
family of ʿulamaʾ who also speculated in irrigated agricultural lands, espe-
cially those that were part of earlier waqf endowments, the Husaynis devel-
oped intimate knowledge of property relations in Minya and worked dili-
gently to increase their holdings in that area.32 Throughout, the Husaynis
27 Marriage strategies also played a role in maintaining family wealth and cohesion. Sayyid Husayn’s
wife, Halima b. ʿAbd al-Jalil, was most likely the great granddaughter of the Pride of Preachers,
Shaykh Ahmad b. ʿAbd al-Jalil al-Husayni, who sometimes appeared as a witness along with Sayyid
Husayn’s grandfather and paternal uncle. See, for example, TICR 5:55.
28 TICR 9:45.
29 TICR 6:95, dated end of Rajab 1144 (January 28, 1732). According to the appointment letter, Sayyid
Yahya was appointed after the leading figures of the Tabbana Quarter petitioned the qadi to remove
the person in charge of the mosque, claiming that he had abandoned his posts a year earlier and the
mosque was falling apart from lack of maintenance.
30 See facsimile of waqf report for Zubala Mosque, dated beginning of Muharram 1169 (October 7,
1755) in ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salam Tadmuri, Wathaʾiq nadira min sijillat al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya bi-
Tarabulus (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Mahfuzat al-Wataniyya, 2002), 292–293. By that time, the title
“Pride of Scribes” (fakhr al-muh.arrirı̄n) had been added to Sayyid Yahya’s many appellations. See,
for example, TICR 10:1.
31 For Sayyid Yahya, see, for example, TICR 5:51, 55; 9:49, 360; and 10:1, 96, 184, 186, 223, 252, 360.
For Sayyid Husayn’s grandfather, see TICR 5:56, 106 and 10:65. For his father, ʿAbdullah, see TICR
5:160.
32 One of them was Sayyid Husayn al-Husayni himself. See, for example, three purchase cases, the first
in al-Zawiya subdistrict and the other two in Minya village (TICR 23:86, 132, and 270, respectively).
In yet another case, Sayyid Husayn, along with a certain woman, Saliha b. Salih from Minya village,
was sued by Saliha’s maternal nephews, who claimed that she had illegally sold a garden of trees that
was part of al-Misriyun waqf to Sayyid Husayn because they had claim through inheritance on some
shares of that garden. They lost the case. TICR 19:208. Sayyid Husayn’s other paternal uncle, Sayyid
Muhammad b. Husayn al-Husayni, was also active as a witness in court cases in relation to irrigated
agricultural properties, especially in the village of Minya in the eastern canal area. See TICR 19:53,
148, 178, 197, 208, 237, 243.
ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Design 117
worked through a network of friends and business associates whose names
almost invariably appear when partners or owners of adjacent properties
were identified in the description of the endowed parcels of land. This was
despite, it is important to add, the wide geographic dispersion of these
properties, which, aside from various locations within the irrigated green
belt, also ranged from the Zawiya to the Kura subdistricts. Were marriage
contracts available, it would not be surprising to find that these networks
were cemented through marriage alliances. At the very least, the repetitions
in groups of names suggests that different networks and alliances within
Tripoli can be mapped out geographically as well as politically and socially –
an important point that will be discussed in greater detail at the end of this
chapter.
Within the discursive structure of the family waqf as a religious and
legal institution, as well as the cultural traditions in the provincial town of
Tripoli at the time, Husayn’s waqf design deeply reflected his own specific
life experiences and relationships. It was a transparently pious act that cel-
ebrated his life, defined the kind of person he understood himself to be,
and cultivated rewards that would ease his path to and experience in the
afterlife. It was also, at the same time, a deeply thought-out and mathe-
matically elegant property devolution strategy that recognized the kin who
counted in his life and invested in their future and the future of their
progeny. Husayn’s vision treated males and females as equal beneficiaries,
and it included blood relations other than his direct descendants (agnates
and in-laws). As we shall see in Chapter 5, Husayn was not an exception in
this regard, as roughly a third of family waqf endowments in Tripoli gave
equal shares to females.
The situation in Nablus could not be more different.
3.2 ʿAbd al-Wahid’s Design

Five successive Khammāsh family waqf endowments – which spanned a
six-decade period (1806, 1826, 1848, 1858, and 1869) – embody the domi-
nant ways of using waqf as a family charter in Nablus (Figure 3.3).33 On the
face of it, the Khammāsh family was very similar to the Husaynis of Tripoli.
The leading male members of both were part of the scholar/businessman
group that climbed the social pyramid during the second half of the seven-
teenth century and accumulated wealth and prestige during the eighteenth.
Both held positions in mosques and the shariʿa court, frequently served as
33 NICR 6:348; 8:287; 11:121–123; 12:226–228; and 15:234–236, respectively.

Abd al-Wahid
Hasan Mustafa (d. 1830)
Joint waqfs 1806, 1826
Shehadeh Abd al-Wahid
Endowed family waqfs

in 1848, 1858, 1869
Figure 3.3 Khammāsh family tree
witnesses, and worked as reciters of the Qurʾan, among other things.34 The
design of their family waqfs, however, differed dramatically when it came
to the types of properties seen as constituting the family’s material foun-
dations, the patterns of inclusion and exclusion of beneficiaries, and the
place of charity and good deeds in the cultivation of relations with the reli-
gious establishment and the accumulation of rewards for the afterlife. In
short, they had different visions of what family was and how it ought to be
organized.
The first Khammāsh endowment consolidated a compound-like cluster
of adjacent structures in the Yasmina Quarter, comprising houses, shops,
and a bakery. The ensuing endowments systematically enlarged the com-
pound to include a soap factory, bathhouse, and more residences and
shops. Over time, the range of real estate holdings endowed in the five
waqfs – houses, shops, gardens, warehouses, soap factories, mills, commer-
cial centers (wikāla), a pottery factory, a bathhouse, and bakeries – spread
34 For example, Husayn b. Shaykh Mustafa Khammāsh was a regular witness in court proceedings in
the 1720s (NICR 4:1). During the same period, one of his cousins, ʿAbd al-Wahid b. Mustafa, was a
preacher in a mosque (NICR 4:20), and another cousin, Shaykh Muhammad b. Shaykh ʿAla al-Din
Khammāsh, was the Hanafi imam at Nasir Mosque. Others relatives also worked as preachers and
prayer leaders (NICR 4:98, 168). In contrast to the Husaynis, the Khammāshs were largely referred
to as “shaykhs” (learned men/religious scholars) rather than “sayyids” (descendants of the Prophet).
all over the city, symbolizing the family’s growing clout. The Khammāsh
waqfs also reveal a large joint household arrangement that went through
the classic consolidation, fission, and reconsolidation phases. The first waqf
was a medium-sized joint endowment by two brothers who lived with their
families in their father’s house. The size of the endowments grew quickly
over time, and the purpose shifted to managing the division of the two
brothers into two separate households. The last, six decades after the first,
was a very large endowment by the older of the two brothers. Well on in
years, he endowed it solely for two surviving sons, who, along with their
children, lived with him in the old family house.
In Nablus, it is fairly common knowledge among elders who are reli-
able repositories of local memory that the Khammāsh, Jawhari, and Abi
al-Huda families are actually closely related branches of a single family that
descended from a common ancestor through the male line. The available
evidence from the shariʿa court registers suggests that the Khammāsh fam-
ily branched off from the Jawhari family sometime in the seventeenth cen-
tury and that the Abi al-Huda family later split off from the Khammāsh
branch in the mid-eighteenth century.35 Branching is usually the legacy of
a successful member whose children and grandchildren seek to distinguish
themselves from the rest of the extended family by relocating to another
residence and/or adopting a different surname. Usually, that would be the
first name of the successful member that they want to be identified with.36
In this case, the Abi al-Huda family was named after Sayyid Abi al-Huda b.
Shaykh Muhammad Khammāsh, who was a young man in 1725. All three
family branches produced scholars and religious workers who played a lead-
ing role among the ʿulamaʾ in Nablus from the mid-eighteenth to the early
twentieth centuries. The Khammāshs eventually became the most powerful
family of ʿulamaʾ in Nablus from the early nineteenth to the early twenti-
eth centuries, largely as a result of the foundations laid by a father-and-son
team who dominated the post of qadi of the shariʿa court: Shaykh Mustafa
Khammāsh and his son, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wahid.37
35 An affidavit laying out the complicated property distribution following the death of Shaykh
Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Rahim Khammāsh captures a moment when a common residence housed
Jawharis, Khammāshs, and Abi al-Huda, son of the deceased Shaykh Muhammad and the founder
of the Abi al-Huda branch. The affidavit was registered on September 16, 1723 (NICR 4:14, dated
mid-Dhu al-Hijja 1135). The Jawharis occupied the posts of qadi and mufti of Nablus more than
once during the eighteenth century, well before the Khammāshs.
36 NICR 4:304.
37 For an overview of the Khammāsh family during the 1800–60 period, see Doumani, Rediscovering
Palestine, 209–211, 213. For the 1860–1914 period, see Mahmoud Yazbak, “Nabulsi Ulama in the Late
Ottoman Period, 1864–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 1 (1997): 74–76.
Not long after Mustafa’s father, ʿAbd al-Wahid (after whom he named
his oldest son), died, he and his brother, Shaykh Hasan, decided, some-
time in December 1806, to consolidate the family’s growing wealth and
status by endowing a joint waqf.38 Joint waqfs by brothers and cousins,
common in Nablus and rare in Tripoli, were simultaneously the reason for
and the product of the high premium put on large extended-family house-
holds among those with enough resources to afford such an arrangement.
Typical of constitutive waqfs, the Khammāshs’ contains a diverse portfo-
lio of properties, but like all waqfs in Nablus (and unlike those in Tripoli,
which almost always start with orchards), the list begins with the family
residence. The family house was crucial in Nablus, because it served as the
headquarters of a family branch that often was indistinguishable from joint
economic enterprises by brothers and cousins. The emphasis on residential
headquarters was such that those from elite families strived to establish self-
sufficient compounds that contained a bakery, water well, stable, shops,
storage facilities, and, in the case of the Khammāshs, a small bathhouse
and soap factory.
The cornerstone of the 1806 waqf, jointly endowed by the brothers
Mustafa and Hasan Khammāsh, was a large new house (dār) built by the
endowers on top of and next to their father’s house in the Yasmina Quar-
ter, where the Khammāsh family had been living for at least a century.
This signaled their independence and readiness to take over the leadership
of the family. The new house was also adjacent to the soap factory they had
recently renovated, which they would endow in a later waqf. Ownership of
a soap factory in Nablus at that time was the ticket, so to speak, into the
most exclusive and powerful social club in the city. The 1806 waqf, there-
fore, also announced that they had become one of the pillars of Nablus
society. The other properties in the endowment included another house
(purchased earlier), three shops, shares in three more, and a bakery. All
were located adjacent to one another in the Yasmina Quarter. The revenue
and control over the endowment was split in half between the two broth-
ers, but two rooms and a storage space were reserved for Shaykh Mustafa
(who was the older brother) alone. This dimension emphasized the lines of
authority within the joint household, as did the very structure of the text:
Shaykh Mustafa was always mentioned first, and his oldest son was always
mentioned ahead of his siblings and of his cousins.
Consistent with the preference for organizing kin and property along
the model of the branch, each of the endowers passed on his share to his
38 NICR 6:348, dated Shawwal 1221.

children, male and female, as well as all future children, with males hav-
ing twice the share of females. Thus, Shaykh Mustafa’s sons, ʿAbd al-Wahid
and Ahmad, as well as his daughters, Sarah, Salha, and Hind, would receive
their father’s share of the waqf revenues according to the two–one ratio of
Islamic rules of inheritance. The same was true for Shaykh Hasan’s chil-
dren, Shehadeh, Mahmud, and Nafisa (female).39 To concentrate this prop-
erty within the male line of each branch, the endowers stipulated that the
shares of their daughters and of any future female children they might have
could not be passed on to their children and must revert to their two broth-
ers and their progeny. They further stipulated that the shares of their female
children, as well as the right to reside in the house, were to be rescinded
for any daughter who married; a consequential condition, considering that
marriage was nearly universal.40 If the branch (farʿ) of either brother died
out, the text further stated, then the waqf properties would revert to the
other branch. Only when the male line of both branches became extinct
would the waqf revert to the children of the females. The dynamic of
devolution, in short, represented a feedback loop always leading to male
descendants of male children, and the access of females to the revenues
was temporary, not lifelong. In addition to the waqf, other practices led to
concentration within this loop: Mustafa and Hasan’s oldest sons, ʿAbd al-
Wahid and Shehadeh, respectively, concentrated power at the expense not
only of their sisters, but also of their younger brothers. There are numerous
court transactions involving the older brothers, and virtually none for their
siblings.
Twenty years later, sometime in January 1826, Shaykhs Mustafa and
Hasan jointly endowed another waqf.41 The partnership was still profitable
in terms of wealth and status, but each brother’s branch had become larger
and more complicated. The enactment of the second joint waqf was akin
to building a dyke against a rising tide, where the dyke was none other than
the physical compound in the Yasmina Quarter. All the endowed proper-
ties of the second waqf were purchased in order to support the expansion
of the contiguous physical space of the compound. Thus, they acquired the
roof of a coffee house next to their residential headquarters and an adja-
cent large space intended for the spreading, cutting, and storing of soap.
They also purchased three more shops and shares of a bakery and two other
39 At the time of the waqf endowment, Shaykh Hasan was married to two women.
40 The founding of this endowment was not without its difficulties, due to tensions generated by the
male-only path of property devolution. Mustafa and Hasan Khammāsh had three sisters, one of
whom, ʿAʾisha, sued them over family property (NICR 6:348).
41 NICR 8:287, dated Jamadi II 1241.
shops. Their social capital was upgraded as well. They were identified with
a new and greater set of titles, projected back in time to adorn the name
of their long-deceased father. This served the purpose of naturalizing their
ascendency: they were now to be seen as members of an old distinguished
line, not a newly “arrived” family. The increase in status was also projected
forward into the future through the oldest son of each. In 1806, ʿAbd al-
Wahid, son of Mustafa and Shehadeh, son of Hasan had no titles. In 1826,
the former was called a Shaykh and Pride of Preachers (fakhr al-khut.abāʾ)
and the latter the Distinguished Shaykh (al-shaykh al-fad.ı̄l).
Despite the anchor of a second jointly endowed waqf, which tied the
two brothers and their families together, kinship relations became more
complicated when Shaykh Hasan, hoping to reinvigorate his own branch,
took on a new wife after his two youngest children had died. More impor-
tantly, the oldest son of each brother was busy expanding his power base
within the household, and both were prepared to take over the mantle
from their aging parents. For instance, in 1830, four years after the second
endowment, Shaykh Mustafa handed over the shariʿa court qadi position
that he had long held to his son, ʿAbd al-Wahid. He died soon after. The
text of the second endowment shows traces of the increased tensions.
The beneficiary pattern remained the same as that of the 1806 waqf, as
did the design of dividing in half both the revenues and the management of
the endowed properties. This time, however, the clarification of the bound-
aries between the two halves was emphatically repeated, and the additional
phrase “neither had the right to become involved in the other’s share” (min
ghayri mushārakat al-ākhar fı̄hi) was inserted.
The joint household broke apart in 1830, following the death of Shaykh
Mustafa. This was not unusual. In their model of a joint household cycle,
James Lee and Jon Gjerde argue that none makes it past this stage.42 What is
unusual is that the split led to the deliberate dismemberment of the recently
endowed joint waqfs of 1806 and 1826 by ʿAbd al-Wahid and Shehadeh
after they took over leadership of the family, as they sought to establish
their own branches.43 This was not done through a legal process – ʿAbd
42 James Lee and Jon Gjerde, “Comparative Household Morphology of Stem, Joint and Nuclear
Household Systems: Norway, China and the United States,” Continuity and Change 1, no. 1 (1986):
92–95.
43 This entailed converting the main residence and soap factory, among other buildings, back into
private property. ʿAbd al-Wahid lived on top of the factory (which was connected to the old
family home), while Shehadeh move to a larger house nearby. Interview with Muhammad Saʿid
Khammāsh, May 5, 1996. The dismemberment of the waqf probably resulted from a fundamen-
tal difference in property devolution preferences between the two cousins. Shehadeh Khammāsh
did not favor the use of waqf to manage his family or devolution of his property, and avoided this
al-Wahid and Shehadeh simply behaved as if these two waqfs had never
existed.44
This assertion of naked power in the face of the shariʿa is striking pre-
cisely because the cousins were leading legal scholars in the city of Nablus,
who should have set an example for the rest of the city by eschewing such
an action. More importantly, they occupied the key administrative position
that was supposed to protect and regulate the family waqf: ʿAbd al-Wahid
was the qadi of the Nablus shariʿa court at the time, and Shehadeh served as
a qadi in both Nablus and in Jaffa. ʿAbd al-Wahid inherited the position of
qadi from his father in 1830 and held it, with some interruptions, until 1864.
His power and wealth received their greatest boost during the period of
Egyptian rule (1831–40), due to the astute political alliances that he forged
with Husayn ʿAbd al-Hadi, known as Abi Bakir al-ʿArrabeh, who became
the Egyptian government’s right-hand man in southern Bilad al-Sham by
1832, and helped it crush the 1834 revolt in Palestine. The ʿAbd al-Hadis
were based in the village of ʿArrabeh but clearly understood that consolidat-
ing their power meant establishing a foothold in the city of Nablus. Shaykh
ʿAbd al-Wahid proved very useful in this regard. As qadi, he provided legal
cover for Husayn ʿAbd al-Hadi and his sons, who proceeded to dismember
the choicest waqfs endowed by some of the long-time leading families in
Nablus, especially those out of favor with the Egyptian authorities. They
focused on soap factories, warehouses, and commanding residential com-
pounds, which they acquired through the mechanism of waqf exchanges
(istibdāl) transacted in the shariʿa court. ʿAbd al-Wahid ruled that the target
waqfs were in shambles, and hence eligible to be exchanged with properties
of another waqf. Documents from the 1820s show, however, that many of
these properties were actually recently renovated and in good condition.
Moreover, and since the ʿAbd al-Hadis did not have waqfs in Nablus, they
were actually exchanged for cash.45
On September 8, 1848, ʿAbd al-Wahid was finally ready to formalize
the ascendancy of his own branch by establishing a family waqf that
was even larger and more diversified than the joint waqfs of 1806 and
1826 combined.46 This waqf included a newly renovated and expanded
institution for the rest of his life. ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh would come to rely exclusively on the
family waqf not only to keep his patrimony intact, but also to impose tight discipline and absolute
rule within his branch.
44 The joint waqfs of Shaykh Mustafa and Shaykh Hasan have disappeared not just in reality, but also
in memory. Members of the family that I interviewed did not even know about these waqfs, even
though very careful registers were kept of ʿAbd al-Wahid’s waqf endowments.
45 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 208–210.
46 NICR 11:121–123, dated end of Shawwal 1264.
version of the residence and the adjacent soap factory (which had originally
belonged to his grandfather and had long served as the joint headquarters
of his father and uncle), an orchard in the same compound, a bakery, ten
shops, two storage rooms (s. bayka), two residential rooms, a large ware-
house in the heart of the commercial district, two mills in a nearby valley,
and a large plot of irrigated agricultural land. ʿAbd al-Wahid renovated
and expanded the residential apartments of his great-great grandfather so
that they ended up on top of the two-story soap factory building that he
had built. The soap factory, in turn, had a concealed stairway that led to
the stable and the houses. The factory and houses were also connected to a
bathhouse that he built, which was connected in turn to the house by a long
narrow private hallway. The fruit orchards, bakery, and some of the shops
he endowed were also part of the compound. The shops and warehouses
reached out like arms into the key commercial space of the city: Khan
al-Tujjar. All were separated by a narrow street from the Satun Mosque,
designated in the waqfs as the charitable end to which the revenues were to
revert once his and his cousin’s progeny were extinct.47 The spatial grid that
the waqf design constructed – a dense array of properties, linked by hidden
passages, staircases, and hallways and then radiating outwards to commer-
cial hubs, gardens, and mills at the very edge of the city – both produces
and reflects the power relations and hierarchies of a vision of family and
kin at the heart of which is the endower and his male descendants.
The timing of the 1848 waqf was partially driven by considerations sim-
ilar to the ones behind the 1806 and 1826 waqfs: times that combined eco-
nomic growth with the danger of political instability, which threatened
the material base of the family. Like his father and uncle, ʿAbd al-Wahid
was also motivated by old age. It was the moment to consolidate his new
branch and to prevent feuds among his children and between them and
their agnates by designing a clear property devolution mechanism within
the waqf. Unlike his father and uncle, however, his strategy was based on
a complete rather than a partial exclusion of female kin descendants. That
is, he stipulated that only his male children (five of them) and any future
male children that God might bestow on him were to receive shares – and,
after them, only their own male children, and so on. This is why we know
the names of his five sons and the order of their birth, but not the names
or number of his daughters, who are nowhere mentioned in the waqf doc-
ument. The only reference we have to them is a clause stipulating that his
daughters and his sons’ daughters (indicating that he was already the head
47 Field visits, May 1996.

of a multi-nuclear household) had the right to live in the residential prop-
erty as long as they remained unmarried. This “right” was also extended
to his wives (number and names were not mentioned) in the event of his
death, as long as they did not remarry, and to his three sisters, who were
still living with him at the time (1848). This is significant because his sisters
must have been at least in their mid to late forties by then, yet they were
still unmarried despite the fact that marriage was virtually universal. Most
likely – and this would not have been a rare case among the elite families
of Nablus – they had been encouraged not to marry so as not to fragment
the family’s material base.48 In return, they would presumably have become
the senior female managers of a large and wealthy household, with all the
privileges that entailed, instead of relocating to and being on the margins
of their husbands’ families. In other words, a strategy of non-marriage was
also at work alongside the strategy of property transmission through mar-
riage and waqf. All aimed at the same goal: concentration of property in
the hands of the senior male offspring.
The focus on males must be seen in the context of a larger focus
on one’s offspring. For ʿAbd al-Wahid, in other words, daughters came
before agnates, and, specifically, before his cousin Shehadeh and his male
children, even though they both were heirs to a long history of joint
households. Thus, ʿAbd al-Wahid stipulated that after the male line of
descent had ended in his family, the revenues were to revert to the
female line of descent. Only after both lines had become extinct were the
progeny of his cousin, Shehadeh, to have access to the waqf revenues.49
This order of beneficiaries reaffirmed the hard line of demarcation that
marked the cousins’ rise to leadership of the family in 1830. The sep-
aration echoes until the present: all but one of the Khammāsh family
members I interviewed in the 1990s introduced themselves, without any
48 Interviews confirm that one of the sisters, Sarah, never married (see, for example, interview with
Muhammad Saʿid Khammāsh, May 5, 1996). The ʿAbd al-Hadi and Nabulsi families, both rich and
powerful at that time, were frequently mentioned in a number of interviews as examples of families
that had a number of women who had never married for precisely this reason (see, for example,
interview with Wafiyya al-Nabulsi, January 29, 1996). The concentration of a family’s resources
depended on the willing, or at least begrudging, participation of females. For an example from the
period under study, see the waqf endowment by three sisters from the ʿArafat family in favor of
their brother’s male children. NICR 9:322–323. It is perhaps not completely coincidental that the
same ʿArafat family house in the old city of Nablus was occupied a century later by three unmarried
middle-aged sisters. The men had long moved beyond the city walls and into new neighborhoods
and countries. One was an artist, another a school inspector of some authority. The latter, Saba
49
ʿArafat, kindly shared with me some of their family papers.
Over 150 years later (as of this writing), the waqf revenues are still being distributed among the male
progeny of ʿAbd al-Wahid.
prompting on my part, as members of either the Shehadeh or the ʿAbd
al-Wahid branch.50
ʿAbd al-Wahid endowed a second waqf almost exactly ten years later, on
September 24, 1858. This waqf shows that the expansion of property and
power extended beyond the city itself and as far away as the Jordan Valley.51
Again, the original family house anchored the spatial grid of the waqf. The
second waqf added two more floors added to the family residence in the
Yasmina Quarter, a third of another bathhouse (Hammam al-Rish), a small
share in a mill in the Jordan Valley, a large residence near the family home,
a shop, another pottery factory, more houses in the Yasmina Quarter, and
three olive groves outside the city. ʿAbd al-Wahid’s third and last waqf, dated
March 1, 1869, added a new bathhouse (since then known as Hammam al-
Qadi) that he had built, a large orchard, shares in another two mills, five
warehouses, two shops, a pottery factory, and two houses.52
By this time, ʿAbd al-Wahid must have been close to, if not well over
seventy years of age, and he had already outlived three of his sons, who
died in the period between the second and third waqfs. Thus, although the
general design of the third waqf was identical to that of the the first two, the
direct beneficiaries were now listed as Muhammad and Munib, his oldest
and youngest sons, respectively, as well as three grandchildren: the male
child of his deceased son Raghib, and the two male children of his deceased
son ʿAttalah. The two children of his third deceased son, Darwish, were not
included as beneficiaries, because they were both female. However, ʿAbd al-
Wahid set aside an annual salary of 200 piasters for each of his daughters
(names and number not mentioned) and for Darwish’s two daughters, as
long as they remained unmarried. If any one of them were widowed, she
could receive her share again from the waqf revenues, as long as she was
not legally obliged to support a child (wa-lam yakūn laha walad kalı̄f ).
50 A certain tension continues to exist between these two branches to this day, partly because neither
Shehadeh Khammāsh nor his children endowed waqfs. One descendant of Shehadeh considered this
a mistake, because, he said, Shehadeh’s descendants had squandered their considerable inheritance,
while the branch of ʿAbd al-Wahid maintained its wealth and status from the revenues of the waqfs
(interview with Mukhtar al-Khammāsh, May 5, 1996). A member of the ʿAbd al-Wahid branch who
was present during this interview later confided that this was true, but that the tables have turned:
now, the Shehadeh branch has greater opportunities, because the waqf rent revenues have not risen
over the decades but the shops, houses, and lands cannot be sold, while the Shehadeh branch has
benefited from the spectacular rise in real estate prices over the past three decades (interview with
Muhammad Saʿid Khammāsh, May 15, 1996).
51 NICR 12:226–228, dated mid-Safar 1275.
52 Khammāsh Family Papers, 1.3. Also NICR 15:234–236, dated Dhu al-Qaʿda 16, 1285. The benefi-
ciaries included two of his sons, the male children of a third, and the orphans of a fourth – all to
be divided equally. The rest of the conditions were similar to those fo the first two waqfs he had
endowed.
Close to death, ʿAbd al-Wahid took special care to design a detailed set
of rules and regulations to govern the management of the waqf that con-
stituted a system of moral discipline, as if the iron hand by which he ruled
his family would continue hovering over his descendants after his death.
First, he banned his progeny from living in the endowed properties, except
for the large residence in the Yasmina Quarter. The original family com-
pound remained the core of the family itself. All other properties were cash
cows. Both the 1858 and the 1869 waqfs explicitly stated that “the afore-
mentioned places are for revenues not housing” (al-amākin al-madhkūra
li-l-ghalla lā li-l-sakan). Presumably, he created an incentive for his branch
to remain fixed in space and focused on income, and not to construct com-
peting layers of claims and access rights to properties that could plunge
them into cycles of dispute and recrimination. To protect the sources of
income, ʿAbd al-Wahid also strictly forbade his progeny from renting out
any of the property through the ijāratayn (long-term rental) contract. To
enforce this rule even after his death, he detailed an escalating process of
punishments and rewards. If any beneficiary even so much as requested
(much less attempted to implement) a long-term rental contract, he would
be forever excluded from the waqf unless he repented (yatūb). Upon repen-
tance, he would regain his lost share after one year, during which time it
would be distributed equally among the other beneficiaries. If repentance
was followed by a second infraction, so warned the waqf, the guilty party
was to be permanently excluded.53
Mabarrāt – good deeds financed by a percentage of waqf revenues – were
entirely absent from all waqf endowments by the Khammāshs, very much
in contrast with the waqf of Husayn al-Husayni in Tripoli. Both waqfs
were typical of their cities, and the reasons for this dramatic contrast, as
will be discussed in Chapter 4, are not entirely clear. In his last waqf, ʿAbd
al-Wahid, nearing the end of his life, did make a small nod in this direction
(relative to the very large size of the waqf ). Specifically, he dedicated one-
half of the income from the new bathhouse that he had built, along with
one-half the income from the irrigated Masʿudiyya garden (bustān), to the
maintenance of the tomb of Saint Masʿud. In addition, he instructed that
100 piasters of the waqf revenues were to be set aside to purchase bread
to be distributed to the poor of Nablus, the rewards of which were to be
gifted to his soul (the soul of the Prophet Muhammad was not mentioned
as it usually was in Tripoli). Also unlike the Husayni waqf, which listed the
53
ʿAbd al-Wahid’s concern about loss of control and revenue due to long-term leases is understandable.
Such leases represented a mechanism by which rising families effectively appropriated the properties
of weaker or temporarily unfortunate families that had seen better days.
Table 3.1 Differences in the waqfs of Nablus and Tripoli, 1660s–1730s,
1800–60
Point of comparison Tripoli Nablus
Type of waqf (most rFamily (75%) rFamily (96%)

common to least common) rMixed rMixed
rCharitable rCharitable
Endower rMostly middle stratum rMostly upper stratum
rHalf by women rVery few by women
rJoint waqfs rare rJoint waqfs common
Recipient rPrimarily for conjugal family rPrimarily for patriline
rFemales included rFemales excluded
Types of properties (most rAgricultural rResidential
common to least common) rResidential rCommercial
rCommercial rAgricultural
Change over time Imperceptible Clear shifts
Good deeds Usual Unusual
Charitable ends Quarter-specific City as a whole
Small waqfs Many Few
Large waqfs Few Many
specific amounts to be spent on each specific day, no additional details were

provided in the Khammāsh waqf, as if the mabarrāt were an afterthought.
Although only a small proportion of family waqfs were as detailed as
those of Sayyid Husayn al-Husayni and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh,
most contained the basic elements of both. A systematic analysis of every
family waqf endowed during the 1660s–1730s and 1800–60 confirms that
the dramatic differences in waqf design between Husayn and ʿAbd al-Wahid
held true for Tripoli and Nablus generally. As can be gleaned from the sim-
plified comparison in Table 3.1, the differences were systematic and endur-
ing, and revolved primarily around the relationship between gender and
property.54 One way to highlight these differences in waqf charters and
property devolution practices is to ask: How is the waqf implicated when
there is no male heir? As the two brief case studies in the next section show,
the answers to this same dilemma in the different cities were diametrically
opposed.
54 These comparisons are made with some confidence as to their accuracy and robustness, because
there is persuasive evidence that almost all (if not actually all) waqfs endowed in Nablus and Tripoli
were actually registered in the shariʿa court. See Chapter 2.
Waqf Preferences in the Absence of a Male Heir 129
3.3 Waqf Preferences in the Absence of a Male Heir
The first case study is a lawsuit registered in the Tripoli shariʿa court reg-
isters on July 2, 1857 between members of the ʿAsbiyya extended family –
or, as it is phrased in the title of the document, “banı̄ ʿAsbiyya,” that is, the
progeny, through the male line, of a common ancestor called ʿAsbiyya.55 On
that day, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghani, the great grandson of Safi ʿAsbiyya, came
before the qadi of the shariʿa court and claimed that the two living daugh-
ters of his father’s paternal uncle, Shaykh Mustafa, son of Safi ʿAsbiyya,
had taken possession of the property that he and his brother Hasan should
have inherited by right of taʿas..sub (nearest agnates) because Shaykh Mustafa
had fathered three daughters and no sons (Figure 3.4). Furthermore, they
argued, they were the only living agnates of Shaykh Mustafa, as they had
proved in a lawsuit concluded the day previous. They requested that the
qadi order Sayyida Sharifa and Sayyida Hasnaʾ (Shaykh Mustafa’s third
daughter, Sayyida Badra, had died a month earlier in June, 1857) to hand
over one-third of the property of their father.56 At stake was a large house
(dār) containing many rooms (buyūt) and shares in six small olive groves.
When asked to respond, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Kharbutli, husband
of Sayyida Hasnaʾ and the legal representative (wakı̄l) of the defendants,
admitted that the plaintiff’s claims, including those specifying the types
and amounts of property, as well as their relation to the defendants, were all
true. However, he added, on February 22, 1828, Shaykh Mustafa, while still
sound in mind and body, had endowed all this property as a family waqf.
The designated beneficiaries of this waqf were his current children (then the
three daughters) and any future children that God might bestow on him
(awlādahu al-mawjūdı̄n wa-man sayah.dithuhu Allāh), with a male child
entitled to the share of two females (li-l-dhakar mithlu h.az.z. al-unthayayn),
plus his wife Sayyida Amina, daughter of Mustafa Fahd. His wife’s share
was to be equal to that of one female child, and she was to receive it after
her husband’s death and for as long as she lived. After this, the revenues of
the waqf were to pass to his children’s children, again with males having
the share of two females, and so on. Only after the extinction of his direct
line of descent were the revenues of the waqf to pass to Shaykh Mustafa’s
brother, Hajj Muhammad (the grandfather of the plaintiff), and then to
his brother’s progeny according to the same conditions. After the end of
his and his brother’s lines of descent, the revenues were to be allocated
55 TICR 36:90–91.
56 Shaykh Mustafa died long prior to this lawsuit, and this belated action was probably precipitated
by the death of Badra, the oldest daughter.
Safi Asbiyya
Muhammad Shaykh Mustafa
Ali
Badra Sharifa Hasna
Defendants
Claim father endowed estate as
waqf in 1828 exclusively for his
daughters and their progenies
Hasan Abd al-Ghani
plaintiffs
Claim 1/3 of estate by right of closest living

aganates to a man with only female heirs
Ruling: in favor of defendants on basis of witnesses and a legal waqf deed
Figure 3.4 ʿAsbiyya lawsuit, 1857
first to the holy sanctuaries in Mecca and Medina, then to the poor of
Tripoli. As evidence, the defendant’s legal representative produced the waqf
document, complete with the seal of the shariʿa court judge at that time.
After inspecting the document and deposing two credible witnesses, the
judge ruled in the daughters’ favor and against their agnates.
The use of the appellation “banı̄” in front of the family name, ʿAsbiyya,
at the top of the documents indicated that the litigants were seen by the
court to possess, or at least to represent themselves as possessing, a cer-
tain solidarity (ʿas.abı̄yya, an Arabic word quite close to the family name)
through the male line. A strong ʿas.abı̄yya, theoretically speaking, enhanced
an extended family’s status in the community, and gave all the male mem-
bers an incentive to consolidate and protect the patrimony of the extended
Waqf Preferences in the Absence of a Male Heir 131
family group within their hands. It is clear, however, that Shaykh Mustafa,
forced to choose in the absence of a male heir between providing for his
daughters and wife and keeping his property within the ʿAsbiyya family as
defined by the male line, decided to take the former course. That is, he
favored his conjugal family despite the absence of sons, and excluded his
closest agnates for the foreseeable future. In so doing, he most certainly
knew that his property would eventually pass into hands of non-family
members – usually called “outsiders” (ajānib, s. ajnabı̄: literally “strangers”
or “foreigners”) in the court registers – when his daughters married and had
children. In fact, this is precisely why the husband of one of the daughters
was their legal representative.
In Nablus, the same situation provoked a different property devolution
strategy. On November 19, 1827, Ahmad son of Hajj Ismaʿil Fatayir, faced
with the quandary of having two daughters and no sons and with the fact
that his brother had recently died, leaving behind male children, decided
to endow his residential property plus a storage room (makhzan) to his
two daughters but not to his daughters’ children.57 Rather, the daughters
would have the right to live in this property but their shares, after death,
would revert to his deceased brother’s male children, then to their male
children, and so on. Clearly, Ahmad Fatayir divided his loyalties between
the conjugal and extended family worlds in the way he thought best. He
provided for his daughters until their death, but made sure that his prop-
erty remained within the Fatayir family as defined by the male line. True,
it is conceivable that if his brother had not died before him, he might not
have felt responsible for his nephews and he might have chosen to include
his daughter’s line of descent as beneficiaries in the waqf. But if Ahmad
Fatayir had taken this alternative course, his case would have gone against
the grain. The vast majority of the family waqfs established in Nablus dur-
ing this period specifically excluded the descendants of female children in
favor of including only the male children’s line of descent.
Faced with the absence of a male heir, Shaykh Mustafa ʿAsbiyya of Tripoli
and his contemporary, Ahmad Fatayir of Nablus, established waqfs that
drew sharply different boundaries between the conjugal and the extended
family, and between male and female children. Like most endowers in
Tripoli, Shaykh Mustafa chose to devolve his patrimony to his daugh-
ters even though his family name would no longer be perpetuated. For
Ahmad Fatayir, like most endowers in Nablus, anything less than the social
57 NICR 8:297.
construction of immoveable family property as a male domain undermined
the wealth, status, and power of the branch and of the family name.
3.4 Conclusion
During its golden age from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries,
the family waqf is peerless as a guide to contemporary notions of fam-
ily, property, and gender. As both a pious act and a practice of property
devolution, it was an expressive and effective legal mechanism for enact-
ing the self and the family in both the here and the hereafter, within the
contexts of Islamic traditions and Ottoman imperial rule. It was especially
useful as a cornerstone of family formation among propertied individuals
in urban provincial settings, who witnessed upward social mobility during
this period. Governed locally through the shariʿa court, and highly sensitive
to regional differences in the Eastern Mediterranean, the family waqf can
be analyzed as a family charter that aims to govern the moral-disciplinary
order of kinship.
Sayyid Husayn al-Husayni of Tripoli and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wahid
Khammāsh of Nablus drew strikingly different boundaries among the kin
who counted in terms of access to waqf revenues. They also had very dif-
ferent gendered visions of what constitutes a family patrimony in regards
to the types of properties that ought to be endowed. Notions of discipline
and power relations between kin and the importance (or lack thereof ) of
financing good deeds were also areas of great contrast. As will be argued
in the next two chapters, Sayyid Husayn and Shaykh Mustafa were typical
of waqf endowers in Tripoli and Nablus, respectively, and the differences
in their waqf charters are historically enduring. Of course, the waqf is only
one element in the overall system of property devolution. Of the other
options available to propertied individuals and families, the inclusion or
exclusion of potential marriage partners was perhaps the most important.
Unfortunately, the available sources do not allow a systematic study of mar-
riage practices.58 We also know far too little about patterns, if any, when it
comes to wills, gifts, pre-emptive sales, and other forms of property devo-
lution practice, much less how they all related to one another. Moreover,
58 It is unfortunate that only a few dozen marriage contracts were registered in the shariʿa court registers
of Nablus during the Ottoman period, and almost none in those of Tripoli. For the former, see
Judith Tucker, “Ties that Bound: Women and Family in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century
Nablus,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikki
Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) and “Marriage and Family
in Nablus, 1720–1856: Towards a History of Arab Muslim Marriage,” Journal of Family History 13
(1988): 165–179.
Conclusion 133
only a part of the population – albeit a substantial one – endowed waqfs,
and the average lifespan of any one waqf varied considerably, some last-
ing for centuries and many others for only a generation or two.59 Thus,
one cannot assume that the conditions attached to waqfs became lasting
arrangements.
Nevertheless, and as we shall see over the next two chapters, the dramatic
differences between the two cities indicated by the divergent patterns in the
uses of family waqf are persistent and robust. More to the point, the condi-
tions attached to waqfs reveal different visions of family life that did have
consequences. Indeed, the clauses of inclusion and exclusion attached to
waqf documents constituted the terrain over which family members con-
tested and renegotiated their internal power and property relations, a fact
attested to by the large numbers of lawsuits revolving on waqf endowments.
The next chapter demonstrate that two distinct traditions of waqf endow-
ment developed in Nablus and Tripoli over time. It is to the question of
the waqf as a social act – Who endowed waqfs, and why? – that we now
turn.
59 For a case study of this issue, see Gabriel Baer, “The Dismemberment of Awqaf in Early 19th-
Century Jerusalem,” Asian and African Studies 13, no. 3 (1979): 220–241. Muhammad Rafiq Tamimi
and Muhammad Bahjat, two keen observers who toured the province of Beirut during the First
World War, frequently lamented that most of the charitable waqfs of Tripoli were “swallowed”
by greedy individuals and that many public institutions disappeared due to the lack of revenues.
Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 158, 161, 225.
ch a p ter 4
Good Deeds
The Family Waqf as a Social Act
[I]n vertical systems of transmission . . . individuals require [heirs] to

secure their own particular line . . . This question of ‘security’ has sev-
eral facets. There is the security in old age . . . Then there is the secu-
rity that is gained by making provision for the continuity of the family
estate . . . [and] for the after-life, the continuity of one’s name, one’s mem-
ory, or one’s worship.
Jack Goody, 19731
[Annually] the waqf administrator is to . . . pay twelve piasters each to

four persons: Sayyid Hasan al-Hafiz b. al-Bayraqdar, Shaykh Ahmad b.
al-Safadi, Sayyid Ibrahim b. al-Miqati, and Shaykh Muhammad [not
clear]. Once a month each will complete reciting the Great Qurʾan and
every Friday night they are to meet in the endower’s residence: in the ı̄wān
on the first floor during the summertime, and in the murabbaʿ adjacent
to the ı̄wān during winter. There they are to pray . . . and make a gift of
the accrued blessings to the soul of endower and his ancestors.
Waqf of Qasim Agha al-Shaʿār, January 4, 16782
It is not easy fasting through the month of Ramadan, especially if it coin-

cides with the heat and suffocating humidity of a Tripoli summer. By the
end of the day, the dry cracks of chapped lips bear witness to the body’s
suffering and testify to the soul’s piety. However, the spiritual commitment
and physical discipline needed to keep anything from passing through one’s
mouth during daylight hours for an entire lunar month are handsomely
rewarded. During Ramadan, one reaps double the rewards (thawāb) for
each act of charity. These rewards are deposited in the heavenly ledger,
1 Jack Goody, “Strategies of Heirship,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 1 (1973), 4.
2 This is but one in a long list of mabarrāt (good deeds) in this waqf. TICR 42:154–156, dated Dhu
al-Qaʿda 10, 1088. In Damascene courtyard houses, the iwān (as it was written at the time) is typically
a large semi-outside room opening into the courtyard, fronted with a portico or arch. The murabbaʿ
is an adjacent closed room, usually large, that is used for the same purposes in the rainy winter
season. For an example, see Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “The Social and Economic Structure of Bab Al-
Musalla (Al-Midan), Damascus, 1825–1875,” in Arab Civilization: Challenges and Responses: Studies in
Honor of Constantine K. Zurayk, eds. George N. Atiyeh and Ibrahim M. Oweiss (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1988), 272–311.
134
Good Deeds 135
thus making Ramadan an especially opportune time for the performance
of good deeds – and the endowment of a waqf, whether family or charita-
ble, is widely considered the ultimate good deed.
Perhaps with these thoughts in mind, Sayyid Amin al-Wajih appeared
before the shariʿa court qadi of Tripoli on the seventh day of Ramadan 1230
Hijri (August 13, 1815) and endowed the prized property in his estate – an
irrigated orchard – as a family waqf.3 A bittersweet moment of beginning
and end, the endowment was both the culmination of a lifelong quest for
upward social mobility and the initiation of a new chapter in Sayyid Amin’s
relationship with his children, kin, community, and God. It was, in the
broader sense of the word, a social act, which must be seen as embody-
ing a complex combination of circumstances, motivations, and desires in
a specific historical context. A closer look at Sayyid Amin’s endowment
introduces the key themes of this chapter on the waqf as a social act.
To begin with, there is the relationship between the family waqf, class
formation, and social status. Sayyid Amin worked hard to reach this point
in his life, and to gain access to this property. He did not – indeed, could
not – inherit the land, for it was part of the Mamluk-era Dabbusiyya school
charitable waqf and, therefore, not available for purchase. Rather, his access
was secured through a long-term lease (h.ikr) – not an easy feat, for the land
was located in the coveted Western Irrigation Canal (al-saqı̄ al-gharbı̄), the
best part of Tripoli’s large urban agricultural sector. A sophisticated legal
system that allowed for private ownership of trees and buildings planted or
erected on waqf lands provided Sayyid Amin with a strong legal basis for
making long-term strategic investment in lands he did not own – namely,
by planting mulberry and citrus trees with an eye towards the booming silk
industry and the increasingly lucrative citrus export trade. To protect his
saplings from wind and heat, he also planted tall and shady sycamore trees
on the borders of the orchard. Long-term lease contracts, as we shall see,
were but one of many mechanisms that made waqf lands an attractive field
of investment for local, regional, and international markets.
In addition to social mobility and consolidation of economic invest-
ment, this orchard represented a cohesive, profitable, and geographically
discrete patrimony that, once endowed as a family waqf, helped Sayyid
Amin accomplish several other goals simultaneously: perpetuation of his
family line, safeguarding of the future of his children, care for his body
in old age and nourishment for his soul after death. The endowment pre-
vented the fragmentation of his estate and could be customized to channel
3 TICR 44:91–93.
136 Good Deeds
revenues to those likely to care for him (while excluding others), and it
constituted the ultimate pious act. And even though it became effective
immediately, there was no sudden change in property and power relations.
As permitted by the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, and as commonly
practiced at the time, Sayyid Amin named himself the administrator as
well as the sole beneficiary of the waqf until his death, essentially main-
taining the status quo even though the orchard was no longer his private
property. This delay provided a steady incentive for his daughter and future
beneficiaries to live up to his expectations, for it was also allowed for the
endower to change the conditions of the waqf after the endowment was
registered.
Sayyid Amin instructed that after his death, one-quarter of the revenues
generated by the orchard were to go to his wife, Sayyida Amina, daugh-
ter of Sayyid Mustafa al-Ghalayini, for the rest of her days, but only if she
remained unmarried (hiya ʿazaba khāliya ʿan al-azwāj). The rest were to
go to his daughter, Sayyida Muʾmina, plus any children she might have in
the future, the share of the male being twice that of the female.4 This inter
vivos form of property devolution differed from Islamic rules of inheritance
in two ways. First, a wife’s share was prescribed as one-eighth of the estate
if there were offspring, and one-quarter if there were none. Second, in the
absence of a male heir, a single daughter could inherit no more than one-
half of the estate, with the rest to be distributed to the deceased’s closest
agnates. The absence of a male heir was a common problem in societies that
practiced vertical transmission, faced by 20–40% of families.5 In this sense,
the resort to waqf allowed Sayyid Amin to accomplish a most consequen-
tial goal: he could invest his daughter with full control over the estate – a
position and status she would, otherwise, not have had. With his daugh-
ter in charge, her class position in the social hierarchy reinforced, and her
chances for a good marriage enhanced, all of Sayyid Amin’s other goals
stood a greater chance of being realized.
As argued in Chapter 3, the phenomenon of devolving estates to daugh-
ters in the absence of male heirs was common in Tripoli but altogether
unheard of in Nablus. This practice seems to fit Goody’s conjecture that the
epiklerate (the inheriting or “appointed” daughter) “acts as a social male,
producing children for her own natal group.”6 In Tripoli, property was fully
devolved to daughters even if they married men from other families. Sayyid
Amin’s waqf makes this evident in another way. He instructed that after
4 The wife and daughter’s names share the same root “a-m-n” and mean “one who believes in God.”
5 Goody, “Strategies of Heirship,” 5, 6. 6 Ibid., 12.
Good Deeds 137
the extinction of his daughter’s progeny, the revenues were to revert to his
two orphaned nephews, Nasir and Hasan, the children of his sister, Fatima,
who had died prematurely, as had her husband, Sayyid ʿAli Majanini. Thus,
Sayyid Amin opened the strong possibility that his estate would eventually
come under the control of the Majanini family. Meanwhile, and typical of
Tripoli family waqfs at the time, Sayyid Amin’s agnates from the al-Wajih
family were nowhere mentioned, suggesting a “sex-blind” approach to ver-
tical property devolution in Tripoli, at least in so far as the family waqf was
concerned.
Typical of the elegant mathematical symmetry of piety embodied in the
constitutive family waqf of Sayyid Husayn Husayni and so many others,
Sayyid Amin’s waqf instructed that after the extinction of the progeny of
Nasir and Hasan, the revenues were to be split into equal halves, symboliz-
ing the Sunni Orthodox and Sufi pillars of his faith. For the former, the half
was to be split evenly between the Great Mosque and al-Tawba Mosque.
For the latter, the entire half was dedicated to the mosque of the Sufi saint
ʿAbd al-Wahid Mughrabi, whose descendants at that time played a very
important role in the religious, cultural, economic, and political life of the
city and parts of its hinterland.7 But before any revenues were distributed,
the expenses for the upkeep of the flourishing orchard had to be met. In
addition, Sayyid Amin directed that the hefty sum of twenty-five piasters
be set aside annually after his death for the performance of good deeds
(mabarrāt), the rewards of which were to accrue to his soul. Half (twelve
and a half piasters) was to employ readers to recite the Qurʾan twelve
times a year (once each month), the other half to be spent on feeding the
Muslim poor on the holy night of mid-Shaʿban, believed to be the night
when Doors of Forgiveness and Salvation open, and thus an occasion on
which to commemorate one’s ancestors.
Sayyid Amin’s waqf endowment, it is by now clear, was a deeply personal,
pious, and purposeful act, a singular event driven by specific motivations
that addressed the particular circumstances of his life. After all, it was a
weighty matter to cede one’s property by making it inalienable in perpe-
tuity as the property of God, and to commit the revenues generated by
this property to pre-set formulas of distribution among discrete categories
of beneficiaries. Legal, pious, economic, and affective motivations are an
integrated whole in the family waqf: a social act productive of the social
fabric of urban life, of local political economies, of spiritual practices, and
of modes of imperial governance through the shariʿa court. This is because
7 The word “lodge” (zāwiya) was not used.

138 Good Deeds
Sayyid Amin’s orchard, once endowed as waqf, became invested with a spe-
cific set of relations that shaped the ways kinship and class relations were
constituted. Its consequences on the level of everyday life rippled out to
involve the wider community, the religious-legal establishment, and the
institutions of the Ottoman state. Family, kin, and household, through the
act of endowment, grounded the city’s political and spiritual economy and
tied it to regional networks, and to the empire as a whole.
Chapter 3 introduced the argument that the waqf can be analyzed as a
family charter. Chapter 5 examines the dramatic differences in such family
charters between Nablus and Tripoli when it comes to beneficiary patterns,
while Chapter 6 asks how the local political and spiritual economies of the
two cities can account for these differences. This chapter explores the waqf
as a social act by asking two seemingly simple questions: Who endowed
waqfs? And why? The first part of the chapter, based on a thorough exam-
ination of all waqfs endowed during the period under study, maps out the
social composition of waqf endowers by identifying patterns of correlation
between the class, status, gender, and kinship ties, and by connecting these
patterns to the specific historical contexts of Nablus and Tripoli.
The deeply subjective question of “why” cannot, of course, be fully
answered. Linking motivations to particular social structures in specific
places and times is tenuous at best and mechanical at worst. The flexi-
bility of the waqf allowed endowers to pursue several overlapping objec-
tives when it came to property devolution and pious cultivation of good
deeds in preparation for the afterlife. Each waqf, therefore, was singular in
the sense that each situated the endower’s subjectivity within an inimitable
configuration of affective, kinship, property, and communal relations. Still,
it is possible to make some generalizations about likely motivations based
on clues – such as when the endowment occurred in the life cycle, how the
properties were acquired, and what conditions were attached – found in the
waqfs themselves or in lawsuits, probate inventories, or other documents
relating to the endower.
Generally speaking, each urban center developed its own signature pro-
file in terms of who and why, as well as its own specific trajectory of change
over time. But it is possible to speak of three commonly shared sets of moti-
vations for the endowment of family waqfs as far as Tripoli and Nablus are
concerned during the periods under study: constitutive, supplemental, and
disciplinary. The latter two will only be briefly discussed in this chapter, as
they were usually secondary considerations.
A common practice in Tripoli – far less common in Nablus – was to use
the waqf as a social safety net for kin who fell through the cracks of Islamic
Good Deeds 139
rules of inheritance. Such “supplementary” waqfs tend to be fairly small
in size and were designed to provide an income for children and unfortu-
nate relatives regardless of sex or line of descent. The orphaned nephews of
Sayyid Amin al-Wajih, whose story opened this chapter, are an example of
this demographic. In Tripoli, the frequency of supplementary waqfs, which
were endowed equally by men and women, increased with time. In Nablus,
supplementary waqfs were few in number and were mostly endowed by
women. They virtually disappeared over the course of the nineteenth
century.
The waqf can also be seen as a disciplinary mechanism for enforcing –
through daily or weekly iteration of specific rituals – particular sensibili-
ties about forms of piety, as well as norms about how family life ought to
be organized, the values on which it ought to be based, and the hierar-
chies that ought to govern relations between kin. For those who see dis-
cursive formations as the primary lens through which to understand the
past, the use of the waqf as a mechanism for cultivating certain subjec-
tivities and sensibilities is obviously of critical importance. Here, again,
lies a key difference between Nablus and Tripoli. Only in the latter did
endowers consistently and generously set aside revenues for the perfor-
mance of good deeds. Indeed, for this and other reasons (see later), the
differences between Nablus and Tripoli are partially the result of dif-
ferences in the size, diversity, revenue streams, and role of the religious
establishment.
This chapter focuses on the family waqf as a constitutive social act pro-
ductive of what family is and of its place in society. Such waqfs tended to
be larger and more detailed than other family waqfs. They usually included
the core – if not the full spectrum – of the endower’s immovable properties,
making them a cornerstone for constituting family as a corporate unit in
society. The internal architecture of constitutive waqfs was also more com-
plex, as they usually included a full array of conditional clauses governing
possible developments two to four generations down the line. Equally as
important, constitutive waqfs like that of Sayyid Amin al-Wajih made up
the majority of family waqfs in Tripoli and Nablus. Leading families were
very active in the establishment of such waqfs after the seventeenth cen-
tury, and in both cities individuals of middling means swelled the ranks
of waqf endowers around the turn of the nineteenth century. This chapter
dissects in considerable detail how the family waqf produced the “families”
of Bilad al-Sham, through case studies of the transformation of the Baraka
family in Tripoli and of the property management practices of the Bishtawi
family in Nablus.
140 Good Deeds
A key and counterintuitive argument in this chapter is that a paradox
inhabits the key differences between the constitutive waqfs of Nablus and
Tripoli: the deepening of capitalist relations in both cities led to opposite
results in terms of family organization. In Nablus, the pattern of constitu-
tive waqfs was one of endowing a large and diverse portfolio of mostly res-
idential and commercial properties as a foundation for transforming their
patrilineal branches into discrete corporate structures within the social and
spatial topography of the city. The waqfs of ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh
in Chapter 3 are a case in point. These corporate structures – usually joint
households where older brothers or uncles controlled the patrimony – were
not the diminishing vestiges of an ancient traditional society, but rather a
modern development driven by the rise of the merchant class to political
prominence, by the increasing manufacture of soap and by growing trade
in agricultural commodities. Meanwhile, the expanding capitalist relations
in Tripoli led to seemingly opposite, but no less modern, forms of fam-
ily organization. Here, the rise of a middling entrepreneurial class depen-
dent on the commercial production of silk and on the export of citrus to
overseas markets in an increasingly monetized urban agricultural sector was
accompanied (if not made possible) by a focus on the conjugal family at the
expense of male lineage. In Tripoli, females were key actors in managing
and devolving property, rather than marginalized markers of the bound-
aries of inclusion/exclusion.
Immediately noticeable, for example, are the gender and agnate gaps
between Tripoli and Nablus in terms of who endowed waqfs. In Tripoli, the
social composition of waqf endowers was balanced almost evenly between
men and women throughout the two centuries under study. Joint waqfs by
agnates were virtually non-existent. In Nablus, waqfs by women hovered at
around ten per cent for the period of the 1660s–1730s, declined rapidly in
the early 1800s, and completely disappeared after 1844. This coincided with
an increase in the frequency of joint waqfs by agnates –brothers, paternal
cousins, and paternal uncles and nephews – as trade networks in Nablus
became more concentrated and capital-intensive.
Needless to say, the notions of “constitutive,” “supplemental,” and
“disciplinary” waqfs are used for heuristic purposes only. These were not
legal categories, and the sources do not employ such terms. Moreover,
almost every waqf, like that of Sayyid Amin al-Wajih, was characterized by
a combination of these purposes, as well as by other considerations that we
will never know. Still, a systematic analysis of who established endowments
and why is crucial to any attempt to historicize waqfs, to relate them to
local social structures and political economies, and to understand their
Who?: Class, Kinship, and Gender 141
significance to the organization of family life in the Eastern Mediterranean
during the Ottoman period.
4.1 Who?: Class, Kinship, and Gender

This book focuses primarily on the majority populations of Nablus and
Tripoli: propertied individuals, mostly Sunni Muslims, ranging from the
lower-middle to the upper classes. We know precious little about family
life and household organization among the urban poor, such as laborers,
the lower rungs of artisans, and migrants from the countryside.8 We also
know little about rural residents and other groups, such as Bedouins, that
were largely outside the gaze of the shariʿa courts of Nablus and Tripoli for
most of the period under study. But this is not to suggest that such groups
were insulated within their own cultural worlds. Urban propertied classes
constituted a weighty social and cultural force. Their ideals, worldviews,
and legal norms permeated social and regional boundaries. What we do
not know is how the marginalized and historically silenced of Nablus and
Tripoli may have shaped the cultural environment and meanings of family
in these two cities.
Generally speaking, villagers in the hinterlands of Tripoli and Nablus
did not did not resort to the shariʿa court in large numbers until the latter
half of the nineteenth century.9 Consequently, it is not possible to sys-
tematically compare urban and rural waqfs.10 Only five waqfs by villagers
were registered in the shariʿa court of Tripoli, and just one in the Nablus
registers, during the 1660s–1730s and 1800–60 periods.11 This does not
8 For one of the few studies of property devolution in rural areas during the early modern period, see
Malissa Taylor, “Keeping Usufruct in the Family: Popular and Juridical Interpretations of Ottoman
Land Tenure Law in Damascus,” Bulletin d’études orientales 61 (2012): 429–443.
9 For more on the relationship of villagers to urban legal institutions before and after 1860, see
Chapter 5 and Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, ch. 4.
10 It is important to point out, however, that the few available rural waqfs of both cities fit exactly into
the urban patterns in terms of the social rank of the endower, the types of properties endowed, the
beneficiaries selected, and the conditions attached, among other things. This should not come as a
surprise, for the villagers who endowed waqfs hailed from nearby and large villages that had for the
most part been weaved into the urban legal fabric. In Tripoli, the residents of the closest and largest
Sunni villages that were also politically connected to the city, such as Qalamon, accounted for most
of the court cases that involved villagers, especially lawsuits.
11 TICR 45:131; 54:289; 55:113–14; 61:40; and 63:221–23. NICR 8:272. The number would be two for
Nablus if the shaykh of the Naffaʿ family from the small town of Jenin were included as a “rural”
dweller (NICR 9:215). There were also three endowments by recently urbanized villagers residing
in Tripoli (TICR 43:195–96 and 46:9–10, 202–204). It is telling that most of the endowers from
Tripoli who are cited in this note had strong ties with the urban-based Kaylani Sufi order, headed
by the Zuʿbi family. See, for example, NICR 9:157, 353. In Tripoli, the residents of the closest and
largest Sunni villages that were also politically connected to the city, such as Qalamon, accounted
for most of the court cases that involved villagers, especially lawsuits.
142 Good Deeds
necessarily mean that rural dwellers endowed waqfs only rarely. Church
records cited by van Leeweuen suggest that Christian villagers in Mount
Lebanon routinely endowed waqfs for their churches and monasteries.12
Several lawsuits over waqf property suggest that peasants in Jabal Nablus
endowed more waqfs than appear in the registers of the shariʿa court.13 Also
marginal in terms of their place in the shariʿa court registers were urban reli-
gious minorities. There were no waqfs in Nablus established by Christians
or Samaritans.14 In Tripoli, there were eleven such waqfs, all by Christians.15
Since only four of the eleven were family waqfs, there is not sufficient evi-
dence to make a comparative analysis with Muslim endowers.16
Class and Status

If it is difficult to imagine what we do not and cannot know; it is as difficult
to find the appropriate conceptual language for analyzing what we think
we can know. Constructing a social taxonomy of individuals who endowed
waqfs in Nablus and Tripoli prior to the late nineteenth century is challeng-
ing for two reasons: the absence of empirical demographic and economic
data, such as population and household sizes, occupational structures, and
so on; and the lack of clarity as to the meanings of status markers used
at the time, because their usage changed markedly over time and differed
from region to region.
12 Richard van Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon: The Khazin Sheikhs and the Maronite
Church (1736–1840) (Leiden: Brill, 1994). I found only one such waqf registered in Tripoli shariʿa
court for the period under study: that of a priest from the village of Bishmizeen (TICR 61:40).
However, seven of the eleven waqfs by Christians in Tripoli were dedicated to monasteries, especially
al-Balamand monastery (for further references, see later in this chapter).
13 See, for example, NICR 9:157, 353. The former case reveals the key reason: before coming to the
Nablus court, the litigants argued their case before the rural chief of the Jammaʿin subdistrict
(nāh.iya), of which their village was part, even though he had no legal standing as a qadi.
14 A few Jewish families lived in Tripoli, but probably none in Nabus, at least not until the nineteenth
century. For example, a case from Nablus concerning jizya taxes detailed the number of Christian
and Samaritan households, then specifically stated that “ . . . no Jews were found [in the city] (wa-
.tāʾifat al-Yahūd lam yūjad minhum ah.ad).” NICR 1:213, dated Dhu al-Hijja 10, 1067/September 19,
1657.
15 The waqfs by Christians in Tripoli were all fairly small and were scattered over the periods under
study. Two of the ten were charitable (TICR 2:224 and 5:57). One was a house for poor monks in
al-bayt al-muqaddas (the Holy City, in reference to Jerusalem), endowed by a Frenchman. Five were
mixed waqfs for the benefit of monasteries: TICR 29:171, 178; 30:187; 33:252–253; and 61:40. The
four family waqfs are in the following files: TICR 46:96–97; 47:54–55; 50:166; and 62:233. Only one
was endowed by a woman: TICR 33:252–253.
16 The seven charitable and mixed waqfs consisted exclusively of agricultural properties, the revenues
of which were designated to support monasteries. The family waqfs, in contrast, consisted either
exclusively or primarily of houses. This indicates a different strategy and purpose from the waqfs of
Tripoli Muslims, which were dominated by agricultural properties in the city’s green perimeter. It
is not clear why this is the case.
Still, it is possible to aggregate waqf endowers into a three-tiered
classification system on the basis of appellations such as sayyid, hajj, effendi,
zāde, aghā, bāshā, beik, and ustā; as well as honorifics such as “the Pride
of the Merchants,” which were fairly common at the time.17 True, cali-
brating the meanings and significance of descriptors to social hierarchy,
occupation, wealth, and power is an imprecise process at best.18 Gen-
erally speaking, at the top of the social pyramid were high-status indi-
viduals whose names were accompanied by multiple appellations that
usually began with the honorific words fakhr/iftikhār (pride of ), ʿumdat
(pillar of ), or ʿayn (eye of or most honored of ), and went on to include
specific descriptors of (usually a combination of ) military, religious, politi-
cal, and/or merchant ranks.19 Although women did not have access to mili-
tary, commercial, or religious titles, it is not difficult to identify high-status
women, for their names were adorned as fancily as those of men in terms
of honorifics, and their fathers’ titles were listed as well. An additional clue
is the name and status of their legal agent: middling and poor women usu-
ally represented themselves in court. The middle category includes men
and women whose names are preceded by hajj/hajja and/or sayyid/sayyida.
The former assumed the completion of a costly and arduous pilgrimage
to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, a journey that was beyond the
means of most poor people. The latter was largely based on a locally or
state-recognized genealogy of descent from the Prophet Muhammad, and
its use mushroomed in the nineteenth century among a rising commercial
and middle class in Bilad al-Sham. This category also includes those with
the titles rajul muh.taram or rajul mukarram (respected or dignified man)
and women introduced by the standalone title of sitt (lady). The third cat-
egory includes those with no titles: women introduced simply as h.urma
(married woman) and men as rajul kāmil (complete or mature man).
17 This is why the same individual could be identified with certain titles in one court case and some-
what different titles in another around the same time. For example, this chapter discusses different
sets of titles for Muhammad Baraka in two court cases dated 1677.
18 Appellations, it is important to point out, were usually not formal titles bestowed by the state.
Rather, it was the individual who specified how he or she was to be identified in the written record,
or the qadi and scribe who chose an appropriate identification given local sensibilities of social
hierarchies and the audience for the legal matter under consideration. None of the titles, moreover,
accurately identified the full range of activities pursued. One would be hard-pressed, for instance,
to find leading political and religious figures who were not also involved in land ownership, trade,
moneylending, and manufacturing. At the same time, many merchants were trained as religious
scholars and some, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century, formally acquired
administrative positions, primarily through majlis al-shūrā (a consultative assembly and a forerunner
of the city councils).
19 The greater the number of descriptors associated with a name, the greater the social status and the
greater the likelihood of a stable family name. Many among the wealthy carried a diverse portfolio
of specific status titles.
144 Good Deeds
Table 4.1 Status and male/female ratios of waqf endowers, 1660s–1730s20
Tripoli Early Tripoli Late Nablus Early Nablus Late

Title total (M/F) total (M/F) total (M/F) total (M/F)
Multiple 14 (10/4) 52 (31/21) 22 (20/2) 50 (49/1)

40% 22.6% 45% 34.7%
Hajj/Hajja, Sayyid/Sayyida, 13 (9/4) 120 (74/46) 8 (6/2) 47 (45/2)
Sitt, Shaykh, or 37% 52.1% 16% 32.6%
combination
Rajul Kāmil, H
. urma 7 (3/4) 36 (0/36) 11 (4/7) 20 (8/12)
20% 15.7 22% 13.9%
Artisan (ustā, muʿallam) 11
7.6%
None 13 (7/6) 8 (6/2) 14 (11/3)
5.6% 16% 9.7f%
Other 2 (0/2)
Dhimmı̄ (Christian) 1 (0/1) 9 (8/1)
Total 35 230 49 144
A detailed examination of all waqfs endowed during the periods under

study allows several claims regarding class and status (gender and kinship
issues are addressed in the next section). 21 First, as Table 4.1 shows, a wide
range of propertied individuals endowed waqfs in both cities, thus allow-
ing a certain degree of confidence in generalizations about the pervasiveness
and significance of patterns in the family waqfs regarding property, gender,
and kinship. Second, the upper classes in both cities were over-represented
during the 1660s–1730s period, when the ratio for upper/middle/lower is
40/40/20 for Tripoli and 45/10/35 for Nablus. This is consistent with the
20 The number of females does not include joint waqfs in which the male is presented first, such as
those of a husband/wife or uncle/niece. This has the effect of artificially reducing the number of
waqfs in which women participated. For Nablus 1660s–1730s, row 2 includes one shaykh and one
beik. For Nablus 1800–60, column two includes seven women whose father is a hajj. If shifted to
h.urma alone (row three), the percentages would change appreciably. This is a judgment call. For
Tripoli in the 1660s–1730s, there is a much wider social range for row 2. The thirteen individuals
in that row include three members of the military (two aghā, one bāshā), three hajj (including two
women who made the pilgrimage), three “ladies” (sitt), two merchants (khawāja), one sayyid, and
one mir. In row 3 for Tripoli, we find six of the eight endowments by Christians (the other two were
a priest and a leader of the Christian community in Tripoli).
21 For Nablus and Tripoli during the 1660s–1730s and 1800–60, the total numbers of charitable/family
waqfs were 49/144 and 35/230, respectively. These numbers may seem small considering the overall
size of the populations and the long temporal spans, but there are large gaps of missing registers.
The numbers also do not include waqfs endowed between 1730 and 1800, which arguably witnessed
the highest rate of waqf endowment (the shariʿa court registers of Nablus are largely missing for this
period).
familiar argument that a rising group of notables in Bilad al-Sham benefited
from economic commercialization and more inclusive forms of Ottoman
imperial governance. They consolidated their position during the long
eighteenth century by using waqf endowments to lay the foundations for a
corporate family structure. The waqf allowed them to strike local roots, to
protect their material gains (such as ownership of soap factories, commer-
cial warehouses, and residential compounds), to enhance their status, and
to lower their taxes.22
Third, the practice of endowing waqfs became “democratized,” so to
speak, as it was adopted more eagerly over time by the middle and lower
rungs of society, both in Tripoli and in Nablus. The ratios for the 1800–60
period were 23/52/25 for Tripoli and 36/32/32 for Nablus.23 The practical-
ity and desirability of using waqfs to construct family and shape kinship
clearly became more pervasive across the social spectrum. Moreover, the
gap between the two cities regarding elite versus middle ranks noticeably
decreased during the nineteenth century. Political and economic ruptures
in Nablus, including a period of rapid economic growth in the 1820s, fol-
lowed by the failed rebellion against the Egyptian occupation (1831–34), led
to the demise of many notable families. They also preciptiated the slow rise
to political power of a hitherto middling merchant class, many of whose
members appropriated the title of sayyid. It is this group that accounted for
the vast majority of constitutive waqfs in Nablus from the 1830s onward.
In Tripoli, meanwhile, the already high rate of participation by middling
property owners increased even further to over fifty per cent of all waqf
endowments, almost entirely at the expense of numbers from elite fami-
lies. As in Nablus, there was a remarkable rise in the number of those who
carried the title of sayyid/sayyida and, to a lesser extent, hajj/hajja. This
was largely due to the rapid expansion of the silk and, to a lesser extent,
citrus industries in the nineteenth century. As we shall see in Chapter 6,
22 Ziade, “Takawwun al-ʿaʾilat fi Tarabulus.” Worth noting here is that families at the very top of the
social pyramid in both cities were largely averse to appearing at the shariʿa court. Doing so was
perceived as being below their station. Not incidentally, this helped them to keep their affairs fairly
outside of public view. In Nablus, up until the late eighteenth century, the two most important
ruling families – the Nimr and the Tuqan – did not make it a habit to conduct business under
the auspices of the shariʿa court, especially when it came to inheritance, waqf, and other matters
concerning their own property. Rather, they brought the qadi or respected shaykh to their house and
had the documents drawn up there, with the result that these documents were not always registered
in the shariʿa court. The same holds true for the elite of Tripoli, but on a larger scale. Despite
occasional insecurities, such as the bloody events accompanying the rise and demise of Mustafa
Agha Barbar in early nineteenth-century Tripoli, the patterns in waqf endowments do not show a
greater resort to family waqfs by leading families. Rather, the leading families of Tripoli remained
as distant from the court as possible throughout the periods under study.
23 These percentages are similar to those of Aleppo during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
See Meriwether, The Kin Who Count; Roded, “The Waqf and the Social Elite,” 76.
146 Good Deeds
Tripoli’s capacity for silk production has not been fully appreciated by his-
torians. The same can be said about the ways that co-cultivation contracts
not only led to the growth of a middle class, but also facilitated a strong
role for women in the economy. Indeed, the term “middle” does not mean
the same thing in Nablus as it does in Tripoli. In Tripoli, the “middle”
was largely composed of women, who endowed mostly agricultural prop-
erties. Consistent with their more robust role in the economy, it seems that
many more women from Tripoli went on the hajj pilgrimage than did their
counterparts in Nablus.24
Without burdening these numbers with more analytical weight than
they can support, it is fair to say that waqfs in Nablus were more likely
to be endowed by male members of the upper crust of society, to be large
in size, and to be constitutive of a family corporation that excluded women.
Those of Tripoli were more likely to be endowed by a male or female person
from a middling family, to be smaller in size, to be inclusive of women, and
to be consolidative and/or supplemental in purpose. These generalizations
are supported by stark differences in the social composition between waqf
endowers in Nablus and Tripoli when it comes to women and joint waqfs
by agnates.
The Gender and Agnate Gaps

The most significant differences between Tripoli and Nablus are the gen-
der and agnate gaps, which only widened over time (Table 4.2).25 These
24 See, for example, TICR 6:72, 127.
25 The following comments refer to some of the decisions made in assigning cases to categories. The
Individual Male Category for Tripoli during the 1660s–1730s period includes a waqf by a male dated
Rajab 17, 968 (April 3, 1561), which was re-registered (TICR 4:211). That same category for Nablus in
the same Period does not include four joint waqfs (eight per cent) that included a female endower,
such as a mother and children, husband and wife, and uncle and niece. Men endowed roughly
two-thirds of all waqfs (67.3%). Of these, fifteen per cent (a total of five) were joint endowments by
brothers. The Individual and Joint Female Categories and the Other Category for Tripoli during the
1800–60 period include five joint endowments by women: two by mother/daughter (TICR 30:65
and 46:165–166), two by sisters (TICR 46:19–20 and 57:232), and one by co-wives (TICR 54:186–
188). The percentage of endowments by women is skewed in two contradictory ways that would
seem to neutralize one another. On the one hand, this percentage is somewhat inflated because one
woman, Fansa bint Husayn Agha al-Shadid, endowed nine waqfs in a single day on May 15, 1839
(TICR 57:8–17). On the other, this percentage does not count seven joint waqfs that included a
female endower, such as waqfs endowed by husband and wife, brother and sister, mother and son,
and uncle and niece. The total sample includes one waqf (TICR 57:16–17) by a male, dated mid-
Ramadan 1029 (August 13, 1620), but re-registered in 1842. I included it in the final count. The total
number of female-endowed waqfs in Nablus, 1800–60, is eighteen out of a total of 144. This includes
five waqfs registered between 1859 and 1862 but dated between 1830 and 1834 (NICR 13A:7, 95, 97,
199, 225). The eighteen waqfs do not include five joint waqfs in which one of the endowers was
female: two by aunt/nephew, two by husband/wife, and one by mother/son. The Other Category
for Tripoli includes one waqf by co-wives and one charitable waqf by two unrelated males.
Table 4.2 Male and female waqf endowers: 1660s–1730s, 1800–60
Tripoli Early Tripoli Late Nablus Early Nablus Late

Category Period Period Period Period
Individual male 63% 47.8% 57% 69.4%

22 110 28 100
Individual female 13 105 12 17
37% 45.6% 24.5% 11.8%
Male/female
r Husband/wife 3 2 2
r Brother/sister 1 1 1
r Mother/son(s) 2 2
r Uncle/niece 1
r Brothers/aunt
Joint male <1% 14.6%
r Brothers 2 5 15
r Cousins 4
r Father/son 1
r Uncle/nephew 1
Joint female
r Sisters 2 1
r Mother/daughters 2
Other 2
Total 35 230 49 144
differences are related to and reinforce others, such as the types of prop-
erties endowed, the social uses of the waqf, and the designation of benefi-
ciary patterns. Taken together, they underscore the overall argument that
the divergence in how the inhabitants constructed the relationship between
property and gender is rooted in the local political economies and cultural
fabrics of these two cities.
By any measure, the gender gap between the two cities in terms of waqf
endowers is remarkable. Judging from studies on Istanbul, Cairo, Aleppo,
and Jerusalem, which show an average of about thirty to forty per cent of
waqfs being endowed by women, Nablus and Tripoli inhabit the two ends
of the spectrum.26 For the period 1660s–1730s, women endowed roughly a
26 In a random sample of 500 waqfs from mid-sixteenth-century Istanbul, over a third (36.8%) were
founded by women. Baer found that women endowed twenty-five per cent of all waqfs in Jerusalem
between 1805 and 1820. The highest figures are for Aleppo, which was roughly on par with Tripoli.
The average for Aleppo for the whole Ottoman period according to studies of lists provided by
Kamil al-Ghazzi was 40.8%, but the number went over 50% for the same city between 1770 and
1840. Gabriel Baer, “Women and Waqf: An Analysis of the Istanbul Tahrir of 1546,” Asian and
148 Good Deeds
third (37%) of the waqfs in Tripoli and roughly a quarter (24.5%) of those in
Nablus. Between 1800 and 1860, women accounted for about half (46%)
of the waqf endowments in Tripoli, and about a tenth (12%) of those in
Nablus. In Nablus, there was a sharp transition around the 1820s: almost all
endowments by women were dated prior to 1822, and none were endowed
after 1844.27
In Nablus, all but one of the female endowers came from the middle and
lower ranks. This suggests intense pressure on elite women not to claim cer-
tain properties they would have otherwise inherited and/or to sell inherited
properties back immediately to male siblings or paternal cousins, often for
far less than market price. It is not unusual in Nablus for legal acknowledg-
ments of non-ownership and/or sales by female inheritors to follow the pro-
bate inventories of a recently deceased male head of a branch.28 Moreover,
female endowers in Nablus usually endowed much fewer and far smaller
properties than men. They also tended to include female offspring as ben-
eficiaries more often, and occasionally took into account the unfortunate,
such as orphaned children.
In contrast, female endowers in Tripoli occupied a wide range of posi-
tions in terms of class and status, as well as the size of waqfs and the des-
ignation of beneficiaries. They were better represented in the middle and
lower ranks (fifty per cent) than in the higher ones (forty per cent), but not
by much. Also unlike in Nablus, endowments by women were not signif-
icantly smaller than those of men, and there is no appreciable difference
between men and women in Tripoli when it comes to the pattern of ben-
eficiaries. Indeed, the general evenness and similarity over a two-century
period between male and female waqf endowers in Tripoli is quite remark-
able. As detailed in Chapter 6, a possible explanation for this phenomenon
is that women in Tripoli were active investors and managers in the
African Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 10. Meriwether, The Kin Who Count, x. In Edirne during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, twenty per cent of waqfs were endowed by women. Haim Gerber, “The
Waqf Institution in Early Ottoman Edirne,” Asian and African Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 17. For
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cairo, Daniel Crecelius calculated that the average number of
waqfs by women registered in a number of shariʿa courts ranged between thirty and forty per cent.
Daniel Crecelius, “The Incidence of Waqf Cases in Three Cairo Courts: 1640–1802,” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 29, no. 2 (1986): 179. However, in a sample of close to
400 waqfs in eighteenth-century Cairo, Mary Ann Fay found that almost twenty-five per cent were
endowed by women. Mary Ann Fay, “Women and Waqf: Toward a Reconsideration of Women’s
Place in the Mamluk Household,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 1 (1997): 38.
27 Fifteen out of eighteen were endowed before 1822. In a survey of all waqfs endowed between 1860
and 1900, I found only two other waqfs by women (NICR 29:81, 83).
28 There was also pressure on some not to marry at all. This phenomenon endures today, with some
elite women in Nablus living out their days as spinsters-cum-matriarchs in the impressively large
domestic compounds of the elite.
irrigated urban agricultural sector in Tripoli, and played an important role
in the distribution and transfer of wealth.
The agnate gap between the two cities is even more remarkable. In
Nablus, joint waqfs by two or more brothers, paternal cousins, or pater-
nal uncles/nephews flourished.29 In Tripoli, they were almost non-existent.
Joint waqfs by agnates, especially brothers, became more, not less common
in Nablus over the course of the nineteenth century. This can be accounted
for by the intense competition over the rural surplus as commercializa-
tion of agriculture and commoditization of land took on a frenzied pace.
Struggles over securing olive oil and other agricultural commodities a year
in advance in order to expand manufacturing created a pressing need to
centralize the resources of the extended family at the expense of females
and younger children. These expansions led to increased market shares of
trade networks, primarily in soap and textiles, to Damascus in the north
and to Egyptian port cities, such as Damietta, in the south. Joint waqf
endowments by agnates became a favored legal instrument for consoli-
dating family resources in the hands of two or more closely connected
agnatic branches, each led by a patriarch who owned or controlled the
entire property portfolio of the branch. Building blocks of joint house-
holds, joint waqfs reproduced a specific patriarchal vision of hierarchy and
power within the extended family, as defined by the male lineage.
The Bishtawi Family Firm

Among the impressive and relentless drives to establish a highly concen-
trated family firm in Nablus using joint family waqfs by agnates was an
attempt undertaken around the mid-nineteenth century by leading males
of the Bishtawi family. It began in 1842 and played itself out over an
eighteen-year period, during which four such waqfs were established.30
Two brothers – Asʿad and Saʿid Bishtawi, both referred to in the documents
as the Pride of Dignified Merchants (fakhr al-tujjār al-mukkaramı̄n) –
jointly endowed the first three. The fourth waqf co-established by Hajj
Yusuf Bishtawi, son of Asʿad, and his paternal uncle, Saʿid Bishtawi. It was
registered after Asaʿd’s death and thus was a continuation of the partnership
between the two branches of the Bishtawi family.
29 Only one such waqf exists in the registers of the shariʿa court of Tripoli for the entire period of
study (TICR 43:196). The circumstances surrounding this waqf, moreover, make it the exception
that proves the rule, for it was abrogated after a legal challenge in court. See Chapter 7 for details.
30 NICR 10:83–85 and 12:162–165, 180–182, 331–334, in chronological order.
150 Good Deeds
In the first waqf, dated August 1842, Asʿad and Saʿid endowed what must
have been the entire range of properties that they had inherited, purchased,
and built after their father’s death. They were probably middle-aged at the
time and near the peak of their successful careers as soap manufacturers
and merchants. With this waqf, they laid the cornerstone of a constitutive
family foundation three generations in the making. Providing an excellent
example of the care with which merchant families during this period put
together a diverse portfolio, the properties listed began with the brothers’
shares of the joint residence established by their grandfather, in which they
now lived as joint heads of two lineages forming a large extended fam-
ily household. This was the corporation’s headquarters, so to speak. The
second item listed was the most valuable type of property in Nablus: a
soap factory. Soap production was the most capital-intensive and profitable
line of business in Nablus, and at the time of the endowment was in the
midst of a fourfold expansion that had begun in the 1820s.31 After the soap
factory came an entire commercial center (al-wikāla al-ʾasaliyya), indicat-
ing that the Bishtawis were deeply invested in regional trade networks and
commercial real estate. This was followed by a coffee house and dozens of
warehouses, shops, gardens, fruit orchards, and olive groves.
The model of concentration and joint ownership, it seems, had been
working well, and the brothers’ wealth multiplied. By the time they
endowed the next two joint family waqfs, they had greatly expanded their
commonly held residential and commercial properties. Combined, these
waqfs, dated July 23, 1856 and October 21, 1856, respectively, included shares
of two more large residential compounds, another soap factory, six ware-
houses in the best commercial district of the city, three mills, seven shops,
and dozens of agricultural properties, mostly olive groves, just outside the
city. When the older brother, Asʿad, died, the inheritance estate registered
on July 2, 1857 revealed an arresting degree of concentration and close inter-
mingling of property. In addition to the types of properties already listed,
the two brothers had jointly owned personal items such as furniture, house-
hold appliances, and even clothes.32 It is as if the unity of the male line,
starting with the grandfather and continuing with the father, had remained
unbroken, albeit instantiated in two corporeal bodies. They not only lived
but also planned for the future as one person. In anticipation of eventual
death, the older brother, Asʿad, prepared the legal groundwork for his son,
Hajj Yusuf, to succeed him and take his place in the partnership with Saʿid.
While his father was still alive, Hajj Yusuf appeared in court and secured
31 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, ch. 5. 32 NICR 12:205–206.

himself as the legal representative of his two sisters and as the guardian of
his male siblings, the latter still in their legal minority. With his siblings
firmly in his grip, Hajj Yusuf immediately took the place of his father and,
without skipping a beat, continued the program of joint accumulation of
properties through joint purchases with his uncle Saʿid.33 In a clear exam-
ple of why elite women in Nablus did not have much of an opportunity to
endow waqfs, the uncle and nephew began by jointly purchasing the inheri-
tance shares of Hajj Yusuf’s female siblings. They also purchased the shares
of Bishtawi family properties held by more distant and poorer relatives,
effectively disowning them of a place in the family firm.34 They amassed
additional properties over the next three years, and endowed a fourth joint
family waqf on June 25, 1860. This one contained over fifty newly acquired
properties, mostly olive groves, which were used to supply their two soap
factories with oil.
Throughout this entire period, the vision behind the family charter of
the Bishtawi family, as laid out in the four joint waqfs, never wavered.
The principles of concentration and continuity along the male lineage
were most clearly expressed in the conditions that determined the right-
ful beneficiaries to the revenues and rights of residence. Females, including
the endower’s own daughters, were for all intents and purposes excluded.
The sole beneficiaries, until their death, were the joint-endowers, Asʿad
and Saʿid, one-half each. The revenues were then devolved to their male
children, one-half for each lineage, then the male children of their male
children, and so on until the extinction of the male line. Females had the
right to live in the residential properties as long as they remained unmar-
ried. After the extinction of the male line of descent, the next level of
beneficiaries was composed of the female children of the endowers’ male
descendants, and, after them, the male and female children of the endow-
ers’ female children. In other words, the female descendants of the endow-
ers’ sons superseded the male descendants of the endowers’ daughters. The
operating assumption, throughout, was that the patrilines of the two broth-
ers would be forever linked.
Starting around the 1830s and increasingly through the period under
study, this model became particularity popular among wealthy merchants,
ruling families, and leading religious figures of Nablus who were heavily
33 See, for example, NICR 12:216, 218, 229–231, 235–236, 263. There is some confusion in the num-
bering of the sijill around pages 229–233.
34 For example, see the legal transactions between Zahra and her brother, Yusuf, following the death of
their father, Asʿad (TICR 12:208). Sandwiched between the sales deeds was a legal acknowledgment
(iqrār) by Zahra, testifying that she had received her share of the inheritance.
152 Good Deeds
involved in soap manufacturing. This mirrored the strong growth in this
highly capital-intensive and competitive sector. This was also a period of
rapid vertical integration, in which merchants, who usually fronted capi-
tal to manufacturers in return for batches of soap, eventually built their
own factories. The concentration of capital and the political power it
required and generated may explain why the number of joint waqfs by
agnates and the complete exclusion of females witnessed a rapid accelera-
tion. Counterintuitively, therefore, the rise of manufacturing in Nablus and
the city’s expanding enmeshment in capital-intensive regional and interna-
tional trade networks faciliated the rise not to the modern nuclear family,
but to the “traditional” model of the joint household.
4.2 Why?: Disciplinary, Supplemental, and Constitutive Waqfs

Identifying the range of motivations behind the establishment of waqfs is
an even more tentative exercise than mapping the social composition of
waqf endowers. Family waqfs were endowed for many different and inter-
locking reasons.35 Each, in that sense, is singular. This section introduces
35 The family waqf could serve, with important limitations, as a protective shield against a number
of sources of confiscation or loss of property, including political persecution, unresolvable disputes
with kin or neighbors, and the collection of debts. Expropriation of privately owned properties
by the Ottoman state and its officials was an omnipresent danger, especially for those who built a
local power base capable of posing a challenge, however indirect, to unfettered Ottoman rule. By
definition, this would only be relevant to a tiny group of people who acquired sufficient wealth and
notoriety to attract the attention of the Ottoman authorities. Several huge family waqfs endowed
by the ʿAbd al-Hadis in Nablus during the 1830s and by Mustafa Agha Barbar in Tripoli two decades
earlier can be considered “protective” waqfs for three reasons. First, these figures did not have the
rootedness nor the legitimacy of long-term urban residents, as both were recent arrivals from villages
in the hinterlands of Tripoli and Nablus. Second, the speed and manner in which they acquired
many of the choicest urban real estate properties, from residences to soap factories, involved a great
deal of direct and indirect political coercion. Third, their political fortunes went up and down like
a rollercoaster, making it imperative that they protect their acquisitions as thoroughly as possible.
(For the ʿAbd al-Hadis, see Chapter 3. For Barbar, see TICR 45:44–46, 384–386 and 49:119. For
ʿAbd al-Hadi, see NICR 9:50–51, 311–315, 385 and 10:4, 48.) A small note attached at the end of
a major waqf by Barbar, endowed on May 23, 1815, betrayed the deep concern he had about the
Ottoman state’s recognition of the legitimacy of his hastily endowed waqfs. The note essentially
stated that the waqf deed was sent to the central Ottoman government headquarters in Istanbul
and that the waqf was officially approved. The note is dated December 1, 1816, or six months after
the endowment itself (TICR 45:44–46). Establishment of waqfs to avoid debts was extremely rare in
Nablus and Tripoli. The endowment of a waqf did not necessarily free one from debt obligations.
That depended on the legal question of intention. For instance, on October 19, 1848, the shariʿa
court qadi of Nablus ruled a certain waqf invalid because it transpired that the endower’s motive
was to avoid confiscation of his properties due to debt (NICR 11:94–97, dated Dhu al-Qaʿda 21,
1264). Still, in the right circumstances, the waqf could be a bulwark against economic dislocations.
An instructive example is the lawsuit registered in the Nablus shariʿa court on November 9, 1798.
On that day, a merchant, Sayyid ʿIsa al-Dajuni, sued a villager, Kanʿan al-Amir from the village of
Why?: Disciplinary, Supplemental, Constitutive 153
the categories of disciplinary, supplemental, and constitutive waqfs in order
to highlight three key motivations. These categories are heuristic devices;
they are not legal concepts, the sources do not employ such terms, and all
three can – and often do – inhabit a single waqf, although with different
degrees of domination. Disciplinary and supplemental waqfs will be con-
sidered only briefly, for the constitutive waqf was the cornerstone of family
formation, especially in terms of size and frequency.
Disciplinary
Endowing a waqf was a profoundly pious and subjective act of charity
(s.adaqa), which can be thought of as “sacred redemptive alms giving [for]
the achievement of personal salvation.”36 Throughout the centuries, waqfs
have been consistently perceived as the very embodiment of charity.37
When it came to a family waqf, where the focus was on kin, an impor-
tant motivation was to create and sustain not just a material patrimony for
the rightful beneficiaries, but also a spiritual and moral one. A disciplin-
ing force for the latter was the setting aside of revenues for the enactment
of good deeds (mabarrāt), whose primary purpose was the accumulation,
through repeated performances, of heavenly rewards for both the living
and the dead. This disciplining force, it can be argued, enforced kinship
boundaries and helped construct gender and generational hierarchies, lines
of authority, and the configuration of domestic space. The two basic forms
of good deed described in family waqf endowments revolved around distri-
bution of food and recitation of the Qurʾan: pivotal activities of bodily and
spiritual consumption that nurtured the soul and created an intimate and
kin-saturated cultural space. The design, funding, and repeated enactment
of charitable acts cultivated sensibilities and communicated normative val-
ues and beliefs that animated the internal solidarity of kinship relations and
the place of family in society.
Burin near Nablus, claiming that Kanʿan’s deceased brother was the guarantor of an unpaid debt
contracted by Khalil Jarrar (a member of a powerful rural clan that ruled many of the villages in
the northern part of Jabal Nablus) and that the brother had died before paying the loan that he
had guaranteed. The plaintiff wanted the qadi to force the defendant, who had by then inherited
the deceased brother’s properties, to hand over, as recompense, one level (t.abaqa: story or floor)
of a house that the defendant’s brother had built. The defendant admitted that all the plaintiff’s
claims were true, but claimed that his brother, before he died, had added this level to a waqf he had
endowed prior to acting as guarantor. According to Islamic law, a waqf could not be voided in order
to pay such a debt. Therefore, after securing a ruling from the mufti of Nablus, the qadi ruled in
favor of the villager and against the merchant (NICR 6:19, dated Jamadi II 1213).
36 Lev, Charity, Endowments, 1.
37 Lev makes this argument for the classical and early modern period. Ibid., 53–54.
154 Good Deeds
Table 4.3 Holy days commonly listed in family waqfs for the enactment of
good deeds (mabarrāt)
Ramadan 27 Laylat al-Qadr: Night of Revelation of the first verses of the Qurʾan
Destiny to the Prophet Muhammad
Rajab 27 Laylat al-Miʿrāj or Isrāʾ Ascension of the Prophet Muhammad to
wa-Miʿrāj: Night of the Heaven from Jerusalem (Eastern Wall of
Ascension al-Aqsa Mosque) on his horse, Buraq
mid-Shaʿban Laylat al-Barāʾa: Night of Doors of Forgiveness and Salvation open –
Deliverance or Freedom an occasion to commemorate one’s
from Fire ancestors.
Shawwal 1 ʿĪd al-Fit.r (ʿĪd al-Saghı̄r): Conclusion of fasting during the month of
Festival of Breaking the Ramadan
Fast
Dhu al-Hijjah 9 ʿĪd al-Ad.h.ā (ʿĪd al-Kabı̄r):
Culmination of the hajj; also known as the
Festival of Sacrifice Day of Standing (Yawm al-Waqfa),
when the family graves are visited and
adorned with palm fronds
Muharram 10 ʿAshūra: Day of Atonement Freeing of Israelites from the Pharaoh; for
Shiʿi, martyrdom of Husayn
The public acts of purchasing and distributing food – whether daily,

weekly, monthly, or annually – in the name of the family and its found-
ing figure enhanced a family’s status and imparted a sense of social and
religious discipline among its members. Both could deepen the feeling of
family identity and a common sense of purpose. The rituals of purchase
and distribution, moreover, sutured the endower and the beneficiaries into
the larger social and cultural fabric of the neighborhood and city. Timing,
in this respect, was key to the purpose of organically intertwining family,
religion, and community. Endowers specified that the annual distribution
of food to the poor (in its capacious meaning, referring to both the indi-
gent and religious workers) was to take place during one or more of the
holy days in the Islamic calendar, as summarized in Table 4.3. An added
benefit was that the rewards for pious deeds were multiplied on those days,
increasing one’s blessings during the afterlife.
More common and more significant were the mabarrāt financing the
recitation of the Qurʾan. Usually, the administrator of the waqf was specif-
ically instructed to hire one or more reciters to come to the house of the
endower on a weekly or monthly basis, usually on a Friday, when the fam-
ily members did not work. Surrounded by the kin who counted (beneficia-
ries of the waqf ), the reciter(s) would read designated verses or the entire
Qurʾan then make a gift of the accrued blessings (yahdı̄ thawābahu) to the
soul of the endower and his or her descendants.38 This ritual bound the
family by reinforcing the memory of a founding figure whose endowment
still provided material sustenance and spiritual comfort years after his or
her death. Sometimes, the instructions specified who the reciters should be
and where they were to sit, such as in the waqf of Qasim Agha al-Shaʿar,
cited in the epigraph to this chapter.39
Funding the performance of religious practices, such as the recitation of
the Qurʾan inside the house of the endower, was also consequential for gen-
dered subjectivities of piety.40 Leila Ahmad recalls such scenes in the Egyp-
tian aristocratic household she grew up in, and argues, perhaps too strongly,
that there are two kinds of Islam: a man’s and a woman’s.41 Women did not
attend Friday prayers with the men, and most were illiterate. In this con-
text, the reciters of the Qurʾan became the source of what they knew about
Islam, especially for upper-class women cloistered at home. That is, domes-
ticized recitation could become an authorized form of knowledge trans-
mission that contributed to the differential religious experiences of men
and women. In this sense, the disciplining power of home-based religious
rituals could create pious spaces in which for women to make spiritually
informed interventions in their daily lives.
Like the investment of capital in business activities, the investment in
good deeds was carefully designed to maximize returns and was character-
ized by mathematical symmetry akin, for example, to the elegant way that
Husayn, in Chapter 3, organized the configuration of beneficiaries and the
distribution of shares. The endower could choose the amount of annual
revenue to be set aside and the categories of mabarrāt, such as supplies
(lamp oil, rugs), distribution of food (bread, meat, sweets), or recitations
(specific verses or the entire Qurʾan). The endower could also choose how
38 Typical examples are TICR 29:156–59 and 42:154–156. I am indebted to Margaret Meriwether for
the phrase “the kin who count.”
39 TICR 42:154–56, dated Dhu al-Qaʿda 10, 1088/January 4, 1678.
40 There is no doubt regarding the power and impact of recitation. Richard C. Martin analyses the
speech act in symbolic terms, where it is not man (reciter) who is speaking, but God himself, and the
ritual is a re-enactment of the Qurʾan’s own appearance in sacred history. See Richard C. Martin,
“Understanding the Qurʾan in Text and Context,” History of Religions 21, no. 4 (1982): 361–384.
Jonathan Berkey argues that recitation is a form of unauthorized transmission of knowledge, which
reinforces the point about differential consumption of religious ideas and values between men and
women. Jonathan P. Berkey, “Tradition, Innovation and Social Change in the Social Construction
of Knowledge in the Medieval Islamic Near East,” Past and Present 146, no. 1 (1995): 38–65. But
this is not a straightforward proposition. The impact of this practice on nurturing a gender-specific
view of family, authority, and property needs to be studied with reference to, among other factors,
the historical context, class location, and particular verses recited.
41 Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (New York: Penguin
Books, 2000).
156 Good Deeds
much to spend on each kind of good deed within each category, who
would carry out the tasks (specific religious workers and/or members of a
religious group), the days of enactment (specific holy days in the Muslim
calendar, each understood to have its own special character), the location
(mosque, family home, a public space), the time of day, the number of
recitations, and so on. The preferences provide clues about contemporary
notions of piety, kinship, community, and the afterlife. Far from being
formulaic, packages of good deeds differed from waqf to waqf and from
city to city, thus providing data points for a comparative exploration of
the moral and spiritual dimensions of the reproduction of kinship and
gender norms between Tripoli and Nablus, as well as of the changes (or
lack thereof ) over time.
The differences between Nablus and Tripoli are dramatic. The use of
waqf to invest moral/spiritual rituals was ubiquitous in Tripoli. In Nablus,
it was almost entirely absent. In Tripoli, the provisioning for mabarrāt
occurred irrespective of class, gender, and time: it pervaded all social
groups and was evenly spread over the years. The reverse was true for
Nablus: only a tiny percentage of wealthy individuals who endowed waqfs
in Nablus set aside revenues for mabarrāt, and this phenomenon was
largely confined to the early modern period. As of the early nineteenth
century, provisions for mabarrāt were rare in Nablus.42 This dramatic and
stubborn difference between Tripoli and Nablus is further underscored by
the fact that the percentage of charitable and mixed waqfs whose revenues
were fully devoted for good deeds was much higher in Tripoli than in
Nablus. Since good deeds were labor-intensive and largely performed by
religious workers who got paid a weekly or monthly salary, this means that
the reproduction of family through waqfs was critical to the financing and
maintenance of a large religious establishment (al-jihāz al-dı̄nı̄) in Tripoli,
but not so in Nablus.43
The reasons for these important differences are not clear, nor are the
implications. It is tempting to argue that in Tripoli, establishing a waqf
42 An exception was a waqf by Sulayman ʿAbd al-Hadi, leader of this ruling family at the time. The few
other waqfs that do the same were all endowed by contemporary allies of the ʿAbd al-Hadi family. See
NICR 9:385; 11:72–74, 94–97, 104–105, 113, 121–123, 174, 176; and 12:67–70, 121, 180–182, 228–229,
331–334.
43 At the core of religious establishments in provincial cities along the Eastern Mediterranean dur-
ing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lie the mufti as legal guide, the judge as arbitrator/
administrator, the steward of the descendants of the Prophet (naqı̄b al-ashrāf ) as guardian of status
and privilege, the preachers and imams of the Friday mosques as local powerbrokers and opinion
shapers, and the Sufi leaders as spiritual mentors and guild organizers. In each locale or region, this
core, along with teachers, reciters, callers of prayers, healers, and various lesser officials and employ-
ees in religious institutions, came to constitute a self-reproducing and highly networked religious
establishment.
was seen, at least partly, as a worthy moral gesture and a religiously pious
act, whereas in Nablus, it was strictly motivated by worldly concerns hav-
ing to do with the cohesiveness and competitiveness of corporate family
units. But there is no reason to believe that the inhabitants of Nablus were
any less pious or concerned with the well being of their souls after death.
It could be that they found other ways to invest in their salvation, and
that they developed alternative rituals and practices to discipline kinship
relations. What is clear is that the different spiritual economies of Nablus
and Tripoli, especially the symbiotic relationship between the waqf and the
religious establishment, are implicated in the divergences between the two
cities when it comes to waqf as a social act; that is, when it comes to who
endowed waqfs and why.
In lieu of identifiying specific chains of causality, it would be useful
to briefly compare the key differences in the religious establishments of
Nablus and Tripoli. To begin with, the establishment in Tripoli – in terms
of size, resources, social weight, and institutional complexity – did not have
an equal in Nablus. Tripoli was a larger city, with twice as many Friday
mosques and many times the number of schools and charitable institu-
tions. During the period under study, the number of religious workers was
easily in the hundreds.44 This number constituted a critical mass that was
sufficient to be organized along the same lines as guilds. On December
5, 1668, for example, the mufti of Tripoli, accompanied by the preachers
(s. khat.ı̄b) of the major mosques (individually named in the document)
and an unspecified number of other preachers, imams, and ʿulamaʾ, peti-
tioned the shariʿa court judge in Tripoli to appoint one of their own, a
certain Rajab b. Shaykh Yusuf, as “sergeant-at-arms of the ʿulamaʾ” (jāwı̄sh
al-ʿulamaʾ). This job was described as being a messenger of sorts between
the ʿulamaʾ, on the one hand, and the shariʿa court and governor’s diwan,
on the other.45 In the Ottoman provinces prior to the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, these were the two centers of legal adjudication, power brokerage, and
44 Accounting for the number of religious workers in Tripoli at any one moment in time is difficult,
but unlike Nablus, it was both large and, at one point, organized as a guild. A reasonable estimate
of the number of people involved would be an expansion from dozens in the early seventeenth
century to hundreds by the end of the eighteenth. As mentioned earlier, nine religious families
controlled ninety-five of the top positions in Tripoli around the late seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth centuries. See ʿImad, Al-jihaz al-dini wa al-ʿaʾilat al-diniyya fi Tarabulus, 87–97. ʿImad further
developed his data and arguments in Mujtamaʿ Tarabulus fi zaman al-tahawwulat al-ʿuthmaniyya,
240–245.
45 Rajab, at the time, was a young and distinguished student. He is described as Pride of the Righteous
and Students, the distinguished and cultural young complete (in the sense of married) man (fakhr
al-s.ulah.āʾ wa-l-t.alaba al-shāb al-fād.il wa-l-najı̄b al-kāmil). TICR 2:162, dated end of Jamadi II 1079.
This case is first cited in Ziade, “Takawwun al-ʿaʾilat fi Tarabulus,” 313.
158 Good Deeds
property relations.46 No such semi-autonomous role existed for the small
religious establishment in Nablus, which was tightly integrated into the
political, military, and business elites of the city.
It is important to point out here that the divergent spiritual economies of
Nablus and Tripoli have deep historical roots. The city of Nablus and cer-
tain areas of its hinterland, such as the Jammaʿin subdistrict (nāh.iya), have
long had the reputation of being the only social space in Bilad al-Sham
where the stricter and more conservative Hanbali madhhab commanded
a significant following before, during, and after the period under study.
The Hanbali family monopolized the position of naqı̄b al-ashrāf for gen-
erations, in what amounted to a limitation on the Hanafi (and, previously,
Shafiʿi) school influence in the city. There was, and continues to be, a Han-
bali Friday Mosque in Nablus, and the famous Salihiyya Quarter of Damas-
cus was largely founded by Hanbali ʿulamaʾ from Nablus.47 In contrast, the
spiritual economy of Tripoli and its hinterland were no doubt influenced
by the centuries of Shiʿi presence in the region since Fatimid times (tenth
to twelfth centuries).48 During the Banu ʿAmmar dynasty, Tripoli was a
center of Shiʿi learning with a fabled library, said to have been destroyed
by the invading Crusaders in 1108. During the early modern period, the
hinterland of Tripoli was under the rule of a Shiʿi dynasty, the Hamada
(1641–85), which continued to control rural tax farms in the region until
the 1760s.49 Could this accretion of Shiʿi presence have influenced attitudes
towards property devolution to females, considering that that Shiʿi Islam
has more “female-friendly” inheritance practices than Sunni Islam?50
46 The prominence of the governor’s diwan as an important center of legal arbitration has only recently
been addressed in some detail. See, for example, Baldwin, “Islamic Law in an Ottoman Context.”
47 Toru Miura, “The Salihiyya Quarter in the Suburbs of Damascus: Its Formation, Structure and
Transformation in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Periods,” Bulletin d’études orientales 47 (1995): 129–181
and “The Salihiyya Quarter of Damascus.”
48 See Stefan Winter, “The Shiite Emirates of Ottoman Syria (Mid-17th–Mid-18th Century)” (PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 2002), 97, 104–105. More to the point, neither the Sunni Mamluks
nor the Sunni Ottomans sought to “cleanse” this area of Shiʿi presence. Shiʿi villages still exist in
parts of Tripoli’s hinterland. In addition to Tripoli, Shiʿi rule and/or presence was also concentrated
in the Bekaa and Homs, adjacent to Tripoli (such as Harfush dynasty), and in Jabal ʿAmil (south
Lebanon), which is still largely a Shiʿi-dominated region.
49 This is not to argue for a direct causal relationship, as the Hamadas were recent arrivals in northern
Lebanon, were organized along tribal lines, and were poorly integrated into local – much less urban –
society. For studies of Shiʿi rule and presence in Tripoli, see Stefan Winter, The Shiites of Lebanon
under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); ʿAli al-Ibrahim
Tarabulusi, Al-tashayyuʿ fi tarabulus wa Bilad al-Sham: adwaʾʿala dawlat bani ʿammar (Beirut: Dar
al-Saqi, 2007). See also Abu-Husayn, Provincial Leaderships in Syria.
50 For example, the notion that in the absence of male issue, daughters could still inherit the entire
estate may have had a long-term influence well beyond the formal end of Shiʿi rule. The idea that
the legacy of the historically strong and long-lasting Shiʿi rule and practice in Tripoli can explain
Perhaps the most important difference between the spiritual economies
of Nablus and Tripoli is the latter’s greater degree of integration into the
bureaucracy of the Ottoman state. Nablus was a district (sanjaq) in a
largely autonomous region of southern Bilad al-Sham, while Tripoli was
an Ottoman provincial capital (wilāya) during the early modern period, as
well as an important center for Islamic legal education during the Fatimid
and Mamluk periods.51 In both cities, the positions of mufti (jurisprudent)
and naqı̄b al-ashrāf (Steward of the descendants of the Prophet) were staffed
by local ʿulamaʾ families.52 The key difference was the position of the qadi.
Pivotal to shaping the legal and spiritual economy of an urban center, the
qadi served as the legal administrator of the city, had oversight over reli-
gious and waqf institutions, and had the power to appoint and remove
religious workers from their positions. In Tripoli, the qadi was usually (but
not always – see the case of the Baraka family later) an outsider who was
rotated annually. In Nablus, the position was almost always controlled by
local families. It was sometimes passed on from father to son, with family
tenures that could span decades.
If one must speculate, it is possible that the symbiotic relationship
between the large, diverse, and influential religious establishment in Tripoli
and the pervasive funding of good deeds through the waqf that supported
it may account for the remarkable consistency over a two-century period
in the patterns of who endowed waqfs, why, and to whom. It is also pos-
sible that the strong moral disciplinary component of waqf endowments
in Tripoli shaped family relations between descendants for generations
from the unfathomable distance of the afterlife. Even if unintended by the
endower, the enactment and re-enactment of spiritually inspired acts of
charity and piousness ordered internal family ties and promoted the status
of the family in the society. In Nablus, the dearth of charitable waqfs and
the general absence of mabarrāt in family waqfs, combined with the neces-
sarily small size of the religious establishment and the tight links to ruling
the strong position of women was first suggested to me in 1998 by Saʿid al-Sayyid, the head librarian
of the Tripoli public library.
51 See, for example, Tadmuri, Al-hayat al-thaqafiyya fi Tarabulus al-Sham and Tarikh Tarabulus al-siyasi
wa al-hadari ʿabr al-ʿusur; al-jizʾ al-thani. Ilyas al-Qattar, Niyabat Tarabulus fi ʿahd al-Mamalik.
52 Regarding the former, the lion’s share went to the Karami in Tripoli and to the Jawhari and
Khammāsh in Nablus. As for the latter, in Tripoli, it shifted between local families over time,
although the Baraka family was able to dominate during much of the eighteenth century. In Nablus,
this position was practically monopolized by the Hanbali family (named after the conservative
madhhab to which they belong) which lived near one of the more important Friday mosques in
Nablus, also called the Hanbali Mosque, testifying to the important influence of this school in
the city.
160 Good Deeds
families, may explain the dramatic shifts over time in the patterns of the
waqf as a social act, as will be discussed further in Chapter 5.
Supplemental
By supplemental waqfs, I mean endowments designed as a safety net for
unfortunate family members liable to fall through the cracks of Islamic
rules of inheritance and/or normative forms of kin and community soli-
darity. Such waqfs were often established for the benefit of children whose
father died in the lifetime of their grandparents. According to Islamic rules
of inheritance, their father’s siblings had the legal right to consume the
whole inheritance, leaving the children with nothing.53 Other scenarios
included orphaned nieces and nephews in their legal minority,54 a woman’s
young children from a previous, deceased husband who had no place in her
new home since her remarriage,55 newly manumitted slaves who needed a
start in life, and unfortunate neighbors stricken by a calamity.56
An example is the family waqf of ʿUthman Badran of Nablus, a man of
modest means and the father of three sons and a daughter. He was already
on in years when he registered the endowment in January 1819.57 One of
his sons, Muhammad, had three children of his own and died prematurely.
Shocked by this loss and concerned about the welfare of his grandchil-
dren, who were robbed by fate of their father’s potential estate, ʿUthman
endowed exactly two-sevenths of his entire estate for their benefit. That
is, his grandchildren combined received a share equal to that of each of
their two paternal uncles, and twice that of their paternal aunt. These were
shares in the immovable properties of ʿUthman’s estate: most of a floor in
a family residence, a third of a shop, and small shares in other residences.
The supplemental waqf was far more common in Tripoli than in Nablus.
During the 1800–60 period, over twenty-two per cent of family waqf
endowments in Tripoli, compared to seven per cent in Nablus, were
established to benefit orphaned grandchildren, nephews, and nieces (see
53 For examples from Nablus, see NICR 6:203 and 8:74, 182. The word used, yaʾkul, literally means
“to eat.”
54 For an example from Nablus, see NICR 10:126–127, in which a woman endows properties for the
benefit of her sister’s sons after her sister’s husband dies suddenly.
55 For examples from Tripoli, see TICR 42:40, 154. For an example from Nablus, see NICR 6:284 and
7:14.
56 For example, a number of individuals in Tripoli endowed property to their manumitted slaves so
they could have a solid start in their new lives and be protected from challenges by the endower’s
relatives, who might be unhappy with former slaves taking control of what normally would have
been part of their inheritance (TICR 29:73; 42:47; 52:118–119; and 55:223–224). There were no such
waqfs registered in the Nablus shariʿa court.
57 NICR 8:74, dated Rabiʿ I 1234.
Table 4.3). If one also includes endowments that designated one’s own
children then the figure for Nablus goes up dramatically, to eighteen per
cent. In fact, all but two of the waqfs included in the Other Category for
Nablus designated male and female children of the endower, along with
the endower’s grandchildren and/or a brother’s sons. In other words, unlike
in Tripoli, there were very few family waqfs in Nablus dedicated solely to
kin outside the conjugal family. Moreover, the Other Category for Tripoli
included a far more diverse group of beneficiaries than is ever found in
Nablus: spouses, former slaves, neighbors, and unrelated family friends.
When one correlates primary beneficiaries with the sex of the endower,
it becomes readily apparent that in both cities women were far more likely
than men to endow supplementary waqfs. Although the average size of
waqfs by men in Nablus was considerably larger than that of women, and
even though women generally had less property than men, women dedi-
cated a larger percentage of their holdings to a greater variety of kin than
did men. That is, female endowers, more so than their male counterparts,
acted more as kin keepers and protectors of the weak and the marginalized,
and less as investors or founders of branches.58 One can think of myriad
reasons why this was the case. One important consideration is that women
acquired property primarily through kin and managed it primarily with kin
in mind. In Tripoli, roughly one-half of the properties endowed by females
were acquired through inheritance and one-half through purchase, mostly
from relatives.59 In contrast, the great majority of the property endowed
by men was acquired through purchase and/or investment in building and
planting. The large gap between men and women when it came to supple-
mental waqfs might also be due to the fact that some women were childless,
lived as spinsters, or were widowed early and did not want to or could not
remarry. This pattern can be clearly seen in Table 4.4, which shows that
females were far more likely to establish waqfs for the benefit of daughters
and other people’s children than were men.
Instructive here are the four consecutive waqfs endowed on May 18, 1819,
by Fatima, the daughter of ʿAbd al-Jalil al-Mallah (a sailor), in Tripoli.60
Fatima was still of child-bearing age when she was suddenly deprived of
her husband and two sons. Instead of keeping the properties she inherited
from her husband and sons so that she could be in a good position to
58 In a study of Aleppo, Meriwether found that women often endowed small waqfs in order to address
special family needs. Meriwether, The Kin Who Count, ch. 5, 10–11.
59 The difference in size of the waqf was related to the degree of access of women to property. Baer
shows that in mid-sixteenth-century Istanbul, the “percentage of women among founders of waqfs
decreases as the size of the waqf grows.” Baer, “Women and Waqf,” 11.
60 TICR 47:108–109, 111–113, 118–119.
162 Good Deeds
Table 4.4 Family waqf endowments by males and females according to
primary beneficiaries after and/or including self, 1800–6061
Tripoli Nablus
Female Male Total Female Male Total
Children, male/female 12 24 36 6 56 62
(14.8%) (28.2%) (21.7%) (40%) (47.5%) (46.6%)
Future children 5 14 19 – 1 1
(no existing progeny) (6.2%) (16.5%) (11.5%) (.8%) (.7%)
Spouse and children, male/female 4 11 15 – – –
(5%) (13%) (9%)
Son(s) 2 1 3 – 34 34
(excluding female children) (2.5%) (1.2%) (1.8%) (28.9%) (25.5%)
Daughter(s) 30 12 42 2 5 7
(no existing male progeny) (37%) (14%) (25.3%) (13.3%) (4.2%) (5.2%)
Spouse and daughter(s) 1 13 14 1 3 4
(no existing male progeny) (1.2%) (15.3%) (8.5%) (6.7%) (2.5%) (3%)
Other’s children, male/female 15 1 16 3 3 6
(grandchildren, nephews/nieces) (18.5%) (1.2%) (9.6%) (20%) (2.5%) (4.5%)
Siblings 3 1 4 1 – 1
(3.7%) (1.2%) (2.4%) (6.7%) (.7%)
Other 9 8 17 2 16 18
(11.1%) (9.4%) (10.2%) (13.3%) (13.6%) (13.5%)
Total 81 85 166 15 118 133
marry again and have children, she decided to split these properties into
four separate waqfs. She dedicated the revenues to her children’s same-
generation paternal and maternal cousins, specifically to the children of her
brothers and her husband’s siblings. The timing, sequence, and conditions
of the waqfs point to a set of motivations: to preserve the memory of her lost
ones and to generate rewards for them in the afterlife. The waqf effectively
created a bond, both spiritual and material, that encourages her nephews
and nieces to take the place of her sons and look after her in her old age.
Fatima’s first waqf was a charitable endowment of a house whose rental
revenues were used solely to sow rewards for her own soul and for the souls
of her husband and children. As was common in Tripoli, but rare in Nablus,
61 Female and male endowers jointly endowed several supplemental waqfs. I placed them in either the
male or the female column, depending on the primary endower.
the beneficiary was not a religious institution but a member of the Sufi reli-
gious establishment: the prominent Sayyid Hasan Çelebi, son of Hajj Yusuf
Sufi al-Sabbagh. In return, Sayyid Hasan was to recite as much as possible
(qirāʾ mā tayassara) from the Holy Qurʾan.62 The second, and by far the
most important of the four waqfs, endowed one-quarter of a large olive
grove of 200 trees located in one of the prime locations of Tripoli’s green
perimeter to her brother’s grandson and granddaughter, Muhammad and
Halima, “but only if she has no children of her own.”63 This is a clear sign of
their adoption by her as surrogate children. The third endowed one-quarter
of a house to her in-laws: the sons of Sayyid Hasan al-Maqit, most likely
the brother or cousin of her deceased husband, Muhammad al-Maqit.64
Fatima endowed the fourth waqf to the same grandson, Muhammad, per-
haps her favorite of her surrogate children.
Although in the midst of mourning for her recently deceased husband
and two sons, who perhaps drowned at sea, Fatima was able to design a
very sophisticated inter vivos property transmission strategy that only the
waqf could deliver. Together, the four supplemental waqfs allowed Fatima
to achieve several goals at once without constraining her future options.
She made peace with her conjugal family and took care of their souls in
the afterlife. Additionally, she knit her agnates and in-laws together to
keep alive the network that was dealt such a harsh blow with the triple
death. Finally, she invested in the futures of surrogate sons and grandsons
who might take care of her in her old age. At the same time, the waqf
allowed her to make conditions that kept other possibilities open. Namely,
she instructed that its revenues should go first to any children she might
have in the future, with the children of her brothers and her brother-in-law
becoming legal beneficiaries only after the extinction of her progeny.
Constitutive
During the period under study, to “constitute” a family through a fam-
ily waqf was a pervasive social act usually associated with social mobility.
It is not difficult to identify a constitutive family waqf. The introductory
part tends to be long and ornamental, the number and types of witnesses
betray an exhaustive effort at social mobilization akin to a wedding, and
the description of the properties and persons involved is unusually detailed.
62 TICR 47:108–109. There was no commanding tone nor mathematically rigorous assignment of
readings with specific deadlines, as was common in the constitutive waqfs of well-to-do male endow-
ers, such as that of Husayn al-Husayni in Chapter 3.
63 TICR 47:111–112. 64 TICR 47:112–113.
164 Good Deeds
The typical constitutive waqf was substantial in size – albeit, relative to class
position – and was usually established by upwardly mobile males with suc-
cessful or potentially successful male heirs. Most importantly, it consisted
of a balanced portfolio of residential, commercial, and agricultural prop-
erties that lay the material, cultural, and political foundations for the con-
tinued growth in wealth, power, and status of the endower’s descendants.65
Far from being removed from the sphere of economic exchange, the legal
foundations of family waqfs allowed for economic investments in the prop-
erty portfolio according to the abilities and desires of different groups of
beneficiaries. Constitutive waqfs, therefore, not only delineated the bound-
aries of the family as a corporate unit, but also represented a core element of
property relations in the local economy, undergirded patronage networks,
funded religious workers and institutions, and shaped political culture.66
It was not unusual, for example, for the newly endowed branch to adopt
a surname or appellation different from that of its closest relatives.67 The
key endowed property – such as an orchard, soap factory, or principle resi-
dence – became associated with the name of the endower and turned into
a visible marker, similar to a street name, that structured social and spa-
tial relations in the urban landscape and inhabited the communal mem-
ory of its inhabitants.68 Recording practices at the shariʿa court reinforced
65 For the use of waqf as a vehicle of social mobility by local elites, see Roded, “The Waqf and the
Social Elite.” A partial list of constitutive waqfs in Nablus includes NICR 7:81; 9: 215–217, 387–388;
10:4, 31–33, 83–85, 94–95, 98; 11:72–72, 94–97, 104–105, 113, 121–123, 174, 176; 12: 48–50, 67–70,
162–165.
66 David S. Powers makes a similar point about the “corporate” family in his analysis of waqf endow-
ments in Muslim Spain between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. David Powers, “The Maliki
Family Endowment: Legal Norms and Social Practices,” International Journal of Middle East Studies
25, no. 3 (1993): 401.
67 For an example, see the separation of the ʿArafat from the Shahid family in Doumani, Rediscovering
Palestine, ch. 2. In some leading families, a moniker that distinguished various branches modified
the surname. In Nablus during this period, the paramount military rank branch (Beik Tuqan) ran
parallel to a lower-rank military branch (Çorbcı Tuqan) and a specialized merchant branch (Khawaja
Tuqan). See, for example, a sales deed involving fakhr al-aʿyan (Pride of Notables) Ibrahim Çorbacı
Tuqan, dated mid-Safar 1101 Hijri in Tuqan Family Papers (photocopied from personal collection
of Zahi Tuqan in 1987) 1.1 and a sales deed involving amı̄r al-umarāʾ (Prince of Princes) Ali Beik
Tuqan, dated end of Dhu al-Qaʿda 1194; ibid. 1.2. For an example of the Agha branch, see ibid. 1.4,
dated mid-Dhu al-Hijja 1163, and for the Khawaja branch, see ibid. 1.12, dated Shawwal 1209.
68 Increasing the visibility of or immortalizing one’s name was an especially clear motivation in the case
of those who endowed large charitable waqfs for the construction of mosques. Many mosques in
Tripoli and Nablus were named after families or individuals, such as the Beik (named after the Beik
branch of the Tuqan family), Hanbali (named after the religious scholars branch of the Hashim
family that followed the Hanbali madhhab), and Hajj Nimr al-Nabulsi mosques in Nablus and
the Tinal and Argon Shah mosques in Tripoli. During the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods,
many of those who established mosques or educational institutions through waqf endowments had
their waqf deed and name etched into one of the walls as permanent and indelible proof of their
the relationship between naming and power. The boundaries of immov-
able properties to the south (qibla), east, north, and west (always in that
order) that were sold, endowed, or disputed were almost always identified
by the name of a family or person. An example is the first property listed
in a constitutive waqf endowed in Nablus in 1842 by the Pride of Reciters
(h.uffāz.) and Descendants of the Prophet (ashrāf ) Sayyid Muhammad, son
of the deceased Sayyid ʿAli Amin al-Din. It was identified as his share of
“the residence in the Lower ʿAqaba neighborhood known as the residence
of ʿAli Ghazal Amin al-Din al-ʿUmari . . . bordered on the south by resi-
dence of the Barbar family, east by the Salahi Mosque, north by the resi-
dence of Hajj Muhammad al-Bishtawi, and west by the residence of Hajj
Dawud Salamah.”69 These were not necessarily the names of the actual resi-
dents, but of those who built, endowed, or had once occupied these proper-
ties, etching this connection into the local communal memory. Immovable
properties thus acquired a genealogy similar to that of a person. Endowed
properties, in particular, remained associated with the name of the endower
for generations, inscribing her or him into the physical, political, and cul-
tural landscape of the city. In turn, the cultural capital accumulated in this
process of naming was an important asset in the construction and repro-
duction of the economic and political networks that were so vital to the
survival and prosperity of families, especially those engaged in commerce
and production.70
The endowment of constitutive waqfs as a social act can help historians
map the changing social composition of propertied families as cities and
towns were buffeted by political and economic turbulence. The piecemeal
reconquest of Bilad al-Sham by the Ottoman government in the second
half of the seventeenth century (1640s in Tripoli and 1670s in Nablus) swept
aside some powerful families and opened a space for new ones to emerge,
especially ones with strong ties to Ottoman urban corporate structures,
such as artisanal guilds and Sufi orders. As the dust settled by the late sev-
enteenth century, the constitutive waqf became a major phenomenon in
good deed and as a reminder for pious people to carry out its specific provisions. An example is the
Khatuniyya school in Tripoli, which was established by the wife of Argon Shah. Her waqf deed,
etched in stone and dated March 1, 1372, includes the condition that part of the waqf revenues be
used to hire readers to go to her grave every Friday and recite the entire Qurʾan. Tamimi and Bahjat,
Wilayat Beirut, 159–160.
69 NICR 10:106; dated Rabiʿ II 3, 1258 Hijri/May 14, 1842. Note that the full name of the endower’s
father is given when describing the residence, without identifying the endower. Sometimes, the
name of a property became so famous that it lasted for generations regardless of who occupied it.
Driving home the organic link between naming and residence in Nablus is that the same word, dār,
was used to mean both family and residence. In Tripoli, the word bayt was used for both.
70 For a detailed example, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 61–68.
166 Good Deeds
both cities as newly emerging urban notable families used it to solidify the
material and cultural foundations of their power.71 During the nineteenth
century, the constitutive family waqf continued to flourish, and the growth
of this institution even accelerated in the city of Nablus in tandem with the
rise of a new commercial elite to political power in the wake of the Egyp-
tian miliatry occupation (1831–40). One advantage of the family waqf in
this regard was that it narrowed the channels for the devolution of prop-
erty, thus sharpening the competitive edge. The narrative for Tripoli is far
less dramatic. During this period, the constitutive waqf flourished among
the middling strata of orchard owners cashing in on the growth in silk and
citrus production and trade under conditions of relative political stability.
The following case study of the Baraka family in Tripoli expands on all the
preceding points and connects the diachronic and synchronic dimensions
of this chapter on the family waqf as a social act.
4.3 Rise of the Baraka Family: The Social Life of a

Constitutive Waqf
From Tanners and Sufis to Qadis and Naqı̄bs

We first encounter Baraka family members in the shariʿa court registers
in the late seventeenth century, as important players in the tanners’ guild
(t.āʾifat al-dabbāghı̄n) and as active members of the Khalwatiyya Sufi order.
These two institutions were key rungs on the ladder of social mobility.72
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the social status and wealth
of the family, which also claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad
(and whose members were thus known as sayyids or ashrāf ), seems to
have risen dramatically within a single generation. They became heads of
the tanners’ guild and leaders of the Khalwatiyya order, and moved on to
more traditional positions within the Ottoman governance hierarchy over
the next two centuries. Several of their members held the senior post of
naqı̄b al-ashrāf (Steward of the Descendants of the Prophet), while a few
71 Khaled Ziade makes this argument for Tripoli. Ziade, “Takawwun al-ʿaʾilat fi Tarabulus,” 318–320.
72 This section involved reconstructing the Baraka family by identifying every single case in which the
name “Baraka” is mentioned in the relevant registers of the Tripoli shariʿa court. In addition to the
cases listed later, see the following: TICR 1:73–74, 140; 2:96–97, 111–112, 117, 133–134, 184, 192–193,
206–207, 241, 272; 3:8, 40, 59, 61, 78, 89–90, 100–101, 104, 107, 110, 132; 4:36, 90–93; 5:77, 129–131;
6:3; 7:45, 113–114, 141, 158; 30:145–148, 150. This is not an exhaustive list, but one that cites the most
relevant cases.
Rise of the Baraka Family 167
others became qadis of the shariʿa court.73 During the first half of the nine-
teenth century, for example, Shaykh Darwish Baraka, his son Muhammad,
and his grandson Raghib, all served as shariʿa court qadis.74
All the while, the Barakas accumulated considerable wealth, purchased
key properties in the urban agricultural sector, entered commercial dealings
on the regional and international levels, lent money, and served as profes-
sional witnesses and experts.75 By the third generation, constitutive waqfs
were established to consolidate their upward mobility and to inscribe the
Baraka name on the large socioeconomic and cultural space they had carved
out for themselves. “Baraka” became one of the landmark family names
of Tripoli and the properties associated with it became boundary markers
in real estate transactions. Capitalizing on this status and various official
capacities, the Barakas helped define the meanings of political belonging
in Tripoli by serving as one of the important depositories of the communal
memory via their testimonies and witness seals in dozens of court cases.
An immersive reading of the shariʿa court registers of Tripoli for all docu-
ments relating to members of the Baraka family suggests that the founding
figure was the successful Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad (d. 1686), followed by his
five even more successful sons: Muhammad, Ahmad, ʿUmar, Ibrahim, and
Saleh (Figure 4.1). It was during ʿAbd al-Samad’s lifetime that the fortunes
of the family multiplied, with each of his sons earning high positions.76
Symbolic of this rise was the marked change in the appellations used to
identify Muhammad, likely his oldest son. In 1668, he was referred to sim-
ply as Sayyid Muhammad ibn al-Baraka,77 but both he and his father were
upgraded by 1677, when he was identified as fakhr al-sādāt al-kirām Sayyid
Muhammad, the son of fakhr al-s.ulah.āʾ (Pride of the Righteous – reserved
73 For example, ʿAbd al-Rahman was appointed naqı̄b al-ashrāf on February 8, 1729 (TICR 5:14) and
again a year later (TICR 5:154). He continued to serve as naqı̄b al-ashrāf at least until 1740. See
TICR 7:284. See also Tadmuri, Wathaʾiq nadira min sijillat al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya bi-Tarabulus,
498. Khalil Baraka served as qadi of Tripoli in 1783. Ibid., 524–525.
74 In 1814, Sayyid Darwish Muhammad Effendi Baraka zade presided over one of the Qalamon cases
discussed in Chapter 6. See TICR 43:184–185, dated Shawwal 12, 1229/September 27, 1814. In 1842,
his son, Sayyid Muhammad Darwish Baraka, reversed a decision that his father had made in the
same case twenty-eight years earlier. See TICR 57:33–34, dated Safar 4, 1258/March 17, 1842. Muham-
mad Darwish’s son, Ragheb, also served as qadi in Tripoli. See ʿAbdullah Habib Nawfal, Tarajim
ʿulamaʾ Tarabulus wa udabaʾiha (Tripoli: 1984): 109.
75 These claims are based on dozens of court cases involving ʿAbd al-Samad and his sons found in the
first five extant registers of the shariʿa court of Tripoli. These cover the years 1667–1730, albeit with
significant time gaps. For a lawsuit between two Baraka brothers involving large amounts of money
and connections with Ottoman governors, see TICR 10:109–110, 190.
76 The first mention of ʿAbd al-Samad as deceased (marh.ūm) is in a sale document dated early Safar
1097/mid-July 1686. TICR 3:78.
77 TICR 1:73–74.
168 Good Deeds
Ahmad Abd al-Samad
Saleh Ahmad Umar Ibrahim Muhammad
Abd al-Karim Abdullah Abida
asan Mustafa Muhammad

Hasan Abd al
al-Wahab
Wah
W h
Khadija Yusuf
Fatima Hasan
asa
Abd al-Latif Muhammad Maryam Sa diyya Ahmad Mustafa
Figure 4.1 Baraka family tree
for Sufi masters) Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad al-Baraka.78 Muhammad was also
referred to as fakhr al-tujjār (Pride of the Merchants) in 1677, and he served
as deputy of naqı̄b al-ashrāf (qāʾimmaqām al-naqı̄b bi-T 79
. arābulus). It was
Muhammad’s son, Hasan, who established the constitutive waqf of the
Baraka family analyzed in this section. The timing of this waqf was fairly
typical in that it came in the first generation following the rise of a branch.
A rather dramatic incident marked the Baraka family’s rise to promi-
nence – an incident that coincided with the upheavals and shifting power
78 TICR 2:241–242. 79 TICR 2:192–193, 290.

relations in the wake of the Ottoman reassertion of control over Bilad al-
Sham in the 1660s. The incident also underscores the affinities between
family and, for lack of a better phrase, “corporate citizenship” in an urban
community. It seems that a strongman by the name of Hajj Shehadeh b.
Hajj Zayn, better known as ʿAntar al-Dabbagh (ʿAntar the Tanner), ran an
extortion ring.80 According to his adversaries in court, ʿAntar and his gang
impoverished the tanners and struck fear in their hearts.
In 1668, Muhammad’s brother, Shaykh Ahmad al-Baraka, identified as
the head of the tanners’ guild, was instrumental in mobilizing the tan-
ners and creating an alliance between them and an impressive group of
religious leaders, whose names were affixed at the end of the court docu-
ment on which this narrative is based. According to the testimony in the
court case, Shaykh Ahmad, along with one ʿAli b. Jamal, the head war-
den of several guilds of Tripoli (a position known as akhı̄ bābā), succeeded
in removing ʿAntar al-Dabbagh from the city.81 The shariʿa court qadi at
the time concluded the case by condemning ʿAntar al-Dabbagh to death.82
This form of grass-roots mobilization within corporate structures, com-
bining guilds and Sufi orders, was a core feature of urban politics in the
early modern period and sometimes escalated to local uprisings against
Ottoman-appointed governors. One cannot read them, however, as strug-
gles between the periphery and the center or between the local Arab and
the “foreign” Turk.83 This rather minor incident is best seen in the con-
text of the second phase (1660s–1730s) in the ongoing and multifaceted
process of Ottomanization of the Arab lands, which reached deep into
provincial politics. This view, which challenges both the neo-Orientalist
80 The nickname “ʿAntar” refers to ʿAntar b. Shaddad, a legendary sixth-century pre-Islamic warrior
and poet, stories about whom were popular in Ottoman times and well into the twentieth century.
81 The term akhı̄ (ahı̄ in Turkish transliteration) referred originally to Sufi futūwa (chivalry/virtue)
organizations, whose history, significance to Ottoman urban history, and relationship to guilds have
been the subject of many debates. Suffice it to say that the combination of political muscle, joint
work by guilds and religious leaders, and emphasis on ethics and justice that we see in this case was
not unusual for the time. For an insightful discussion of ahı̄ organizations in urban development
and the bridging urban–rural relations in the context of early modern Ottoman history, see Murat
Dağlı, “Kütahya in the Eighteenth Century: Transformation or the Persistence of the Old Order?”
(PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012): 27–29, 44–45. Dağlı also notes that in the
Anatolian town of Kütayha during the early modern period, blacksmiths, tanners, and tinsmiths
had a single head warden with the title akhi baba. Ibid., 190.
82 TICR 2:96, dated end of Safar 1079/mid-August 1668. By the time the case was brought to the
shariʿa court, the grip of ʿAntar must have been already broken, for he was forced to appear in court
and listen to the qadi’s death sentence.
83 For example, see Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Al-ʿArab wa-l-ʿUthmaniyun, 1516–1916 (Damascus: Maktabat
Atlas, 1974): 233. For a discussion of this issue in the context of the 1730 uprising against the Ottoman
Governor of Tripoli, Ibrahim Pasha al-ʿAzm, see Faruuk Hublus, “Al-intifadat al-shaʿbiyya fi Tarab-
ulus,” in Lubnan fi al-qarn al-thamin ʿashar (Beirut: Dar al-Muntakhab al-ʿArabi, 1996): 288–289.
170 Good Deeds
decline paradigm and nationalist renderings of the past, has become main-
stream in Ottoman studies and has opened up rich veins of inquiry into
the political economies, class structures, and religious cultures of provin-
cial regions.84 Many families, including the Barakas, became part of the
machinery of Ottoman governance, often on their own terms and for their
own purposes. As we have seen, the upward mobility of the Baraka fam-
ily may have begun with support from members of the tanners and the
Khalwatiyya Sufi order, but they eventually translated their prominence in
local affairs into the Ottoman state institutions of naqābat al-ashrāf and
the shariʿa court, as well as into a wide range of economic ventures.
The increasing class distance and power inequality between the Baraka
family and its long-time allies in the tanners’ guild became especially clear
on August 28, 1729, when over thirty representatives of the tanners’ guild,
including past and present leaders, amassed in front of the shariʿa court
qadi and testified that they had collectively borrowed the considerable
sum of 720 piasters from fakhr al-sādāt Sayyid ʿAbd al-Wahab Çelebi and
Sayyid Muhammad Çelebi, sons of mafkhar al-sādāt al-muh.taramı̄n Sayyid
Ibrahim.85 The loan, as well as the appellations given to Ibrahim’s sons’
names, clearly position them as leading merchants/moneylenders. The
interest-free loan, made both in kind and in cash, effectively put the tan-
ners’ guild under the financial control of the Baraka family. The tanners
needed capital to purchase raw materials for the year, so they divided the
cash among themselves according to need, and agreed to collectively pay
back the entire amount one year from the registration of the deed, accord-
ing to the following schedule: one-half to be paid at the rate of thirty
piasters a month, the other half in full at the end of the year. The broth-
ers, by that time, were not only moneylenders, but also textile and olive
oil merchants, soap manufacturers, religious leaders, and experts and wit-
nesses on all sorts of legal, fiscal, and political matters. Most of all, they were
deeply involved in the most lucrative sector of Tripoli’s economy: irrigated
84 A footnote cannot do justice to the rich historical literature. Suffice it to say the initial wave of schol-
arship was characterized by a materialist approach that sought to integrate provincial political econ-
omy and social formations with imperial and global developments. The second wave was influenced
by a more discursive approach influenced by the cultural turn. Both stressed an Ottomanization
dynamic that challenged nationalist and modernization theory narratives. Some examples of stud-
ies of Ottomanization approaches during the early modern period are Peirce, Morality Tales; Ariel
Salzmann, “An Ancien Régime Revisited: ‘Privatization’ and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-
Century Ottoman Empire,” Politics & Society 21, no. 4 (1993): 393–423; Dina Rizk Khoury, State
and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997); Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the
Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
85 TICR 5:77, dated beginning of Safar 1142.
urban agriculture. Indeed, a major water canal and the orchards it fed in
the green belt around the city came to be known as the Baraka Canal (saqı̄
al-Baraka).86
The rise of the Baraka family was not a smooth process, nor, at the time,
self-evident. They continued to cultivate the tanners’ guild as a backbone
of their position in the social hierarchy of Tripoli, partly by recycling its
leadership between the five sons. For instance, Shaykh ʿUmar, the third
son of the founding figure, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad, became the head war-
den of the tanners’ and related guilds in Tripoli.87 This development met
resistance from a family that had held the position of akhı̄ bābā for over
three generations. In 1679, for instance, in response to a petition from the
guild leaders of Tripoli, the shariʿa court qadi of Tripoli dismissed Shaykh
ʿUmar from his position and appointed in his stead the former akhı̄ bābā,
fakhr al-sādāt al-kirām Sayyid ʿAli b. Sayyid Jamal. Since ʿAli’s father and
grandfather had previously held the same position, the petition was clearly
a response to the swift rise of the Barakas and a call for restoration of the
status quo. The petition may also have been an attempt to check the power
of the tanners’ guild, given the pointed warning by the shariʿa court qadi
to the elders of the tanners’ guild not to oppose this decision.88 The power
of the Baraka family and the tanners’ guild were not to be denied, how-
ever. The fourth son, Shaykh Ibrahim, amassed multiple appellations as
the venerable head of the Khalwatiyya Sufi order (of which his father was
also a leading member) and was appointed as akhı̄ bābā in 1687.89 This
same Ibrahim Baraka eventually became the naqı̄b al-ashrāf of Tripoli, a
position that was distant from the guild and futūwa identity of his youth
in terms of both political hierarchy and religious sensibility.90
86 See, for example, TICR 5:2. Another example of the properties in the green belt is found in the exten-
sive waqf of Sayyida ʿAbida, granddaughter of the patriarch ʿAbd al-Samad Baraka. She acquired
most of the waqf from her father, ʿUmar. TICR 5:129–131. For the Barakas’ status as notable experts,
see an iltizām (tax-farming) case in TICR 7:113–114.
87 See a document registered ten years later, in which elders of the tanners’ guild agreed on a formula
for assessing taxes per member. This document refers to “Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad Baraka and his two
sons, ʿUmar and Ibrahim.” The head of the guild at that time was from another family, but Shaykh
ʿAbd al-Samad and his sons were listed immediately following the names of the leaders. TICR 2:272,
dated Dhu al-Qaʿda 23, 1088/January 17, 1678. Tadmuri inaccurately states the reference as 3:272 and
the year as 1677. Tadmuri, Wathaʾiq nadira min sijillat al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya bi-Tarabulus, 162.
88 TICR 2:345 dated Rabiʿ I 14, 1090/April 25, 1679. The qadi rendered his decision in response to a
petition by the leaders of all the other guilds, all mentioned by name.
89 In this document, he is given a formidable appellation that focuses on his religious persona: fakhr al-
.sulah.āʾ al-sālikı̄n wa-l-atqiyāʾ al-nāsikı̄n Sayyid Ibrahim ibn al-Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad Baraka. TICR
3:132, dated early Jamadi I 1098/mid-March 1687.
90 In 1731, he was referred to as fakhr al-sādāt al-kirām Sayyid Ibrahim, known as ibn Baraka, the
former naqı̄b al-ashrāf. TICR 6:1, dated mid-Shaʿban 1143/February 2, 1731.
172 Good Deeds
Sayyid Hasan’s Patrimony
One reason for – and a byproduct of – the longevity of the Baraka fam-
ily’s prominence was the care and persistence with which its leading male
and female members accumulated, maintained, and expanded the family’s
patrimony (in the larger sense of the word), including both its cultural (per-
sonal and scholarly reputation, piety, generosity, leadership) and material
capital. The endowment of waqfs –constitutive, charitable, and supple-
mental – was critical to these efforts.91 Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad’s grandson,
fakhr al-sādāt Sayyid Hasan Çelebi b. Sayyid Muhammad Effendi Baraka
zade, achieved these goals by endowing two very different types of waqfs –
charitable and constitutive – in quick succession, thereby establishing him-
self as a leader of the family, a position he was eager – perhaps too eager,
considering he was still a young man at the time – to pass on to his descen-
dants. The charitable waqf was rather small, but it had enormous social,
cultural, and political value for the family as a whole. The constitutive fam-
ily waqf, in contrast, was very large in terms of the value of the properties
endowed, but was sharply focused on his young children.
On July 3, 1715, Sayyid Hasan established a charitable waqf for the ben-
efit of the members of the tanners’ guild.92 The waqf was clearly designed
to memorialize his father’s and grandfather’s successes in building up the
Baraka family and to generate a continuous stream of thawāb (heavenly
rewards) for his grandfather’s lineage. It was also designed to reward the
tanners’ guild for its crucial role in the Barakas’ upward mobility and polit-
ical power, while at the same time affirming the Baraka family’s leadership
and control of the guild. The waqf consisted of six shops (s. h.ānūt) inside
the tanners’ compound (dabbāghat T . arābulus), the revenues of which were
to be distributed to the tanners of Tripoli. The revenues served the pur-
poses of patronage and discipline in that Sayyid Hasan attached conditions
that governed precisely how they would be spent, on whom, for what pur-
poses, and when. Further, the conditions required the recipients to engage
in precisely choreographed performances of charity, piety, family, and com-
munity. One of the conditions of the waqf, for example, was that mem-
bers of the tanners’ guild who were h.uffāz. (those who had memorized the
91 See the following waqfs by Baraka family members: TICR 4:36; 5:129–131; and 30:145–148, 150. One
waqf is missing from the available registers: that of Ibrahim son of ʿAbd al-Samad. In one of the
other waqfs, a property is described as being adjacent to the waqf of Ibrahim son of ʿAbd al-Samad,
but this must have been endowed during one of the many years whose registers have been lost for
this period (TICR 5:130).
92 TICR 4:36, dated beginning of Rajab 1127. The timing, purpose, types of properties endowed, and
specific conditions strongly suggest that Sayyid Hasan established this waqf shortly following the
death of his father.
Qurʾan) were to gather in the Tanners Mosque (masjid al-dabbāgha) after
the evening prayer on Ramadan 27 each year. Also known as laylat al-qadr
(Night of Destiny), Ramadan 27 was the date when the first verses of the
Qurʾan were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and thus a popular occa-
sion for the performance of good deeds and the accumulation of heavenly
rewards. They were then to recite the entire Qurʾan (each taking a part) and
then repeat sūrat al-tawh.ı̄d (also known as sūrat al-ikhlās.) 70 000 times.
According to a widely accepted hadith, reading this sura once was equiv-
alent to reading a third of the Qurʾan.93 The thawāb of these recitations
were to go to the benefit of Hasan’s father’s soul, Hasan’s soul, and then
the souls of the Baraka family as a whole. After the recitations, the tan-
ners were to be served rice with pure-ghee cooked mutton, filtered honey,
and bread made from high-quality flour. Leftovers were to be distributed
among the poor of the tanners’ compound (fuqarāʾ al-dabbāgha).
The goal of the endowment was nothing less than baking the memory
of the family into the spatial order of the tanners’ guild. The six shops at
the center of the compound were turned into living mausoleums: spaces
devoted to the quotidian realities of making leather, yet producing rev-
enues designed to secure heavenly rewards for the Baraka family in the
afterlife.94 By endowing these workspaces and specifying a set of annual rit-
uals or performances, Hasan Baraka reinforced the centrality of his family
to the everyday life of the tanners, and symbolically erased the boundaries
between family and guild. The waqf document refers, not accidentally, to
.tāʾifat bayt Baraka (the Baraka Family Association), echoing the artisanal
roots of the family and indicating a view of blood kinship as analogous to
solidarity within a guild.95 This appellation reinforced the view of the patri-
line family as a corporation akin to a guild, which was also called .tāʾifa at
the time. In both types of families – guild brothers and blood kin – power
and property passed from father to son, and decisions on key issues (such
as payment of taxes) were made collectively through a hierarchical model
93 Continuous repetition of sūrat al-tawh.ı̄d is a practice called tahlı̄la and is usually performed on the
third day after a loved one’s death, as well as on special occasions such as laylat al-qadr. The verse
is:
In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful
Say: He, Allah, is One.
Allah is He on Whom all depend.
He begets not, nor is He begotten
And none is like Him.
94 All the properties endowed were ones Sayyid Hasan had inherited from his father, and were adjacent
to those of his paternal uncles. For example, one of the shops is identified as “sitting on the cellar
of the inheritors of his the deceased ʿUmar Baraka, Hasan’s paternal uncle.”
95 The term .tāʾifa was usually reserved for guilds or religious sects and is often translated as “group”
or “sect.” This suggests a strong agnatic solidarity, not unusual at times of rising fortunes.
174 Good Deeds
of elders and seniority. Indeed, the tanners’ compound seems to have been
organized by families in much the same way that the family compound was
organized by patrilines.96
While evincing solidarity and sameness, however, Sayyid Hasan’s chari-
table waqf laid bare the hierarchal structure within the tanners’ guild. In a
politically savvy and highly symbolic move, Sayyid Hasan put not only a
class, but also a generational – that is, temporal – distance between himself
and the tanners’ guild by appointing not himself, but his oldest paternal
uncle, fakhr al-ashrāf Sayyid Ahmad Çelebi akhı̄ bābā, as the mutawallı̄ of
the waqf. By putting the waqf in the hands of the older generation, Hasan
bent age and tradition to new modes of power and wealth. That is, the
waqf marked a point of rupture that celebrated beginnings but pointed to
a different future. The message was clear: “You are our family, and we are
your patrons, but you are no longer our central concern.”
With his duties to past alliances discharged and his concern for the souls
of his father and grandfather demonstrated (by his having secured heavenly
rewards on their behalf ), Hasan turned his attention to the establishment
of a constitutive family waqf. As already argued, constitutive waqfs can be
seen as a declaration to the community of a family’s ascendance into promi-
nence. Sayyid Hasan Baraka achieved prominence early in life by parlay-
ing his multifaceted inherited cultural capital – as a member of a rising
family that claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and through
his connections to guilds and Sufi orders, his religious learning, and his
“civic” presence as a witness in legal proceedings – into a successful com-
mercial career. By the time of his father’s death, he had already purchased
and built many properties and planted many orchards and groves.97 He
had also married and fathered two sons, which ensured the continuation
of the line. Having reached these three milestones – property accumula-
tion, a male progeny, and ascendancy to family leadership – the time was
right for Sayyid Hasan to consolidate some of his key properties into a sin-
gle indivisible patrimony and to endow them to his branch by establishing
a constitutive waqf.
As argued earlier, the constitutive waqfs of leading families are recog-
nizable by their ornamental phraseology, degree of detail, and exceptional
social mobilization, and by the size and range of properties endowed.
Shaykh Hasan’s waqf, endowed on May 30, 1716, displayed all these
96 See, for example, the description of the location of the Baraka shops inside the tanners’ compound
in the charitable waqf analyzed earlier.
97 For details, see later. In addition to his economic activities, Sayyid Hasan also served as a professional
witness in the shariʿa court. See, for example, TICR 5:21, 23, 45, 78, 84, 161, 163, 164, 168.
elements.98 Instead of the usual one to three lines of text about the religious
basis and significance of a waqf, this one had thirteen, with elaborate refer-
ences to and quotes from the Qurʾan and the hadith. Instead of the usual
professional witnesses plus two or three relations and friends, this one had
the names and seals of thirty-five men, who represented the broad contours
of Tripoli’s leading forces: religious leaders, Ottoman officials, wholesale
merchants, Sufi masters, and, not least, family members.99 The last were
key to the legitimacy of the waqf, for they were the most impacted by it and
the most likely to challenge it in court. It is very significant, therefore, that
the first name in the list of witnesses was Ibrahim, the oldest surviving son
of ʿAbd al-Samad Baraka and the most senior member of the family. This
effectively passed the leadership of the family to his nephew and signaled
that it was not his branch, but that of his older deceased brother, Muham-
mad, which had the honor of laying the foundational waqf and, for a brief
period at least, leading the family as a whole.
Most importantly, Shaykh Hasan’s waqf was typical in that the property
portfolio was large, diverse, and highly detailed. It was made up of a wide
range of productive properties, each of which was carefully described in
terms of size, content, location, and any other relevant information, such as
water rights, tax obligations, or the names of its co-owners or of waqf lands
of which it was part. Since irrigated urban agriculture was the major source
of wealth in Tripoli, agricultural properties were listed first. These include
four large wholly-owned and irrigated orchards on the most lucrative and
productive part of the green belt, between the city and the sea; 130 newly
planted olive trees in the rain-fed Zawiya subdistrict; thirty-one more olive
trees on another plot of land; sixty-five more on yet another; and nineteen
pear trees and twenty-four fig trees. The last were adjacent to the orchards
of the inheritors of Shaykh Hassan’s deceased uncle, Saleh, suggesting that
these properties were but part of a larger geographic footprint of the Baraka
family.
Next in order were residential properties. These were a combination of
the long-established Baraka extended family compound in mah.allat Zuqaq
al-Rumman (the Pomegranate Alley Quarter)100 and newly built properties
in other quarters that provided income from rentals. The former included
four large residential complexes (dār: multi-room houses, usually with a
98 TICR 4:90–93, dated end of Jamadi II 1128.

99 Original deeds (h.ujja) usually have more names, as not all are included in the court’s copy.
100 One of the landmarks of this quarter was and is the d.arı̄h. al-Baraka (Baraka Mausoleum), which
testifies to the long association between family and space. The mausoleum is mentioned in
Tadmuri, Wathaʾiq nadira min sijillat al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya bi-Tarabulus, 38.
176 Good Deeds
courtyard, fountain, and gardens) and a storage facility (qabw). The first
listed was the endower’s own residence: a clear message about the indivis-
ibility of this property and his wish that it remain the headquarters of his
branch until his line was extinct. The residence was adjacent to his sister
Fatima’s house, as well as to the residence of the inheritors of his deceased
uncle, Saleh, testifying yet again to the centrality of space in the produc-
tion of family. It consisted of two stories and, like the residences of other
wealthy families, it received water directly from the main canal of Tripoli.
The next two residences and the storage space were adjacent to the first
and had the same amenities. The last residence, located very close by in
mah.allat al-Yahūd (the Jewish Quarter), was newly built by the endower.
Commercial properties came last. These included a bakery, three wholly
owned shops, and a half share each of ten other shops. They were purely
investment properties, as indicated by Shaykh Hasan’s stipulation that that
they were not to be rented out for more than three years at a time, nor to
anyone who wielded political influence or who was in power (la yuʾajjar
ladhi shawakat wa-la ilā man yantamı̄ min h.ukkām al-ʿurf ). Fully aware that
long-term contracts by powerful military and government officials were a
time-honored way of effectively possessing someone else’s property or pri-
vatizing a waqf, Shaykh Hasan sought to make such a situation impossi-
ble. The carefully chosen and diverse portfolio of agricultural, residential,
commercial, and real estate rental properties constituted a self-sustaining
foundation – secure and stable revenue streams, housing, and status –
upon which Shaykh Hasan’s descendants could build their own futures.
As detailed later, the use of the French word “mortmain” to describe a waqf
as effectively “dead” property is inaccurate. A body of law elaborates on the
possibilities and limits of differential investment by beneficiaries in waqf
properties.
Shaykh Hassan’s diverse and impressively large portfolio was carefully
pieced together and designed to maximize his branch’s chances for suc-
cess and continuity. Children were the primary beneficiaries of all family
waqfs in both Nablus and Tripoli throughout the periods under study, for
it was the branch, not the extended family that lay at the center of property
devolution strategies. Shaykh Hasan’s was not an exception. He named his
two existing children, Sayyid Mustafa and Sayyid Ahmad, as well as any
future children he might have, as the sole beneficiaries after his death, with
the share of males twice that of females. In a manner typical for Tripoli
but unusual for Nablus, Shaykh Hasan ensured the complete exclusion of
his closest male agnatic relatives, such as brothers and paternal uncles and
cousins, by not designating them as next in line after the extinction of his
progeny. Rather, he designated his sister, Sayyida Fatima, and her progeny.
It is not clear from the waqf whether Fatima was married or had children,
but we do know that she lived across the street from Sayyid Hasan, with
whom she obviously had a close relationship.
This narrowly vertical pattern of beneficiaries was in tension with the
word .tāʾifa – which indicates horizontal solidarity of males within a cor-
porate structure, whether Sufi, guild, or blood relatives – which was used
in this waqf, not accidentally, to identify the Baraka family (t.āʾifat bayt
Baraka). How could Shaykh Hasan claim the mantle of leadership over
the Barakas as a patrilineal collection of branches while excluding them
from core properties established by his grandfather, the family patriarch?
This paradox is visible precisely because the appellation .tāʾifa was rarely
used in reference to a family. This paradox is also an important reminder
that the family waqf was only one of several concurrent property devolu-
tion strategies (perhaps the most important of which was marriage), which
worked on multiple and sometimes contradictory levels. For instance, ver-
tical family waqf beneficiary patterns could be checked, theoretically, by
the not unusual practice of cousin marriage, although there is no evi-
dence that this was widely practiced among propertied families in Tripoli
at the time. More effective, perhaps, were the constraints posed by the
many ways that the Baraka estates were enmeshed with one another, both
in terms of concentration in specific geographical locations and in terms
of multiple access rights. These enmeshments – joint ownership, part-
nership, moneylending, sharing of resources, close living quarters – can
also be seen as constituting a larger Baraka space of exchanges, under-
girding the extended Baraka family as a viable association and a discrete
corporate entity in the social sphere.101 By the same token, the rhetoric
of corporatism as a means of mobilization and discipline within the
extended agnatic group was often checked by family charters and prop-
erty devolution strategies that drew tight boundaries around the conjugal
family and privileged the endower’s direct descendants, male and female
alike.
This tension may partially explain why waqf endowers in Tripoli (but
not in Nablus) usually set aside revenues for good deeds, which funded
101 The position of the administrator of the waqf, for instance, would remain under the control of the
endower until his death, then pass to his children and descendants. Once his branch was extinct,
the office would pass on to his sister’s progeny, then to “whomever is found from the Baraka
household association (ilā man yūjad min .tāʾifat bayt Baraka),” and then, finally, to the Hanafi
Mufti of Tripoli. The last condition was a slap in the face for the Tripoli shariʿa court qadi, who
was almost always named as the last resort in other family waqf endowments.
178 Good Deeds
rituals that not only bridged the divide between horizontal solidarity and
vertical transmission, but also expanded the family to include the reli-
gious establishment and the community as a whole. Good deeds gener-
ated heavenly rewards for the endower and his or her descendants and
generated cultural capital by subsidizing the religious establishment and
distributing food to the poor of Tripoli. Shaykh Hasan set aside signif-
icant amounts of money for both purposes, in two ways: the daily dis-
tribution of bread made from high-quality flour to “Muslims” at a total
cost of sixty silver piasters a year (a very large sum for the time) and
the creation of ten jobs for religious workers at the rate of one-half a
piaster each, for a total of five piasters a month. Yet again, the mathe-
matical symmetry of piety is on full display, as the total would be sixty
piasters a year. The job description for the al-h.uffāz. al-s.uluh.āʾ (literally,
the pious, devout, or righteous memorizers) of the Qurʾan was elaborate.
All ten were to sit in al-ʿAttar Mosque and each was to read a part of
the Qurʾan in sequence. At midday on the third day, they were to com-
plete the reading (khit.m al-Qurʾan) in the presence of the administrator
of the waqf, then proceed to recite the names of God. The rewards for
these good deeds were to accrue, first, to Shaykh Hasan’s soul and then,
in expanding concentric circles, to the souls of his parents, his ances-
tors (ajdādahu), his kin (aqribāʾahu), and Muslims in general (ʿāmmat al-
muslimı̄n). There was no place in this waqf for the Khalwatiyya Sufi order
that had been so instrumental to the Baraka family name two generations
earlier.
This constitutive family waqf, like others in Tripoli, laid the religious,
legal, spiritual, and material foundations for the Shaykh Hasan branch,
in particular, and for the rest of the Baraka family generally, as a notable
kinship group in Tripoli. In so doing, it articulated a model of the mean-
ing, structure, and boundaries of family and its place in society and the
afterlife. It was, in this sense, a dyke against the river of time – the hope
being that it would continue to shape family relations and keep the fam-
ily extant. Anticipation, therefore, was central to designing a waqf. For
instance, Sayyid Hasan anticipated the possibility of having more children,
so he specified that the beneficiaries should include his “existing” children,
Mustafa and Ahmad, and “any future children that God may bestow on
him, the share of the male twice that of the female.” Sure enough, after the
establishment of the waqf, Sayyid Hasan fathered two daughters, Saʿdiyya
and Maryam, both from the same mother as Mustafa and Ahmad. Sayyid
Hasan also married two other women, with whom he fathered a son each:
Muhammad and ʿAbd al-Latif.102 All automatically became beneficiaries of
his waqf according to the conditions he had laid out.
The Baraka Waqf as a Field of Economic Investment, Power Relations,

and Law-Making
Sayyid Hasan’s constitutive waqf, despite his best efforts to design it in
such a way that it could anticipate and pre-empt disputes that might arise
after his death, had the disadvantage of being endowed too early in his
life. Many disagreements were bound to crop up between the three sets of
half-siblings that constituted his progeny, most of whom were born after
the waqf’s endowment. The differing combinations of maternal kin, ages,
sexes, and in-laws (for the sisters) dispersed Sayyid Hasan’s six children
from three wives into different locations in the social fabric of the city in
terms of wealth, status, and political networks. The waqf, not surprisingly,
became a source not of harmony and discipline, but of persistent conflict.
Conflict is the fuel of historical narratives, and the bundle of lawsuits
concerning Sayyid Hasan’s waqf does not disappoint in this regard. Indeed,
the lawsuits testify to the resilience and flexibility of family waqfs and the
sophisticated legal terrain on which they were managed. The social life of
Sayyid Hasan’s waqf after his death supports two general arguments. First,
constitutive waqfs were not frozen time capsules, but living estates respon-
sive to investment, market forces, and shifts in power relations. Second,
robust legal and cultural mechanisms, formal and informal, were available
for the management of conflict, the enabling of differential capital invest-
ment in waqf properties, and the extension of the life of the waqf well past
the critical two-generation milestone.
Family waqfs, especially constitutive ones, were high-maintenance
affairs. The passage of time only multiplies the forces of contingency – such
as accidents of birth and death and sudden political and economic shifts –
that threaten even the best-laid plans. Keeping patrimonies intact and prof-
itable required careful planning, management, capital investment, and all-
too-frequent legal stitching through lawsuits, which, in turn, generated a
102 In the lawsuit cited earlier, Muhammad and ʿAbd al-Latif are identified as brothers, but in the very
next document recorded in the register (see later), they are identified as half-brothers. The latter
document removes Muhammad from his position as administrator of the Sayyid Hasan waqf and
appoints ʿAbd al-Latif in his place. While it is not absolutely certain that ʿAbd al-Latif and Ahmad
were half brothers, the sensitive nature of the latter document and the very precise way it was
written lead me to conclude that it is reliable.
180 Good Deeds
constant stream of fatwas; hence, law-making. As indicated in Chapter 2,
lawsuits involving family waqfs made up a substantial percentage of all law-
suits recorded in the shariʿa courts registers of Tripoli and Nablus. Equally
as important, legal queries concerning the waqf dwarfed all others cate-
gories in the fatwa collections of the two most famous muftis in Bilad
al-Sham during this period: Khayr al-Din al-Ramli and Ibn ʿAbidin.
The biggest cluster of waqf-related fatwas for al-Ramli concerned the
proper distribution of revenues among legal beneficiaries. A smaller clus-
ter dealt with disputes regarding capital investment in and use of endowed
properties. These were the precise issues that animated the internal conflict
among the beneficiaries of Sayyid Hasan’s waqf. In Rajab 1157/August 1744,
twenty-eight years after the establishment of the waqf, the three groups of
half-siblings divided up (iqtasamū) the waqf so that each individual could
manage his or her allotted share as he or she deemed best. The driving
force behind this agreement was the desire of one of the siblings, ʿAbd
al-Latif, to invest heavily in the productive capacity of the orchards. He
wanted to make sure that the fruits (literally) of this investment accrued to
him directly, not to the waqf as a whole.103 It might seem as if the bene-
ficiaries of Sayyid Hasan’s waqf privatized the waqf, thus negating its very
purpose. However, although the word for division (qisma) usually refers
to privately owned property, its legal meaning can differ when it is used
for waqf.104 In this instance, the division was not for the purpose of pri-
vate ownership (tamalluk), but for the purpose of investment – a legal
arrangement known as qismat h.ifz. wa-ʿamāra (Preservation and Develop-
ment Division).105 In the words of the lawsuit, the half-siblings “divided up
all the waqf properties – both inside and outside the town – according to a
Preservation and Development Division; and each took possession of [his
or her] legally allotted share.” The very words used for this arrangement
assume that a waqf can be, simultaneously, a sphere of investment and a
self-contained repository. H . ifz. wa-ʿamāra division allowed each beneficiary
a specific property or share of a property, to collect its revenue and/or invest
in it for as long as certain legal conditions were met. The roles of the qadi
and the administrator were crucial here. The qadi had to make sure that
beneficiaries were allocated their proper shares according to the intentions
103 By this time, Sayyid Hasan and his second-oldest son from his first marriage, Ahmad, had died.
Power within the family did not pass on to the oldest son, Mustafa, but to the second-oldest,
Muhammad, who became the administrator of the waqf.
104 I thank Baber Johansen for this insight. Conversation, April 10, 2011.
105 “Iqtasamū . . . jamiʿʿaqarāt al-wāqif al-kāʾina bat.n al-balda wa-khārijiha qismat h.ifz. wa-ʿamara wa-
wad.aʿa kullun minhum yadahu ʿala mā uqirra lahu bi-t.arı̄q al-istih.qāq al-sharʿı̄.”
of the endower (as set in the text of the endowment). The administra-
tor, meanwhile, had to make sure that a key condition of this type of
division – that all parties were informed about and approved the actions
of the others – was implemented.106 Such an arrangement, in other words,
required a clear and actively maintained consensus, which severely limited
the extent to which a waqf could be effectively subdivided by beneficiaries.
It is not clear how widespread this arrangement was at the time, nor when
it became part of accepted Hanafi doctrine.107 We do know that a fatwa by
Khayr al-Din al-Ramli argued for its legality based on his reading of several
canonical Hanafi jurists and texts, including Shihab al-Din al-Halabi.108
This agreement was followed four years later by a second and more com-
plex arrangement, testifying to the resilience and flexibility of family waqfs
and the sophisticated legal terrain on which they were managed. Starting
May 21, 1748, the half-siblings met in court twice over a two-day period and
orchestrated the production of three legal documents in four legal moves:
a double lawsuit (two lawsuits in a single document) and two letters of
appointment to the position of mutawallı̄ (waqf administrator). These doc-
uments restored the waqf to its former state, reimbursed one of the siblings
for monies he had invested into the waqf, removed the administrator, and
concocted a unique arrangement for the waqf’s future management.109
The first move was a lawsuit in which Mustafa and his two full sisters,
Saʿdiyya and Maryam, sued their half-brother, Muhammad, the admin-
istrator of the waqf. The two men represented themselves, and the two
sisters were represented by their husbands, neither of whom belonged to
the Baraka family. The plaintiffs claimed that the existing Preservation and
Development Division agreement was unfair because it contained exces-
sive undervaluing (ghabn fāh.ish) and thus excessive loss for the aggrieved
party.110 They asked the qadi to nullify the arrangement and to return
106 See Zuhdi Yakan, Qanun al-waqf al-dhurri (Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa, 1964): 47–48.
107 For examples of such cases from another coastal area, Sidon, see Ghassan Munir Sinno, Madi-
nat Sayda, 1818–1860: Dirasa fi al-ʿumran al-hadari min khilal wathaʾiq mahkamatiha al-sharʿiyya
(Beirut: al-Dar al-ʿArabiyya lil-ʿUlum, 1988): 471.
108 Ramli, Al-fatawa al-khayriyya, vol. 1, 119. It is beyond the scope of this study to trace the genealogy
of this legal concept through the authorities cited by Ramli and by the mufti of Tripoli at the
time, Shaykh ʿUthman Effendi al-Karama, who also ruled on the case. Suffice it to say that they
cited Hanafi texts such as al-Halabi’s Multaqa al-Abhur and al-Qunawı̄’s al-Qunya as being in favor
of legal mechanisms that would allow investment in waqf properties, especially those involved in
agriculture. It is not a coincidence that Ramli ruled on this issue, for he owned coastal orchards and
was involved in a larger debate about private property and waqf in Bilad al-Sham. See Chapter 6
for details.
109 TICR 10:12, dated Jamadi I 23, 1161; and TICR 10:13, dated Jamadi I 24, 1161.
110 The question of intentional deception is important to whether an arrangement which contains
excessive undervaluing can legally stand or not, but that is beyond the scope of this case study. See
182 Good Deeds
the waqf to its former state so that the administrator could maintain and
develop it as a whole.111 The defendant readily agreed to the request, and
the qadi, citing the agreement among the litigants, nullified the division
without calling witnesses. By way of legal justification, the qadi noted
that according to Hanafi jurisprudence, the Preservation and Development
Division, while legal, could be revoked upon the request of any beneficiary.
This lawsuit was but a preamble that cleared the legal ground for a sec-
ond and more consequential one, which literally began on the same line on
which the first ends, leaving no doubt that they should be considered as a
pair (Figure 4.2). In it, ʿAbd al-Latif sued his half-siblings, asking them to
reimburse him the amount of 329 piasters he had spent in additional invest-
ment expenses in the orchard that had been parceled out to him. Specifi-
cally, he claimed that he had earlier secured permission from Muhammad,
the waqf administrator, to make this investment, with the understanding
that he would have raqaba (guardianship) over the property.112 Since the
division was now nullified, he asked that he be reimbursed this money from
the revenue (ghalla) of the waqf. The defendants denied that such permis-
sion was issued, so ʿAbd al-Latif provided two credible witnesses and the
qadi ruled in his favor, citing a fatwa by the mufti of Tripoli at the time,
ʿUthman Effendi al-Karama. Karama himself cited Khayr al-Din al-Ramli,
to the effect that if permission were given by a waqf administrator to one
of the waqf’s beneficiaries to invest in a share allocated to him through
a Preservation and Development Division, then that investment must be
repaid from the revenues of the waqf as a whole once that division was
nullified.
The third move took place the next day – May 22, 1748 – when Muham-
mad legally testified in court that he was no longer capable of performing
his duties as mutawallı̄ (administrator) of Sayyid Hasan’s waqf and asked
to be removed from his position. The qadi removed him and appointed his
M. Y. Izzi Dien, “Taghrı̄r,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E.
Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Brill Online), accessed April 12, 2011, http://www
.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-7299; Chafik Chehata, “ʿAk.d,” in Encyclopae-
dia of Islam, 2nd edn., eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and
W. P. Heinrichs (Brill Online), accessed April 12, 2011, http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?
entry=islam_SIM-0460.
111 “Yurı̄duna shat.b al-qisma wa-iʿādataha ilā al-shuyūʿ wa-d.abt.iha thata yad al-mutawallı̄ li-yaqūma
bi-iʿmāriha wa-mā fı̄ numūwiha wa-baqāʿʿayninha.”
112 Raqaba is the term usually used in such cases. However, since the word has a much more expansive
meaning when it comes to ownership, I translated it here as “guardianship” to emphasize the
context of investment in waqf land and the subsequent debt that the waqf owes to the investor.
See Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Ownership of Real Property by Foreigners in Syria, 1869–1873,” in New
Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, ed. Roger Owen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000): 228.
Figure 4.2 Baraka double lawsuit

184 Good Deeds
half-brother, ʿAbd al-Latif, in his place. Then the qadi took the unusual step
of appointing his half-sister, Sayyida Saʿdiyya, as ʿAbd al-Latif’s superinten-
dent (nāz.ira), and ordered ʿAbd al-Latif not to collect or spend any waqf
revenues without her knowledge.113 He also appointed Saʿdiyya’s husband,
Sayyid ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Samadi, as her legal representative.114 The qadi
thus set up four layers of control in order to ensure the integrity of Sayyid
Hasan’s waqf as a charter for the Baraka family: ʿAbd al-Latif, Saʿdiyya,
ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Samadi, and, of course, the qadi himself. In effect, the
Baraka waqf was to be administered under the watchful eye of an in-law
from another family. Mustafa, the oldest son, was never able, for reasons
unknown, to take leadership of Sayyid Hasan’s branch, so his sister Saʿdiyya
acted as a check on her half-siblings, who were obviously much more ener-
getic in developing the waqf properties. This arrangement would be highly
unusual – if not inconceivable – in Nablus, due to a fear that the family’s
patrimony would come under the control of a rival.
The fourth and final move formalized the arrangement with an official
appointment letter from the qadi to ʿAbd al-Latif. In this letter, ʿAbd al-
Latif was appointed to
take control of all the . . . orchards, houses, shops, and olive trees; to collect
their revenues; to deduct the amount of 329 piasters; . . . to pay the benefi-
ciaries of the good deeds (arbāb al-mabarrāt) what they have been allocated
[by the waqf deed for performing these deeds such as reading the Qurʾan
or distributing food] after deducting the [expenses] of maintenance and
development of the waqf. Whatever remains, you shall divide up among
the beneficiaries.115
With the guidance of the qadi and the mufti on a complex legal journey,
the children of Sayyid Hasan – three pairs of half-brothers and -sisters, mar-
ried and with their own children – were able to constitute and reconstitute
themselves as kin group related not only by blood, but also by membership
in a foundation that embodied a vision of what family was and how the
relations between its members ought to be regulated. Crucially, they were
113 In Nablus and Tripoli, the word nāz.ir usually refers to a waqf superintendent who oversees one
or more waqf administrator (mutawallı̄). For a brief discussion of usage in Beirut during the nine-
teenth century, see Moumtaz, “Modernizing Charity,” 138–139.
114 TICR 10:13, dated Jamadi I 24, 1161/May 21, 1748. The exact text for this unusual arrangement
is “wa-nasaba . . . Sayyid ʿAbd al-Lat.ı̄f Çelebi wa-qarrara al-tawliyya ʿalayhi . . . wa-nasaba ukhtahu
al-sayyida Saʿdiyya nāz.ira ʿalayhi wa-aqāma zawjaha al- sayyid ʿAbd al-Rah.man al-Samadı̄ wakı̄lan
ʿanha fı̄ dhālika wa-an lā yaqbud. al-mutawallı̄ shayʾan wa-lā yas.rufuhu illā bi-maʿrifat al-nāz.ira
aw-wakı̄luha wa-ittilaʿihuma ʿalayh.”
115 TICR 10:13, dated Jamadi I 24, 1161.
Conclusion 185
also able to make use of a sophisticated body of law to oversee the eco-
nomic management of and differential investment in the waqf properties,
backed by and implemented through an effective legal and moral gover-
nance structure under the shariʿa court, which gave waqfs flexibility and
resilience. The lawsuits unpacked in this case study would not, of course,
be the final act in the social life of the Sayyid Hasan waqf. Waqfs, especially
constitutive ones, are not events as the word “act” implies. They can be bet-
ter understood as processes that shaped family life, economic interactions,
the local moral order, and the spiritual environment during the seventeenth
through the nineteenth centuries, especially in provincial cities and towns
such as Nablus and Tripoli.
4.4 Conclusion
Cole and Wolf, in their study of European peasants in two northern Italian
villages, capture the gist of the dilemma facing societies characterized by
vertical property transmission: perpetuating the family line while providing
a patrimony flexible enough to ensure the future of the kin who count:
He would like to see every daughter well married and every son with land
enough to support a family. Then too, he would like to see the holding that
he has maintained against the world for a lifetime remain essentially intact
to provide a material basis for perpetuation of the family line. However, the
meager resources at his disposal are, more often than not, insufficient to
fulfill both these goals. He must balance his desires to perpetuate his name
against the future of his children.116
The availability of the waqf in Muslim societies allowed for a partial reso-
lution of this dilemma. By transferring ownership to God, endowers were
able, theoretically at least, to maintain the integrity and viability of their
property as a whole, as well as to assign its revenues only to designated ben-
eficiaries in whatever formula was deemed best, depending on the number
and sex of existing children, as well as their age and marital status. It also
resolved the problem of perpetuating one’s name, for the endower was for-
ever the source of this bounty and was guaranteed through enactiment of
this good deed a great many blessings in heaven. During his or her lifetime,
the endower maintained virtually full control over the properties, magnify-
ing the disciplinary power of inter vivos property devolution. Beneficiaries,
moreover, had legal instruments at their disposal through which to make
investments in waqf properties. Largely ignored in most of the literature on
116 Cole and Wolf, The Hidden Frontier.
186 Good Deeds
the waqf, these and other advantages allowed propertied individuals to pur-
sue a number of objectives simultaneously. In this sense, the endowment
of a waqf was much more than a legal and pious act; it was fundamentally
a social one that enjoyed wide currency in urban areas of Bilad al-Sham
during the centuries of Ottoman rule, especially the period under study.
This chapter has examined the waqf as a social act by asking: Who
endowed waqfs and why? A comparative analysis of all family waqfs during
the 1660s–1730s and 1800–60 periods shows Tripoli and Nablus each had
unique profiles in terms of correlation between motivations, class, gen-
der, property portfolios, beneficiaries, and the financing of good deeds,
among other things. True, in both cities high-status individuals were over-
represented, and in both cities the use of the waqf became more pervasive
among middling groups around the turn of the nineteenth century. It is also
true that the most important motivation, especially for upwardly mobile
individuals, was a constitutive one: to lay a foundation for a respectable and
leading family unit in society. Beyond that, however, there were important
and systematic differences in how family was organized and in the place of
females in kinship relations.
The profile of waqf endowers in Tripoli bulged in the middle and tapered
at the top and bottom, while that in Nablus bulged at the top and narrowed
at the bottom. The percentage of supplementary waqfs – those designed
for orphans and other unfortunate kin and non-kin who fell through the
cracks of property devolution – was much higher in Tripoli than in Nablus.
The same holds for the percentage of charitable and mixed waqfs. Morover,
in Tripoli, most waqfs set aside a considerable percentage of their revenues
for the funding of good deeds, such as the distribution of food and the
recitation of the Qurʾan. This was a rare practice in Nablus. Good deeds
funded by waqf revenues were critical to the articulation of disciplinary
moral and spiritual power within households and for increasing the social
capital of family in society. The waqfs of Nablus did not play this role and,
consequently, were marginal to funding the local religious establishment.
The most noticeable differences are the gender and agnate gaps. In
Tripoli, males and females were equally active in establishing waqfs, and
consistently so over time. In Nablus, men accounted for the overwhelming
majority of waqf endowers, with the percentage of female endowers drop-
ping to zero by 1844. Strikingly, the more the Nablus economy focused on
manufacturing and on funding the production of commercial agricultural
commodities through moneylending, the more women were excluded and
the more centralized extended-family households became the norm. Over
the course of the nineteenth century, there was a marked increase in joint
Conclusion 187
endowments by male siblings, paternal cousins, and paternal uncles and
nephews. The opposite held true for Tripoli, where joint waqfs by agnates
were virtually non-existent, and women established waqfs at the same rate
as men. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the growing role of Tripoli in silk
production and in commercial production of citrus for regional and Euro-
pean markets reinforced the focus on the conjugal family, including female
children, who often were given the same share as their male siblings. These
variations in the social act of endowing waqfs in Tripoli and Nablus antici-
pated and partly accounted for the dramatic differences in beneficiary pat-
terns, which are the subject of the next chapter.
ch a p ter 5
Who’s In? Who’s Out?

The Waqf as a Boundary Marker
The manner of splitting property is a manner of splitting people; it creates

(or in some cases reflects) a particular constellation of ties and cleavages
between husband and wife, parents and children, sibling and sibling, as
well as between wider kin.
Jack Goody, 19761
Equally to my children and children’s children, the male not to be preferred
over the female.
Waqf endowment by Hasan al-Tabbal, Tripoli, 18152
[The witness] is of one of those who disinherit women.
Lawsuit in the Nablus shariʿa court, 18433
In the winter of 1833, a well-to-do landowner and merchant in Tripoli,

Sayyid Hajj ʿAli, son of the deceased Sayyid Muhammad Sabbagh, took a
long, hard look at his life. Well on in years, he wanted to devolve his con-
siderable properties before his death, but the world around him seemed
suddenly uncertain and volatile. His complicated family situation, more-
over, presented him with difficult choices in terms of where to draw the
boundaries around kin and property. How should he go about devolving
his property? Who were the rightful beneficiaries?
The world around him was literally up in arms. Tens of thousands of
Egyptian soldiers marched on Bilad al-Sham in November of 1831, and the
very survival of the Ottoman Empire seemed in doubt as its own gover-
nor of Egypt, Mehmet ʿAli Pasha, inflicted defeat upon defeat on its armed
1 Goody et al., Family and Inheritance.
2 “Awlādahim bi-l-sawı̄yyāt lā-yufad.d.al dhakarahim ʿalā unthāhim.” TICR 44:174–175, dated Muhar-
ram 28, 1231/December 30, 1815.
3 From an argument made by Ibrahim and ʿAbd al-Ghani, sons of Shaykh Nasir al-Mansur, against a
witness from the village of Qaryut, near Nablus, NICR 10:89, dated Muharram 14, 1259/February 14,
1843. The exact wording is “innahu mina alladhı̄na lā-yuwarrithūna al-nisāʾ.” They also objected that
he pimped his female siblings: “He sold his sisters in Jabal al-Quds without a legal contract” (“innahu
baʿa akhawātahi fı̄ Jabal al-Quds bidūn ʿaqd sharʿı̄”). In this particular case, the second witness was
also dismissed as a person who received a bribe for his testimony.
188
Who’s In? Who’s Out? 189
forces. Initially unprepared for a military confrontation, one of the first
actions of the Ottoman sultan in the winter of 1832 was to peel Tripoli
off from the province of Sidon and restore its status as a province in its
own right. He used Tripoli as a base for securing the coastal areas north of
the fortified city of Acre, then under siege, while tasking the governor of
Aleppo with focusing on the interior areas. ʿUthman Pasha was appointed
as Tripoli’s governor, but he and his troops proved no match for the com-
mander of the Egyptian forces, Ibrahim ʿAli Pasha, who easily won the
first battle near Homs in March 1832, even while most of his army was still
laying siege to Acre.4 The Egyptian victory shifted the political landscape.
In Tripoli, an Egyptian government administrator from Aleppo replaced
Mustafa Agha Barbar, the local strongman who had long ruled the city.
Meanwhile, there was already much talk of an armed uprising against Egyp-
tian rule, which in fact broke out in Palestine in 1834. This series of events
constituted a major psychological and political shock, the likes of which
had not been experienced in living memory.
ʿAli’s family situation was complicated, because he had no male heir.
In 1833, he was father to four mature daughters, at least one of whom
had been married for some time. Further complicating matters, ʿAli’s only
brother, Mustafa, had recently died, leaving behind mature sons. In decid-
ing how to devolve his property, therefore, ʿAli had to take into account the
legal rights and cultural expectations of his paternal nephews, for accord-
ing to Islamic rules of inheritance, they were entitled to one-third of their
uncle’s estate. In order to strengthen their position in claiming this poten-
tial inheritance, ʿAli’s nephews did not partition their deceased’s father’s
orchards between themselves, but instead maintained a united front and
collectively worked these lands, many of which were co-owned by ʿAli. In
so doing, Mustafa’s sons sent their paternal uncle a clear message: they
were the heirs and guardians of the Sabbagh family (as defined by its
male lineage). Like most propertied individuals, however, ʿAli was deter-
mined to settle the question of property devolution before his death. As
the leading member of what the court document referred to as bani (lit-
erally, “sons of” or “male progeny of”) the Sabbagh patrilineal line of
descent, the question he faced was: To whom and under what condi-
tions should he devolve his share of the family patrimony in light of the
4 Useful here is the account by Nawfal Niʿmat Allah Nawfal (1811–87), a man who occupied important
administrative posts in Tripoli during this period. Nawfal Niʿmat Allah Tarabulusi, Jirji Yanni, Mishal
Abu Fadil, and Jan Nakhkhul, Kashf al-litham ʿan muhayya al-hukuma wa-al-ahkam fi iqlimay Misr
wa-barr al-Sham (Tripoli: Jarrous Press, 1990): 279–280, 285–286. See also Khaled Muhammad Safi,
Al-Hukum al-Masri fi Filastin, 1831–1840 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2010): 74.
190 Who’s In? Who’s Out?
uncertainities of Egyptian rule, the absence of a male heir, and the pressure
from his nephews?
ʿAli’s answer, which was typical for Tripoli at the time, was to give his
wife and daughters everything. On February 1, 1833, he appeared before the
qadi of the Tripoli shariʿa court and endowed all his property as a family
waqf.5 He specified that one-eighth of the revenues should be allocated
to his wife and seven-eighths to his daughters and any future children he
might have, the share of the male twice that of the female. This included
twenty-two orchards and olive groves, a house, a room, and two shops. In
short, he followed the Islamic rules of inheritance except in one regard: he
excluded his paternal nephews, even though there was plenty of property
to go around.
ʿAli Sabbagh’s decision was a deliberate one, for he took additional steps
to completely exclude his nephews. First, he did not designate them and
their progeny as beneficiaries following the extinction of his own lineage.
The revenues would, instead, revert to charitable purposes. Second, he
specifically appointed his oldest daughter as the administrator of the waqf
after his death, then added that his daughter’s husband, who was not from
the Sabbagh family, should manage the waqf on her behalf. He even set
aside a considerable annual stipend to his son-in-law in compensation for
his efforts. The message to his nephews and to the community at large was
clear: there was no room for agnates in this property devolution strategy.
Unlike his contemporaries in Nablus, ʿAli’s vision of family patrimony was
not dependent on devolution through the male line. This example of the
disassociation between family name and family patrimony in Tripoli would
be nothing short of a radical – perhaps even incomprehensible – move in
the context of Nablus.6
In one fundamental respect, however, ʿAli Sabbagh’s legal barricade
against his deceased brother’s children illustrates a fundamental similarity
between Tripoli and Nablus when it comes to beneficiary patterns in fam-
ily waqfs. In both cities, there is a laser focus on vertical property devolu-
tion and a marginalization of horizontal property flows through lateral kin,
including agnates.7 That is, the endower’s direct line of descent was always
5 TICR 52:91–93.
6 One could argue that ʿAli Sabbagh constructed a transmission strategy that turned his married daugh-
ter into a social male and his son-in-law into a social female. The son-in-law moved into his wife’s
house and acted as an adopted son, looking after his wife’s parents and helping her produce sons for
her natal group. For the inheriting female as a social male, see Goody, “Strategies of Heirship,” 11–12.
7 This is not to say that agnates were excluded as a rule. There were many endowments in which pater-
nal cousins, nephews, and nieces (and maternal ones as well, in the case of Tripoli) were included,
but only after the endower’s line of descent became extinct.
Who’s In? Who’s Out? 191
Table 5.1 Beneficiaries (aside from oneself ) in family waqf endowments8
Tripoli Nablus Tripoli Nablus

Beneficiaries 1650s–1730s 1650s–1730s 1800–60 1800–60
Children 12 30 83 108
Future children 3 1 20 1
Children and grandchildren 1 2 4 13
Children and spouse 5 2 28 6
Grandchildren only 3 1 6 5
Grandchildren and kin – – 3 –
Other kin 3 – 29 5
Non-kin – – 3 –
Total 27 36 176 138
privileged in the family waqfs of both cities. For Nablus during the 1660s–
1730s and 1800–60 periods, a remarkable ninety-seven and ninety-three per
cent, respectively, of all family waqfs designated children as the sole ben-
eficiaries following the death of the endower (see Table 5.1). For Tripoli,
the numbers were seventy-eight and seventy-seven per cent, respectively.
This effectively excluded spouses, parents, and agnates – who made up the
largest pool of potential legal inheritors – were post-mortem Islamic rules
of inheritance shares (ʿilm al-farāʾid.) to apply. Agnates, as indicated ear-
lier, were eligible to inherit in the not uncommon event that the endower
had only female children or no children at all, which were both substan-
tive statistical probabilities. 9 Yet, only one out of the hundreds of family
waqfs in either city designated agnates as primary beneficiaries.10 This is
not to say that agnates were completely ruled out as waqf beneficiaries.
They were sometimes listed in step three or four following the extinction
of the endower’s progeny (the incidence was much higher in Nablus than
in Tripoli, suggesting that the contradiction between the branch and the
extended family, as defined by male lineages, was a constant source of ten-
sion in Nablus).
8 TICR: 1–6, 29, 30–33, 35, 36, 42–50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 66, 69; NICR: 1–12.
9 At the time of transmission, the probability is forty per cent that a couple will have no male heir and
twenty per cent that they will have no living heir. This is according to E. A. Wrigley, a leading demo-
graphic historian and the co-founder, with Peter Laslett, of the Cambridge School for Population
and Social Structure in 1964. See his essay, “Fertility Strategy for the Individual and the Group,” in
Historical Studies in Changing Fertility, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1978): 135–154.
10 NICR 1:19, dated end of Jamadi I 1066 (March 26, 1656). In this waqf, Khater son of Ahmad from
the Zaʿrur lineage (min awlād Zaʿrur: literally, of the sons of Zaʿrur) endowed one-eighth of a large
residence for his paternal cousins (awlād ʿamm) and their progeny.
Even unborn children had priority over horizontal kin. Many waqfs in
both cities included the phrase “plus any future children that God might
bestow” before moving on to the next step. In Tripoli, unlike in Nablus,
this was the case even when the endower had no children at all. More than
eleven per cent of the family waqfs in Tripoli designated “future children” as
the primary beneficiaries even though the endowers had no children at the
time the endowment was registered. That is, the waqf excluded the entire
pool of potential inheritors in favor of non-existent beneficiaries, with no
guarantee of a male descendant to carry on the family name. There was
only one such case in Nablus.11
The pervasiveness of this overall pattern of inclusion and exclusion in
hundreds of family waqfs established over a two-century period in Nablus
and Tripoli clearly shows that inter vivos property devolution favored one’s
children within the conjugal family. Brothers and paternal uncles, cousins,
and nephews were marginal at best, and often were nowhere to be seen.
This preference seems to have been prevalent in the urban centers of Ana-
tolia, Bilad al-Sham, and North Africa during the Ottoman period, as well
as in rural and nomadic areas, albeit to varying degrees.12 Such a scenario
may not fit pervasive stereotypes about the traditional extended family pop-
ularly imagined to be the bedrock of Arab, Muslim, or Eastern Mediter-
ranean societies, but it comes as no surprise to family historians of Europe,
Asia, and Africa.13
The similarity ends here, however, for within the relatively narrow
space of vertical transmission, the patterns of designating beneficiaries
11 In addition, less than half of these endowments (eight out of nineteen) designated other kin as
beneficiaries in case no children were produced (and half of those specified relatives on the maternal,
not the paternal side of the family).
12 For example, a survey by O. L. Barkan and E. H. Ayverdi of 2500 waqfs endowed in Istanbul
during the sixteenth century shows that the conjugal, not the extended family was the primary
concern when it came to property transmission: O. L. Barkan and E. H. Ayverdi, İstanbul Vakıfları
Tahrir Defteri: 953 (1546) Tarihli (Istanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1970). Gerber argues the same thing for
the city of Bursa in Anatolia during the seventeenth century: Haim Gerber, “Anthropology and
Family History: The Ottoman and Turkish Families,” Journal of Family History 14, no. 4 (1989):
409–421. Meriwether’s findings support the same contention for Aleppo in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries: Meriwether, The Kin Who Count, ch. 5. Finally, Etty Terem makes the
same argument for late nineteenth-century North Africa: Etty Terem, “The New Miʿyar of Al-
Wazzani: Local Interpretation of Family Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Fez” (PhD diss., Harvard
University, 2007).
13 As Jack Goody noted a long time ago, Africa and Eurasia can be distinguished by the system of
inheritance: lateral and lineal, respectively. He posits that this difference is the direct result of the
two different tools used for turning earth in preparation for planting, the hoe and the plow, as well
as the relative abundance of land in Africa compared to Eurasia. Goody, “Strategies of Heirship,” 15.
This perspective is further elaborated in Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative
Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See also Jack Goody,
The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial
Societies of Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Four Patterns: No More, No Less 193
were almost diametrically opposed between the two cities (see next sec-
tion). Simply put, female children and their progeny were largely excluded
in Nablus, while in Tripoli they were included. ʿAli’s decision to name
his daughters as sole beneficiaries would have seemed strange to most
residents of Nablus at that time. They would have considered stranger
still his condition that his eldest daughter’s husband be the administra-
tor of the waqf. As we shall see, the elite of Nablus, including the shariʿa
court qadi and other ʿulamaʾ, would likely have perceived his property
devolution strategy as highly threatening to their idea of the “kin who
count.”
5.1 Four Patterns: No More, No Less

Each family waqf was singular in its motivation, circumstances, and con-
sequences. Yet, with rare exceptions, all the family waqfs of Nablus and
Tripoli for the periods under study invoked one of four basic patterns
of designating beneficiaries (Table 5.2). I have organized these patterns
in ascending order according to the degree to which female children and
their progeny were excluded. In Pattern One, all of the endower’s children
and their progeny, male and female, are included and given equal shares,
regardless of sex. In Pattern Two, all of the endower’s children and their
progeny are included, but according to Islamic rules of inheritance, with
males receiving twice the share of females. Pattern Three includes all the
endower’s children, male and female, but excludes the progeny of female
beneficiaries and the progeny of the female children of male beneficiaries
(in most such cases, the daughters of the endower were cut off upon mar-
riage, and they usually only had the right of residency in the endowed
property before that point). The most restrictive is Pattern Four, which
completely excludes daughters and their progeny, as well as the progeny of
the female children of male beneficiaries.
In light of the diversity of human experiences and circumstances, as
well as the flexibility of the waqf as a legal instrument, one would expect
such a rich variation in beneficiary patterns that it would be impossible
for ethical historians to impose this level of taxonomical clarity. Why are
there four patterns in designating beneficiaries, no more, no less? Are these
patterns a reflection of actual family arrangements, or are they products
of powerful discursive traditions – legal norms, cultural ideals, and tex-
tual practices – that have been relatively stable for centuries? A close liter-
ary reading of the language and structure of each waqf, combined with a
contextualized reading based on the political economy and social forma-
tions of the two cities, can help us transcend the binary structure of these
Table 5.2 Basic patterns in designating beneficiaries in family waqfs14 Square
brackets [ ] designate conditions sometimes added to the
basic pattern
Steps Pattern One Pattern Two Pattern Three Pattern Four
One Self Self Self Self

Two Male/female Male/female Male/female Male children only
children children children
1:1 2:1 2:1
Three Same Same Children of male Male children of
children male children
Four Same Same Same Same
Five [Mabarrāt] [Children of [Progeny of female [Male progeny of
brother(s)] children] female children]
Six [Nearest agnates] [Children of [Male children of
brother(s)] brother(s)]
Seven [Mabarrāt] [Nearest agnates] [Male children of
nearest agnates]
Last Charitable Charitable ends Charitable ends Charitable ends
ends
questions. By following this double reading, it becomes clear that these

patterns mask a great deal of diversity and carry different meanings in time
and place. For example, the beneficiary patterns in Tripoli seem straight-
forward and remarkably stable and consistent over time. However, they
exhibit a considerable degree of variation when we look closely at the class,
sex, and social status of the endower, the number and sex of existing chil-
dren, the types of properties endowed, and the timing of the endowment.
In contrast, the patterns of beneficiaries in Nablus show dramatic changes
over time, but the specific strategies that drove them were remarkably
consistent.
When mapped on to a comparative spatial and diachronic grid, what
the patterns have to tell us is nothing short of stunning. Generally
14 The fact that the first step names the endower as the sole beneficiary until death in virtually all
instances reflects the use of the Hanafi madhhab (school of jurisprudence) in the Ottoman shariʿa
courts of Nablus and Tripoli. The Maliki madhhab does not allow a founder to designate him- or
herself as the initial beneficiary. According to David Powers, this deprived Malikis of many advan-
tages, and he cites it as a reason why Malikis sometimes endowed for their unborn children. Powers,
“The Islamic Inheritance System,” 396, 404. But as we shall see, in the case of Tripoli (and less often
Nablus), it was not unusual for endowers to designate future children as the primary beneficiaries.
Table 5.3 Incidence of neneficiary patterns in family waqfs endowed by men
and women in Tripoli and Nablus, 1660s–1730s15
Tripoli Nablus
Male Female Total Male Female Total
Pattern One 7 2 9 1 – 1
(41%) (20%) (33%)
Pattern Two 9 8 17 8 8 16
(53%) (80%) (63%) (30%) (89%) (47%)
Pattern Three – – – 13 1 14
(48%) (39%)
Pattern Four – – – 5 – 5
Other 1 – 1 – – –
Total 17 10 27 27 9 36
(100%) (100%) (100%) (100%) (100%) (100%)
speaking, the family waqfs of Tripoli and Nablus inhabited opposite ends
of a spectrum of possibilities. In Tripoli, not only were females included as
beneficiaries, but in about one-third of all family waqfs they received equal
shares to their male siblings. In Nablus, married females and their progeny
were excluded, and some waqfs excluded daughters altogether. As detailed
in Table 5.3, ninety-nine per cent of family waqfs endowed in Tripoli dur-
ing the 1660s–1730s followed Patterns One and Two, both of which include
female children. In Nablus, by contrast, the figure is only forty-seven per
cent – and that is largely made up of female endowers, with ninety per
cent of female endowers designating Pattern Two, compared to just thirty
per cent of males. In Tripoli, by contrast, male and female endowers were
just as likely to opt for Pattern Two. In fact, ninety-five per cent of male
endowers in Tripoli included female children, and half of those designated
equal shares between the sexes. Such a strategy was simply unheard of in
Nablus.
The already large gap between the two cities widened further in the
1800–60 period. As can be seen in Table 5.4, an overwhelming ninety-seven
per cent of family waqfs in Tripoli included female children, compared to
a meager eleven per cent in Nablus. Put differently, eight-nine per cent
15 TICR: 1–6; NICR: 1–6. The Pattern One row for Nablus includes a joint waqf between a husband
and wife, the Pattern Three row includes three joint waqfs (two by brothers and one by an uncle
and his nieces), and the Pattern Four row includes one joint waqf by a husband and wife.
Table 5.4 Incidence of beneficiary patterns in family waqfs endowed in
Tripoli and Nablus, 1800–6016
Tripoli Nablus
Pattern One 23 26 49 – – –
(25.5%) (30%) (28%)
Pattern Two 65 57 122 10 6 16
(69%) (11.5%)
Pattern Three – – – 79 10 89
(65%) (59%) (64.5%)
Pattern Four 1 3 4 32 1 33
(26.5%) (24%)
Other 1 – 1 – – –
Total 90 86 176 121 17 138
(100%) (100%) (100%) (100%) (100%) (100%)
of the family waqfs in Nablus excluded females, compared to only three

per cent in Tripoli. No matter how the numbers are sliced, it is clear that
these results – completely unexpected when I began my research – cast
into bold relief the degree of regional differentiation that can occur within
the same cultural zone, the same legal order, and the same imperial rul-
ing structure. Before analyzing each beneficiary pattern separately through
16 TICR: 29, 30–33, 35, 36, 42–50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 66, 69; NICR: 6–12. Pattern Two is assumed if
no ratio for children is mentioned. A very small number of cases in which the first step specifically
excludes living children have been counted as Pattern Two, because the pattern holds for future
generations. For example, Hajj ʿAbd al-Hadi b. Hajj ʿUthman Dabbouran endowed his house to
his son only, and specifically excluded his three daughters, allowing them only the right of usufruct
for so long as they remained unmarried. However, in the next step, he included the progeny of his
son, male and female, without specifying the ratio of shares (the assumption being two to one).
NICR 6:142, end of Shawwal 1216 (March 5, 1802). The Pattern One row for Tripoli includes one
uncle/niece in the male column and one mother/daughter in the female column. The Pattern Two
row includes three joint waqfs by spouses – if these are taken out, the number is almost even between
males and female. The same holds true for Pattern One, which means that there was no difference
between men and women in Tripoli when it came to patterns of beneficiaries, very much unlike in
Nablus. The Pattern Three row for Nablus includes seventeen joint waqfs (nineteen per cent of all
Pattern Three waqfs): eleven primarily endowed by brothers (including two brothers/aunt and one
brothers/cousin), two by a husband and wife, one by an uncle and nephew, one by sisters, one by a
father and son, and one by a mother and son. All but the joint waqf by sisters are included in the male
column. The Pattern Four row for Nablus includes nine joint waqfs (twenty-six and a half per cent
of all Pattern Four waqfs): six by brothers and three by cousins. This clearly demonstrates how the
drive for concentration of resources overcame the strong impulse for vertical property transmission
strategies through the endower’s male descendants.
case studies, it is useful to note some general differences between Nablus
and Tripoli when it comes to designating beneficiaries other than one’s
children.
In the following sections, the patterns are not addressed sequentially in
order of degree of exclusion (Pattern One to Pattern Four), but in order of
prevalence over space and time (Patterns Two, One, and Three and Four).
Historically, in Nablus, Tripoli, and elsewhere in the Ottoman domains,
Pattern Two dominated. Pattern One was very significant in Tripoli but
largely absent in Nablus, where Pattern Three, and later Pattern Four,
became the norm. In both cities, parents, spouses, and lateral kin, includ-
ing agnates, were usually absent from family waqfs. In the case of a post-
mortem division of shares according to Islamic rules of inheritance, par-
ents and spouses stood to inherit one-sixth and one-eighth, respectively,
of the total probate inventory, regardless of the number and sex of the
endower’s children. However, during both periods under study, only five
family waqfs in Tripoli included a parent, and none in Nablus.17 True,
waqfs were often endowed late in life, and the chances that one or both
parents of the endower would be alive at the time were low.18 Still, suffi-
cient clues exist to say with certainty that parents, even when alive at the
time of endowment, were excluded as a rule.
But even in this limited sense, there are significant differences between
Nablus and Tripoli. First, spouses were included as beneficiaries (always in
addition to children) in sixteen and eighteen per cent of all family waqfs
endowed in Tripoli in the 1660s–1730s and 1800–60 periods, respectively.
In Nablus, the numbers were much lower for both periods (five and four
per cent, respectively), and no waqfs that included spouses were endowed
in Nablus after 1805. Second, one-fifth of all family waqfs in Tripoli des-
ignated kin other than children as the primary beneficiaries, compared to
just one to three per cent in Nablus. This reinforces some of the arguments
17 The five are TICR 6:50, 52–53; 29:78; 54:96–97; and 55:223–224. The first and second are dated 1731.
In the first, a man designated one-third to his wife, one-third to his mother, and one-third to his
daughters. In the second, a woman allotted one-quarter to her mother, one-quarter to her husband,
and one-half to her son. The third named the father as the sole beneficiary in the first step, and the
father’s children in the second. In the fourth, a female endower allotted one-quarter of the waqf to
be split between her husband and her mother. The rest was to go to her children. The fifth waqf
allocated one-quarter to the endower’s mother, who was described as “black,” perhaps meaning she
was formerly a concubine or slave. The dates, respectively, are: October 25, 1731; November 1, 1731;
February 12, 1802; December 5, 1835; and September 1, 1839.
18 The easiest and most reliable clue, albeit by no means a foolproof one, is whether the word
“deceased” (marh.ūm) appears just prior to the endower’s father’s name. Since all individuals are
identified through the father, not the mother, this clue is partial at best.
made in the previous two chapters about the much more diverse and capa-
cious vision in Tripoli as to what constitutes the kin who count. Specifi-
cally, it confirms the greater concern in Tripoli with supporting those kin
who were most likely to fall between the webbing of existing social safety
nets, especially orphaned grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. The goal
of these endowments, therefore, was not lateral property transmission to
either paternal or maternal kin.
In Tripoli, the inclusion of spouses strongly correlated with male endow-
ers, with the absence of male children, and with the presence of unmarried
daughters.19 The implication here is that the cohesiveness of the conjugal
unit was paramount to ensuring the best future for the daughters. Men
endowed four-fifths of family waqfs that included a spouse in Tripoli.20
Faced with the absence of a male heir and with unmarried daughters, these
men used the waqf as a way to ensure that the mother was part of a larger
package of residential and financial security for their unmarried daughters,
who were otherwise the sole beneficiaries. Having said that, very few of
these waqfs in Tripoli devolved real power to the spouse, as their inclusion
was considered a temporary condition. They were rarely designated as the
sole beneficiary in step one or two, or as the administrator of the waqf.21
The inclusion of the mother/spouse may be designed to bolster her author-
ity in order to maintain the integrity of the conjugal family to the extent
possible in the absence of a male heir, to prepare the daughters for marriage,
and/or to support them in case of divorce. The transfer of the entire pat-
rimony to the daughters, including the family house, not only made them
economically self-sufficient and more attractive marriage partners but also
incentivized people to pursue matrilocal marriage arrangements in Tripoli,
whereby the future husbands of the daughters would move in with them
and end up taking care of the parents-in-law. The case of ʿAli Sabbagh,
with which this chapter opened, is one example of this tendency.
19 The same is true for the few such waqfs in Nablus.

20 In Tripoli, twenty-seven waqfs designated the wife as a beneficiary, compared to six that included the
husband. The latter are TICR 6:52–53; 31:56–57; 43:269–270; 52:102, 112; and 54:96–97. In Nablus,
the split was almost even, at four to three: NICR: 4:94; 5:80; and 6:27, 38, 137, 146, 221.The inclusion
of husbands did not mean a transfer of real authority to them over their wife’s properties. Rather,
the husband was but one of many beneficiaries in the step after the endower’s self. In only one of
these waqfs (TICR 52:102) was the husband designated as the sole beneficiary in this step. Children
were included in the second step – that is, after the death of the husband.
21 In Tripoli, only nine out of the thirty-three waqfs that included a spouse designated that spouse
(almost always the wife) as the sole beneficiary before the children. The nine waqfs are TICR 6:48–
49; 30:209; 36:240; 43:268–270, 268–269; 52:102, 116, 116; and 54:253–255. The norm according
to Islamic inheritance rules would be one-eighth, but most were one-quarter to one-half, so the
motivation was not simply one of following Islamic rules of inheritance.
Pattern Two 199
5.2 Pattern Two
The male twice the share of the female lay at the core of post-mortem
inheritance rules in Muslim societies.22 One would expect this proportional
allocation – ingrained through countless repetitions, memories, conversa-
tions, sermons, and books for over a thousand years – to be the norm in
family waqfs. And in Tripoli, it was indeed the norm, and consistently so
over time. Roughly two-thirds of family waqf endowers in the 1660s–1730s
and 1800–60 periods (sixty-nine and sixty-three per cent, respectively) dis-
tributed the revenues among their children and their children’s progeny
according to Pattern Two. In Nablus, it held true for roughly half of all
family endowments in the earlier period, but the percentage dramatically
dropped to only one-tenth for the later period. Again, we see two forces at
work: that of ingrained juridical tradition and that of the historical root-
edness of regions as discrete social spaces.
The general popularity of Pattern Two waqfs begs the question: If the
goal is property devolution, why go through the trouble of endowing a waqf
only to follow a distribution identical to Islamic rules of inheritance? The
most obvious answer is the one provided by the waqf of ʿAli Sabbagh and
his wife Muʾmina, which opened this chapter. It is the option to exclude
specific categories of potential legal inheritors, especially if the endower
has only female children, children in their legal minority, and/or no chil-
dren altogether. These three types of existing or potential vertical benefi-
ciaries were particularly vulnerable. By enabling the exclusion of competi-
tive claims in a pre-emptive move, the family waqf drew tight boundaries
around the kin who counted, and provided the best legal insurance avail-
able that the family’s patrimony would remain intact and devolve to them.
The power to exclude agnates and other potential inheritors was not
the only reason for the endowment of the majority of Pattern Two waqfs,
however. In Tripoli, two-thirds of Pattern Two waqfs included mature male
and female children among the beneficiaries, meaning that the claims of
agnates were not an issue. A less obvious but more important answer, there-
fore, is that Pattern Two masked, by its very orthodoxy in following Islamic
inheritance rules, an unconventional customization of inter vivos property
devolution. Pattern Two waqfs in Tripoli were established for such a wide
range of purposes that contemplating what work they did is akin to roam-
ing a mansion where each of its many rooms is filled with a rich history.
This chapter’s opening case study – the 1833 waqf of ʿAli Sabbagh and his
22 In both cities, the designation of beneficiaries in Pattern Two waqfs is almost always followed by
the phrase “according to Islamic inheritance rules” (h.asab al-farı̄d.a al-sharʿı̄yya).
wife, Muʾmina – presents just one of the possibilities that seem more and
more kaleidoscopic the closer one looks at the text of each endowment.
By way of fleshing out this argument, let us consider two additional case
studies of Pattern Two waqfs in Tripoli, both of which were endowed in
the same year, 1833.
A Case of Black and White

The first case can be called “black and white,” for it is about differences in
skin color and regional origin, or, to put it anachronistically, race and iden-
tity. The protagonist can be referred to simply as Habib Kanun, for his list
of titles in the endowment, like that of his deceased father, Muhammad, is
long.23 A merchant, Sufi leader, and scholar of some renown and wealth,
Habib Kanun, also named in the document as “the Moroccan from Fez,”
married a local woman some time after he settled in Tripoli. Over the years,
he bought, bit by bit, the home of his in-laws: a very large residence that his
wife, ʿAdla b. Hajj Muhammad al-ustā (master of a trade) al-Khayyat, her
three sisters, and others had inherited. In mid-August 1833, a hot, humid,
and politically troubled time in Tripoli, he entered the shariʿa court with a
stack of deeds testifying to the various stages of his incremental ownership
of the residence. He then endowed the property as a family waqf for two
beneficiaries and their progeny.24 He designated one-half of the waqf for
his dark-skinned (asmar al-lawn) son, Muhammad, born to him from his
concubine, Mabruka, then to Muhammad’s progeny according to Pattern
Two. The other half, he designated to his wife, ʿAdla, and any future chil-
dren he might have with her, again to be distributed according to Pattern
Two. The binaries he constructed in the distribution of domestic space are
layered: male/son/black/foreigner and female/wife/white/local. It is diffi-
cult to disentangle these layers, which is why they are simply referred to in
what follows as “black and white.”
Habib Kanun established the endowment at a time when his son
Muhammad, most likely born in Morocco, was still a young, unmarried
man. It was also at a time when ʿAdla had not yet borne him any children
after a few years of marriage. As he adjusted to life in Tripoli, amassed prop-
erties, and anxiously hoped that he would have children with his new wife,
many questions probably preoccupied his mind. How could he ensure that
23 Fakhr al-amājid al-kirām wa-l-s.ulah.āʾ dhawı̄ al-ih.tirām al-h.ājj H
. abı̄b Çelebi ibn al-marh.ūm ʿumdat
al-amājid wa-l-akārim . . . Muh.ammad Çelebi Kānūn al-Fāsı̄ al-Maghribı̄.
24 TICR 52:118–119, dated end of Rabiʿ I 1249. The title of the deed is “h.ujjat waqfı̄yyat al-h.ājj H . abı̄b
Kānūn al-Fāsı̄ al-Maghribı̄” (the Deed of Hajj Habib Kanun, the Morrocan from Fez).
Pattern Two 201
he was not forgotten after his death? How could he keep intact the patri-
mony and families he had created? Who would carry on his legacy? Would
it be his low-status and out-of-place son or his locally rooted, high-status,
but hitherto childless wife?
To the normative Pattern Two, Habib attached a set of conditions con-
cerning the relationship between the black and white halves of the waqf
that made clearer his motivations and his notions of family and property.
The gist of the conditions was a segregated-but-equal living arrangement.
The overriding motivation was the survival and continuation of his lin-
eage. He specified that each of the two beneficiaries was to supervise his
or her half of the waqf and that each was to be followed in that role by the
most capable (al-arshad) of his or her progeny. ʿAdla’s share would revert
to Muhammad in two circumstances: if she died before producing any
children for Habib, or if she remarried and had children by another man.
Only if Habib fathered ʿAdla’s children would her share pass on to them
(ʿalā awlādiha minhu lā-ghayr). Conversely, Muhammad’s share would
revert to ʿAdla if he died before he produced children. The conditions
of inclusion and exclusion aimed to diminish the possibility that ʿAdla’s
family might deprive Muhammad of his property or that Muhammad
would force ʿAdla out, so that both could have a chance of ensuring the
continuity of Habib Kanun’s seed.
Habib Kanun’s endowment can be seen as a carefully calibrated frame-
work for managing property, kin, and gender relations in contingent ways
according to what fate might have in store in terms of births, deaths, and
marriage. By endowing the waqf at this specific point in the family’s life
cycle, Habib Kanun provided a moral vision and a revenue stream that
could enable the two halves of his family to imagine sharing a common
future based on affective and material autonomy. In that sense, the endow-
ment symbolically metamorphosed Habib Kanun into a unifying, prosper-
ous, and durable point of reference for generations to come.
The Symmetry of Love?

The second case study further illustrates the argument that Pattern Two
waqfs in Tripoli have an enormous range and complexity. While they
remain attentive to the key normative principle of Islamic rules of inher-
itance, they also express the specific desires of endowers in terms of insti-
tutionalizing their legacy, nourishing their souls, and providing a vision
for their descendants in the form of a family charter. The phrase, “the sym-
metry of love” best captures the intimate partnership and specific set of
desires animating the joint husband and wife waqf registered in the shariʿa
court of Tripoli on July 21, 1833, only a month prior to Habib Kanun’s.25
In the waqf design, great care was taken to detail and model the conjugal
family as the ideal arena for affective and material relations between kin,
especially the relationships between husband and wife, parents and chil-
dren, and brother and sister. The basic desires were for a life of prosperity,
a brood of children, the (re)constitution of a patrimony to be passed on
to future generations, and, as icing on the cake, a pious act that gener-
ated earthly respect and heavenly rewards and kept alive the names of the
endowers. The hope was that a waqf endowment could become a beacon
to the straight path of love, piety, and comfort for future generations.
Hajj ʿAli al-Buz b. Sayyid Mustafa Durnayqa, acting on his own behalf
and as the legal agent for his wife, Zamzam b. hajj Ahmad al-Buz (almost
certainly his paternal uncle’s daughter), arrived in court accompanied by
two scions from established ʿulamaʾ families, Ziyada and Dhawq, who tes-
tified to knowing his wife and her properties. The property portfolio was
typical of a middling family in Tripoli at the time: irrigated orchards of cit-
rus trees, a residence, and olive groves. ʿAli al-Buz then endowed his and his
wife’s properties for the benefit of their children according to Pattern Two.
The names and sexes of the children were not mentioned. This is usually
an indication that the endowers had mature male and female children, that
no one was excluded, and that future children were not a possibility.
The structure of the waqf itself and some of its conditions can be seen
as a portrait, drawn for the benefit of the couple’s children and of future
generations, of the ideal conjugal family: economically successful, biologi-
cally productive, and with a peaceful, affective, and balanced (if not equal)
partnership between the parents. The phrase “affective and balanced part-
nership” may sound strange, invoking as it does Victorian bourgeois ideals
of love, mutual respect, and companionate marriage as the foundations of
domestic bliss. But if the waqf deed is a reliable guide, then these ideals
obtained at the time, at least for this couple. Signs of them are apparent
in how property and power were structured in the narrative. It seems that
love and a common purpose leveled the playing field between two intimate
partners, a man and a woman, in a male-dominated society.
To begin with, their status as two separate but equally legitimate prop-
erty owners was evident in the fact that the properties to be endowed were
listed separately – first his, then hers – even though several of them were
jointly owned, probably through inheritance from the same grandfather.
After the inventory, each was named as the sole beneficiary of the revenues
25 TICR 52:111, dated Rabiʿ I 3, 1249.

Pattern Two 203
of his or her own properties. A condition then followed regarding what
would happen when each of them died. Upon Zamzam’s death, the rev-
enues of her shares were to go immediately to the children. The same was
to be true upon ʿAli’s death unless he died before Zamzam did, in which
case one-third of the revenues would go directly to her and two-thirds to
the children.26 While females had an equal legal status to males as property
owners, the waqf was designed in such a way that it recognized the respon-
sibility of the male to be the provider to the conjugal family. It also rec-
ognized the reality that males usually owned more property than females.
This double recognition was built into the mechanism of revenue distri-
bution by way of compensation. The equality of legal status and structure
of partnership is also evident when it comes to the control of the endowed
properties. The waqf deed specified that each was to be the sole adminis-
trator (mutawallı̄) of his or her part of the waqf while alive. Implied here
was that Zamzam already had real control over her properties, and that
she would continue to be actively involved in their management. As we
shall see in Chapter 6, female ownership and management of the material
backbone of propertied families in Tripoli – irrigated mulberry and citrus
orchards – is key to understanding the differences between the two cities
when it comes to the organization of family life.
The revenues set aside for good deeds (mabarrāt) were also put into two
separate accounts. Again, the implication was that Zamzam would have
real say as to who would be hired to perform these good deeds, which
bakeries and shops would be asked to provide the food, who would do the
cooking and distribution, and so on. Since ʿAli had more properties, the
amount he set aside for good deeds was three times that of Zamzam. ʿAli
designated the hefty sum of 150 piasters annually for food distribution and
Qurʾan recitations, to be performed three times a year at the rate of fifty
piasters each on the following dates: the Prophet’s birthday, the night of
Rajab 27, and the night of mid-Shaʿban (see Chapter 4). Zamzam set aside
fifty piasters annually for recitations of the Qurʾan, the rewards of which,
like those generated by her husband’s good deeds, were to accrue to both
their souls in heaven, signifying that their partnership would continue
after death. By transferring their properties into the hands of God, ʿAli
and Zamzam presented themselves and their children with the ultimate
gift: they reconstituted the al-Buz family patrimony, sealed its legal status
by notarizing it in court with the help of impeccable witnesses, readied it
26 It is not clear why this condition was not reversed as well. Perhaps there was an expectation that
she and the children would need greater economic support after his death than he and the children
would need after hers.
for their children without sacrificing separate personal control, and set in
motion a process of pious commemoration to prepare for their transition
to the afterlife.27 True, they did follow the basic principle of Islamic rules
of inheritance, the male twice the share of the female, but they did it in a
way that managed to impart to their children, via the waqf as a social act
and a family charter, an understanding of the conjugal family based on a
lifelong and mostly symmetrical partnership, perhaps even love, between
a man and a woman, both in the temporal world and in the afterlife.
Pattern Two in Nablus

Contemplating Pattern Two in Nablus, in contrast to Tripoli’s many-
roomed mansion, is akin to poking around the small and increasingly
abandoned servant’s quarters. This pattern was neither dominant nor
equally valued by male and female waqf endowers. Rather, its incidence
was strongly correlated to two factors: female waqf endowers and conjugal
families with no mature male children. It was also more prevalent among
middling property owners, and Pattern Two waqfs were usually smaller and
more focused on residential properties. Such waqfs became more marginal
over time and eventually disappeared. In the 1660s–1730s period, ninety
per cent of women endowed Pattern Two waqfs, compared to only thirty
per cent of men (in Tripoli, the percentage was fifty–fifty). The overall
frequency dropped from fifty per cent to about ten per cent in the 1800–
60 period. In fact, only four Pattern Two waqfs in Nablus were endowed
after 1820, a year that effectively marked a point after which female descen-
dants were systematically excluded from family waqf endowments.28 This
remarkably steep decline mirrors another: after 1844, there were no family
waqfs in Nablus endowed by women.29
What explains these trends? And why did the women of Nablus endow
this pattern so much more frequently than men? Tempting as it might be,
one cannot argue that this is a male/female issue only, because there was
no noticeable difference in Tripoli between male and female waqf endow-
ers when it came to beneficiary patterns among children. Many women in
Nablus, moreover, endowed waqfs that excluded females, and increasingly
so over time. The percentage of women who designated Pattern Two fell
from ninety per cent in the 1660s–1730s to sixty per cent in the 1800–60
27 Many other Pattern Two waqfs were driven by similar considerations. See, for example, the endow-
ment of ʿUmar al-Fattal al-Masri (TICR 32:49–50).
28 The four are NICR 9:7, 19; 10:126; and 11:102.
29 For an early example, see the waqf of ʿAʾisha Smadi (NICR 4:136).
Pattern Two 205
period. A more persuasive explanation, contextual and contingent, is that
the confluence of a major economic expansion in the 1820s with a mili-
tary invasion in the 1830s heated up the competition for power and wealth
in Nablus. This fueled already existing exclusionary property devolution
practices that favored the concentration of capital within elite households
at the expense of women and younger male siblings.
Nabulsi female waqf endowers, in other words, did not live in an alter-
nate moral universe from their male counterparts. Rather, many of them
had a different purpose in mind than most men when they endowed
their waqfs. Generally speaking, men in Nablus tended to endow consti-
tutive waqfs designed to serve as the cornerstone of lineages, while women
endowed supplementary waqfs designed to provide a safety net for daugh-
ters, orphaned grandchildren, children from a previous marriage, and so
on. A critical clue in this regard is that male children are absent in over half
of Pattern Two waqfs in Nablus. Endowers of Pattern Two waqfs in which
there was no male heir were strongly motivated to make sure that their
daughters could fend off the claims of agnates and gain control of their
mothers’ properties. This counterbalanced, so to speak, a rooted property
devolution practice that funneled the most important properties, such as
commercial shops and artisanal tools and space, through the male line. A
second critical clue is that Pattern Two waqfs in Nablus have a clear class
dimension. Endowers who chose this pattern hailed from the middle or
lower strata, while those who who excluded women (Patterns Three and
Four) came from leading families.30 The lower-class status was especially
clear in the case of males who endowed Pattern Two waqfs, although it was
not absolute.31
A typical example from the early eighteenth century is that of Hajj
Muhammad b. Hajj ʿAli b. Tantura, a man of middling means without
a male heir. On September 24, 1729, he endowed all the properties he
owned – residential, agricultural, and commercial – as a constitutive waqf
entirely for the benefit of his mature daughter, Hamida, then her children,
30 This is very clear from even a cursory look at the surnames of endowers of Patterns Three and Four
waqfs for the Early Period: Tuqan, Nimr, Hanbali, Sharabi, Shahid, Akhrami, Shamiyya, Bishtawi,
Smadi, Jamus, Batta, ʿUbaydan, and Bassam. Virtually all are from the top ʿulamaʾ, merchant, and
military families at the time, and most maintained that status throughout the Ottoman period.
Those who endowed Pattern Two waqfs came from poorer families, some of which had disappeared
by the late nineteenth century: Qasam, Khadwardi, Sulayman, Baqqash, Jubran, Siwar, Saʿad al-
Din, Mulla, ʿAllak, Simani, Shan Qallah, Marwad, Tantura, and Qirab.
31 For examples of Pattern Two waqfs by males from middling families, see NICR 1:175, 218–219; 2:46–
47, 333, 396; and 5:32, 34, 142–143. In contrast, see waqfs endowed by members of leading families at
the time, such as Sharabi (2:41 and 3:71–72), Shahid (2:240), Shamiyya (2:328–329 and 3:7), Akhrami
(2:387–389), Imam (4:149), Hanbali (4:166), Tuqan (4:304, 5:49, and 5:84–85), and Nimr (5:81–82).
male and female, according to Pattern Two.32 His wife, he added, could
have the normative share of one-eighth of the revenues and right of resi-
dency until she died. Like many female endowers of Pattern Two waqfs,
Hajj Muhammad did not designate “future children” as having a share in
the waqf, nor did he include his agnates in third or fourth steps. For mid-
dling families, it seems, the preference in the absence of a male heir was
for one’s female progeny over close paternal relatives such as brothers and
cousins. Thus, Hajj Muhammad specified the holy cities of Mecca and
Medina as next in line after his daughter’s progeny became extinct.
Hajj Muhammad’s gesture towards his daughter appears to have made
a deep impression and set an example, at least within the Tantura fam-
ily. Remarkably, the same situation – the absence of a male heir – drove a
descendant of Hajj Muhammad Tantura to endow an identical waqf design
almost exactly a century later. On November 1, 1830, Mustafa b. Shaykh
Qasim Tantura endowed one-half of a large residence in the Habala Quar-
ter and one-half of a karm in the northern part of the city for the benefit of
his wife, Ammun b. Sayyid ʿUmar al-Qaqa, and his two daughters, Safiyya
and Zaynab, all of whom were to receive equal shares. Upon her death, the
mother’s share was to be distributed among the daughters and, after them,
their descendants, according to Pattern Two. Again, like his ancestor Hajj
Muhammad, Mustafa Tantura did not designate agnates as beneficiaries
after the demise of his daughters’ progenies. Rather, he named the Great
Mosque of Nablus as next in line.33
Female endowers of Pattern Two waqfs in Nablus during the 1660s–
1730s period shared the same concern as men in the absence of a male heir.
Far more often than men, however, they used the waqf for supplemental
purposes to support those who fall through the cracks. A typical example
is the waqf of h.urma Khadija b. Murad Marwad, endowed on January 31,
1729.34 As would be expected of a well-to-do woman – especially one mar-
ried into the conservative Hanbali family of ashrāf, named after the school
of jurisprudence that remained stubbornly rooted in Jabal Nablus despite
centuries of Hanafi dominance under Ottoman rule – Khadija did not go
to court in person. Rather, her sister’s son, fakhr al-sādāt al-kirām Sayyid
32 NICR 5:142–143, dated end of Safar 1142. The properties were: a room (bayt) and iwān in the
Karawya family residence; one-half of the land of an olive grove in the western part of the green belt
plus one-quarter of the olive trees on that land; one-quarter of another olive grove plus one-eighth
of the olive trees on that land; and one-half of a shop.
33 NICR 9:19, dated mid-Jamadi I 1246. For similar waqfs dedicated to female children, see NICR
2:82–83, 333, 396; 4:191; 5:10, 32, 148–149; and 11:102.
34 NICR 5:86–87, dated end of Jamadi II 1141.
Pattern Two 207
Salih b. Sayyid Ibrahim al-Hanbali, represented her as her legal agent. Wid-
owed and remarried, the timing and motivation of the waqf was likely the
fact that she wanted to secure a future for her daughter from her deceased
husband after she bore two sons to her current one. As usual in such waqfs,
the property in question was residential and small. It consisted of one-half
of a house located in the interior portion of the large Hanbali family com-
pound in the Gharb Quarter, along with one-half of another house in the
Marwad family residence, which she had inherited from her father. She
assigned the former, along with one-quarter of the house in the Marwad
residence, to her two male children, Sayyid Muhammad and Sayyid ʿAli,
both in their legal minority, and both the sons of her current husband,
Sayyid Amin al-Din al-Hanbali. She assigned the remainder to her mature
daughter from a previous marriage, Zuhur, daughter of the deceased Khalid
al-Badawi.35 While Khadija Marwad’s waqf favored the sons whose father
was still alive, she at least guaranteed an income for her mature daughter,
from whom she was physically separated following the death of her former
husband. This revenue stream provided the daughter with a modicum of
leverage and autonomy before and after marriage.
Such examples can be multiplied.36 The point is that Pattern Two rep-
resented much more than the passive acceptance of an Islamic tradition of
a post-mortem inheritance rule about the male’s share being twice that of
the female’s. Rather, and within the formal boundaries of this tradition,
it embodied a wide range of goals and desires, especially in Tripoli, where
this pattern consistently dominated over a two-century period. In the case
of Nablus, Pattern Two is best understood by triangulating the absence of
male heirs, the presence of female children, middle- to lower-class status,
and a female endower. Most often, Pattern Two family waqfs in Nablus
were designed to fend off agnates, to keep residential quarters intact with
full and equal access to daughters, and to postpone the application of nor-
mative Islamic rules of inheritance until the generation of the daughter’s
children.37
35 Khalid al-Badawi died sometime in 1725, as indicated in a lawsuit by his sons from a previous wife,
Hamida Zaʿrur. See Chapter 2.
36 A woman from an elite household, al-sitt al-mas.ūn wa-l-jawāhir al-maknūna al-sitt Fakhriyya,
daughter of the deceased Mustafa Beik Shah Siwar, endowed a large residence and a nearby h.awsh
to her son ʿUthman and her daughter ʿAʾisha, the children from her current husband, and to her
mature daughter Salhiyya, the daughter of her deceased previous husband. The difference in this
case was that Fakhriyya excluded Salhiyya’s progeny. After Salhiyya’s death, her share was to revert
to ʿUthman and ʿAʾisha and their progeny. NICR 3:34, dated mid-Jamadi I 1101/February 24, 1690.
37 In yet another example, Safiyya, daughter of the deceased Mustafa al-ʿAllāk, endowed portions of
two residences and a house equally to her two daughters, Alfiyya and Qadiriyya. The revenues, after
their deaths, were to be distributed to their descendants according to Pattern Two. NICR 4:191,
5.3 Pattern One
Two aspects of Pattern One (equal shares to all children and their descen-
dants, regardless of sex) stand out: the remarkable difference between
Tripoli and Nablus, and the elusiveness of a persuasive explanation as to
why it exists in the first place. Having initially read the Nablus shariʿa court
registers for the nineteenth century, which do not contain a single Pattern
One waqf, I was surprised when I first came across such a case in the Tripoli
shariʿa court registers. I slowly came to realize that this case was not unique,
but rather part of a pattern representing twenty-eight and thirty-three per
cent of all family waqf endowments in Tripoli for the 1660s–1730s and
1800–60 periods, respectively. This is to be compared to only one such
case in Nablus for the entire period under study. The differences between
the two cities on this score were fundamental and resistant to change over
time.
Pattern One transgressed, in favor of female children, the central norma-
tive provision in Islamic inheritance rules: the share of the son twice that
of the daughter. This undermined a key pillar in differentiating male from
female social positions within and outside the family: the argument that
the male deserves a greater share of the inheritance, because he is respon-
sible for all family maintenance expenses. Awareness of this transgression
accounts, perhaps, for the quite explicit and emphatic wording that is con-
sistently used in Pattern One waqf deeds. An example is the waqf of Hasan
Bashsha b. Iʿrabi al-Tabbal (drummer), registered on December 30, 1815.
He endowed his property for the benefit of his (future) children and chil-
dren’s children “equally; the male not to be preferred over the female.”38 In
the only Pattern One waqf in Nablus, a similar statement was repeated
three times to ensure there was no misunderstanding. On February 26,
1724, Salih b. Ahmad al-Shahid and his wife, Ghayyada b. Taha, jointly
endowed a constitutive waqf of all their properties for the benefit of their
two daughters, ʿArifa and Zahra, equally (sawı̄yyatan lahuma). They were
to be followed by their “male and female children, to be divided equally
between them, the share of the male the same as the share of the female”
(awlādahum al-dhukūr wa-l-ināth baynahum bi-l-sawı̄yyāt li-l-dhakar
dated mid-Rajab 1137/March 30, 1725. Five years later, a woman from an elite household endowed
one-half of a house that she inherited to her only daughter after her (endower) husband died. The
revenues were then to be distributed to her daughter’s progeny according to Pattern Two. See NICR
5:148–149; dated Rabiʿ I 8, 1142/January 10, 1729.
38 “Awlādahum bi-l-sawı̄yyāt lā yufad.d.al dhakarahim ʿalā unthāhim.” TICR 44:174–175, dated Muhar-
ram 28, 1231. Emphasis added.
Pattern One 209
mithlu al-unthā) and then “their descendants, equally” (li-ansālihim bi-l-
sawı̄yyāt).39
I do not know what possessed Salih and Ghayyada to jointly embark on
this lonely swim against the tide and endow the only Pattern One waqf
in Nablus. There are no clues other than the absence of male heirs. The
endowed residential houses and olive groves were co-owned with other
members of the Shahid family. Since they had only daughters at the time
of the endowment, and since they did not specifically add the phrase “and
future children,” the risks to the patrimony of the Shahid lineage if their
daughters married outside the family must have been completely obvious
to them. The Shahid family of learned scholars and merchants had long
put a premium on patrilines and on the setting up of multi-family house-
holds consisting of a father and his married sons.40 Indeed, all other waqfs
by the Shahid family before and after this one designate Pattern Three,
which excluded the progeny of female children.41 Yet, despite these con-
sequences, Salih and Ghayyada underscored their commitment to Pattern
One by jointly endowing the waqf.
It is fairly obvious why this waqf is the exception that proves the rule for
Nablus. More difficult to explain are three remarkable facts about Pattern
One waqfs in Tripoli. First, they constitute a substantive one-third of all
waqfs throughout the two centuries under study. Second, men and women
endowed them equally.42 And third, there are no significant differences
between Pattern One and the dominant Pattern Two waqfs when it comes
to the size and type of properties endowed, the social status and wealth
of the endower, or the range of beneficiaries.43 These facts are remarkable,
because Pattern One embodies a widely shared vision, among male and
39 NICR 4:72, dated beginning of Jamadi II 1136.
40 See the case study of the ʿArafat family in Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, ch. 2.
41 NICR 2:240, 6:169; and 8:222, 223.
42 Men endowed thirty out of fifty-eight Pattern One waqfs.
43 The only correlation that slightly distinguishes Pattern One waqfs is a higher incidence of endow-
ments marked by an absence of male heirs. About one-half (forty-eight per cent) of the fifty-eight
endowments that designate Pattern One listed daughters and/or other female members, such as
wives and granddaughters, as the primary beneficiaries. This is compared to about thirty-two per
cent of the 139 Pattern Two waqfs. The absence of male children is only a minor factor, however, for
there were numerous Pattern One waqfs in which sons were designated as beneficiaries yet daugh-
ters were still given equal shares, as were the descendants of both. And while it makes sense to have
equal shares for the first generation if the endower has only female children, one would expect that
the normative two-to-one ratio of shares would be restored beginning with the grandchildren. That
is exactly what usually happened in the considerable number of Pattern Two waqfs whose primary
beneficiaries were daughters and/or other females: the female children were given equal shares, but
Pattern Two was restored beginning with the next generation. But this was not the case with Pat-
tern One. Pattern One waqfs also have a higher proportion of residential property-only endowments
compared to Pattern Two (thirty-five to twenty-six per cent), but the difference is not significant.
female endowers alike, of unconditional equality for future generations of
descendants, regardless of sex. In the context of a patriarchal society and
the Islamic rules of inheritance, Pattern One effectively privileges female
beneficiaries as a matter of principle, at least when it comes to the distribu-
tion of waqf revenues. By “a matter of principle,” I mean that the waqf was
used to create a legal space for equality between males and females regard-
less of current circumstances, such as strong affective relations between the
endower and his or her daughter(s). As such, it undermined the gendered
organization and reproduction of kinship and property relations, and by
extension social relations in general. Could there be an egalitarian con-
sciousness at work?
There is no clear answer to this question. What is clear is that Pattern
One waqfs made females strong stakeholders among their natal kin. They
also reinforced a tendency among waqf endowers in Tripoli to provide
female children with the maximum material leverage, for a variety pur-
poses: to pursue an effective marriage strategy; to lessen their vulnerability
if divorced or widowed; to take care of their parents in their old age; to
carry on the family patrimony even if married to an outsider; and even to
set up a matrilocal household for a conjugal family. For example, females
with equal access to waqf revenues and/or to an endowed residence prior to
marriage would presumably prefer to live in their own house with their hus-
band and children, rather than with in-laws in an extended-family house-
hold.44 In the former, they would literally be the possessor of the residence
and the head female of the family. In the latter, they would be subordinate
to their mother-in-law and away from the support of their natal kin. In
other words, if Pattern One waqfs allowed daughters to have independent
material means, including their own houses, regardless of inheritance and
dowry (the two major sources of property for females), then they made it
possible that their future husband(s) would move in with them instead of
the other way around.
This is not far-fetched speculation. Two Pattern One waqfs by the same
endower, registered nineteen years apart, illustrate these points. On Febru-
ary 29, 1817, the Pride of Descendants of the Prophet (fakhr al-ashrāf)
Sayyid ʿAbdullah al-Qawwaf decided to endow a waqf for the benefit of
his daughters and their descendants some time after his son had married
and established his own, separate household.45 His endowment consisted
of two residential properties, along with a storage cellar (qabw). The first
44 A woman with access to regular income from waqf revenues would also have the option to divorce
without the risk of penury or of burdening her natal family.
45 TICR 45:235–236, dated Rabiʿ II 11, 1232.
Pattern One 211
property, located in the Qawwaf family home in the Nuri Quarter, was
one-half of his deceased father’s residence, which ʿAbdullah inherited along
with his two sisters, Hasnaʾ and Sharifa, who owned the second half, his
share being equal to both of theirs combined. The residence was large,
encompassing four levels of rooms, tiled floors, an open courtyard, and
a pool fed by the main canal that carried water into the Nuri Quarter.
Although ʿAbdullah was likely born in this house, he did not live there at
the time at which he endowed his waqf. We know this because the doc-
ument mentions Sayyid ʿAbdullah’s own residence (bayt al-wāqif) in the
process of describing the boundaries of the endowed house, stating that the
former was located just north of the latter. The second endowed property
in ʿAbdullah’s family waqf was two-thirds of a smaller residential structure
he had purchased, along with the storage cellar, exactly six years earlier.
This structure is described as being located next to the house of his son.46
He named his two daughters, Zaynab and Halima, as the sole beneficiaries,
along with any children he might have in the future. The shares were to
be divided equally, not only between the two daughters, but also between
their descendants, males and females alike.47
In his waqf design, Sayyid ʿAbdullah al-Qawwaf excluded his son and
did not endow his own residence, information on both of which is only
accidentally revealed in the description of the property boundaries. The
purpose of this waqf, therefore, was to provide his daughters with sepa-
rate and independent living quarters, allowing them to become heads of
families in their own right while remaining within the orbit of al-Qawwaf
family. The daughters were in their legal majority, but we do not know
if one or both were already married. They were probably not, for Sayyid
ʿAbdullah chose not to provide them with a stream of revenues from rent
or from orchards in the green zone. Rather, he gave them a space in houses
strategically located next to his and his son’s houses. Sayyid ʿAbdullah also
ensured his daughters had the maximum degree of control over their prop-
erty, partly by stipulating that they were to hold the position of administra-
tor (nāz.ir) after his death.48 Regardless of their current or future marital sta-
tus, having their own residential quarters gave Zaynab and Halima a degree
of autonomy, independence, and control over their lives. Not accidentally,
46 The qabw was purchased on January 19, 1811, and the residence on February 21, 1811. The name of
the son, contrary to usual practice, is not mentioned.
47 After the end of their lines of descent, the waqf was to be divided equally into three parts: one for
his sister Hasnaʾ and her progeny, one for the Great and Tawba Mosques, and one to a certain Omar
Bashsha al-Dinnawi, about whom we know only his name.
48 This was not unusual in Tripoli. Most waqf endowments that designated daughters as sole benefi-
ciaries also designated them as the administrators of the property.
it also kept them close and in a position to tend to Sayyid ʿAbdullah in his
waning years.
Sayyid ʿAbdullah’s second waqf – endowed on September 1, 1839 – fur-
ther illuminates the points about care in old age and about propertied
Tripoli women acting as key stakeholders in their natal families and car-
riers of the family patrimony.49 Much had changed in the period between
the two waqfs. Most of the women in Sayyid ʿAbdullah’s life had died: his
sisters, Hasnaʾ and Sharifa; his wife, also called Sharifa; and his younger
daughter, Halima. He had no other children and did not remarry. Again,
there was no mention of his son. The only kin that appear in the second
waqf document are his older daughter, Zaynab, and his granddaughter,
called Sharifa in honor of both her grandmother and her great aunt. Sharifa
was the orphaned child of Halima’s exogamous marriage to Sayyid Khalil
b. Ahmad al-ʿAqqad family. Although Sayyid ʿAbdullah was an old man by
now, but his mother, Zahra, was still alive.
The diverse property portfolio was typical of a constitutive waqf, unlike
the strictly residential one designed for the daughters nineteen years earlier.
The most important property, listed first, was a share (almost one-third) of
a large irrigated orchard planted with mulberry and fruit trees. Judging
from the length of the water timeshare – from dawn until noon on Sun-
days – this was a large and profitable orchard. ʿAbdullah designated his old-
est daughter, Zaynab, as beneficiary of one-half of the total waqf, with the
other half split evenly between his granddaughter Sharifa and his mother
Zahra, described as “black skinned.”50 All future descendants were to have
equal shares, regardless of sex. Effectively, therefore, the al-Qawwaf family
patrimony passed to Zaynab and her orphaned niece, Sharifa, whose share
was to be managed by her father, Khalil al-ʿAqqad, Halima’s widower. Since
ʿAbdullah remained the sole beneficiary until his death, the waqf created
an incentive for them to care for him and his mother in their old age.51 The
second waqf also provided Sharifa with a steady income and a house of her
49 TICR 55:223–224, dated Jamadi II 21, 1255. There is no mention of ʿUmar al-Dinnawi or of the
residence he had bought earlier, which was likely now in the hands of Halima’s widower, sayyid
Khalil b. Ahmad al-ʿAqqad. There is also no mention of the son. If he was alive, then it is very likely
that ʿAbdullah al-Qawwaf passed on properties to him as well, although through means other than
a waqf endowment. It is not accidental that we do not know. Silence, it is important to stress, is key
to the design of family waqfs.
50 He made it a condition that his mother would lose her access if she remarried.
51 This desire almost certainly played a role in the ʿAnklis waqf discussed in Chapter 1. In some regions,
the obligations of children towards their parents were formalized and reinforced through official
contracts. This was the case, for example, in northwestern Portugal. Caroline B. Brettell, “Kinship
and Contract: Property Transmission and Family Relations in Northwestern Portugal,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 33, no. 3 (1991): 448–451.
Patterns Three and Four 213
own, making her a very desirable marriage partner of independent means.
Indeed, ʿAbdullah al-Qawwaf had surrounded himself with propertied and
independent women – mother, sisters, daughter, and granddaughter – who
had their own residences and sources of income. He further ensured that
not only they, but also their female descendants would be equal to male
beneficiaries for generations to come. Why would he make this equality a
general principle?
An important clue in this unfolding argument about Pattern One is that
ʿAbdullah inherited the orchard from his wife, Sharifa, who died before his
daughter, Halima. The rest of the orchard, therefore, was owned equally
between Zaynab and Halima’s daughter, Sharifa. In other words, he did not
construct a new reality of equality. He, himself, was heir to women as strong
stakeholders in the most profitable and important sector of Tripoli’s econ-
omy. Prior to her marriage, ʿAbdullah’s wife had an independent source of
income as a property owner/manager of profitable irrigated orchards geared
towards the silk industry and citrus exports. ʿAbdullah was providing his
daughters and granddaughter with the same means for financial and res-
idential independence as his wife had enjoyed. This, combined with his
inclusion in the endowment of the large al-Qawwaf family home, meant
that he also passed on the family name and patrimony to his daughter.52
5.4 Patterns Three and Four

Commitment to an egalitarian principle in property devolution practices
would have seemed naive, if not alien, to most Nabulsis who endowed
family waqfs, males and females alike. Revealing was the reaction of Nazih
al-Sayih when I asked him in the late 1990s whether anyone still endows
family waqfs in Nablus, and why. At that time, al-Sayih had been serving
as the head scribe (still referred to in Nablus as bāsh kātib) of the Nablus
shariʿa court for decades. He knew who used this court, and why, better
than anyone. As was his habit – the product of long experience in an insti-
tution packed daily by crowds of litigants and claimants caught between
intractable problems and deep desires – he answered authoritatively, suc-
cinctly, and without hesitation: “Oh, yes! People still endow waqfs; they
do it to disinherit females.” Then he looked at me with a hint of a pained
52 The other properties were a shop (h.ānūt) and a storage area attached to or very near to the house.
ʿAbdullah had endowed one-half of this residence almost two decades earlier. By including the
entire house as part of another endowment with different beneficiaries and conditions, ʿAbdullah al-
Qawwaf reconfigured his family charter in light of the new circumstances, in spite of legal restraints.
smile on his face and said in a lower voice: “It is not right, really. They
should not do that, but that is what they do.”
No doubt, al-Sayih’s comment could be simply a reflection of a mod-
ernist sensibility, widespread among the middle classes of Nablus at that
time, which imagined an undesirable traditional past and lamented its tena-
cious grip on the present. Yet, there is no denying the clarity and consis-
tency of the evidence: excluding females in property devolution practices
through the family waqf in Nablus has been a common practice for at least
300 years. However, the degree of exclusion increased qualitatively start-
ing in the late 1830s. Until then, Pattern Three was the most widely used
strategy to make sure that upon the endower’s death his or her daughters
did receive one-half the share of males, but that the daughters’ progeny,
male and female, were excluded from the pool of beneficiaries.53 Moreover,
the beneficiary status of daughters in Pattern Three was only a temporary
one. Virtually all waqfs that designated this pattern also attached a con-
dition that the female children of the endower could only receive their
shares or have residential usufruct rights if they remained unmarried or
were widowed or divorced.54 Considering that marriage was largely univer-
sal, Pattern Three effectively excluded the endower’s female children upon
maturity. Pattern Four waqfs essentially eliminated this grace period for the
endower’s own female children as well as the female children of their sons
and progeny by excluding females altogether. Only sons and their male
descendants were eligible beneficiaries. It was as if female offspring sim-
ply did not exist within the circle of the kin who counted. Immediately at
birth, they were potential outsiders unless they married a paternal cousin
or never married at all.
Patterns Three and Four can be viewed as patriline incubators, for they
promoted male descent from the endower as the organizing principle of
kinship relations through various degrees of exclusion of wives, daughters,
and their descendants, as well as the female progeny of the male descen-
dants of waqf endowers. The underlying assumption was that access to
waqf revenues by females and their offspring would fragment the material
base of the patriline, reduce the total sum of revenues accruing to the male
line of the endower, and allow male “outsiders” (ajānib) related through
53 Pattern Three is not unusual in terms of accepted norms for property devolution. At least, that is
the impression one gets from looking at fatwas from Damascus and Morocco during this period.
See, for example, Etty Terem and David Powers, “From the Miʿyar of Al-Wansharisi to the New
Miʿyar of Al-Wazzani: Continuity and Change,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 33 (2007):
1–39.
54 In Tripoli, a woman who endowed a residence applied this condition to her husband (TICR 54:96).
exogamous marriage to the “family females” a foothold in the endower’s
household and undue influence on the management of waqf properties.
By establishing large constitutive waqfs whose pools of beneficiaries were
dramatically reduced and focused on the male line, endowers in Nablus
unleashed a dynamic affecting all facets of family life. The very existence
of revenues to be collected and distributed established a network among
the male progeny of the endower’s branch, all of whom had a personal
stake in promoting an understanding of immoveable property that enti-
tled them to monopolize the revenues of waqfs to the exclusion of their
female siblings and relatives. They also had a common material interest
in remaining vigilant in calculating the constantly changing division of
shares, which were most impacted by marriage strategies – a common site
of contestation among family members. The dynamic reinforced patriar-
chal authority within kin networks and the concentration of resources at
the expense of females and the young. These were all advantages, as we
shall see in the next chapter, if one lived in an extremely competitive urban
commercial economy based on access to the rural surplus and regional trade
networks, as well as in a fragmented and precarious political environment.
In Nablus, the greater the competition and the more polarized the politi-
cal environment, the more categorical the exclusion of females from waqf
endowments.
The Swift Rise of Pattern Four

Unfortunately for the women of Nablus – at least, those from well-to-
do families – a number of dynamics converged in the 1830s to produce
a sharp and dramatic shift in beneficiary patterns towards greater exclu-
sion of females. This shift coincided with three transitions – local, impe-
rial, and regional – that followed closely on one another’s heels. Locally,
Nablus witnessed a vigorous economic expansion in the 1820s following the
assassination of the local strongman Musa Beik Tuqan, fear of whom had
kept investment capital locked at home for two decades.55 Empire-wide,
the destruction of the Janissaries in 1826, seen by some as the beginning of
the modern period in Ottoman history, led to a period of reorganization
and reform (tanzimat).56 Regionally, after the military invasion of Bilad
al-Sham in 1831, Egypt’s Ottoman governor, Mehmet ʿAli Pasha, aggres-
sively promoted the commercialization of agricultural production to feed
55 Nimr, Tarikh Jabal Nabulus wa-l-Balqaʾ, 291. 56 Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire.
a growing European market recovering from the Napoleonic Wars.57 All
this unleashed a period of cutthroat competition, especially in the capital-
intensive realm of soap production, the leading industrial sector in the
city.58 The rise of a new merchant-dominated elite intensified the com-
petition, as did a high-stakes political struggle in the 1830s, as some ruling
families in Nablus and its hinterlands declared open revolt in 1834, while
others – such as Husayn ʿAbd al-Hadi and ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh –
threw their lot in with the Egyptian authorities. By the late 1830s, Patterns
Three and Four had become dominant. The frequency of Pattern Three
rose from less than forty per cent in the 1660s–1730s, to sixty-five per cent
in the 1800–60 period. Meanwhile, the even more restrictive Pattern Four
rose from fourteen per cent in the earlier period to twenty-four per cent in
the 1800–60 period, with a dramatic spike after 1830. Of the thirty-three
Pattern Four waqfs in the Late Period, only one was endowed prior to that
year.
This was such a rapid development that it is possible to track the change
within the same family,59 or even where one person endowed more than one
waqf during this time. As detailed in Chapter 3, ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh,
the long-serving qadi of the shariʿa court of Nablus, started off endowing
Pattern Three waqfs like his father (also a qadi). Then, in the 1830s, he
switched to Pattern Four waqfs. The latter served the double purpose of
allowing for the concentration of wealth and power and providing a legal
structure for the consolidation of a rapidly growing portfolio of properties
in the hands of a new elite, at the expense of the old. This double purpose
suited the needs of those families that bet their political futures on the new
Egyptian rulers, and it was they who endowed the first batch of Pattern
Four family waqfs in the nineteenth century and set the trend for others to
follow.
The Political Work of Exclusion

A Pattern Four waqf was an efficient way to marshal and consolidate
authority and concentrate wealth within the family and in society, but
it came at a price: it severely narrowed the meanings of “family” and it
57 There is a rich literature on this event. See, for example, Safi, Al-Hukum al-Masri fi Filastin; Sulay-
man, Athar al-hamla al-misriyya ʿala Bilad al-Sham.
58 Soap production quadrupled within a generation. See Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, ch. 5.
59 An example is the Tuffaha family. A leader of the ʿulamaʾ of Nablus, Hasan Tuffaha, endowed a
Pattern Three waqf in 1801, while his son, Ahmad, endowed a Pattern Four waqf in 1855. See NICR
6:117, dated July 2, 1801; and NICR 17:369, dated January 20, 1855.
stretched the limits of the waqf as a legal institution. The following three
examples demonstrate the political work such waqfs do by highlighting
the contextually specific and fraught relationship between economy, power,
and exclusion.
Not coincidentally, the first Pattern Four waqf was jointly endowed by
three brothers from the town of Jenin in Northwest Jabal Nablus. Jenin was
the commercial capital of Marj Ibn ʿAmer, Palestine’s most fertile plain and
the site of the most rapid commercialization of agriculture and commodifi-
cation of land during the nineteenth century. This waqf was followed soon
after by a very large waqf by Sulayman, son of Husayn ʿAbd al-Hadi from
the fortified village of ʿArrabeh, also located in the Marj Ibn ʿAmer region.
Both families supported Egyptian military conquest and rule over Bilad
al-Sham and reaped great rewards from this. Soon after, the increasingly
more powerful urban merchant elite of Nablus came to favor this style of
waqf.60
Five years into the period of Egyptian rule, Shaykh Asʿad, ʿAbd al-
Razzaq, and Nasir – all from the locally powerful Naffaʿ lineage and impor-
tant allies of the ʿAbd al-Hadis – thought it prudent to consolidate the
properties they had gained by endowing a constitutive waqf. On March 15,
1836, not long after the Egyptian military re-established control over the
Nablus region following the 1834 revolt, they appeared before the shariʿa
court qadi in Nablus and endowed two large residential compounds, ten
retail shops, three large gardens, a watermill, and a bakery. All were located,
with the exception of the watermill, in Jenin, their hometown. Unlike the
ʿAbd al-Hadis, they had no ambitions to break into the power structure
of the city of Nablus itself.61 The Naffaʿ brothers designated themselves as
beneficiaries, equally at one-third each. After their death, the shares would
pass to each brother’s male progeny separately, thus creating three patrilines
within a single waqf. That is, they designed the waqf in a way that gave due
respect to a horizontal alliance between male siblings for the purposes of
mutual support while at the same time allowing each branch the autonomy
60 This is not to imply that Pattern Four was a rural import into Nablus. It was far from a clan
(h.umūla)-inspired pattern based on male solidarity. For one thing, leading rural-based families like
the Naffaʿ and ʿAbd al-Hadi actively emulated urban fashions, living in kursı̄ (throne) villages inside
large urban-style residences built by urban masons that contrasted sharply with the nearby peasant
homes. Their women distinguished themselves sartorially from female peasants, including by the
adoption of the urban veil. The argument is actually the opposite. As noted in Chapter 4, the Pat-
tern Four waqf was a modern development that accompanied the expansion of capitalist relations
in Jabal Nablus.
61 NICR 9: 215–217, dated Rabiʿ I 1252. The watermill was located in Bisan Valley, quite a distance
to the east, which shows the geographical reach of the Naffaʿ business interests. Perhaps this is why
they decided to endow the waqf in the Nablus shariʿa court instead of locally in Jenin.
to manage, invest, mortgage, and rent properties in a manner deemed to
serve the branch’s best interests.
Following the extinction of male descendants, the revenues were to
be channeled to the female descendants of the male children and their
progeny.62 The brothers also designated an annual stipend of fifty piasters
to each of their daughters and twenty-five piasters for each female child
of male beneficiaries. This fixed income was based on the general prin-
ciple of being female: it was not tied to marital status, residency, degree
of kinship, or any other condition. Such stipends were an unusual feature
in that they made the financial support of females a structural part of the
endowment and conveyed a clear message about the responsibility of men
towards their sisters and daughters, regardless of who they married. At the
same time, they had the effect of categorizing females as legal and moral
objects of charity, not as legal and rightful beneficiaries who received a pro-
portional share of the revenues. This arrangement carried, therefore, a very
different valence from the usual Pattern Two and Pattern Three conditions
that daughters were temporary beneficiaries whose status as such was to be
terminated upon marriage. Pattern Four, in essence, challenged the very
eligibility of females to inclusion in vertical property devolution strategies.
They were erased.
The brothers added a condition that challenged the integrity of the
waqf as a single patrimony. Each beneficiary, they instructed, was to be
the administrator (nāz.ir) of his own share of the waqf (kulla man istah.āqqa
shayʾan yakūna nāz.iran ʿalayhi). It was not unusual to divide a waqf in
half or thirds and appoint different administrators for each. But to make
every beneficiary an administrator over his share was tantamount to parti-
tioning and privatizing the properties in the same manner as post-mortem
Islamic rules of inheritance, albeit according to a formula that excluded
females. At first blush, this condition seems unrealistic and counterpro-
ductive, because the properties remained the same while the number of
descendants could increase exponentially. Theoretically, a small shop could
have had a dozen or more supervisors. But it makes more sense when con-
sidering the premises that inform the endowment. First, that the purposes
of the waqf were to provide legal protection from confiscation, to create
a family charter for an inter vivos property devolution strategy meant to
exclude females, and to allow management of the properties as if they were
privately owned and inherited. Second, that the waqf was not expected to
62 The last station stops of the waqf were the two mosques of Jenin – the Great Mosque and the Small
Mosque – followed by the “poor of the community of (ummat) Muhammad.”
last beyond two generations. Third, that each branch would be internally
centralized. This endowment, therefore, is best seen not as the culmina-
tion of a lifetime of patient investment and accumulation, but as the estab-
lishment by a newly wealthy extended family of a platform for managing
an accelerated economic expansion by regulating relations between three
branches. The brothers were fairly young at the time of the endowment:
Shaykh Asʿad had two sons, Mustafa and Ismaʿil; ʿAbd al-Razzaq had one,
Salih; and the youngest, Nasir, had no male children. The waqf provided
an organizational principle that carried the force of law and the blessing of
God as instantiated by the shariʿa court.
The qadi of the Nablus shariʿa court who certified the waqf, ʿAbd al-
Wahid Khammāsh, must have known that making each beneficiary an
administrator over his own share was legally suspect. “Al-waqf lā-yuqassam”
(a waqf cannot be partitioned), ruled ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili, Mufti of Tripoli
in the mid to late seventeenth century, in case after case. His reasoning
was simple: beneficiaries had a right to the revenues of a property, but not
to the actual property itself (li-anna h.aqqahum fı̄ al-ghalla lā-fı̄ al-ʿayn).63
They could not divide up a waqf even if they all agreed to do so.64 Aware-
ness of this perceived legal transgression may explain the last line in the
lengthy Naffaʿ waqf endowment (two and a half folios long), which states
that the brothers took possession of this waqf as administrators, not as
owners (wad.aʿū aydı̄him ʿalā waqfihim hadha wad.iʿ nadhāra lā wad.iʿ milk).
This reassurance betrays the opposite intent.
ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh also used his position to help the ʿAbd al-
Hadi family and its allies establish themselves in Nablus by approving
what amounted to the illegal sale of scores of waqf properties from the
old elite to the new. The ʿAbd al-Hadis wanted to acquire soap factories,
warehouses, residential compounds, and the like, but all the choice morsels
of real estate in the city were already endowed as waqfs and could not be
sold. If, however, the qadi ruled that these properties were in such a state of
disrepair that they were no longer revenue-producing, then it would be per-
missible to exchange them for properties that would be more useful to the
63 al-Khalili, Fatawa al-Shaykh ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili, case 41, p. 26. See also two related cases: case 27,
p. 24 and case 44, p. 26. The same reasoning was used regarding a rental case (p. 23) and a right-to-
residence case (p. 5). The mutawallı̄’s role becomes crucial here, for it is he or she who must protect
the interests of the waqf and make sure it does not become privatized in practice. For example, see
the answer to the question as to whether it is permissible for someone to divide up properties for
purposes of investment and maintenance and what role the mutawallı̄ will have in such an instance
(case 17, p. 22).
64 Mufti ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili volunteered a reason for the widespread temptation to divide up waqf
properties: to prevent conflict between beneficiaries (qat.ʿan li-maddat al-nizāʿ baynihim). Ibid., case
45, p. 27.
waqf in question. This legal arrangement, known as istibdāl (exchange),
was precisely what ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh approved, putting his seal
on waqf exchange deeds that described desired properties as useless except
as a “home for dogs.”65 In fact, they were anything but. Soap factories, for
example, were sites of major investment in the 1820s in terms of renovation
and expansion. Complicating matters further, in a way that undermined
the legitimacy of the waqf as an institution in Nablus, the ʿAbd al-Hadis
and their allies had no immoveable properties with which to complete the
exchange. All they could offer was cash, which was duly approved by the
qadi.66
The ʿAbd al-Hadis and their allies, mindful of the 1834 revolt and the
emerging consensus among European countries that the Ottoman Sultan
should be supported against Mehmet ʿAli Pasha of Egypt, moved to endow
their newly acquired properties as family waqfs. All, without exception,
designated beneficiaries according to Pattern Four. Although this pattern
was not entirely new to Nablus, the enormous ʿAbd al-Hadi waqfs and the
rapid transformation of property and power relations among the elite of
Nablus constituted a major turning point and set a new model. Sulayman
ʿAbd al-Hadi, Shaykh Husayn’s oldest son and de facto leader of the family,
endowed the first of several constitutive waqfs on July 5, 1837.67 Two more
large family waqfs were endowed in quick succession on July 7, 1838 and
October 23, 1839. All shared the same conditions.68 The first endowment
is a sight to behold. The language is so flowery and thick that it drips off
the page like caramelized sugar syrup. The titles Sulayman is given and/or
arrogates to himself are so many that it begs credulity. The amount of real
estate is also staggering: four full folios of the court register, containing
dozens of properties ranging from residential compounds, gardens, retail
shops, and warehouses to mills, olive presses, bakeries, and coffee shops.
65 For details, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 210–212.

66 These “exchanges,” therefore, were forced sales. In at least one case, the previous waqf administrator
successfully recuperated the properties through lawsuits that proved the illegality of the sale. Ibid.,
210–211.
67 NICR 9: 311–315, dated early Rabiʿ II 1253. Sulayman ʿAbd al-Hadi also endowed a small charitable
waqf, dated July 21, 1838. This waqf endowed a piece of land (which contained grapevines, fig trees,
and a cave) located in Hebron, near the highly venerated Ibrahimi Mosque, and designated its
revenues to pay two cousins from the Hebronite Tahbub family to recite the verse of Ya-Sin eight
times a day each. The rewards (thawāb) were to be gifted according to the following formula: three
times for the soul of the endower’s father, three times for the soul of the endower, and one time each
for the endower’s two most important allies: Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghani Zayd al-Qadri, the Sufi leader
from the nearby village of Yaʿbad, and Shaykh Mustafa Effendi Khammāsh, father of the long-time
qadi of Nablus, ʿAbd al-Wahid Khammāsh. NICR 9: 385–386, dated end of Jamadi I 1254.
68 NICR 9:50–51, dated Rabiʿ II 14, 1254 and 10:4, dated Shaʿban 14, 1255.
The pattern of beneficiaries is similar to that of the Naffaʿ brothers,
in terms of having separate revenue distribution streams and a multiplic-
ity of administrators, both of which are mechanisms for the cultivation
of patrlines around the shell of a family corporation. The difference, of
course, is one of scale: this new waqf was large enough to support multi-
ple branches for generations. After himself, Sulayman designated his three
sons and any future sons he might have, each supervising his own share
(kul mustah.iqʿalā istih.qāqihi). Female children of male progeny were next
in line. But then an extra step, absent from the Naffaʿ waqf, was added.
Male children of the females descended from the male line came before
female children descended from the females of the male line. In other
words, the female children of the male line were more important than
the male children of the female line. In keeping with this more exclu-
sionary spirit, Sulayman ʿAbd al-Hadi did not set aside stipends for the
females. Rather, he only allowed them to live in the residential proper-
ties for so long as they remained unmarried. This included his wives,
his white and black concubines, and his daughters, in that order. Unlike
with sons, whose names permeate the waqf, not a single female name is
mentioned.
The third and final example is that of an even more exclusionary Pattern
Four waqf than the previous two. In what amounts to an arms race over
the concentration of power and wealth solely in the hands of male leaders
of branches, this waqf was endowed by the senior members of the Tuqan
family, which had, prior to the challenge put forth by the ʿAbd al-Hadis,
been the leading political family in Nablus. In order to strengthen their
position, the two reigning members of the powerful “Beik” branch of the
Tuqan family, Mahmud and Sulayman, endowed a joint waqf on August
22, 1838 that shut all possible doors in the face of females. After the extinc-
tion of their male progeny, the endowers specified that the revenues were
to revert to the male progeny of the endowers’ paternal cousins, the sons
of the deceased Ibrahim Beik Tuqan. Still moving horizontally, they speci-
fied that after the demise of the male members of the Beik branches of the
Tuqan family, the waqf was to revert to leading males of the Aghā (a lower
military rank than Beik) branch; namely, the sons of Ahmad Agha and
Mustafa Agha Tuqan. Finally came the remaining Tuqan branches, under
the heading of “nearest agnates” (aqrab al-ʿas.abāt).69 Even for Nablus, this
was wholly unusual. It was also a thoroughly modern construction that
69 NICR 9:386–389, dated early Jamadi II 1254. For other examples of the place of agnates in the third
or fourth step in a list of beneficiaries, see NICR 7:53, 77–79, 81, 139–140.
broke with past practices largely as a result of the political and economic
changes that were transforming Nablus.
5.5 Conclusion
Waqfs carried the force and legitimacy of a religiously sanctioned legal
transaction that had the potential to exert considerable influence on the
dynamics of relations between family members for generations. Of all the
possible variables for comparative analysis of waqf endowments between
Tripoli and Nablus, beneficiary patterns speak loudest and most clearly
about who’s in and who’s out; hence, about the production and reproduc-
tion of notions of family, property, and gender through property devolu-
tion practices.
In the family waqfs of Tripoli and Nablus, vertical transmission was the
rule. Children, not spouses, parents, or agnates, constituted the default
pool of beneficiaries. In Tripoli, regardless of the sex of the endower, this
pool invariably included all children, male and female. Typically, the shares
of waqf revenues assigned to males were twice those assigned to females,
in keeping with the core principle of post-mortem Islamic rules of inher-
itance. Remarkably, however, a substantive third of all family waqfs in
Tripoli allotted equal shares to females and males. The reasons are not
clear, but they may have to do with the strong position of women in urban
agriculture and the centrality of the conjugal family – especially relations
between husband and wife – to kinship organization. While one cannot
argue for an egalitarian consciousness in a positivist sense, there is no doubt
that family waqfs in Tripoli, as charters of family life, were committed to
enfranchising females.
In contrast, the prevalence of Patterns Three and Four in Nablus focused
the vertical transmission on male descendants. For the purposes of dis-
tributing waqf revenues, daughters were considered temporary residents
rather than permanent kin. The waqf incubated competitive, financially
concentrated, and centralized patrilines characterized by strong business
and property relations between father and son, between first paternal male
cousins, and between paternal uncles and nephews. The commitment of
resources was not to the full conjugal family (as in Tripoli), nor to the
horizontally extended agnatic male kin, but to the branch of the endower.
The practice in Nablus of excluding females from family waqf endowments
should not be viewed as a result of an ingrained rural, Arab, or Islamic cul-
tural trait. This certainly did not happen in Tripoli, even though it shared
the same legal environment, political structure, and general cultural norms.
Conclusion 223
Just as importantly, beneficiary patterns changed over time, and dramati-
cally so in the case of Nablus, in ways clearly related to larger transforma-
tions in the political economy of the city and its hinterland. Not so for
Tripoli. To say that the patterns in that city were remarkably consistent is,
if anything, an understatement. What explains the systematic and long-
lasting divergent patterns in property devolution practices and notions of
kinship, gender, and property between Nablus and Tripoli? It is to this
question that we turn next.
c h a p ter 6
Property and Gender

The Political Economy of Difference
They dug the canal from the river through valleys and folds of mountains.
They removed boulders and cleared lands and hills. Large sums of money
were spent on it and, with the help of God almighty, the water, full of
profit and gain, flowed with abundance.
Legal acknowledgment deed regarding the construction
of a canal from al-Bared River to the village of Minya.
Tripoli Court Register, 17321
The term middle [class] in Tripoli means those planters (zurrāʿ): the own-
ers of orchards and the traders in citrus.
Tamimi and Bahjat, 19162
When the ballān blooms, women rule.
Proverb in silk-producing regions of Bilad al-Sham3
This chapter’s central claim is that ingrained differences in the local polit-
ical economies of Nablus and Tripoli account, in large measure, for the
dramatic variations in the relationship between gender, property, and fam-
ily organization as suggested by divergent patterns in family waqf endow-
ments, especially those of exclusion and inclusion of beneficiaries. The core
assumption here, buttressed by much of the voluminous literature on fam-
ily history, is that there is a strong correlation between historically and eco-
logically embedded techniques and relations of production and exchange
1 TICR 6:116, dated early Dhu al-Qaʿda 1141. Minya village became a highly profitable region, and a
good part of it is still covered with orchards today. A full consideration of the political economy and
technological infrastructure of water is beyond the purview of this book.
2 Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 227.
3 Meaning that women dominated the process of production with their skilled labor, and that silk
was the most important source of capital among all the agricultural seasons. Ballān is a ubiquitous
thorny shrub whose clustered and entangled stalks, like those of the genista (broom) plant, resemble
latticework and make ideal homes for the silkworm to climb on and weave its cocoons in. Both were
widely used in the silk-producing regions of Bilad al-Sham, especially in house production, where the
ballan, preferred by the silkworm, was put on stacked wooden shelves (s.aqāla). For an entertaining
and insightful essay on the history and folklore of women and silk, see Fawwaz Tarabulsi, In kan
baddak taʿshaq: kitabat fi al-thaqafah al-shaʿbiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Kunuz al-Adabiyya, 2005), 21–22.
224
Property and Gender 225
on the one hand, and kinship dynamics and forms of property devolution
on the other.4 That is, how people made a daily living helped shape the
ways of organizing family life in anticipation of inevitable death. Of course,
there is no mechanical relationship between political economy and prop-
erty devolution strategies. In both cities, the circulation of capital and prop-
erty across space and time, as well as across gender and class, was expressed
in the language of Islamic law and largely governed by the shariʿa court,
the key Ottoman state institution on the local level. Still, and within the
overarching legal and imperial umbrella, there is a key difference between
Tripoli and Nablus. In Tripoli, the major source of wealth was privately
owned (milk) urban orchards, dedicated mostly to the silk industry and
operated through co-cultivation contracts. In Nablus, it was access, pri-
marily through forward-purchase moneylending contracts, to the surplus
of peasants who had usufruct cultivation rights over government-owned
(mı̄rı̄) dry farming lands. The former militated for a large middle class and
inclusion of women in property devolution strategies, while the latter facil-
itated the concentration of wealth and the exclusion of women.
Briefly put, the backbone of the political economy of Tripoli through-
out the Ottoman period was irrigated mulberry and citrus orchards located
on privately owned estates that formed a fat north–south corridor separat-
ing the city from the Mediterranean Sea. River-fed urban irrigated agri-
culture, whether in interior oasis cities such as Damascus or in coastal
ones such as Tripoli, was a powerful force in shaping local social forma-
tions, political relations, cultural dynamics, and spiritual life. A focus on
urban agriculture allows a line of inquiry that decenters the coast/interior
and urban/rural binaries of Eastern Mediterranean history. It also compli-
cates the view of the Ottoman agrarian formation as simply one of peasants
engaged in working field crops sown on mı̄rı̄ (state) lands.
During the 1660–1860 period, Tripoli had the largest and most sophisti-
cated urban agricultural sector of any of the coastal cities along the Eastern
4 Iconic here is Goody’s explanation of the lineal versus horizontal structures of the inheritance systems
of “Eurasia” and “Africa,” which he attributes to the use of the plow versus the hoe. Goody, “Strategies
of Heirship,” 15. A classic argument, based on Weber, locates difference as a product of horizontal
versus vertical modes of social organization. For instance, Vanessa Maher begins the introduction of
her influential book on women and property in Morocco by citing two economic circumstances –
market/wage labor and kinship/patron–client – as leading to two different modes of social rela-
tionship. Vanessa Maher, Women and Property in Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1974), 1. Martha Mundy and Richard Suamarez Smith set the bar high for future scholarship when
they integrated, into one cohesive argument, an in-depth legal history of land and the cultivator in
Ottoman times, a detailed analysis of administrative practices on the East Bank of the Jordan River
during the late nineteenth century, and a meticulous mapping of land use and property devolution
on the village level. Mundy and Smith, Governing Property.
226 Property and Gender
Mediterranean. The huge several-kilometers-square green zone, subdivided
into multitudes of orchards (bustān, pl. basātı̄n), was a powerhouse for the
commercial production of silk (and later citrus) for local, regional, and
European (mostly French) markets. For centuries, the white mulberry tree,
the leaf of which is the only food the silkworm deigns to eat, dominated
this landscape, and absorbed the energies of large swaths of the population
of Tripoli and its nearby villages. Private ownership during this period was
mostly concentrated in trees, which could be owned separately from the
land (as was the case with water, as well) on which they were planted, the
latter being mostly endowed as waqf.
It is the contention of this chapter that this irrigated urban green zone
supported a large and diverse middle class characterized by the signal
importance of the conjugal family and gender-inclusive property devolu-
tion strategies. Indeed, propertied women in Tripoli played a prominent
role in this key economic sector through ownership of trees and, especially,
through capital investment in co-cultivation contracts that organized the
division of labor and created opportunities for social mobility. Women also
provided the skilled and unskilled labor associated with sericulture as a sys-
tem of production, and they endowed, on an equal basis with men, numer-
ous family waqfs for the benefit of their children, male and female, as well
as to support vulnerable kin and the religious establishment.
In Nablus, by contrast, the commercial and manufacturing livelihoods
of the urban population –especially merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans –
depended largely on the agricultural surplus of peasants with usufruct cul-
tivation rights over government (mı̄rı̄) land. The transfer of that surplus
was legally realized primarily through the forward-purchase (salam) mon-
eylending contract.5 The surplus was unevenly appropriated; the lion’s
share went to the large merchant households operating centralized fam-
ily firms, which carved distinct social and physical spaces both in the city,
in the form of large residential compounds, and in the hinterland, in the
form of spheres of influence in clusters of villages. These spheres were con-
structed through multigenerational patron–client networks, volatile male
spaces that required carefully nurtured and sometimes violently sutured
political and social alliances between the heads of rich and powerful urban
families and the leaders of armed rural extended families and clans. These
latter controlled the rain-fed and state-owned lands that produced the olive
oil, grains, legumes, cotton, and other commodities.
5 Beshara Doumani, “Le contrat salam et les relations ville-campagne dans la Palestine
ottomane,”Annales HSS 61, no. 4 (2006): 9901–9924.
Property and Gender 227
All property relations are gendered to one degree or another, but the sit-
uation in Nablus was highly polarized along the male/female axis, because
the women of Nablus, very much unlike those of Tripoli, were virtually
excluded from the primary economic life of the city. They played but a
minor role, if any, in the urban–rural moneylending and trade networks
and in the key sectors of textile and soap manufacturing. Not surprising,
and as indicated in Chapter 2, Nabulsi women had the lowest participa-
tion rate in family waqf endowments among any Ottoman city for which
we have comparative data. Those who did endow family waqfs focused on
residential real estate to bolster their position within the household and
to generate income from rent, some of which was circulated in the form
of moneylending to kin and close associates. Their property devolution
strategies, judging from the beneficiary patterns discussed in the previous
chapter, were only slightly less invested than those of their fathers, brothers,
and husbands in favoring sons over daughters as the surest path to resource
mobilization, wealth, and power.
The political economy of Tripoli and Nablus also differed in one other
important respect: change over time. In Nablus, there was a significant and
fairly sudden shift towards a much tighter restriction of women’s access
to the family patrimony. Starting in the 1820s, the intense competition
over the surplus between and within merchant families and their part-
ners in the political/military and religious establishments further polar-
ized the alignment of property and gender in Nablus. The percentage of
endowments by females dropped dramatically in the 1830s, and women
completely disappeared as waqf endowers in Nablus after 1844. In con-
trast, the number of female waqf endowers in Tripoli was roughly equal
to that of men across the two centuries under study, and the inclu-
sive patterns of designating beneficiaries remained steady throughout that
period.
The bulk of this chapter is devoted to unpacking the political econ-
omy arguments, especially when it comes to women and urban agricul-
tural production in Tripoli, for I have written extensively elsewhere about
the political economy of Nablus.6 It is useful, however, to preface and sit-
uate these arguments by briefly considering what one might call “legal and
spiritual economies.” By that, I mean the long-term yet contingent inter-
sections between Islamic discursive formations, legal practices, religious
establishments, and regional political economies.7 It is these contingent
6 For details, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.
7 Of course, political economy is inextricably intertwined with other factors in the larger universe of
differences between Tripoli and Nablus, most of which we simply do not have the sources to explore
intersections that shaped the production of the key sources on which this
study is based: shariʿa court registers, fatwa collections, and other locally
generated legal documents, such as family papers. These sources, in turn,
embody and facilitate the legal and religious practices and vocabularies that
govern property and kinship relations in ways that (re)produce hierarchies
of difference and power.
6.1 Legal and Spiritual Economies

Legal and spiritual economies deeply influence kinship and property devo-
lution practices. On the spiritual economy front, the contrasting patterns
of beneficiaries in family waqf endowments can be partly attributed to dif-
ferences in the size, social composition, political dynamics, and funding
of the religious establishments of Nablus and Tripoli. On that of the legal
economy, private ownership – hence, the possibility of waqf endowments –
in the urban green zones of the Eastern Mediterranean owe a great deal to
juridical arguments about the legal status of the Arab lands conquered by
the Ottomans in 1516–17.8
The legal economy argument recognizes the dramatic contestation
within Hanafi jurisprudence following the Ottoman conquests of Bilad
al-Sham and Egypt over the question of whether the Arab lands were
privately-owned (milk) or state-owned (mı̄rı̄). This was especially cru-
cial for the highly profitable urban agricultural sector, consisting of irri-
gated orchards of mulberries, olive, citrus, and other fruit trees located
in green zones outside of urban centers. Leading local muftis argued
for the former, while the official position of the Ottoman state was in
favor of the latter. While the legal history is complex and cannot be
reduced to crass materialist determinism, it is clear that class interests
were of some consequence. As Ken Cuno argues, it is not accidental
that Khayr al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) and Ibn ʿAbidin (1783–1836), the
two most influential muftis in Bilad al-Sham in Ottoman times, argued
against mı̄rı̄ and for milk. Both belonged to a social class that was heav-
ily invested, mostly via waqf endowments, in the privately-owned orchard
economies of the coastal area of Palestine and in the Ghuta of Damascus,
in any systematic way. Subject formation, affective relations, demographic data, and visual culture
are but four examples of the kinds of topics for which there are virtually no sources. Parish registers
and other serial records, as well as diaries, letters, and paintings, are but some of the sources available
to historians of the family in early modern and modern Europe.
8 The literature on which this brief sketch draws is highly complex. The aim is to suggest a connection,
not to substantiate direct causation.
Legal and Spiritual Economies 229
respectively.9 Cuno notes, for instance, that “an orchard or vineyard was
involved in each of the fatwas in which al-Ramli ruled that kharaj-paying
land was the property of the kharaj payers.”10 Ibn ʿAbidin’s rulings, roughly
two centuries later, were even more far-reaching, reflecting the increased
investment of Damascene notables in rain-fed grain lands.11 The cumula-
tive effect of this jurisprudence would have a profound impact on the orga-
nization of family life and property devolution strategies, especially since
women could have access to this key economic sector through inheritance
and family waqf endowments.12
Cuno builds his argument on a seminal line of inquiry opened up by
Baber Johansen, who traced and contextualized legal debates on the status
of the land and the cultivator in Egypt and Bilad al-Sham from Mam-
luk through Ottoman times. Johansen’s main point was that contracts of
agricultural tenancy, especially sharecropping (muzāraʿa: usually used for
field crops with annual turnover in terms of plowing and harvest), facili-
tated the commodification of land and labor, essentially by transforming
a relationship into a quantifiable substance that came into existence after
9 In 1995, Ken Cuno, building on Johansen (see later), argued that the Shafiʿi legal background, as
well as the class position of the key jurists in Bilad al-Sham, led them to the conclusion that the land
of this region should be considered private property. Ken Cuno, “Was the Land of Ottoman Syria
Miri or Milk? An Examination of Juridical Differences within the Hanafi School,” Studia Islamica
81 (1995): 142–146. Moreover, Shafiʿi jurisprudence, unlike the Hanafi school, allowed long-term
tenancy contracts, which were favored by the tree-centered middle class of urban farmers in Tripoli.
10 Ibid., 148. Kharaj is a complex category of taxation whose meaning and usage changed radically over
time. For the period under discussion, it came to denote, for certain influential jurists, a tax paid on
privately owned land that, as such, can be endowed as waqf. In the early twentieth century, kharaj
was understood as a tax on irrigated orchards. See Tawfiq al-Ahdab, “Al-daraʾib wa al-ziraʿa.” Al-
Ziraʿa al-H. aditha 3, no. 1 (February 1927): 15–16. Al-Ahdab was the director of the Salamiyya Agri-
cultural School. See also Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN)/Syrie-Liban/1,
2432bis, folder title: “Immatriculation Foncière.” I am indebted to Elizabeth Williams for this
reference.
11 Ken Cuno, “Was the Land of Ottoman Syria,” 150.
12 Although not directly related to the period under study, it is important to note here that by the
late nineteenth century there was a shift in the legal status of the cultivator from that of one who
temporarily occupied a state-dispensed office to one who had rights to land as part of his or her
estate. This meant that close female kin could gain access to agricultural properties through suc-
cession. In a compelling work that connects legal history with administration and local political
economy, Martha Mundy and Richard Suamarez Smith trace this shift throughout the centuries
of Ottoman rule. By the first half of the nineteenth century, they argue, it became possible for the
great Damascene jurist, Ibn ʿAbidin, to state “that the right to the cultivator’s lot was an abstract
one (haqq mujarrad) not conceptually bound up with labour.” “This conceptual step,” Mundy and
Smith go on to say, “was required for land to form an object transactable by those who did not cul-
tivate.” In short, it was no longer possible to exclude women from a foundational economic sector,
and this would have major implications for the situation of women in Nablus and its hinterland,
for it brought them closer to the situation in Tripoli, where women had owned agricultural lands
and trees in the green zone since at least the beginning of the Ottoman period, if not much earlier.
Mundy and Smith, Governing Property, 37–38.
a contract was entered into.13 That is, the contract was not about what
already existed, but what could come to exist through the sale of the right
to use the land plus labor, making land use (labor and land) a commodity.14
This insight by Johansen is important to my argument about gender and
property, because co-cultivation contracts became central to the profitable
management and social mobilization of workers into the irrigated orchard
economy on which the material income and social prestige of the landown-
ing and waqf-holding classes in Tripoli depended. The contracts not only
anchored the middle class of farmers and opened up the possibility of social
mobility for others, but were amenable to the active management of these
properties by women. As spelled out in detail in the case study on ʿAtika in
Section 6.7, many women in Tripoli were heavily involved in the silk indus-
try and had access to orchards and trees through inheritance, marriage, pur-
chase, or as beneficiaries in waqf endowments. Co-cultivation contracts,
negotiated directly with a skilled arborist who could invest labor and capi-
tal in a profit-sharing arrangement, were flexible and inclusive, facilitating
the participation of a wide range of actors, including women who wished
to actively manage their properties.15 It is important to note here that it
was not concern about gender equality that animated jurist efforts to legit-
imize and protect the access rights of females to the highly profitable urban
agricultural sector, but rather a byproduct of the material interests of the
powerful urban-based group that sought to turn peasants into “tenant cul-
tivators who pay rent, not taxes.”16 In that sense, the advantageous forms of
organization of production and legal protection available to the property-
owning women of Tripoli were entirely accidental; the product of a histor-
ical contingency.
Discussions by historians of the Ottoman agrarian regime usually ref-
erence rain-fed and grain-growing agricultural areas located in the open
13 Johansen, The Islamic Law.
14 Ibid., 28–32. The careful work of James Reilly on agricultural relations in the green zone of Damas-
cus leaves no doubt that such long-term leases and contracts that granted ownership over the trees,
structures, and other improvement on waqf lands allowed waqf properties to enter the commodity
market and made possible the ascendency of certain groups, such as military officers. This casts
doubts on the common thesis by colonial authorities and modernization pundits that waqf is detri-
mental to capitalist development. See James A. Reilly, “Rural Waqfs of Ottoman Damascus: Rights
of Ownership, Possession and Tenancy,” Acta Orientalia 51 (1990): 27–46.
15 True, Johansen’s argument is focused primarily on the contract of sharecropping (muzāraʿa), not
musāqā or mughārasa, which were longer-term contracts used for trees that gave the tenant own-
ership of a percentage (usually half ) of any trees raised to maturity (see later). But the underlying
principles of a tenancy contract were the same for these contracts, notwithstanding that the muzāraʿa
was far less favorable to the tenant than the mughārasa. That is, the latter militated for greater inclu-
sion, in terms of both class and gender.
16 Johansen, The Islamic Law, 122–124.
countryside. They pay little attention to the very highly productive and
valuable orchards, gardens, and other agricultural lands inside and adjacent
to population settlements. What constitutes an urban center, and where
should its boundaries be drawn? Johansen tackles this complex legal prob-
lem in another seminal work. He argues that in Hanafi jurisprudence dur-
ing the classical period, the deciding factor was topography, not the pres-
ence of mosques. Simply put, urban/rural was separated by fināʾ al-misr,
defined as “an open space serving the common interests of all town resi-
dents [that] . . . serves as a bridge between the built-up area of the town and
its agricultural surroundings on the one hand, and the open countryside,
the mafaza, on the other hand.”17 This may well be why the all-important
irrigated orchards adjacent to the city of Tripoli (as well as the green zones
of villages, towns, and cities) were recognized from the Ottoman period, if
not earlier, as privately held urban real estate.18
In sum, the relevance of this legal economy to women’s control and man-
agement of irrigated orchards is twofold. First, since only privately owned
property could be endowed as a family or charitable waqf (as opposed to
sultanic waqfs, which were a different matter altogether), the establish-
ment of a legal basis for the right of private ownership was crucial. Sec-
ond, the availability of long-term co-cultivation contracts allowed women
to actively manage these privately owned or endowed properties (see later)
in ways that became critical to the production and reproduction of kinship
networks, social class, and the religious establishment.
The spiritual economy argument takes heed of the ways in which local
religious workers shaped discrete regional traditions of pious and legal prac-
tice over long periods of time. As the primary mediators between al-dı̄n
and al-dunyā (faith and everyday life) on the local level, religious work-
ers formed local establishments, differing in size and sophistication, that
funded streams, political connections, and locally inflected hierarchies of
religious authority – all of which can be collectively called the “spiritual
economy.” As argued in Chapter 4, the key differences between the reli-
gious establishments of Tripoli and Nablus during the early modern and
modern periods were scale, relation to the imperial center, and source of
income. Tripoli’s religious establishment was large, diverse in terms of sects
and institutions, partially self-organized as a guild, closely connected to
17 Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 105.

18 There is no doubt that built-up and green-zone areas, including in villages, were considered private
property across the Eastern Mediterranean. If the same held true in the Ottoman Balkans and
Anatolia, it would have far-reaching implications for our current understanding of private property,
urban/rural relations, and family life, to name but a few topics.
Istanbul, and well financed by a plethora of charitable and family waqfs
that created jobs and supported mosques, schools, and other foundations.
Nablus’s religious establishment, in contrast, was small and limited to a
few families, integrated into if not subordinate to the local elite, weakly
linked to imperial networks, and not nearly as dependent on income from
waqf foundations. While no direct causal connections can be drawn, there
is no doubt that the legal environment, political dynamics, and cultural
perspectives of the different religious establishments of Nablus and Tripoli
militated for divergent practices when it came to women and property
devolution.
For example, waqf endowments, which constituted the core material
base of religious workers in Ottoman times, generously financed the reli-
gious establishment of Tripoli through three discrete streams of income,
none of which amounted to much in Nablus. These were the ubiquitous
mabarrāt in family waqfs, the significant number of charitable and mixed
waqfs, and the large local footprint of large charitable sultanic foundations.
Almost every family waqf endowed in Tripoli set aside an annual stipend
for good deeds (mabarrāt), the two most common of which were recita-
tion of the Qurʾan or specific verses thereof (especially Yā Sı̄n) and the
distribution of food on specific holy days. Added up, these revenues con-
stituted a large annual income for scores of religious workers, including
Qurʾan reciters, mosque employees, and teachers. In Nablus, by contrast,
mabarrāt were rarely included in family waqfs, severely limiting the num-
ber of jobs available. Similarly, charitable and mixed waqfs that dedicated
revenues to mosques, schools, and other religious institutions and work-
ers were rare in Nablus but constituted a consistently significant resource
for ʿulamaʾ in Tripoli throughout the two centuries under study.19 Dur-
ing the 1800–60 period, for example, nine of the fourteen charitable waqfs
and twenty-nine of the forty mixed waqfs of Tripoli were dedicated to liv-
ing Sufi shaykhs, scholars, and reciters of the Qurʾan and their progeny.20
Only one such waqf exists in the shariʿa court registers of Nablus for the
entire period under study. Typically established by female members of
Tripoli’s large middle class (less so by the rich), these waqfs were fairly small,
but were socially impactful. They also reinforced the normative principle
of inheritable (tawāruth: succession from father to son) positions in the
19 In both Tripoli and Nablus, family waqfs often named specific Friday Mosques as the primary
beneficiaries upon the extinction of the endower’s kinship lines.
20 Mixed waqfs constitute seventeen per cent of all waqfs endowed in Tripoli during the 1800–60
period. For examples of such waqfs, see TICR 30:58 and 44:32–33, 154–155. In Nablus, mixed waqfs
are virtually non-existent.
religious establishment. Maryam ʿAnklis, the reader may recall from the
introductory chapter, endowed annual stipends to ten Sufi shaykhs and
their progeny.
Finally, and in contrast to Nablus, the religious establishment of Tripoli
benefited from access to the properties attached to sultanic waqfs, the two
most important being Waqf al-Haramayn, dedicated to the holy cities of
Mecca and Medina, and Waqf al-Sadat al-Misriyyin, dedicated to Egyptian
descendants of the Prophet. From artisanal shops to orchards, the income
from the management and leasing of these properties gave the waqf admin-
istrators substantial social and economic clout.21 For instance, by the early
eighteenth century, leading members of the religious establishment had
carved out among themselves the numerous orchards of the villages of Bek-
fatin and Minya, both of which were part of Waqf al-Sadat al-Misriyyin. As
discussed later, Minya was a powerhouse of urban agricultural production
and a major source of water for mills.
It bears repetition that there is no necessary causal link between the
material interests of the ʿulamaʾ and the inculcation of particular tradi-
tions of beneficiary patterns. But one does get the impression from the
waqf endowments of Tripoli that the religious establishment of the city
operated somewhat like a pension management firm for the soul, at least
during the period under study. Female waqf endowers in Tripoli, whose
wealth was concentrated in orchards managed through co-cultivation con-
tracts, were especially generous to the religious establishment. Their con-
tributions subsidized positions that passed from father to son, and helped
sustain a semi-autonomous moral and spiritual order that gave meaning to
their lives.22 In contrast, the religious establishment of Nablus was long
dominated by a small group of powerful ʿulamaʾ whose fortunes were
intimately tied to the political and merchant elite of the city. It was the
leading members of this elite and their ʿulamaʾ allies, especially in the
nineteenth century, who established the most exclusionary family waqf
endowments.23
21 The properties of Waqf al-Haramayn ranged all over the Ottoman Empire. For a detailed study of
the role this waqf played in the political economy of Algiers, see Hoexter, Endowments, Rulers, and
Community.
22 At the same time, an irony is evident here. Women, who endowed most of the waqfs dedicated to
Sufi leaders and their male progeny, helped reinforce a male-only profession.
23 As with most long-term phenomenon, the reasons for the divergence of spiritual economies in
Tripoli and Nablus are not clear. Nor are the reasons why this divergence was sustained. We can
only guess as to why propertied women in Nablus did not develop the kind of symbiotic relationship
to the religious establishment that their sisters in Tripoli did. Likewise, we can only wonder why,
unlike in Tripoli, the family waqf endowments in Nablus, by both men and women, did not set
aside funds for the religious establishment through mabarrāt.
6.2 The Family Firm in Nablus
The political economy of the Nablus region gave rise to what one might
call the commercial family firm, especially among wholesale merchants and
industrialists. This family firm was vertically integrated, centralized, ruled
by partner brothers or male paternal cousins, and transmitted through their
male line of descent.24 The key source of wealth in Nablus was the rural
surplus of rain-fed and peasant-held lands in its hinterland. Without this
rural surplus of mostly olive oil, cotton, grains, and legumes, the manufac-
turing and trading sectors of Nablus would not have existed. Throughout
the period under study (1660–1860), peasants enjoyed hereditary usufruct
rights to these nominally state-owned (mı̄rı̄) lands, which could not legally
be bought or sold.25 The propertied classes of Nablus had no real con-
trol over these lands and were, with a few exceptions, unable or unwill-
ing to manage them before the 1860s.26 Thus, the primary field of activity
that absorbed their energies was the construction of layered networks of
personal connections, largely based on the salam system of moneylending
(forward purchase), which appropriated the rural surplus and channeled it
into the city for processing and marketing.
The relations these commercial family firms built with villagers to ensure
future delivery of goods at fixed prices determined not only profit mar-
gins, but the very security of access to raw materials, such as cotton for
textiles and olive oil for soap. These relations required the cultivation of
clients through visits to villages and the provision of hospitality in the
city. Merchants, for example, systematically nurtured personal connections
with male heads of peasant households by participating in rituals and gift
exchange to mark life events such as births, deaths, and marriages. This
involved frequent travel into the countryside by male merchants and their
24 This section is based on my previous work on the political economy and social history of Jabal
Nablus during the Ottoman period. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, chs. 2, 4, and 5.
25 Usufruct was the right to use lands and pass them on to one’s children as long as they were not
neglected for a period exceeding three years. The common practice was to devolve the land to male
children only, but that changed in the late nineteenth century. For an overarching legal history of
usufruct and private property as they relate to land under Ottoman rule, as well as a discussion of
the social and gender dimensions of this history, see Part I of Mundy and Smith, Governing Property.
26 Most villagers were enmeshed in urban-dominated moneylending networks, and they used their
lands as collateral. Merchants could have claimed the lands of hopelessly indebted villages and,
after the 1858 Land Law, legally registered these lands as their own private property. But merchants –
both before and, for many years, after the 1858 Land Code – did not have the political and military
power or the financial incentive to force peasants off the land or to manage them as sharecroppers,
especially in the hill regions of Jabal Nablus. The situation differed in the flatlands along the coast
and through the valleys, which witnessed a concentration of land holdings among a few leading
families, such as the ʿAbd al-Hadis, well before the 1858 Land Code.
The Family Firm in Nablus 235
agents in order to gather information, collect debts, attend weddings, and
pay respects. It also involved offering a whole range of services to peasants
visiting the city, including providing them with food and shelter for the
length of their stay, guaranteeing their purchases on credit from other mer-
chants, storing their goods, intervening on their behalf with the authorities,
and so on.
The commercial family firms were risky and highly competitive enter-
prises, for they were constructed and reproduced in a decentralized political
environment characterized by multiple territorially based centers of power
and frequent political upheavals. Rural-based clans, Ottoman government
and military officials, and foreign and regional merchants all competed
for that surplus. This is not to mention the greatest competition of all:
that between and within the families of Nablus, especially as the pace of
the commercialization of agriculture and commodification of land started
picking up speed in the eighteenth century. Vigilance and political con-
nections were important, for merchants needed to pay careful attention
to all factors – from weather patterns to factional struggles – that could
affect the supply, demand, quality, movement, and prices of the agricul-
tural goods that were the lifeblood of Nablus. Alliances with the powerful
political families, both urban and rural, that controlled peasant militias and
neighborhood strongmen required continuous negotiation and reinforce-
ment in order to reduce the risk that monies spent on favors might not
produce the hoped-for results. Aside from being buffeted by shifting polit-
ical winds, family firms had a sword hanging over their necks: the very real
possibility that the peasants could not or would not pay back their loans
or deliver promised goods.
To place their commercial networks on firm and predictable footing,
the merchant families of Nablus sought to carve geographically defined
spheres of influence in the hinterland through the construction of what one
may call a shared historical memory based on perceived (real or fictional)
multigenerational relationships with particular clans and villages. These
relationships depended on the careful accumulation and maintenance of a
reputation for honesty, trust, piety, and political reach in the urban sphere
on behalf of peasant families. Women were excluded from these networks
because they required repeated personal travel outside the city, face time
with peasant leaders, and political participation in non-kin patron–client
relations.
The capital resources and reputation needed for daily operations were
tightly controlled and jealously defended, since it took generations for suc-
cessful networks to strike deep roots. The concentration of family resources
in turn required a high degree of internal discipline, mobilization, and
stratification along gender and age lines. In terms of property devolu-
tion and marriage strategies, this came at the expense of younger brothers,
females, and children in their legal minority.27 After all, these networks
were not material things than could be inherited, but practices, relation-
ships, memories, and alliances instantiated through relations between men.
Property devolution strategies, therefore, had to factor in not only tangible
properties, but also the transmission of intangible assets – especially the
position of manager of the family firm – to capable sons, with the old-
est being the clear favorite and final arbiter. Women were virtually shut
out of the commercial family firm not because of the nature of trade and
commerce as such – women participated heartily in these spheres in differ-
ent contexts and circumstances – but for reasons pertaining to the specific
political economy of Jabal Nablus.
Changes in the political economy of Nablus during the modern period
militated for even more exclusionary practices in terms of property devolu-
tion. Starting in the 1820s, merchants had to compete far more vigorously
for access and control of the rural surplus, both with one another, with a
rising wave of foreign merchants and their local allies in the coastal cities,
and with a centralizing Ottoman state – the latter two eager to deepen their
involvement in the interior regions. This they tried to do in the 1840s by
breaking the stranglehold of Nablus merchants on the hinterland villages
of Jabal Nablus through organization of a bidding market for the purchase
of the rural surplus. The promise of money and new opportunities lured
many Nabulsi merchants into partnerships with regional and foreign mer-
chants, which contributed in turn to rising tensions and factional struggles
in Jabal Nablus as a whole. The pressure on merchant families to concen-
trate property in male hands in order to increase their operating capital
only increased with time. Three trends in the waqf endowments of Nablus
illustrate the impact of this development: the much more frequent resort
to Pattern Four; the precipitous decline in, then end of, the endowment of
waqfs by females; and the concomitant rise in joint endowments by broth-
ers or close agnates, such as first paternal cousins.28
The drive to concentrate resources and to discipline the family was inten-
sified by two additional factors having to do with women and marriage.
27 Tucker argues that “affluent families were far more likely to exercise strict control over the arrange-
ment of marriages.” She cites the wider prevalence of child and cousin marriage among this group,
and the lower rate of divorce and remarriage compared to lower-class families. Also relevant is
her conclusion that marriage was influenced more by a desire to broaden political and economic
alliances than by a desire to transfer wealth. Tucker, “Marriage and Family in Nablus,” 177.
28 See Chapter 5, and the case study of the Bishtawi family firm in Chapter 4.
The Family Firm in Nablus 237
The first was the fragmentation inherent in Islamic rules of partible inher-
itance. Exogenous marriages by women who inherited properties could be
conduits for transfer of wealth to competing families. The second was the
lack of evidence during the period under study of a marriage strategy that
paired largely well-to-do urban males with rural women from the dominant
clans of the villages in the network, or vice versa.29 The option of using the
exchange of women through marriage as a way of defining and then anchor-
ing one’s position in the commercial and moneylending network between
peasant clans and urban merchant families does not seem to have been
practiced widely, if at all. It is not clear why, but perhaps the combination
of rich/poor and urban/rural was inconceivable on both cultural and legal
grounds (principle of kafāʾa).30 Consequently, a very clear gendered divi-
sion of property took hold in which all tangible forms of wealth that were
crucial to the family firm, from artisanal workshops and dry goods stores to
wholesale warehouses and soap factories, became male property. Effectively,
this included most commercial real estate in Nablus. True, most women
from propertied families in Nablus came to own, through inheritance and
marriage, shares in houses, shops, manufacturing establishments, and so
on. The question is, did they keep and manage these properties? What the
registers show is that access by women to property was contained and lim-
ited through a variety of means, such as excluding women as beneficiaries
from waqf endowments, restricting their marriage options, and pressuring
them to forego or immediately sell their inheritance share. The shariʿa court
registers of Nablus contain numerous such legal acknowledgments (iqrār)
or sale deeds by women shortly after the death of a father or brother (see
the Bishtawi case study in Chapter 4).
This is why it is important not to assume that the large-scale involvement
of women in property transactions is a clear indication of their economic
clout. If a distinction is made on the basis of whether women were the
sellers or the buyers, it becomes clear that few women bought property,
but many sold it, usually willingly, and most often to their agnates. For
example, more than sixty-one per cent of the property purchase/sale deeds
registered in Nablus between June 1728 and March 1730 list one or more
females as a party to the transaction, yet women constituted only sixteen
per cent of the buyers. For the 1723–26 period, the numbers are sixty-two
29 A study of marriage contracts during the Ottoman period does not mention that such unions took
place. Tucker, “Marriage and Family in Nablus,” 165–179.
30 This did not remain the case. Interviews I conducted in Nablus show that many in the generation
of Nablus merchants who grew to maturity around and after the First World War married women
(often as second wives) from the villages in which they had business interests.
and less than five per cent, respectively. If one were also to trace how these
women came to acquire the property being sold, the vast majority of cases
would show that they tended to sell property they had inherited, as opposed
to property they had received as dowry (mahr) or property they had them-
selves purchased earlier.
Similarly, the women of Nablus also had access to liquid capital as a result
of their largely voluntary exclusion from the commercial real estate market,
and they used it to invest in urban real estate and manufacturing. This can
be ascertained from the probate inventories of women, the asset columns
of some of which include lists of individuals who owed them money.31
These same lists, however, reveal the narrow scope of women’s moneylend-
ing activities: most loans were made to spouses and relatives. There were
exceptions, but generally speaking the women of Nablus did not have the
same opportunity as their sisters in Tripoli to be major participants in the
political economy of the city, especially when it came to salam contracts,
soap manufacturing, and regional trade networks geared primarily towards
Egypt and Damascus.
6.3 Urban Agriculture in Tripoli

The centrality of urban agriculture to the political economy of Tripoli
accounts, in large measure, for the city’s historically inclusive property
devolution practices. A chain of arguments detailed in the following sec-
tions supports this claim. The first is that the economic weight of urban
agriculture in the political economy of many towns and cities in Bilad al-
Sham has not been fully appreciated. This is especially true for Tripoli,
whose green zone of irrigated orchards constituted the city’s main economic
engine and the material backbone of its propertied classes.32 Important
here is that the land was privately owned and often endowed as waqf, and
that wealth was primarily counted in trees (mulberry, citrus, and olive),
which could be owned separately from the land. The second argument
relates to Tripoli’s role as the epicenter for the regional silk industry, the
31 The probate inventories of Nablus never include immoveable property unless the deceased is in
debt and her house or shop has to be sold to satisfy the debtors.
32 Irrigated orchards were vital to oasis and river-fed coastal urban centers such as Damascus, Sidon,
Tripoli, Beirut, Rosetta and Damietta. Garden agriculture and public spaces have recently become
the focus of political upheavals in the region, such as the Gezi protests in Turkey, which were
related to concerns about the citywide green space and struggles over urban agricultural spaces
such as Yedikule. Paul Kaldjian, “Istanbul’s Bostans: A Millennium of Market Gardens,” Geograph-
ical Review 94, no. 3 (2004): 284–304. I am indebted to Cemal Kafadar and Aleksandar Shopov for
providing a deeper understanding of these issues.
Urban Agriculture in Tripoli 239
importance of which has also not been fully recognized. Women were cen-
tral to this industry in terms of participation in production, ownership of
assets, and management of properties. The third argument is how the tech-
niques and relations of production in the green zone of Tripoli – especially
the prevalence of co-cultivation contracts, such as mughārasa/munās.aba and
musāqā – allowed for social mobility and sustained a large “middle class”
of orchard and tree owners.33 The co-cultivation contracts enabled custom-
designed arrangements that made it much easier for a wide range of actors,
including women, to access the highly profitable sector of irrigated urban
orchard agriculture. Women actively managed their productive properties
by entering into these contractual arrangements, as we shall see in the case
of ʿAtika, daughter of Mustafa Ibn Baqara, around the turn of the eigh-
teenth century.34 The fluidity and capaciousness of the ways in which the
surplus of the green zone could be tapped by a broad spectrum of social
groups reduced the pressure on the concentration and centralization of the
family patrimony in male hands and allowed for more inclusive practices
of property devolution. The green zone, in short, is key to the particular
configuration of class, gender, power, and property devolution practices in
Tripoli.
In comparison to Tripoli, Nablus’s green zone was not central to the city’s
economy. Nablus is squeezed into a narrow and fairly short valley between
33 This is not to argue that the co-cultivation contracts, by their very legal nature, militate for, or much
less explain, the participation of women. Rather, it was the privately owned or endowed legal status
of land, water, and trees in the green zone that was key.
34 The shariʿa court registers and fatwa collections of Bilad al-Sham are overflowing with cases gen-
erated by the management and reproduction of the complex web of ownership and access rights
in the green zone. These can be used to map out changing power structures, family networks, and
economic relations. Abdul-Karim Rafeq and James Reilly pioneered this area of research for the
history of Damascus. James Reilly, “Properties around Damascus in the Nineteenth Century,” Ara-
bica 37 (1990): 91–114 and “Rural Waqfs of Ottoman Damascus”; Rafeq, “Al-ʿAlaqat al-ziraʿiyya fi
Bilad al-Sham,” 120–139. With few exceptions, however, historians have steered clear of produc-
ing in-depth studies of contractual mechanisms, investment strategies, legal practices, production
techniques, labor organization, finance and taxation, ecological conditions, and the technologies
of irrigated urban agriculture in the green zones of Ottoman cities and towns. These, after all, are
labor-intensive lines of investigation whose relevance to the big issues in the field is difficult to artic-
ulate. The lack of studies is also a result of the demise of green zones, especially starting in the 1950s,
a period of massive urbanization led by modernization-obsessed planners. The destruction of part
of the old city of Tripoli in order to build a massive concrete canal to contain Abu ʿAli River after
a deadly flood in 1955 is still an open wound – literally in terms of the topography of the city, and
emotionally for those who care about the integrity of the old city. Moreover, the available sources for
Tripoli are largely silent on the number, size, and productive capacity of orchards and on the tech-
niques of production (such as planting, grafting, pruning, maintenance of canals, feeding of trees,
and harvesting). Information on the organization of labor, the management of water resources, and
marketing practices is relatively rare. There is indirect information on joint-cultivation and rental
contracts, taxes, and advance purchase agreements, mostly from endowment and sales deeds, as well
as lawsuits. This information constitutes the basis of the following sections of this chapter.
Figure 6.1 Nablus, circa 1898: view from the south
two steep-sloped hills (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). The lower parts of the hills
were terraced and devoted primarily to rain-fed olive trees. Water springs
did irrigate a small area near the eastern entrance of Nablus and a larger
one towards the west. The much larger green zone of Tripoli was com-
posed primarily of irrigated orchards (pl. basātı̄n) of mulberry and citrus
trees on the western side of the city, as well as the rain-fed olive groves on
the elevated limestone foothills of the eastern side (see Figures 6.3–6.8).35
The olive groves were crucial to the city’s soap industry, food consump-
tion, and exports. But it was the irrigated orchards in the more sandy soil
at sea level that produced most of the wealth. The western green zone of
Tripoli separated the city from the Mediterranean Sea and covered an area
approximately three kilometers deep by four or five kilometers wide. It was
shaped like a scalene triangle, with the tip formed by the two longest sides
pointing north. Its lifeblood – water – was circulated through a complex
network of canals fed by the Abu ʿAli River, which ran through the city into
35 Fruit trees and vines could also be found in the inner courtyards and surrounding gardens of houses
inside the city itself.
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Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511989605.008
Figure 6.3 Tripoli and environs, circa 1873
the sea.36 The three major arteries of irrigation, the basic infrastructure of
which dates to the Roman period, are referred to in the court registers as the
Western, Middle, and Eastern Canals (al-saqı̄ al-gharbı̄, al-saqı̄ al-wast.ānı̄,
al-saqı̄ al-sharqı̄). Smaller water channels, lined with bamboo reeds, criss-
crossed the area, defining the borders of each discrete orchard (bustān).37
The width of the western green zone doubles when one includes the exten-
sive orchards, also connected by canals fed by the Nahr al-Bared River, on
the lands of Minya village, just north of Tripoli. This northern enclave
of orchards can be considered part of the Tripoli’s green zone (see upper
right-hand corner of Figure 6.4) because it was historically part of the large
charitable al-Sādāt al-Misriyyūn waqf controlled by Tripoli-based families.
36 Fuʾad A. Bustani, ed., Lubnan: Mabahith ʿilmiyya wa-ijtimaʿiyya, vol. 1 (Beirut: Lebanese University,
1969): 27. This book was originally published in 1918 by a committee of scholars under the direction
of the governor of Mount Lebanon at the time, Ismaʿil Haqqi Beik.
37 Bustān is a ubiquitous term in the shariʿa court registers and can carry many meanings. For an
overview, see Reilly, “Properties around Damascus,” 97–100.
To say that the major economic activity of the city was agriculture – or,
more accurately, horticulture – might sound like an oxymoron. Yet every
city and town in the largely arid regions of the Ottoman Empire owed its
location to the availability of water. This supported a green zone of irrigated
orchards and gardens, which were crucial to economic life, social stratifi-
cation, and cultural activities. Legally, green zones had the status of private
personal property (milk). The land, trees, and water could be bought, sold,
Figure 6.6 Orchards and olive groves: Tripoli, al-Mina, and Min
Figure 6.7 Tripoli, circa 1930s: view to northwest from c
Urban Agriculture in Tripoli 247
Figure 6.8 Tripoli, circa 1930s: view to southeast
endowed as waqf, leased, rented, and so on. In Bilad al-Sham, the most
famous green zone by far was the Ghuta of Damascus, fed by the Barada
River. The Ghuta’s lore in recent times has increased in inverse proportion
to its devastation by the development of suburbs, major thoroughfares,
and, most tragically, a brutal civil war that started in 2011.38 All the coastal
cities on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza to Isk-
enderun had irrigated orchards of mulberry and citrus, among other fruit
trees, but Tripoli’s dwarfed them in terms of size and productive capacity,
especially when it came to mulberry plantations for the silk industry.
Until well after the Second World War, their share in the orchards of
the green zone, along with their water resources, constituted a person’s
measure. The number of mulberry trees owned and the weight of silk pro-
duced were indicators of wealth, status, and political power. This is in much
the same way that the residents of Jabal Nablus or the district of Kura in
the region of Tripoli counted their livelihood by the number of olive trees
38 The lore of the Ghuta is pervasive. My 1967 Lebanese fourth-grade Arabic textbook includes an
essay, “Inspiration by the Ghuta,” written by the famous intellectual, Muhammad Kurd ʿAli, when
he was sixty years old. Dripping with nostalgia, it describes the sites, sounds, and smells of the Ghuta
and its seasonal changes. Al-Jadid fi al-Qiraʾat al-ʿArabiyya (Beirut: School Library Publications,
1967): 147–149.
owned and the number of oil jars produced, or how pastoral nomads mea-
sured themselves according to the number of animals owned and weight of
samn (ghee) produced. Almost every family with a stable surname – that
is, in the middle and upper classes – had property in this area. The plots of
land they owned, or, more often, held as family waqfs, were usually named
after them, allowing them to inscribe the family name into the landscape,
as well as on the collective memory of the population.39
These basātı̄n and hawākir were a primarily spatial, social, and cultural
site for the forging of family and kinship (both blood and non-blood)
relations.40 They were the destination of frequent picnics in the spring-
time, usually on Thursdays. In the hot and humid summer months, they
became a home away from home. Families would spend many days and
nights under the shade and shelter of the trees, bounded by the water canals
and the swaying reeds in the sea breeze. The silk season, commencing at the
end of April, had the greatest impact on the city, for it was the major
source of income for most of the population and required an enormous
amount of labor.41 Until the end of June, most residents of the city, joined
by teams of laborers from the region, would spend much of their time
between the tree and the worm:
The fragrant valley between the city and its port is suddenly filled with
activity as the whole city relocates to the plains planted with mulberry. The
resplendence of the spring takes the place of the gloom and paralysis of win-
ter. Teams (warsha) of laborers work in the orchards . . . and when finished
for the day, visit each other in the evenings. They introduce themselves and
compete among each other in terms of generosity and hospitality and in per-
forming dabka (a step dance), dancing, and singing and they remain thus
engaged until late at night.42
6.4 The Tree and the Worm

Wealth in the green zone of Tripoli during the period under study was con-
centrated not in land, but in trees, especially the white mulberry dedicated
39 The topography of names is highly diverse. Many orchards named after families begin with the
descriptor banı̄, reinforcing the patrilineal focus – although as we have seen, male solidarity
(ʿas.abiyya) cannot be automatically assumed. Some were named after individuals, including women.
Some larger orchards had old names of unknown origin, but contained sections named after fam-
ilies, somewhat akin to a modern mall. Finally, there were orchards named after major charitable
waqfs. The same patterns of naming can be seen in Nablus and other cities. For a comprehensive
listing of the names of plots in Sidon’s green zone, see Sinno, Madinat Sayda, 151–172.
40 In local use, the word h.ākūra (pl. h.awakir) usually refers to the location of an orchard – in this case,
one that is bounded by walls and/or abuts a residential structure.
41 The ʿĪd al-Bishāra is on April 25; hence, the saying, “fı̄ ʿı̄d al-bishāra tatafarraq al-bidhāra” (On the
Bishara Holiday the [silkworm] eggs are distributed). Tarabulsi, In kan baddak taʿshaq, 19.
42
ʿAbd al-Latif Krayyim, Barbar Agha: majd Tarabulus uʿtiya lahu (Tripoli: ʿAbd al-Latif Krayyim,
2004): 54.
The Tree and the Worm 249
to the feeding of silkworms.43 Legal deeds registered in the shariʿa court do
not measure the size of a plot of land, but rather enumerate the number of
trees or new plantings on it, as well as its hourly share of water. Irrigated
trees dominated the waqf endowments in Tripoli. They were the measure
of value and exchange, and the focus of labor for the majority of the inhab-
itants. Trees were living property: they were planted, nurtured into matu-
rity, pruned, cut, and replaced on the same plot. Their complex legal sta-
tus prompted many questions, the two most important being: Could trees
planted on government or waqf land be considered private property apart
from the land? And was it possible for a person who expended the labor
needed to bring trees to maturity to become the owner of those trees even
if that person was not a beneficiary of the waqf or the owner of the land?
Yes, is the short answer to both questions, and that is what opened the legal
paths for social mobility and economic participation to women in this sec-
tor. Both, in turn, have profound implications for the political economy
and class structure of Tripoli in general and for property devolution prac-
tices in particular.44
While citrus has been a popular coastal product since at least Mam-
luk times, it was the mulberry tree (referred to in the sources as either tūt
or firs.ād) that dominated the green zone of Tripoli for almost the entire
Ottoman period. Mulberry leaves were the only food the silkworm ate,
and it did so in enormous quantities. An ounce (28 grams) of silk eggs con-
sumed 750–900 kilos of mulberry leaves before pupating and spinning a
cocoon.45 Calculated differently, a worm grew seventy times in size, and
200 pounds of mulberry leaves produced 1 pound of silk. The climate
of Bilad al-Sham was especially well suited to the mulberry tree and the
43 The two basic kinds of mulberry trees were Morus nigra (black) and Morus alba (white). The
leaves of the latter, which is native to northern China, were preferred by the silkworm. Christian
Hünemörder, “Mulberry Tree,” in Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World: Antiquity,
16 vols., eds. Hubert Cancik, Helmuth Schneider, and Manfred Landfester (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
44 In Tripoli, it was a regular practice to endow trees on waqf land. Since one can only endow what
one freely owns, this means that these trees were considered private property separate from the
land. This was not unusual, and it has basis in Islamic jurisprudence. For instance, and as Colin
Imber has argued, both Hanafi jurisprudence and Ottoman state law long distinguished between
the ownership of trees and the ownership of the land on which they grew: they were considered
separate entities even if owned by the same person. Colin Imber, “The Status of Orchards and Fruit
Trees in Ottoman Law,” Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi 12 (1982): 763–774. This short essay also appears in
Imber’s Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1996). Imber relies on the fatwas
of Ebu Suud, the famous Sheyhülislam of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, to parse
out the complex issues involved here, such as the status of wild trees that had been grafted, whether
trees were planted individually or as part of a legally recognized orchard, whether a tree planted
on waqf land was freehold or a hereditary tenancy, and whether the land under it shared the same
status.
45 Kais Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes in Lebanon, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 22, no. 2 (May 1990): 158.
raising of silkworms. Since at least the sixteenth century, silk had been the
most important commercial product in Mount Lebanon, and in most of
the coastal areas of the Eastern Mediterranean between Iskenderun in the
north and Acre in the south.46
Generally speaking, silk production increased significantly over the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries with the growth in population and the
increasing regional and overseas demand for the white silk of Tripoli. Up
until the mid-nineteenth century, three-quarters of the production went to
Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, and the rest to the local weaving sec-
tor, which sustained Tripoli’s reputation as a producer of fine silk belts and
scarves.47 But then a rupture took place, which changed the dynamics of
the industry. Native species of worms were decimated by disease, which was
not eradicated until the 1880s.48 Meanwhile, rapidly increasing demand,
primarily from France, and the importation of foreign silkworms in order
to meet it refocused the relations of production and the destinations of
exports. During this period (1840s–1870s), the industry was restructured
for the export of raw silk to France, and French merchants and brokers
came to dominate the process of sericulture. By 1873, forty per cent of silk
thread was exported to France. By the 1910s, it was ninety-nine per cent.
Industrial mills, the first of which were built in 1838, started taking over the
work of unraveling and spinning the silk from cocoons, which had usually
been done by families on a put-out basis. By 1860, there were sixty-five
mills. By 1913, there were 200.49
Historical studies of the silk industry in Bilad al-Sham, especially in the
post-1850 period, have focused on Mount Lebanon. This is not surpris-
ing: this region was the most affected by mid-nineteenth-century ruptures.
Both the great migrations to the Americas, starting in the 1880s, and the
46 Much of this section is based on the research of Kais Firro, who digested a wide range of sources,
especially French ones. Ibid. For the significance of this industry to the economy of the coastal
regions of Bilad al-Sham, see Roger Owen, “The Silk-Reeling Industry of Mount Lebanon, 1840–
1914: A Study of the Possibilities and Limitations of Factory Production in the Periphery,” in
The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri Islamoğlu-Inan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004): 271–283. For a social history of the silk industry in Lebanon with par-
ticular reference to female factory workers and immigration, see Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing
Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2001).
47 Kayyal, “Al-libas al-tarabulusi fi madinat Tarabulus fi al-nisf al-thani min al-qarn al-tasiʿʿashar,”
283.
48 The disease, pébrine, also hit silk-producing regions in Persia and Anatolia.
49 Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes,” 154. See also Khater, Inventing Home, 26–27; Roger Owen,
“The Study of Middle Eastern Industrial History: Notes on the Interrelationship between Factories
and Small-Scale Manufacturing with Special References to Lebanese Silk and Egyptian Sugar, 1900–
1930,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 4 (1984): 475–487.
The Tree and the Worm 251
famine during the First World War, which claimed about a third of the total
population of Mount Lebanon, were directly related to this area becoming
a mono-crop silk economy.50 Estimates are that seventy to eighty per cent
of the cultivable land of this mountainous region became devoted to mul-
berry orchards by the early twentieth century, compared to about ten per
cent in the 1840s, and the number of trees increased from three to twenty-
eight million.51 Stories abound of how the olive trees of Lebanon were cut
down to make room for this expansion, which claimed the energies of the
overwhelming majority of the rural population.
What is missed in such studies is that Tripoli was a powerhouse of silk
production on the Mediterranean coast, and had been for a long period.
No other coastal city came close to Tripoli in terms of the mulberry tree
and the silkworm.52 However, Tripoli’s story is harder to see than Mount
Lebanon’s for four main reasons. First, because Lebanese nationalist histori-
ography and leading institutions of cultural production focus almost exclu-
sively on Mount Lebanon and the trials and tribulations of the Christian
Maronite communities. Second, because with the exception of a diverse
and dedicated cohort of Tripoli natives, Tripoli has been ignored by histo-
rians due to its displacement by Beirut as the leading city on the Mediter-
ranean coast and because it was cut off from its vital economic connections
to Homs, Hama, Aleppo, and Lattakia after the First World War, when the
French colonial authorities partitioned this area into two countries: Syria
and Lebanon.53 Third, because Tripoli’s experience is one of remarkable
stability and continuity, not of rapid and violent transformations. The fluc-
tuations in demand for silk were balanced by increasingly strong demand
for citrus trees, which were ideal for the irrigated sandy soil of Tripoli’s
green zone and were quicker to mature than the olive tree. Fourth, because
Mount Lebanon had far more trees. But it is not only the number of trees
that matters – it is their productive capacity. The mulberry trees in irrigated
coastal orchards were at least three times as productive as their rain-fed
counterparts in the mountains.54 Thus, although there were roughly three
50 Khater, Inventing Home, ch. 2. See also Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes,” 154.
51 Khater, Inventing Home, 21–22 and 198, fn. 9.
52 For example, of the nine million mulberrry trees planted along the coast between Lattakia and
Acre in the late nineteenth century, about seventy-five per cent were in Tripoli and about eighteen
per cent in Lattakia, which was really part of Tripoli’s social and economic space. Firro, “Silk and
Agrarian Changes,” 153, table 1.
53 See, for example, the numerous works by ʿUmar Tadmuri and Khaled Ziade.
54 It is estimated that a hectare of mulberry trees in the irrigated orchards of the coast produced
12 000 kilograms of leaves, compared to about 4000 kilograms in the rain-fed hill and mountain
areas, which could be anywhere from 250 to 1800 meters above sea level. At the same time, however,
a mulberry tree in higher elevations could live for up to 100 years, while the ones on the coast passed
times as many trees in the foothills and the mountains of Bilad al-Sham as
on the coast, Tripoli accounted for a larger share of total silk production.
True, by the mid-nineteenth century, much of the increase in land devoted
to mulberry tree production occurred in places of higher elevation (Mount
Lebanon) and further inland into the Bekaa Valley;55 nevertheless, both the
large capacity of Tripoli’s green zone and its greater yield per tree allowed
the city to maintain a consistent and expanding share of silk production. Its
silk exports between 1893 and 1897 accounted for ten per cent of all exports
from Bilad al-Sham, and that figure doubled to twenty per cent between
1897 and 1901.56
The silk industry in the Eastern Mediterranean eventually collapsed in
the early twentieth century, but there is no indication that urban agricul-
ture in Tripoli was irreparably damaged. Trees were living property that
could be replaced, and Tripoli’s green zone produced a variety of cash-
crop fruit trees, especially citrus, for which there was consistent demand.
The devastation of the silkworm disease and competition from Japan were
balanced by increasing investment in the lucrative market in citrus, likely
inspired by the example of successful commercial export of the Jaffa orange
to Britain.57 According to Tamimi and Bahjat, two Ottoman officials who
wrote a detailed report on social, economic, and demographic conditions
in Bilad al-Sham based on field visits in 1915 and 1916, the green zone
of Tripoli consisted almost entirely of citrus orchards (basātı̄n al-laymūn).
These orchards occupied 2500 faddān (faddān = one-quarter acre), each
valued at 20–25 000 piasters. Prior to the outbreak of the First World
War, they added, Tripoli exported an average of 400 000 boxes of cit-
rus fruit yearly to Istanbul, Romania, and Russia, and roughly half that
number to Beirut, Hama, Homs, and other towns in Bilad al-Sham.58 In
their prime after fifteen years of production, and had to be removed so the land could be replanted.
Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes,” 158.
55 For example, the coast’s share of the total production between 1889 and 1911 remained a stable thirty
per cent, while that of the upper mountain increased from five to twenty per cent. Ibid., 153.
56 It is estimated that between the 1840s and early 1900s, silk accounted for an average of twenty per
cent of all exports from the ports of Bilad al-Sham, including those of Palestine. Ibid., 164.
57 Bustani, Lubnan, vol. 2, 395–396. Roger Owen notes the boom in orange production and export
from Jaffa. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Methuen,
1981): 177–178. It is not clear what the percentage of land devoted to citrus orchards was prior to its
dominance by the early twentieth century. However, reading the court registers chronologically, one
notices that transactions in land, lawsuits, and waqf endowments registered in the court registers
start referring to citrus trees with greater frequency with each passing year starting around the mid-
nineteenth century and probably continuing until the eradication of the silkworm-disease in the
1880s.
58 Olive groves on the higher and non-irrigated eastern side of the city occupied the same space as
citrus orchards (2500 faddān) but were worth one-quarter the value (5000 piasters). Ibid., vol. 2,
217. Writing in the mid-1960s, Gulick makes the same observation that citrus orchards were far
more important than olive groves as sites of capitalist development. The latter, he notes, occupied
Silk, Power, and Class 253
other words, the green zone, adaptable and renewable, literally constituted
a physical and economic buffer around Tripoli that muffled the impact of
economic upheavals, market fluctuations, volatile relations with rural areas,
and power struggles on the regional and imperial levels. This may well
explain the remarkable stability and consistency in the patterns of waqf
endowments in Tripoli in terms of who endowed what to whom over a
two-century period – unlike in Nablus, which witnessed dramatic changes
in these patterns.
6.5 Silk, Power, and Class

“I think the great public advantages of the culture of silk and raising mul-
berry trees make the subject of such general importance, as to deserve public
encouragement, and therefore is an object proper to be considered by congress
and all the state assemblies . . . ” So ended an eight-page essay published in
1790 by Pelatiah Webster, a citizen of Philadelphia, extolling the “culture of
silk” and calling for government investment in the industry.59 He was not
alone. Sericulture was a global concern of states and entrepreneurs during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which witnessed a major expan-
sion of the industry. France led the way in Europe, and silk fever also caught
on in the British colonies that would become the United States of America;
hence, the pamphlet by Webster.60 The Ottoman Empire and its subjects
were no exception.
The economic and political elite of Tripoli paid close attention to seri-
culture, the rhythm of which set the pace for the local fiscal structure. The
payment of taxes by both the general population and the tax farmers (in
the form of iltizām payments) were timed to coincide with the silk and
olive seasons. The proportion of the taxes paid during each season mir-
rored the weight of these sectors in the political economy of Tripoli. For
example, in late June 1686, the brothers Abu ʿAssaf and Abu Musa, sons of
Sharif Hammad, appeared in court and legally committed to pay the huge
sum of 15 000 piasters for the right to collect the taxes of the district of
Zawiya. They promised to do so in two installments: three-quarters of the
only “5.4% of the area and are actually merely an extension of the groves of the contiguous Zgharta
and Kura plains which comprise the major olive-growing region of Lebanon.” Gulick, Tripoli, 95.
59 Pelatiah Webster, An Essay on the Culture of Silk, and Raising White Mulberry Trees, the Leaves of
Which Are the Only Proper Food of the Silk-Worm (Philadelphia, PA: 1790): 8.
60 The pamphlet begins: “The manufacture of silk has proved a most prolific source of industry
and riches in France, and has spread with very considerable advantage into other countries of
Europe . . . Wherever this manufacture has been liberally gone into . . . profits and advantages vast
indeed, and almost beyond conception, never fail to accrue, and rise into the most substantial real-
ity.” Ibid., 1.
total sum were due at the end of the silk season, and one-quarter at the end
of the olive season.61 Most debts in Tripoli came due at the end of the silk
season. In Nablus, they came due at the end of the olive season.
Even more important than the size of this economic sector was the mul-
tiplicity of legal access rights it embodied, which cultivated a culture of pol-
itics and power relations characterized by flexible economic arrangements
and social alliances. Irrigated urban agriculture devoted to feeding silk-
worms was especially well suited for bringing together a large and diverse
set of social forces into a complex network of (unequal) dependent rela-
tions around land, trees, water, and silkworm farming. Each of these net-
works involved owners, renters, contractors, and so on. In this context,
investment by state officials and local elites in sericulture, while intended
to increase their wealth and power, also required alliances and partnerships
that distributed part of that wealth across the region as a whole.
Instructive here was the major investment in the early 1730s by the gov-
ernor of Tripoli, Sulayman Pasha, in the construction of a major canal from
the Nahr al-Bared river to the village of Minya. It was unusual for Ottoman
governors to initiate large infrastructural projects, because most were for-
eigners who rarely served more than one to three years.62 But Sulayman
Pasha was different. He belonged to the Damascene-based ʿAzm family,
which had strong connections with Tripoli, and which supplied a string
of powerful and long-serving governors to Bilad al-Sham during the eigh-
teenth century. Sulayman’s older brother, Ismaʿil, the key figure in the rise
of ʿAzm family into the most powerful political force in the region, was
born in Maʿarret al-Nuʿman, near Homs and Hama. His first governorship
was over Tripoli. Sulayman, before succeeding his brother in that position,
served as the governor of Sidon Province. During the period 1725–30, three
of the four provinces in Bilad al-Sham (Damascus, Tripoli, and Sidon) had
governors from the ʿAzm family.63
61 TICR 3:173, dated early Shaʿban 1097.

62 There are several lists of Ottoman governors of Tripoli, the two key ones being a French gov-
ernment list reproduced by Adel Ismail, Documents diplomatiques et consulaires relatifs à l’histoire
du Liban et des pays du Proche-Orient, du XVIIème siècle à nos jours (Beirut: 1975): 367–371; and
Father Ignace Tannus, Mustafa Agha Barbar: Hakim iyalat Tarabulus wa al-Ladhiqiyya: 1767–
1834, 2nd edn. (Tripoli: Jarrous Press, 1985): 25–32. These sources and others were collated and
reproduced in Tarabulusi et al., Kashf al-litham ʿan muhayya al-hukuma wa-al-ahkam fi iqli-
may Misr wa-barr al-Sham, 388–403. Both contain mistakes noticed by those scholars who
rely primarily on shariʿa court registers for copies of administrative correspondence and court
cases.
63 Rafeq, Al-ʿArab wa-l-ʿUthmaniyun, 235–242. Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Ismaʿil, also become governor
of Tripoli Province. Ibrahim, in turn, appointed his son Yasin as mutasallim (ruler) of Lattakia
district.
The ʿAzms were intimately familiar with urban agriculture, which was
critical to the tax base and economies of all three provincial capitals that
they controlled. Not surprisingly, they made strategic investments in that
sector, amassing properties stretching from Lattakia and Homs in the
north to Damascus in the south.64 Sulayman Pasha, who served as Gover-
nor of Tripoli twice (1725–27 and 1731), had an additional motivation for
this major investment in constructing a water canal: to garner the good
will and support of the leading families of the city after an uprising in
1730–31 against his nephew, Ibrahim Pasha al-ʿAzm, the son of Ismaʿil
Pasha and governor of Tripoli Province at the time.65 The additional water
expanded the land under cultivation and raised the productivity of the
existing orchards in the area, both of which represented profitable business
opportunities for those who would enter into a contractual partnership
with the ʿAzm family. Thus, on April 26, 1732, the former Steward of the
Descendants of the Prophet (naqı̄b al-ashrāf ), Sayyid ʿAbd al-Rahman
Effendi Baraka zade, whom we met in Chapter 3, went to the Tripoli
shariʿa court accompanied by all the “owners of the old and of the newly
established orchards of Minya village [that is part of ] waqf al-Sadat al-
Misriyyin.”66 There, they acknowledged en masse that the former gover-
nor of Tripoli, Sulayman Pasha, privately owned the water delivered via the
canal to the orchards of Minya. This acknowledgment followed an effu-
sive description of the great expense and heroic effort involved: “They dug
the canal from the river through valleys and the folds of mountains. They
removed boulders and cleared lands and hills. Large sums of money were
spent on it and, with the help of God almighty, the water, full of profit
and gain, flowed with abundance.” Then, each of the proprietors of the
orchards and trees (arbāb al-basātı̄n wa-l-nus.ub) was assigned an annual
fee, to be paid in the spring, “according to the amount of water that his
orchards and his trees drink from it (canal).”67 The fees were to pay for
annual maintenance described as “dredging the bottom [of the canal] and
weeding its sides so the water can flow plentifully.”68
64 An indication of the scale of properties they accumulated in the process is given by the massive
waqf, thirty-five folios long, endowed on March 5, 1754 by Saʿd al-Din Pasha ʿAzm, son of Ismaʿil
Pasha and governor of Tripoli at the time of endowment. TICR 13:245–279, dated Jamadi I 10, 1167.
65 For an account of the uprising, see Hublus, “Al-intifadat al-shaʿbiyya fi Tarabulus.”
66 TICR 6:116, dated early Dhu al-Qaʿda 1141. Other key figures included another former naqib, sayyid
Ibrahim afandi, and others from the Dabbusi and Yagan families. The case is reproduced in Tad-
muri, Wathaʾiq nadira min sijillat al-mahkama al-sharʿiyya bi-Tarabulus. Tadmuri incorrectly gives
the location as register 6, page 111 and dates the case to 1731. The actual page is 116 and the correct
date is 1732.
67 “bi-qadri mā yakhus. bustānahu wa-nas.abahu mina al-shurbi minhā.”
68 There is no mention of rental fees for the water itself.
It is not a coincidence that this agreement – the aim of which was to
identify who owned what trees and the amount of water each proprietor
used – was concluded on the very first day of the silk season (which usu-
ally began on April 25). This cleared the way for the complex machinery
of multiple economic actors, literally brought together by water, to begin
working. The stakeholders ranged from leading Ottoman officials in Istan-
bul to local subcontractors. The entire land of Minya village was part of
the al-Sādāt al-Misriyyūn charitable waqf, overseen by the sultan’s house-
hold in Istanbul and by the chief Black Eunuch, and administered by the
mutawallı̄ who resided in Damascus, with support and local arbitration
from the head of the Janissaries in Tripoli and the shariʿa court qadi.69 In
1668, for instance, the mutawallı̄ rented parts of the waqf lands to a variety
of military men, merchants, ʿulamaʾ, and farmers.70 Most importantly, the
trees in the orchards of Minya village were owned by the middle and upper
classes of Tripoli, who are referred to in the document as “arbāb al-basātı̄n”
(proprietors of orchards).71
Arbāb al-basātı̄n was an entrenched yet diverse and fluid social category
throughout the Ottoman period (if not earlier) and well into the twentieth
century. Those whose names appeared in the April 26, 1732 document
were nearly at the top of the green zone food chain. The category Arbāb
al-basātı̄n, however, denoted a much wider circle of investors and con-
tractors, characterized by social mobility and dominated by a large middle
class, including women. This was not an exclusive social club like soap
factory owners in Nablus, and to plant a foothold in the orchard business,
so to speak, was not nearly as difficult as establishing a trade network
69 TICR 2:65, 127–128.

70 In this contract, the mutawallı̄, Ahmad Agha, rented out the entire production of the farms and
watermills (jamʿı̄ mah..sūlāt) of Minya, Bekfetein, Mal Salas, and Tel Khleifeh villages, as well as all
the shops in the famous Sandamar Market in Tripoli, among other things, to a high-ranking military
man, Muhammad Jawish bin Qasim, for a period of one year, in return for the sum of 1200 piasters.
The superintendent claimed his authority on the basis of a written document (barāʾa sharı̄fa) issued
by the “Pillar of Kings and Sultans, Mussali Agha, the head of the Porte’s Agha corps.” TICR 2:90,
dated Safar 20, 1079/July 30, 1668.
71 This is but one example of state authorities investing in trees and infrastructure in order to increase
production of silk. Muhammad ʿAli Pasha and his son Ibrahim, who led the Egyptian invasion of
Bilad al-Sham in 1831, promoted the planting of mulberry trees with a focus on the green zones of
coastal cities along the Mediterranean shores. According to Bowring, a British Member of Parlia-
ment who visited the area and wrote one of the most cited economic reports on Bilad al-Sham dur-
ing this period, the Egyptian authorities ordered the planting of 37 000 mulberry trees in Tripoli,
Beirut, and Sidon. In 1836, the British Consul-General in Beirut reported a twenty-five per cent
increase in land devoted to mulberry trees. The Ottoman government also encouraged the planting
of mulberry trees. The 1858 land law stated that trees could be considered private property three
years after their planting, and in 1882 these first three years were made tax-free. Cited in Owen, The
Middle East in the World Economy, 70, 79.
there. The purchase of land was not a requirement, and water was readily
available. Additionally, the distance to the urban center was close, labor
from a growing rural population was plentiful, demand for silk was high,
and the purchase of tree saplings was not prohibitively expensive. The
social circle of investors was further widened through the pooling of
capital via joint ownership, partnerships, and co-cultivation contracts
with skilled and unskilled labor. These included those who planted and
tended the trees, picked and processed the leaves, raised the silkworms,
harvested the cocoons, and reeled the silk. As demonstrated later, these
factors also made it possible for wide participation by women in owner-
ship and management of orchards, a matter of some consequence to my
argument.
In 1916, Tamimi and Bahjat observed that “the term middle [class] in
Tripoli means those planters (zurrāʿ ): the owners of orchards and the
traders in citrus.”72 To refer to the social backbone of a city as “planters”
reveals a great deal about the political economy of Tripoli. Zurrāʿ is of the
same root z-r-ʿ (to plant) as mazraʿa (farm) and muzāraʿa (a co-cultivation
contract between and landowner and a worker – discussed later in this
chapter).73 In shariʿa court documents, zurrāʿ were sometimes referred to
as “proprietors of orchards and saplings” (arbāb al-basātı̄n wa-l-nus.ūb),
which emphasized that the key was not the land, but the trees themselves.
In short, this was a propertied class with enough capital to plant, water,
maintain, harvest, and trade in cash-crop trees. The “farmer class” (t.abaqat
al-zurrāʿ), as Bahjat and Tamimi called it, constituted, in their estimation,
the overwhelming majority of Tripoli’s population (al-sawād al-aʿz.am fı̄
hādhihi al-baldāt). The rest, they reported, belonged to a small number of
“working poor” and a few rich “merchant” families, the latter making made
most of their profits from moneylending, soap and silk manufacturing,
and the trade in grains and sheep.74 They estimated that the poor num-
bered about 3000 (or fifteen per cent of the population), while the very
rich constituted only a dozen families. The very large size of the middle
72 Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 227.

73 It is also of the same root as muzariʿ (sharecropper), but it definitely does not carry the same con-
notation, nor could it be paired with fallāh. (peasant; literally “one who plows”).
74 Moneylending through the salam (advance-purchase) contract seems to have been used widely to
secure supplies of silk at predetermined fixed prices, in much the same way that the merchants of
Nablus secured olive oil for the soap factories. For an example of such a contract with the head of
the Zawiya district, which stipulated the delivery of two qint.ār (in this case, equal to 200 rat.l) of
silk over a period of four years, see a lawsuit registered in TICR 3:108–109, dated mid-Muharram
1098/December 1, 1686. For a discussion of such a fundamental contract to urban–rural relations
and what it tells us about economic and political change, see Doumani, “Le contrat salam.”
class in Tripoli, they noted with relief, gave them hope for the future of
the city.75
The correlation between urban agriculture and a large middle class is
not unique to Tripoli. Another (albeit smaller) coastal city, Sidon, had a
large green zone, consisting at the turn of the twentieth century of 300–
350 orchards ranging in size from 4000 to 28 000 square meters each.
Talal al-Majdhub argues that small landholding prevailed partially because
merchants and artisans invested in buying small portions of the green
zone whenever they had extra cash.76 Muhammad Kurd ʿAli, in his mag-
isterial six-volume study of Bilad al-Sham, notes that sharecropping and
extreme inequality in landholding predominated except for certain regions
of “ . . . irrigated farms around the city where the owners work their own
land and hire peasants as wage laborers on a monthly or annual basis.”77
Writing in 1925, he also noted that three-quarters of one such area, the
Ghuta of Damascus, belonged to middle and small planters (zurrāʿ), with
the remaining quarter in the hands of the elites of the city.78
James Reilly persuasively argues that the Ghuta of Damascus was charac-
terized by private small-scale landholdings during the nineteenth century,
largely due to the intensive and commercial nature of irrigated agriculture.
These small parcels generated substantial revenues that accrued primarily
to what he calls a broad “middle class” of “gentleman farmers,” who did not
perform the manual labor. Whether as the holders of usufruct rights over
the land or as its tenants, the “gentlemen farmers” usually rose from humble
origins and their ranks were constantly replenished both from within the
city and from the countryside, attesting to the social mobility that charac-
terizes this sector. Another key feature of the system was continuity and sta-
bility. Despite the enormous political, economic, and administrative trans-
formations that took place from the time of the Egyptian invasion in 1831
till the full impact of the tanzimat (including the 1858 Land Law) was felt
75 Tamimi and Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, 224–228. As enthusiastic members of the Committee for Union
and Progress (CUP), Bahjat and Tamimi were unalloyed positivists with little patience for “tradi-
tional” society. Hence, their disgust, dispensed in equal measure to the poor, considered filthy and
vulgar, and the provincial rich, described as parasitic, provincial, and ignorant. Although Tamimi
was from Nablus, neither he nor his co-author hid their very negative view of a city that seemed to
represent the worst of the old order. They had a different view of Tripoli and were careful to note
that the rank and file of CUP’s membership in that city came from the educated sons of the middle
class of planters.
76 Talal Majdhub, Tarikh Sayda al-ijtimaʿi, 1840–1914 (Beirut: al-Maktabah al-ʿAsriyya, 1983): 101.
77 Muhammad Kurd ʿAli, Kitab khitat al-Sham, 3rd ed., 6 vols. (Damascus: Maktabat al-Nuri, 1983),
196. The series was originally published in 1925. The statement is, of course, very general. Con-
centration of land holdings is likely in irrigated orchards if, among other factors, the water supply
depended on expensive digging of wells and pumping of water.
78 Ibid., 195.
Co-cultivation Contracts 259
by 1880, property holding patterns remained virtually unchanged in the
Ghuta, suggesting that it was not easily disrupted, at least not when com-
pared to the trade and craft sectors.79 The same can be said for Tripoli,
where citrus production complemented mulberry plantations.
6.6 Co-cultivation Contracts

Horticulture is a long-term investment that requires, in addition to land
and water, specialized skill, local knowledge, and intensive labor over a
period of many years in order to bring trees to a consistently high level
of productivity. Saplings must be properly planted and nursed to maturity,
trees grafted and pruned, the soil turned and fed, canals dredged and main-
tained, and fruit harvested and processed.80 Mulberry plantation involved
additional layers of production: leaves were picked, cut, and fed to silk-
worms, and cocoons were nurtured and unraveled. For most of the period
under study, itinerant spinners called hilālı̄yyūn (s. hilālı̄) used a hand-
powered spinning wheel to spin the cocoons on the plantation.81 The silk
was then sold to merchants and brokers. A family or group of kin and part-
ners could either perform these activities or contract some or all of them
out to renters or co-cultivators, along with the seasonal work teams. That
is, one option was to provide land and capital to a person in return for rent
and part of the revenues. The other option, more popular among women
and the upper echelons of orchard owners, was to enter into a joint cul-
tivation agreement, with the understanding that a portion of the trees or
land would become the private property of the working partner.
Co-cultivation contracts gave those with the skills, energy, and patience
to grow trees over several years the opportunity to own a share of them
and/or the land under them, depending on the contract. Charles Issawi
cites mughārasa as one reason why “small property” was much more
79 James Reilly, “Status Groups and Propertyholding in the Damascus Hinterland, 1828–1880,” Inter-
national Journal of Middle East Studies 21, no. 4 (1989): 517–539.
80 Generally speaking, it took about seven years to get the first commercial season of leaves from a
mulberry tree. The first year was spent in a nursery, where the seeds were raised. Two years after
planting, the tree was grafted, and leaves could be picked four years after that. Olive trees took two
to three times longer than mulberry trees to become productive, but they lived for much longer
and did not need more than rainwater once mature. Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes,” 158. For
more information on rain-fed and terraced olive trees, see Sarah Graham-Brown, “The Political
Economy of the Jabal Nablus, 1920–48,” in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Roger Owen (London: Macmillan, 1982): 118.
81 Khater, Inventing Home, 26. Khater discusses Mount Lebanon before 1838, so this may not apply
to the coastal areas. The first modern mill in Mount Lebanon, built in 1840, was located too far
from Tripoli, but by 1860 there were sixty-five modern mills in the region. Firro, “Silk and Agrarian
Changes,” 154.
widespread in “geographical Syria.” He describes it as a “practice . . . under
which a landlord provides uncultivated land (and if necessary, water) on
which a tenant grows trees. When these reach maturity, the tenant keeps
either half the land and trees or only half the trees.”82 In a study of mul-
berry trees in Mount Lebanon, Firro argues that terraced horticulture mil-
itated for co-cultivation contracts, especially musāqā and mughārasa.83 The
former, which is derived from the root s-q-y (to irrigate), referred to the
servicing of already existing trees. It was a short-term lease in which invest-
ment and profit were evenly divided. According to Firro, “In the case of
musāqā, the peasant tended the trees, the field, and cocoon growing, paid
for half the silk eggs, and supplied the sheds and trays necessary for accom-
modating and hatching the worms. The landowner paid the other half of
the cost of the egg as well as the tithing tax, and other surcharges. The
cocoon yield was divided equally between them.”84 Mughārasa, which is
derived from the root gh-r-s (to plant), was a long-term lease “between the
landowner and the farmer, under whose terms the farmer cleared a plot of
land on which the owner planted trees, and the farmer then tended the
trees until they matured. After 3–5 years (in the case of mulberries) . . . and
10–12 years (for olives), the grove was divided equally between the farmer
and the landowner. The owner kept the land, and the farmer retained the
right to half of what was produced on it.”85
As with all historically pervasive practices, co-cultivation contracts var-
ied from region to region and changed over time. Based on a study of the
Damascus shariʿa court registers, Rafeq notes that the exact percentages of
division depended on the nature and size of the land, type of trees, amount
of available water, number of renters, type of waqf (family or charitable),
and school of jurisprudence under which the contract was made.86 He
argues that mughārasa and munās.aba (which he uses interchangeably)
proliferated in the eighteenth century due to what he describes as the
growing strength of local notables at the expense of the central Ottoman
government. To secure their position, notables turned to Shafiʿi judges,
82 Issawi, Economic History of the Middle East, 145.
83 He also argues that the capitalization of agriculture and spread of mulberry plantations to the Bekaa
valley helped break up mushaʿ forms of landholding (collective ownership and annual division of
shares among villagers). Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes,” 157–159. For more details on Mount
Lebanon, see also ʿAbdullah Ibrahim Saʿid, Ashkal al-milkiyya wa anwaʿ al-aradi fi mutsarrifiyyat
Jabal Lubnan wa Sahl Al-Biqaʿ, 1861–1914 (Beirut: Bisan, 1995): 188–190.
84 Firro, “Silk and Agrarian Changes,” 157–158.
85 Ibid., 158. Firro bases this information on Andre Latron, La vie rurale en Syrie et au Liban; étude
d’économie sociale. Mémoires de l’institut Français de Damas. (Beyrouth: Impr. catholique, 1936):
67–71.
86 Rafeq, “Al-ʿAlaqat al-ziraʿiyya fi Bilad al-Sham,” 131.
who allowed long-term (sometimes up to ninety-nine years) leases of
private and waqf lands in the Ghuta, a practice forbidden in Hanafi
jurisprudence, which does not allow lease contracts longer than three
years. In contrast, he further argues, short-term musāqā contracts were
more prevalent in the early sixteenth century, when the Ottoman state was
strong and Hanafi jurisprudence was implemented more rigorously.87
The general thrust of these arrangements is illustrated in a privately
recorded musāqā contract from Nablus found among the Smadi Family
Papers (Figure 6.9).88 On June 21, 1847, four joint owners of two orchards
(hākūra) outside of the city handed over (sallama wa sāqā) the lands and
trees to Hajj ʿUmrān bin Yusuf ʿUmrān al-Dirbas.89 They authorized him
to plant what he wished in trees and field crops, to construct terraces, and
to level some areas of ground and raise others. In return, he was to receive
one-eighth and one-sixth of the existing mature trees (al-zarʿ al-qadı̄m) and
one-half of all new trees he plants. If he decides to plant grains and veg-
etables in between the trees, the cost was to be born by all and the surplus
(after costs are deducted) was to be split evenly between the planter and
the landowners.
Scholars interested in the capitalist transformation of Bilad al-Sham
following the promulgation of the 1858 Ottoman Land Law argue that
co-cultivation contracts can explain the rise of a small landowning class
in hill regions based on horticulture, while the coastal regions of largely
grain and cotton production became dominated by large land owners
exploiting a landless class of sharecroppers.90 This would have enormous
87 Ibid., 126–128.
88 Smadi Family Papers, 1.2.27, dated Rajab 7, 1263. For reasons unknown, moneylending and co-
cultivation contracts were rarely certified by the shariʿa court qadi or recorded in the court registers.
As Figure 6.9 shows, however, such contracts were visually and structurally identical to court h.ujja
(deeds), except, of course, for references to the court or qadi. Such documents are rare.
89 Three of the owners belonged to long-established urban Nabulsi families (Jurri, Qanadilo, Saʿd
al-Din), while Hajj ʿUmrān was probably a villager from Salama, east of Jaffa.
90 Latron, La vie rurale. For Lebanon, in addition to Firro, see Khater, Inventing Home, 26. In rigorous
studies largely based on local sources, Firestone and later Graham-Brown extended this argument to
Palestine. See Ya’akov Firestone, “Production and Trade in an Islamic Context: Sharika Contracts
in the Transitional Economy of Northern Samaria, 1853–1943,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 6, no. 2 (1975): 185–209. For a comprehensive study of co-cultivation contracts in the political
economy of Jabal Nablus during the Mandate period, see Graham-Brown, “The Political Economy
of the Jabal Nablus.” Based on business records of the ʿAbd al-Hadi family in the northern part
of the hill region of Palestine (Nablus, Jenin, and ʿArrabeh), Firestone shows that the plains where
field crops were grown became characterized by a concentration of landholding and a production
system based on sharecropping contracts between landlord and grain-growing peasant (muzāriʿ).
He details this contract in two articles published the same year. Ya’akov Firestone, “Crop-Sharing
Economics in Mandatory Palestine – Part I,” Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. 1 (1975): 3–23; “Crop-
Sharing Economies in Mandatory Palestine – Part II,” Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. 2 (1975): 175–
194. For a rigorous legal history of this contract, see Johansen, The Islamic Law, ch. 3.
Figure 6.9 Private musāqā contract, Nablus, circa 1847

socioeconomic and political consequences, for it accounts for the transfor-
mation of Mount Lebanon in terms of silk production and its dislocations,
as discussed earlier. It may also explain why the central hill regions of Pales-
tine stubbornly resisted all Zionist settler colonial attempts at establishing
a foothold through land purchases, and why they became the heartland of
the 1936–39 revolt against British colonial rule.
It is possible to extend this argument about the linkage between co-
cultivation contracts and the prevalence of smallholdings beyond the ter-
raced hill and mountain regions to the green zones of the coastal cities, such
as Tripoli, where joint-cultivation contracts were a widespread practice.91
The difference between the seaside orchards of Tripoli and the interior
terraces is that most of the land in the urban green zones was already
endowed as waqf. The issue was not so much the constant replenishing and
expansion of the ranks of small landowners, as was the case in the hill
regions, but the expansion of the ranks of tree owners.
The typical long-term lease for Tripoli took the form of a waqf adminis-
trator contracting a second party to plant trees and raise them to maturity,
after which a formal division took place whereby a second party received
a share of the mature trees, usually one-half.92 Within this broad frame,
a wide range of specific arrangements co-existed as a result of individual
negotiations. An example is a contract registered in the shariʿa court of
Tripoli on December 16, 1677, which used all three legal terms – mughārasa,
munās.aba, and munās.afa –in referring to a single overarching arrangement
(Munās.aba, from the root n-s.-b, meaning a sapling (nas.aba) that is planted
upright; munās.afa literally meaning “in half,” in reference to the most
common division of shares).93 Not surprisingly, the parties represented
91 Majdhub suggests that the use of the mughārasa contract was pervasive in the orchards of Sidon,
which had a large irrigated green zone. He gives an overview of the terms and the typical time span,
which depended on the type of tree. However, he cites no sources. The specific details he mentions
may have come from Latron, La vie rurale, 67–71.
92 See, for example, the qisma (division) of trees in an orchard whose land was part of two waqfs, but
whose hired contractor was a Christian who planted the trees by way of munās.afa. TICR 80:159.
Another example is the division in half of a citrus and fruit orchard at the conclusion of a munās.aba
contract. TICR 80:315–316. Both are cited in ʿAbdullah Ibrahim Saʿid, “Adwaʾ ʿala al-mulkiyya
al-ʿiqariyya li-madinat Tarabulus min khilal sijillat al-mahakim al-sharʿiyya fi al-nisf al-thani min
al-qarn al-tasiʿ ʿashar,” in Al-muʾtamar al-awwal li-tarikh wilayat Tarabulus ibbana al-haqba al-
ʿuthmaniyya, 1516–1918, eds. Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-ʿUlum al-Insaniyya, al-Jamiʿa al-Lubnaniyya,
and Farʿ al-Thalith (Tripoli: 1995): 175.
93 The multiplicity of terms could be due to the different elements of the contract: co-cultivation,
trees, and equal division of the end product. The title on the top of the document states “qad.ı̄yyat
munās.aba” (munās.aba deed), but “munās.aba” does not appear again in the document. Instead,
the word “mughārasa” is repeatedly used in a variety of conjugations throughout the text, suggest-
ing that it was the accepted legal term. The word “munās.afa” appears only once, as a modifier
two discrete social elements which vied for access to the profitable green
zone: former Ottoman military/administrative officials who were fairly
new to the region and local urban farmers skilled in silk industry. Two
brothers, the Pride of his Peers (fakhr aqrānihi) ʿAli bashsha and Ibrahim
çelebi, sons of the recently deceased Muhammad Effendi Al-Rūznāmjı̄ (a
title used in Egypt to refer to revenue collectors), entered into a mughārasa
contract with two other brothers, Mustafa and Ahmad, sons of Hiba
al-Qazzaz (the silk merchant).94 ʿAli and Ibrahim had inherited from their
recently deceased father land that had eighty old mulberry trees on it, plus
an area cleared of trees (bayād.). They had already sold half of those trees
to Mustafa and Ahmad. They then offered them a contract to the entire
orchard, along with its water allotment, for a period of five years, during
which they could plant whatever trees they “wished and desired” in the
empty part.95 At the end of this period, the orchard would be divided in
half between the two sets of brothers, each owning their half free and clear.
6.7 ʿAtika’s Options

If investment in trees was the key path to social mobility and the main-
stay of the middle class in Tripoli, it was even more so for females, espe-
cially when coupled with silk production. Consistently throughout the
two centuries under study, women, more than any other propertied social
group, focused on gaining access to trees through purchase, inheritance,
and waqf endowments in order to anchor and expand their space in the
social and economic fabric of the city.96 Judging from cases registered
in the Tripoli shariʿa court, women were active in the orchard business
as owners, contractors, investors, and managers. More so than any other
group, they depended on co-cultivation contracts, primarily musāqā and
mughārasa/munās.aba, to realize the productive potential of their trees,
whether owned privately or as shares in a family waqf. Important here
is that the contractual and management arrangements did not necessar-
ily depend on nurturing long-term multigenerational social relationships,
for the word “istaghrasa” (meaning “to enter into a mughārasa contract”), suggesting that its main
purpose was to indicate the equal division of the end product. TICR 2:262, dated Shawwal 20,
1088. The orchard is located in the western irrigated section (saqı̄ al-gharbı̄) between Tripoli and
al-Mina.
94 For this meaning of rūznāmjı̄, see Henry Herbert Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931): 195.
95 “yaghrisa fı̄ bayād. al-h.aqla mā shaʿa wa-ah.abba min anwāʿ al-nus.ub wa-l-ghirās.”
96 For anecdotal evidence of the involvement of women in urban agriculture, see Haim Gerber, “Social
and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600–1700,” International Journal
of Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 235–237.
ʿAtika’s Options 265
as did the moneylending and trade networks in Nablus. In Tripoli’s green
zone, both skilled and manual labor from the city and its surrounding vil-
lages seem to have been readily available. Equally as important, land and
trees were located within a short walking distance from the owners’ homes.
Women could directly tap into the information needed to calibrate capital
investment and market conditions, to contract and manage labor, to super-
vise the production process, and to organize the marketing of silk or citrus.
This is precisely what ʿAtika, daughter of Mustafa, of the family known
as Ibn Baqara, did in the late seventeenth century. Sometime before 1685,
she endowed an orchard (bustān) of mulberry trees as a family waqf and
appointed herself as the sole beneficiary and administrator.97 This change
in the legal status of her property provided her with a measure of pro-
tection: waqfs cannot be confiscated in case of indebtness, and they are
less vulnerable to counterclaims by agnates in the absence of a male heir.
She then rented one-half of the orchard to Hasan ibn al-Hajj Mansour
al-Dallal, for a period of twelve years.98 She did not rent the other half,
which was a smart move on her part as it allowed her to minimize the claims
and dependency that could be generated by a long tenancy. She could also
make more profit if she performed part of the work herself (which was not
unusual) or acted as her own contractor, hiring seasonal groups of workers.
It was also a smart move in terms of timing, for the late seventeenth cen-
tury turned out to be an excellent moment for investing in mulberry trees
and silk production. After a five decades-long absence due to French gov-
ernment anger at the treatment of merchants in Tripoli, French merchants
returned in 1667. They focused on white silk – much desired in France
as a background to gold and silver threads for military insignia, among
other things.99 Moreover, and in the same year as ʿAtika’s appearance in
court (1685), Louis XIV of France ordered the lifting of all customs on silk
directly imported from the East to the port of Marseille.100 Finally, the price
of silk was rising. Indeed, and unbeknownst to ʿAtika and Hasan, the price
of silk would make a leap in the early eighteenth century, precisely at the
time when their trees would be at their prime.101
97 This information can be found in the registration of the co-cultivation contract. TICR 3:8, dated
Dhu al-Qaʿda 15, 1096.
98 Ibid. This was exactly the period of a typical mughārasa contract for the planting of olive trees
in the hill regions of Palestine during the Mandate Period (1921–48), and probably before. For a
detailed discussion and a representative case, see Firestone, “Production and Trade,” 311–313.
99 Sharamand, “Dawr Tarabulus al-iqtisadi,” 209–210. 100 Ibid., 210–211.
101 The price per rat.l increased from tweleve to fifteen piasters in 1705 to eighteen to nineteen piasters
in 1714, and twenty-six piasters in 1726. Ibid., 216.
The rental agreement was registered in court at the request of the renter,
Hasan al-Dallal, who paid the court fees so he could possess the original
deed. In other words, it was not ʿAtika who went to court to protect her
legal rights, but the man who entered into what was essentially a joint
cultivation agreement with her. His concern was justified. Since this was
a long-term contract, it was entirely possible that ʿAtika might die in the
interim, and that her waqf beneficiaries might challenge the arrangement in
court.102 Besides, and as Baber Johansen has observed, trees have no “spec-
ified end” (nihāya maʿlūma), so they might well have been still standing at
the end of the tenancy. Therefore, a “tenant who grows summer crops or
plants trees will face many legal and economic conflicts at the end of the
specified period of tenancy.”103
The exact nature of the contract and the specifics of the waqf endowment
are not known, because the shariʿa court registers were lost for the years that
the waqf was endowed and the contract agreement made. Further, as noted
earlier, such contracts were normally not certified by the qadi or recorded in
the registers. Fortunately, a combing of the registers revealed a deed (h.ujja)
summarizing what amounted to three follow-up legal transactions between
ʿAtika and Hasan. The registration of this document was again requested
and paid for by Hasan. It describes how ʿAtika appeared before the judge
of the shariʿa court in person on November 13, 1685 and legally acknowl-
edged that she had received the substantial sum of sixty piasters from the
renter, Hasan, as an advance payment (salafan wa-taʿjı̄lan) for four years
of rent of one-half of her endowed orchard, beginning in 1098H/1686–87
and ending in 1101H/1689–90.104 She further acknowledged that he had
delivered exactly as specified in the rental contract for the first three years
and that he now had nine years left. The second transaction, immedi-
ately following this, was a legal commitment (taʿahhud) by ʿAtika that she
would pay the running expenses for these four years at the rate of fifteen
piasters a year (which implied a fifty–fifty investment and, presumably, a
fifty–fifty share of the profits). The expenses (ʿamāl al-bustān) were listed as
costs for “plowing, fertilizer, watering, and (waqf ) lease (fee on the land),
plus any other usual and necessary expenses of producing the silk.”105 The
102 For an example of this precise point, see the lawsuit against the renter of a mulberry orchard
by the inheritors of a recently deceased female owner who had rented it to him: TICR 3:140–141.
Although witnesses were key to adjudication, the presentation of legal documents played an impor-
tant role in framing negotiations and arguments, and even shaping the decisions of the judge. See
Chapter 2.
103 Johansen, The Islamic Law, 44 fn. 12. ʿ
104 TICR 3:8, dated Dhu al-Qa da 15, 1096.
105 “ghabba idhā taʿahhadat ʿAtika al-madhkūra bi-ʿamāl nis.f al-bustān . . . fı̄ kulli sanat mina al-arbaʿat
sinı̄n . . . min al-h.irātha wa-zibl wa-sāqı̄ wa-h.ikr wa-ghayra dhālika min al-mas.ārı̄f al-muʿtāda al-
lāzima li-shayl al-h.arı̄r wa-tarbiyyatihi.”
ʿAtika’s Options 267
third transaction was a surety or guarantee for ʿAtika provided by her sis-
ter, Muhsina, and by her paternal cousin’s husband, Murad Çelebi, who
legally committed to paying the fifteen piasters in annual expenses each
year if ʿAtika was unable to. In addition, the next sentence allowed Hasan
to claim recompense from the unrented half of ʿAtika’s waqf in case all else
failed. He then “requested from the judge . . . to register this legal contract
to aid him in securing his money upon need and in case of complaint.”106
Nowhere in this brief document can one find the legal term for the contrac-
tual arrangement between ʿAtika and Hasan, other than the description of
Hasan as the “renter” (al-mustaʾjir). There is no mention of h.ikr (long-term
lease of waqf land), or of musāqā, or mughārasa. Given the unavailability of
the original contract, one can only note that its span of twelve years was
exactly the same as the mughārasa contract. ʿAtika’s commitment to pay her
share of expenses recalls a musāqā contract. The rental payments involve
tenancy (ı̄jāra). And ʿAtika’s investment in labor and the sharing of profit
from silk production involves manufacturing (raising silkworms and reel-
ing thread to produce silk).107 The capacious legal framework that gov-
erned the transubstantiation of a relationship into a calculable commod-
ity through a tenancy contract allowed for a flexible arrangement between
parties, both male and female, that were not bound by long-term social,
political, or kinship ties. In the context of the political economy of the
green zone, it also helped facilitate the participation of a broad spectrum of
actors, rather than the concentration of holdings. Hence, the greater pos-
sibilities of inclusive property devolution practices in Tripoli. We should
not be surprised, therefore, that among ʿAtika’s guarantors were two other
women. One was her sister, the other her paternal cousin, Zainab, who
acted through her husband, Murad. It is very likely that Murad inhabited
the role of the adopted son of the Baqara family as part of a matrilocal
arrangement following the deaths of two brothers, Mustafa and Ibrahim
Baqara, who were the fathers of Muhsina and Zainab, respectively.108 It
bears emphasis here that in Tripoli, very much in contrast to Nablus, it
was not unusual for women to take charge of the natal family estate, even
if married to an outsider. In fact, each of the three women (ʿAtika, Zainab,
. asan al-mustaʾjir . . . mina al-h.ākim al-sharʿı̄ . . . bi-an yussat.ir lahu bi-dhālik sakkan
106 “iltamasa H
sharʿı̄yyan li-yakūna nafiʿan lahu ʿinda al-ih.tiyāj ladā al-ih.tijāj.”
107 According to Johansen, the contract of tenancy was “best suited to growing crops that can be sown
and harvested within the term of a year, but is also admissible for other types of crops and for
longer periods.” Johansen, The Islamic Law, 26.
108 In cases where male heirs were absent, the size of the green zone inelastic, and demand for urban
managerial skill high, it was not unusual for a husband to move in with his wife and serve as the
“adopted son” of her natal family.
and Muhsina) had been married more than once, yet they managed to
maintain control of the Baqara family home and orchards.109
6.8 Bustān vs. Dār

In light of the differences in political economy discussed in this chapter,
it should not come a surprise that a comparison of the types of properties
(residential, commercial, agricultural) endowed in Tripoli and Nablus
yielded dramatically different results, especially when it came to female
endowers.110 In Tripoli, the overwhelming majority of women endowed
orchards (bustān), while in Nablus women almost exclusively endowed
residences (dār).111 In Tripoli, exactly sixty-three per cent of waqfs estab-
lished in the 1660s–1730s included at least one agricultural property.
Remarkably, the statistical result for the 1800–60 period is exactly the
same, at sixty-three per cent. This is a bit more than double the percentage
for Nablus, which stood at thirty-one per cent for both the early and
the later periods. The difference becomes clearer if one looks at waqfs
that endowed only agricultural properties. In Tripoli, the percentages for
the two periods are twenty-six and forty-three per cent, respectively. In
Nablus, they are 0.02 and four per cent. This is a remarkably large differ-
ence, especially when one keeps in mind that Tripoli is not exceptional in
comparison with other cities with a very large urban agricultural sector,
such as Damascus and Sidon.112
109 The argument about the nature of relations between the three women is not based on speculation,
but built on the basis of bits and pieces of information culled from a lawsuit registered in volume
three of the Tripoli shariʿa court sijill about 100 pages after the preceding contract appears. The
lawsuit, registered May 7, 1687, pits Muhsina against Zainab’s mother over ownership of the Baqara
family home. TICR 3:143, dated Jamadi II 24, 1098.
110 These are not neat categories. Most residential compounds included storage facilities, gardens,
stables, and the like. They were also adjacent to, if not on top of artisanal and retail shops, ware-
houses, and storage depots, which were usually run or rented by the families in these houses. For
examples of residential waqf that had a commercial storage space (s. khazna), see NICR 6:43;
7:114–115; and 8:48. For a residence with a small water-powered mill, see NICR 10:115. For one
with a stable for animals, see NICR 7:108. All of these were included in the “residential” cate-
gory. Agricultural properties, such as orchards, gardens, and vineyards (bustān, h.ākūra, and karm)
were all located in the green zone, and almost always planted with fruit trees. There were no lands
planted with grains, legumes, or other types of field agriculture. As to commercial properties, they
were primarily shops and warehouses (dukkān, h.ās.il) and industrial facilities, such as olive presses,
soap factories, and bakeries (badd, mas.bana, and furn).
111 In both cities, commercial properties – such as artisanal shops and tools, warehouses, mills, soap
factories, and sesame presses – were largely the domain of men. Of course, women did inherit
commercial properties, but most such properties found their way back to men before long.
112 Due to the centrality of the Ghuta, waqfs endowed in Damascus during the sixteenth century also
show a heavy focus on agricultural properties. According to Toru Miura, seventy-five per cent of
waqfs endowed agricultural properties, compared to only fifteen per cent that endowed what he
Bustān vs. Dār 269
Table 6.1 Types of properties endowed in Tripoli and Nablus, 1660s–1730s113
Tripoli Nablus
Type of property Male Female Total Male Female Total
Cash – – – 7 2 9
Cash, commercial, – – – 2 1 3
agricultural
Residential 5 3 8 10 10 20
21.7% 25% 27.7% 83.3%
Commercial 1 1 2 2 – 2
Agricultural 6 3 9 1 – 1
26% (26%) (.02%)
Residential, commercial 1 2 3 4 – 4
Residential, agricultural 5 2 7 2 – 2
21.7%
Commercial, agricultural 3 – 3 2 – 2
Residential, commercial, 2 1 3 7 – 7
agricultural
Total 23 12 35 36 13 49
This variance between Nablus and Tripoli becomes more dramatic still
when one compares the types of properties endowed by women. In Tripoli,
women endowed primarily irrigated agricultural properties, and increas-
ingly so over the decades, at rates higher than men. Only thirty-seven
per cent of male waqf endowers in Tripoli endowed solely agricultural
property during the 1800–60 period, as compared to forty-nine per cent
of females. 114 This is to be compared to absolutely none for Nablus in
either period. Instead, seventy-seven per cent of women of Nablus endowed
waqfs consisting solely of residential property, and that already very high
figure went up to almost ninety per cent for the 1800–60 period (Tables 6.1
and 6.2).
The historically entrenched differences are also clear in the structure of
legal texts. Consistently over a period of three centuries, and no matter
calls “urban” properties, such as residences and shops. The remainder endowed large structures
that he classifies as “common,” such as mills and oil presses. See Miura, “The Salihiyya Quarter
of Damascus.” A survey of 101 family waqfs registered in the shariʿa court sijills of Sidon for the
period 1816–1860 shows that thirty per cent endowed agricultural properties, mostly orchards in
the city’s green zone. See Sinno, Madinat Sayda, 472–473.
113 For Nablus, I included two joint husband/wife waqfs in the male column and one mother/son waqf
in the female column. The male column of the residential commercial row in Nablus includes two
joint waqfs, one by a husband and wife and one by an uncle and niece.
114 The percentages for the 1660s–1730s period are equal, at about twenty-five per cent.
Table 6.2 Types of properties endowed in Tripoli and Nablus, 1800–60115
Type of property Tripoli Nablus
Cash – – – – – –
Cash, commercial, – – – – – –
agricultural
Residential 28 35 63 46 17 65
(37%) (90%) (45%)
Commercial 13 4 17 4 – 4
Agricultural 44 54 98 6 – 6
37% 49% (43%) (4%)
Residential, commercial 2 2 4 32 1 33
(26%) (23%)
Residential, agricultural 17 14 31 7 1 8
Commercial, agricultural 6 1 7 4 – 4
Residential, commercial, 9 1 10 27 – 27
agricultural (22%) (19%)
Total 119 111 230 125 19 144
the number or kinds of properties in an endowment, the residence (dār)

was always listed first in Nablus, while the orchard (bustān) was always
listed first in Tripoli. Why was this the case? And how did it not just
reflect, but also produce understandings of what constituted the meanings
of family? For Nablus, the message could not be clearer. Dār was solid
and immovable: the headquarters of a household, constituting a discrete
corporate entity centralized around the male. Dār was the key marker in
the built environment of the city that defined a family name’s longevity
and its potential wealth, power, and status in the larger society. Dār
was the anchor of surplus extraction networks connecting the city to its
hinterlands, as well of manufacturing and trade networks on the local
and regional levels. Dār, not surprisingly, was and still is the word used
115 The male column of the residential row in Tripoli includes one mother/sons joint waqf. For the
commercial row, it includes one husband/wife joint waqf. For the agricultural row, it includes
one husband/wife joint waqf. For the residential, agricultural row it includes two husband/wife
joint waqfs (TICR 45:131 and 52:111) and one brother/sister joint waqf (TICR 57:230). For the
residential, commercial, agricultural row it includes one uncle/nieces joint waqf (TICR 46:101).
The total for Tripoli does not include two waqfs that could not be read due to the bad condition
of the documents. These two waqfs are TICR 57:8, 16. I included them in the agricultural column
because the endower, Fansa Shadid, established several other waqfs at the same time, all of which
consisted solely of agricultural properties. See TICR 57: 8, 9, 11–13, 15, 16.
Conclusion 271
in Nablus (and southern Bilad al-Sham in general) for both “house” and
“family.”116
It is difficult to fully understand or even find the proper language to
express the centrality of bustān to family in Tripoli, because the green zone
has all but disappeared in the last few decades and the meanings of family,
consequently, have radically changed. Bustān, in contrast to the fortress-like
limestone residence, was an open living entity characterized by a wide range
of partnerships among a wide range of social groups around access rights to
resources (land, trees, water), factors of production labor, and so on. Bustān
was a dependable and lucrative source of revenue with long-term stability.
Bustān seemed to be best suited to conjugal families, regardless of whether
the primary holder or beneficiary was male or female, for both were equally
well situated to manage its affairs. Profitable and dynamic, yet stable, bustān
encouraged the proliferation of investors, not the concentration of estates.
This may explain the absence of an aggressive concentration of resources
between and within families at the expense of women and children. It may
also explain the clear lack of worry that daughters posed a danger to the
family’s patrimony through exogamous marriage, as well as the seemingly
warm reception given to sons-in-law, who sometimes lived in their wife’s
natal residence and acted as adopted sons.
6.9 Conclusion
There is a great deal that we do not know about the demographic, social,
cultural, and economic histories of Tripoli and Nablus. But in light of the
evidence presented in this chapter, it is fair to say that the substantive differ-
ences between them when it comes to gender and property – especially the
dramatic divergences in the social composition of waqf endowers, the types
of properties endowed, and which beneficiaries were included or excluded –
were intimately related to long-standing variances in the local political and,
to some extent, spiritual economies of the two cities.
It is best to think of the discrete regional social spaces of Bilad al-Sham
during Ottoman rule as variations on a theme: that is, the opposite of
the popular metaphor of a mosaic of homogeneous spaces. In this respect,
Nablus and Tripoli were points on the spectrum of possibilities in the East-
ern Mediterranean in Ottoman times. These two points, it bears empha-
sis, were fairly far apart, and consistently so for at least two centuries,
116 In Tripoli, like northern Bilad al-Sham, the word for family, bayt, also means house. In Nablus, bayt
is used exclusively to refer to a room containing a conjugal family inside a multi-family residence.
Figure 6.10 Tripoli, circa 1954: urban growth
because they were deeply rooted in the ecological landscape, in economic

and social relations, and in legal and spiritual cultures. Still, they were
hardly immutable. Far more dramatic changes have taken place since the
1950s (Figures 6.10 and 6.11). Tripoli’s green zone is largely gone, replaced
mostly by high-rise apartment buildings and a largely abandoned sports
complex built in more optimistic times. This, along with major demo-
graphic transformations partly precipitated by the Lebanese and Syrian
civil wars, have created completely different circumstances for the produc-
tion and re-production of family life.
The same is true of Nablus as well. The destruction of Palestinian
society in 1948, the ongoing Israeli colonization coupled with a military
occupation since 1967, massive migration from the villages to the city,
and remittances from the large number of Nablus natives now outside of
Palestine – all have dramatically reshaped family life. At its core, Nablus
still sounds, feels, smells, and looks like a provincial capital. The narrow
streets of the old city, lined with shops that cater to rural inhabitants, are
still flooded every morning and stand virtually empty by the end of the
afternoon. But the continuity in this ancient rhythm is deceiving. Large
tracts in Nablus’s hinterlands have been forcibly appropriated by Israeli
Figure 6.11 Tripoli, circa 2015: urban growth
Figure 6.12 Nablus, circa 1994: urban growth

Figure 6.13 Nablus, circa 2000s: urban growth
colonies or starved of water, markets, and freedom of movement. The city,

flooded by refugees and villagers, has grown dramatically (Figures 6.12 and
6.13). Its economic life undergoes periods of feast and famine according
to the degree of Israeli military restrictions on movement, manufacturing,
and commerce. Entrepreneurs and the educated classes must look much
further away than Jabal Nablus for opportunities, and the regional nodes –
Damascus and Cairo – that historically attracted the capital and human
resources of Nablus are largely inaccessible.
One wonders what new strategies have replaced the once deeply rooted
traditions of property devolution that regulated life in these two cities.
ch a p ter 7
Fatima’s Determination
Islamic law’s presumed “failure” to distinguish between law and morality

equipped it with efficient, communally based, socially embedded, bottom-
up methods of control that rendered it remarkably efficient in command-
ing willing obedience
Wael Hallaq, 20091
As to her act of selling (her father’s waqf property in 1817), it is based on
her faith in the correctness of the qadi’s ruling (invalidating her father’s
waqf in 1814) . . . As to the permissibility of the qadi allowing the sale of
an unrecorded waqf to an inheritor of the endower, it is bearable as a
price for a qadi’s license to interpret.
Ruling of a qadi invalidating the sale of waqf property, Tripoli, 18422
It is difficult to overestimate Fatima’s determination to be the master of

her own fate, to control and manage her father’s estate as a son would, and
to lead a dignified and comfortable life in her home village of Qalamon,
the central village of the Lower Kura district and a strategic settlement
that hugs the Mediterranean coast about five kilometers south of Tripoli.3
For twenty-eight years (1814–42), Fatima – a tenacious, resourceful, and
strong-willed woman, who was the only child of Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir al-
Mudabbir (“The Fixer”) al-Qalamoni – fought legal battles against the sons
of ʿAli, her father’s brother, to do just that (Figure 7.1).4
1 Hallaq, Sharīʻa, 2. For a detailed review and penetrating critique of Hallaq’s claims, see Yossef
Rapoport, “Review of Shariʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations, by Wael B. Hallaq,” Islamic Law
and Society 20 (2013): 141–148.
2 “Wa ammā .sudūr al-bayʿ minha fa huwa mabnı̄ ʿala dhanniha sih.h.at al-qad.āʾ . . . Wa ammā jawāz it.lāq
al-qād.ı̄ bayʿ al-waqf al-ghayr musajjal li-wārith al-wāqif fa huwa mah.mūl ʿala al-qād.ı̄ al-mujtahid.”
TICR 57:34, dated March 17, 1842.
3 Qalamon is one of the larger villages in the Kura region, famous for its olive groves in the hills and
mulberry trees on the coast.
4 Like most people in Bilad al-Sham and across the world at the time, Fatima and her kin did not
have a surname. Of course, they and their community were intimately familiar with the kinship and
property map of the village. This cognitive map, like a secret treasure, was largely hidden from the
gaze of the world outside that community, including the shariʿa court and other state institutions.
275
276 Fatima’s Determination
ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Mudabbir ʿAli al-Khabbaz

(d.1814) (d. < 1814)
Fatima Mustafa Ahmad Muhammad al-Khabbaz

(d. b/w1838 -1842)
Ahmad
Properties:
Residence (bayt) of ʿAbd al-Qadir
Miqṣal of mulberry trees near the residence
Garden (bustān)
Mulberry trees and grape vines near al-Khammarah Spring
Field (haql)
. of trees
*Land adjacent to the Sufi Saint Tomb (zāwiya) with mulberry and citrus trees
*Olive press in Harisha land in al-Kura district
*not mentioned in the 1814 lawsuit
Youngest Oldest
Figure 7.1 Qalamoni family tree, according to an 1842 lawsuit
The central legal question over the three decades of litigation, which
included four lawsuits brought before four different qadis, was the valid-
ity of her father’s family waqf (ithbāt waqf ). Much to the chagrin of her
paternal cousins – Sayyid Muhammad al-Khabbāz (“The Baker”) and his
two younger brothers, Ahmad and Mustafa – the endowment stipulated
that al-h.urma al-sayyida Fatima, as she was called in the court register, and
her descendants were the sole beneficiaries. At stake was the entire estate
Fatima’s Determination 277
Table 7.1 Qalamoni lawsuits
Relation of
Date Plaintiff (P) Defendant (D) P to D Qadi Decision
1814, Muhammad Fatima b. ʿAbd Paternal Darwish Plaintiff

September 27 b. ʿAli al-Qadir cousin Baraka (Muhammad)
al-Khabbaz al- Muddabir
1837, Fatima b. ʿAbd Muhammad Paternal ʿAbd Defendant
August 20 al-Qadir b. ʿAli cousin al-Wahad (Muhammad)
al-Muddabir al-Khabbaz Mughrabi
1838, October 9 Fatima b. ʿAbd Muhammad Paternal ʿAbd al-Qadir Plaintiff
al-Qadir al-Khabbaz cousin (Fatima)
Muddabir
1842, Ahmad b. Fatima b. ʿAbd Paternal Muhammad Defendant
March 17 Muhammad al-Qadir aunt b. Darwish (Fatima)
al-Khabbaz al-Muddabir Baraka
of Fatima’s father (Tables 7.1 and 7.2).5 But this is not the issue Fatima’s
cousins raised in court. Throughout this entire period, not once did they
challenge Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir’s intention to establish a family waqf, or
his designation of Fatima as the sole beneficiary. They were not blind to
the fact that it was a fairly common practice in Tripoli to designate daugh-
ter(s) as the sole beneficiaries of a family waqf in the absence of a male heir.
Indeed, females (daughters and granddaughters) were the sole beneficiaries
of every family waqf endowed by villagers from Qalamon between 1800 and
1860.6 Rather, the sons of ʿAli argued that ʿAbd al-Qadir’s endowment was
5 I was able to reconstruct the timeline and specifics of the litigation by working backward from a
lawsuit dated 1842, which was what first piqued my interest in this case. In this lawsuit is a narrative
that mentions, in quite brief summary fashion, previous rounds of litigation. I then searched the
various registers for the previous lawsuits. For instance, there is a reference to a lawsuit dated 1229. The
exact date is not provided, so I read all documents dated 1229 and was able to locate the particular case:
TICR 43:184–185, dated Shawwal 12, 1229/September 27, 1814. Each of the referenced documents
contained additional details. During this process, I found related documents never mentioned in
any of the lawsuits, such as a jointly endowed waqf by ʿAli’s sons registered shortly after they won the
first lawsuit and copied into the register ten pages later: TICR 43:195–196, dated Shawwal 29, 1229.
6 Perhaps setting a pattern for the others, the first was endowed by the head of the village, the Sufi
Shaykh and Sayyid ʿAli b. ʿAlam al-Din al-Qalamoni, who endowed one-half of two houses and
one-half of two pieces of land (one with fruit trees, the other with grape vines) to his two daughters.
He endowed the other half to his granddaughter (TICR 43:304, dated March 30, 1815). Mustafa
Tassu b. Ahmad Khaled al-Qalamoni endowed a house and three pieces of land (grape vines and fig
trees) to his daughter (TICR 45:170, dated December 10, 1816). Sayyid Ahmad b. Sayyid Ramadan
al-Qalamoni and his wife, Shama b. Sayyid ʿAli Khamra, endowed a large constitutive waqf of eleven
properties to their three daughters, Diba, Mona, and Sharifa (TICR 45:131, dated July 15, 1816).
Table 7.2 Qalamoni timeline
1811–14 ʿAbd al-Qadir endows waqf to daughter Fatima (either 1811 or

1814) and dies in 1814. His older brother, ʿAli, died earlier and
was survived by three sons.
1814, September 27 ʿAli’s sons sue Fatima to invalidate waqf and wins. Fatima is
represented by her husband, ʿAbd al-Qadir Kasra
al-Qalamoni. The qadi, Darwish Muhammad Effendi Baraka
zade, rules in favor of ʿAli’s sons.
1814, October 14 ʿAli’s sons jointly endow the properties they inherited from
Fatima’s father as a family waqf, designating themselves and
their progeny equally as beneficiaries, each in control of his
own third of the properties.
1817 Fatima sells one-half of her inherited shares in the olive trees to
her paternal cousin, Muhammad, son of ʿAli, who owns trees
in the same plot, for 300 piasters.
1831–40 Egyptian occupation of Bilad al-Sham.
1837, May 18 Fatima sues Muhammad for the properties. The qadi, Sayyid
ʿAbd al-Wahid Effendi Mughrabi zade, rules in favor of
Muhammad, represented by his son Ahmad.
1838 Fatima personally appears in court and sues her cousin
Muhammad, again represented in court by his son Ahmad.
The qadi, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir Effendi Al-Hajj, rules in favor
of Fatima and orders that her father’s now valid waqf be
officially recorded in the registers for the first time.
1842 Ahmad sues his paternal aunt, Fatima, over all seven properties.
The qadi, Sayyid Muhammad Darwish Effendi Baraka zade,
rules in favor of Fatima.
not valid for a technical reason: he had enunciated that it was to take effect
after his death. Since a waqf must be established during one’s lifetime, ʿAbd
al-Qadir’s enunciation, they continued, legally amounted to the enactment
of a will (was.ı̄ya), not a waqf. Furthermore, since a will can only be made
with a third of one’s estate, and since post-mortem Islamic rules of inheri-
tance limited Fatima’s share to one-half of that estate, Muhammad and his
brothers were entitled by the right of nearest agnates (taʿas..sub) to one-third
of the total properties of their uncle.
In response, Fatima claimed that her father had not uttered the word
“after.” This would have been easy for her to prove had ʿAbd al-Qadir, as
was normal practice, certified and recorded the waqf in the shariʿa court of
Sayyida Khadija b. Sayyid ʿAli Naʾisa from Qalamon endowed a plot of trees (h.aqla shajariyya) that
she had purchased to her daughter Fatima (TICR 54:289, dated January 3, 1837). Finally, ʿAʾisha b.
Sayyid Khadir al-Qalamoni endowed a house she had purchased thirteen years earlier to her daughter
Hasnaʾ (TICR 59:111, dated April 10, 1848).
Fatima’s Determination 279
Tripoli and paid for an original deed for safekeeping. But Fatima never pro-
duced such a document throughout the long litigation process, the impli-
cation being that the waqf was orally established; hence, the difficulty of
adjudicating this case. As discussed in Chapter 2, documentation of waqf
endowments is crucial, because each word casts a long shadow over the
landscape of time. Theoretically of infinite duration, a waqf endowment
reconfigures the modes of temporality in three sets of relations. The first is
between the endower and his or her descendants, via the endower’s contin-
ued “presence” in the lives of future generations through the distribution
of revenues. The second is between the descendants themselves, via rules of
inclusion and exclusion that depend on gender, marital status, generation
(t.abaqa), degree of closeness (qurba), and so on. The third is between kin
and the political/spiritual economies of the society at large, via the types of
properties endowed, contracts and rent strategies, annual contributions to
the religious establishment and its institutions, and so on. When a waqf is
endowed, human time, in as much as there is such a thing, is suspended;
God’s time takes over.
Precisely because of the long and layered temporal horizons of waqf
time, the consequences of each word were serious and potentially unpre-
dictable. The flexibility of the waqf as a legal instrument allowed for a
wide range of surgically precise distinctions, clauses, and conditions. Con-
stitutive waqfs such as ʿAbd al-Qadir’s were family charters that governed
not only property devolution, but also the moral and disciplinary order
of kinship and gender. The registration and governance of family waqf
endowments through the shariʿa court were critical to the construction
of “family” as a corporate unit in Ottoman times, especially in provincial
cities, towns, and large villages. In such spaces, family as a concept and a
practice was largely shaped through a specific legal vocabulary employed
to accurately express the endower’s intent, as well as to anticipate compli-
cations and disputes that might surface generations later. This is why the
critical issue in the frequent lawsuits between kin regarding the validity of
a waqf and/or who are the rightful beneficiaries hinged on contestations
about the exact words used. Questions regarding the sequence and mean-
ing of words were subject to much reflection by scholars and constituted
the largest part, by far, of fatwa collections by leading jurists such as Khayr
al-Din al-Ramli and Ibn ʿAbidin. This is also why, as argued in Chapter 3,
virtually every waqf was certified by a qadi and recorded in the shariʿa court
registers. Waqf deeds, moreover, were carefully guarded and periodically
re-registered in court as an Ottoman state institution, as their possession
conferred considerable power within and between kin. Most importantly,
and as detailed in Chapter 2, waqf deeds were routinely used as evidence in
court proceedings. It was not unusual for qadis to render decisions in waqf
disputes without calling witnesses, despite the normative rule that proof
requires the oral testimony of two credible witnesses. Since the social life
of a waqf was expected to outlast that of the endower’s line of descent, and
even that of the institutional objects of charity, such as mosques; and since
every word, like a pebble thrown into a pond, had many possible ramifica-
tions depending on the configuration of beneficiaries and circumstances,
how could disputes be resolved if the waqf deed were not available and if
the endower and all possible witnesses were long dead?
This is not simply a technical legal question. It has implications that
range from the organization of kinship and power relations in the context
of local political economies to the epistemological foundations of law
and society and the formation of modern technologies of governance by
centralizing states. Family is the product of all three dynamics and, simul-
taneously, the idiom through which they are made legible, contested, and
transformed. This concluding chapter highlights some of the conceptual
stakes involved through an analysis of the social life of the waqf dispute
between Fatima and her paternal cousins. The first section recalls the
historiographical and methodological arguments made possible by a com-
parative study of waqf and property devolution in Nablus and Tripoli from
the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The second and third sections
take a deep dive into the specific legal maneuvering over the three decades
of litigation between Fatima and her cousins to make some counterintu-
itive arguments about the mutually constitutive relationships of kin/court
and shariʿa/class. The last section reflects on what the lines of inquiry
pursued in this study open and foreclose when it comes to framing the
post-1860 stories of modernity in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond.
7.1 What if Fatima Lived in Nablus?

We do not know why ʿAbd al-Qadir did not register his waqf in the shariʿa
court of Tripoli before his death in 1814. Certainly, it was not because he
feared losing control of his property. Endowers of family waqfs almost
always designated themselves as sole beneficiaries until their death, and they
sometimes gave themselves the right to subtract from or to add to the prop-
erties endowed. We also do not know, if we are to believe his nephews, why
he made the simple but costly mistake of uttering the word “after,” which
could easily have been flagged, had he gone to court, by the qadi or one of
the scribes. What we do know is that the stakes were high for the people
involved in terms of the value of the properties and of the authority and
What if Fatima Lived in Nablus? 281
social capital they embodied. This much is clear from the genealogy of the
properties and the spatial web of relations in which they were enmeshed.
To begin with, ʿAbd al-Qadir’s estate was considerable by local standards.
It consisted of seven properties typical of the diverse portfolio of a pros-
perous villager integrated into the production and trade networks of the
city next door. The core, in addition to a house and olive press (dawwārat
zaytūn), was composed of five pieces of land devoted largely to mulberry
trees for the silk industry, along with grape vines, olive groves, and citrus
orchards. These properties passed through Fatima’s agnatic family for at
least three generations, and hence were etched deeply into the collective
memory of her extended family. They were also intermeshed with other
family properties. Judging from the description of the boundaries, the agri-
cultural lands were directly adjacent to lands owned by Fatima’s legal neme-
ses: her paternal cousins, led by the oldest, Sayyid Muhammad and, after
his death, his son Ahmad.7 Beyond their market value, therefore, the dis-
puted properties symbolized the family’s place, literally, in the material and
social landscape of Qalamon. Thus, a fundamental question informed the
social life of this long-running legal dispute: Who controls and represents
the Qalamoni family patrimony? This, in turn, begged larger questions:
What did “family” mean? How should it be organized? And who were the
rightful heirs and beneficiaries?
A key finding of this book is that the answers depend, in large measure,
on the local political and spiritual economies of the social space in which
one lives. Fatima did not differ from her sisters in Nablus in any essential
way. She was a Sunni Muslim Arab who shared, among other things, the
dialect, cuisine, and history of the inhabitants of Bilad al-Sham in Ottoman
times. But if Fatima had lived in Nablus, it is almost certain that we would
have come across her name not in lawsuits against her cousins, but in a pur-
chase/sale document or – even more probably – a legal acknowledgment
deed (iqrār) in which she testified that she had no claim over her cousins’
share of disputed properties. This is because, in Nablus, a high value was
put on concentrating and consolidating family properties within the patri-
line. That is, if Fatima had lived in Nablus, she would likely have been
vigorously pressured to hand over her remaining share of the inheritance
to her cousins, in one legal form or another.
We can be fairly confident of this for two reasons. First is the absence of
a male heir combined with the presence of first-degree paternal cousins:
7 They are described as miqs.al (it is not clear what type of land this indicates) of mulberry trees,
bustān (orchard), karm (vineyard) containing vines along with mulberry tree saplings, h.aqla shajariyya
(orchard), and ard. (land) containing mulberry and citrus trees. All were located on the outskirts of
the village of Qalamon.
whereas ʿAli had three sons, his brother ʿAbd al-Qadir had one female
child.8 In real life, as in fairy tales, the absence of a male heir is the lynch-
pin that activates disputes over property and authority within families. It is
also the factor that shines the brightest light on the differences between the
Nablus and Tripoli regions. The second reason is that Fatima was married
at the time of her father’s death, to a non-family member (ʿAbd al-Qadir
Kasra al-Qalamoni). This meant that were she to inherit her father’s estate,
it would eventually pass on to her husband’s side of the family through
her children, thus undermining the wealth and status of her agnatic fam-
ily. Fatima’s post-mortem inheritance rights, in other words, would have
been perceived in Nablus as a threat to the integrity of family patrimony;
hence, to the very survival of the family as a discrete corporate unit in soci-
ety. If Fatima had lived in Nablus, it is very possible that her father and
his brother would have taken steps to pre-empt the possibility of a dis-
pute between their children in the first place. As shown in Chapter 5, joint
endowments by brothers or by male paternal cousins designed specifically
to do just that were fairly common in Nablus, but unheard of in Tripoli.
As it happened, Fatima did not live in Nablus. Rather, she lived in a social
space where inter vivos property devolution practices, especially those orga-
nized through family waqf endowments, always included female children
as beneficiaries. In Tripoli, moreover, female children were routinely des-
ignated as sole beneficiaries in the absence of a male heir. Even more strik-
ingly, one-third of Tripoli’s endowments designated equal shares between
male and female children, challenging the most important pillar in Islamic
rules of inheritance: the male’s share is twice that of the female’s.
There is no need to rehearse the reasons, detailed in Chapter 6, for this
difference between Nablus and Tripoli. Suffice it to say that the implica-
tions of the divergent patterns in family waqfs, lawsuits, and other legal
transactions in the shariʿa court should not be underestimated. The pat-
terns of kinship, property, and gender relations constituted families, com-
munities, and regional political economies and social formations. They
were also constitutive of the spiritual sensibilities, normative values, and
beliefs that shaped subjectivities and informed everyday life. Indeed, it is
possible to argue that the accretion of property devolution practices over
8 When Fatima and Muhammad’s paternal grandfather died, his two surviving (male) children, ʿAli
and ʿAbd al-Qadir, mutually agreed to equally divide the family’s patrimony and form two lines of
descent. ʿAli and ʿAbd al-Qadir died around the same time, which dramatically opened Pandora’s box
in terms of who controlled the family patrimony. ʿAli’s date of death can be deduced from the joint
waqf endowment established in 1814 by his three sons, wherein he is referred to as recently deceased
(marh.ūm). See later.
Endowing Family, Litigating Kinship 283
the centuries in provincial regions, where the overwhelming majority of
Ottoman inhabitants lived, was a major factor in shaping the fiscal, legal,
and moral order of the Ottoman Empire in early modern and modern
times.
The historically contingent and diverse configurations over space and
time of the kinship/property/gender matrix between Nablus and Tripoli
cast doubt on prevalent assumptions about family and religion in the past,
on whose shoulders stand a range of claims about Islam, women, and
modernity. Crucial here is that the divergences in practice between these
two urban centers were systematic and long-lasting, and became increas-
ingly dramatic over the course of the nineteenth century. Claims about the
Arab or Muslim family types that are so central to Orientalist, national-
ist, and Islamist constructions of the past simply did not hold true for the
overwhelming majority of the populations of the Eastern Mediterranean
during the period under study. Nor was there a single set of legal, cultural,
or religious norms that disciplined kinship relations and gender roles in
Bilad al-Sham, much less in Arab or Muslim societies in general.
This study of the legal practices that imagined and constructed kinship,
property, and gender relations in the context of local political economies
clearly shows that the social spaces of the Nablus and Tripoli regions had
their own traditions – so to speak – of property devolution practices. This
matters because the case studies of specific waqf endowments and lawsuits,
along with the quantitative mapping of patterns in two provincial regions,
are not simply a matter of adding granular detail and exotic textures to
predetermined narratives of West dominating East, of uneven integration
into the capitalist world system, of modern state formation through cen-
tralization and reform, or of an epistemological rupture that signals the
triumph of a colonially engendered liberal positivism. Rather, they form
the infrastructure of an argument about the relevance of the social history
of the inhabitants of regional social spaces, whose remarkable adaptabil-
ity and stubborn struggles to realize themselves materially and spiritually
are underrated and little understood forces in shaping the very geographies
and meanings of modernity.
7.2 Endowing Family, Litigating Kinship

This social history of family life, a young field in Middle East and Ottoman
studies, is primarily a study of the encounters between kin in court and
between kin and court. During the 1660–1860 period, the shariʿa court
was the most important institution of Ottoman state governance on the
local level and the key arena for the alignment of relations between per-
sons over things, especially when it came to inheritance and family waqfs.
The “people” (ahālı̄) of Nablus and Tripoli, commoners and elites alike,
attached great importance to the court as a public records office and as
an adjudicator of disputes. Over the centuries, the daily interactions and
contestations generated an archive of communal textual memory that is
the product, simultaneously, of historically contingent Islamic legal tradi-
tions, of the bureaucratic machinery of an Ottoman state institution, and
of locally specific political economies and social formations. The mutually
constitutive relationship between kin and court is most clearly seen when
long-lasting disputes generate competing narratives each supported by a
bundle of documents that seek to establish the relationships between peo-
ple about things. Over several court appearances, Fatima and her pater-
nal cousins assembled legal genealogies of individuals and things upon
which to build their arguments, in much the same way one constructs
an irrigation channel to reach newly planted trees (see Tables 7.1 and
7.2).
In making the case against the validity of the waqf in the 1814 lawsuit,
Muhammad put forward a morally clever and legally powerful argument.
He questioned neither the intent of ʿAbd al-Qadir to establish a family waqf
nor the condition that excluded himself and his brothers. Rather, Muham-
mad’s objection was based on a technicality made possible, ironically, by his
presence at a family gathering arranged by ʿAbd al-Qadir in order to enun-
ciate the waqf. In his testimony, Muhammad stated that he had personally
heard his uncle list the properties to be endowed and then make the criti-
cal declaration: “All the aforementioned properties are constituted as waqf
after my death for the benefit of my daughter, Fatima.”9 If true, ʿAbd al-
Qadir’s utterance of “after my death” invalidated the waqf, as a waqf must
be established during the endower’s lifetime, while they are in sound mind
and body. By way of proof, Muhammad produced three witnesses, all from
Qalamon, who testified that they had clearly heard ʿAbd al-Qadir state that
the waqf would be established upon his death. They further added that
when he died in 1814, three years after this alleged declaration, the waqf
was never legally completed (lam yakūn munjizan), nor legally transferred
9 “Qāla anna jamiʿa mā dhukira yakūna waqfan baʿda wafātı̄ ʿalā bintı̄ Fāt.ima.” Emphasis added. This
is as related in the fourth and final lawsuit by Muhammad’s son, Ahmad, in 1842. In this lawsuit, the
narrative shifts from third to first person twice in order to drive home the point that the waqf was
orally uttered and left incomplete. For instance, the text says “I heard” the words of ʿAbd al-Qadir,
even though Ahmad was not born at the time. Moreover, Ahmad is recorded as saying “my father”
instead of the usual “the plaintiff’s father.”
to a mutawallı̄ (lam yusalimahu li-ah.ad).10 In rendering his decision, the
qadi, Sayyid Darwish Muhammad Effendi Baraka, who was from a locally
prominent family of scholars (see Chapter 4), cited a long and detailed
fatwa by Muhammad Karameh zade, a native of Tripoli whose family had
controlled the position of mufti for generations. The mufti opined that
ʿAbd al-Qadir’s utterance amounted to a legal will (was.ı̄ya) for a future
waqf, effective upon his death, which could only apply to one-third of
the properties. The qadi ruled that Fatima was to share equally with her
cousins the revenues of the willed properties until her death, after which
these properties would become a valid waqf for her progeny.11 The remain-
ing two-thirds were to be subject to Islamic rules of inheritance, and thus
divided equally between Fatima and her three paternal cousins.
With wind in their sails following their victory in the 1814 lawsuit, yet
clearly still insecure about their legal hold over the disputed properties,
ʿAli’s sons pursued a two-pronged strategy designed to construct a new
legal genealogy for these properties and to pre-empt future challenges. First,
they immediately endowed the contested properties as a joint waqf between
them. Second, they embarked on a campaign to persuade Fatima to sell
her remaining shares of her father’s estate, even though she had already
legally testified that it was endowed as a family waqf. In so doing, they
acted precisely as their counterparts in Nablus would have done in such a
situation. But, and as we shall see, that only made this case the exception
that proves the rule for Tripoli.
On October 14, 1814, less than three weeks after winning the first law-
suit, ʿAli’s sons jointly endowed four of the properties as a family waqf for
the benefit of their descendants, each to contribute one-third, and each
to separately administer his share.12 Their goal was not to lay the corner-
stone of a centralized joint household, as was the case with the Bishtawi
10 The objection, to be clear, was not to orality or lack of registration in court, but, rather, to the
absence of the specific legal procedures needed to validate the waqf. Specifically, the Hanafi qadis
of the shariʿa court in Bilad al-Sham during Ottoman times, and up till the present, insisted on a
formality in the registration of the waqf: its delivery (taslı̄m) to an administrator (it does not matter
who it is), followed by a lawsuit questioning the validity of the waqf and an inevitable ruling by the
qadi that waqf is indeed legally endowed (munjizan) and validated. This formality was usually no
longer than two sentences appended at the end of each endowment. Nada Moumtaz argues that
that this seemingly procedural fiction actually reflects the contested genealogy of the waqf in the
Hanafi school of jurisprudence, especially the fear that it might be converted to private property.
Moumtaz, “Modernizing Charity,” 66–88.
11 The mufti referenced a key text for Hanafi jurisprudence at the time, al-durr al-mukhtār, by the
Damascene scholar, ʿAlaʾ al-Din Muhammad al-Haskafi (d. 1677). As this book is not a legal history,
I will not discuss the details of this ruling. Suffice it to say that the issues it raises were very much
alive in legal discourse in Bilad al-Sham during this period.
12 TICR 43:195–196, dated Shawwal 29, 1229.
and Khammāsh families in Nablus (Chapters 3 and 4). Rather, this was a
move to consolidate the favorable ruling they had received in the lawsuit by
changing the legal status of the properties. Three clues point in this direc-
tion. First, the waqf document explicitly stated that the endowed prop-
erties were inherited through the right of taʿas..sub. Such a descriptor was
extremely rare in family waqf deeds. Second, the waqf was plainly struc-
tured as an inheritance, with each brother independently controlling his
part.13 Third, this was the only joint waqf by brothers in Tripoli for the
period under study. Twenty years later, it would also become the only waqf
recorded in the Tripoli shariʿa court registers in 200 years that was invali-
dated in court.14
As for the second prong of their strategy, it took three years for ʿAli’s
sons to persuade Fatima to sell some of the properties she claimed were part
of her father’s waqf. They were relentless, because the sale would strongly
reinforce the new genealogy of property they were building, in three ways.
First, it would legally undermine her claims about the validity of her father’s
waqf. Second, she would be committing a sin that morally compromised
her position, because a waqf is the property of God and cannot be sold.
Third, it implicated the qadi and the court by making them accessories in
a manner that would make it much harder for a future qadi to invalidate
the sale. For reasons unknown, Fatima appeared in the shariʿa court on
April 18, 1817 and sold her shares in the olive trees to Muhammad for the
considerable sum of 300 piasters. This created a formidable document, and
Muhammad would subsequently present the original sales deed in court on
several occasions (see Tables 7.1 and 7.2).15
The common phrase “Subh.ān Allāh, mughayir al-ah.wāl ” (Glorious is
God, the Transformer of Circumstances) must have crossed Fatima’s mind
when, in 1837, twenty-three years after she had lost the lawsuit over her
father’s waqf, she initiated a new lawsuit against Muhammad. Much had
changed, indeed. In the 1810s, the balance of power was clearly in favor of
ʿAli’s sons. They mobilized the court in Tripoli and witnesses from Qala-
mon to win a lawsuit, endow a waqf, and transact a purchase. But by the
13 The actual conditions were those of a typical Pattern Two waqf in Tripoli: to male and female
descendants according to Islamic inheritance rules. Also typical was the setting aside of revenues
for mabarrāt, in this case the purchase of reed mats for the Qalamon Mosque. It is not clear why
neither Fatima’s cousins nor their children chose to leverage the 1814 waqf endowment as supporting
evidence in future litigation.
14 TICR 57:33–34.
15 The sales document is dated Jamadi II 1, 1232. Although presented in court on more than one
occasion, I could not find it in the existing registers, perhaps because it was later voided.
1830s, the balance of power seems to have shifted, and Fatima was embold-
ened to initiate a counter-legal process. The reasons for the shift are not
entirely clear. It could be the fact that two of ʿAli’s sons had died and that
Muhammad was by now an old man who may no longer have had the sup-
port of his brothers’ children. It could be that the arrival of sympathetic
qadis and muftis on the scene created opportunities for re-litigation.16 Most
likely, however, it had to do with larger forces: the rise of a native son from
the village next door, Mustafa Agha Barbar, to power in Tripoli; and the
period of Egyptian military rule over Bilad al-Sham (1831–40).
Mustafa Agha Barbar’s rise directly affected power and property relations
in Qalamon village. Although born in Tripoli, he was raised in the vil-
lage of Barsa, located just south of al-Qalamon. He also married a woman
from Qalamon. During the period in between the first and second lawsuits,
Barbar was, albeit with interruptions, in the peak of his power. Under-
girding that power were local militias and patron–client networks that he
mobilized in Qalamon and other villages in the Kura district. This pro-
vided opportunities for well-connected individuals to amass property and
become more integrated into the urban, commercial, and legal networks of
Tripoli.17 There is no mistaking the increasing frequency of villagers from
Qalamon in the registers of the shariʿa court of Tripoli in this period, and it
is no coincidence that four of the six waqfs endowed in Qalamon between
1800 and 1860 were established during Barbar’s ascendancy.18
We do not know how these developments may have affected Fatima,
especially since the Egyptian rule polarized political alliances, destroying
some elites and bringing others to the fore. Be that as it may, by 1837
Fatima believed herself to be in a position to win back all of her father’s
properties. On August 20 of that year, she sued Muhammad, represented
16 Re-litigating cases before different qadis and muftis seems to have been a fairly common practice,
albeit one frowned upon by many legal scholars, especially in Tripoli. See, for the example, the fatwa
collection of ʿAbdullah al-Khalili, in which he repeatedly declares such practices illegal. al-Khalili,
Fatawa al-Shaykh ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili, 21, 25, 26, 28.
17 Barbar was a local strongman/soldier who clawed his way to the top, first serving in the village of
Dedde, the closest village to al-Qalamon. Hikmat Beik Sharif, Tarikh Tarabulus al-Sham min aqdam
azmaniha ila hadhihi al-ayyam (Tripoli: Dar Hikmat Sharif, Dar al-Iman, 1987): 145. Local alliances
were key to Barbar’s strength, but he never challenged the legitimacy of the Ottoman state. Rather,
he fit into a well-worn pattern of that time, in which locally based strong men were given loose reins
by the Ottoman state as a way of reducing costs, absorbing internal dissent and external challenges,
securing taxes, and keeping the forces of decentralization in check.
18 This does not include the waqf established orally by ʿAbd al-Qadir on October 14, 1814 (TICR
43:196–196). The six are, in chronological order: TICR 43:304, dated March 30, 1815; TICR 45:131,
dated July 15, 1816; TICR 45:170, dated December 10, 1816; TICR 45:179, dated December 10, 1816;
TICR 54:289, dated January 3, 1837; and TICR 59:111, dated April 10, 1848.
in court by his oldest son, Ahmad.19 Perhaps overconfident, Fatima did not
change her legal strategy. Nor did she appear in court, sending a representa-
tive instead. The qadi at the time, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Wahid Effendi Mughrabi
zade, who came from a well-known family in Tripoli and thus had access
to both the oral memory of the community and the textual memory of
the court, heard the same narratives as the qadi in the first case, but with
the additional weight of precedent and the documentation presented by
Muhammad, especially the bill of sale of 1817. Not surprisingly, he ruled
against Fatima and affirmed the earlier decision that ʿAbd al-Qadir’s utter-
ance was a testament (will), because it was only effective upon death
(bi-annahu waqfun mustanid li-mā baʿda al-mawt).
Undeterred, Fatima sued again a year later, but this time she chose to
represent herself and to change her legal strategy. On October 9, 1838, she
appeared in court, unveiled and accompanied by four witnesses ready to
corroborate her claims. Facing off against her nephew Ahmad, she told
a tall tale. She claimed not only that her father had validated the waqf
and handed it over to her while alive, but also that she had exercised her
rights to its revenues during the remaining three years of his life and for
four years after he died.20 At play here was an insistence on distinctions
between three forms of property possession: legal, physical, and potential.
Each form instantiated different temporalities and consequences. Fatima
claimed that her father had endowed a waqf in his lifetime (legal) and that
she had actually lived in the house and worked the lands for years after his
death (physical). This made irrelevant the issue of post-mortem property
transfer through inheritance (potential) and, along with it, the entire legal
edifice that Ali’s sons had built out of documents: the 1814 lawsuit and joint
waqf endowment and the 1817 purchase.21 Moreover – and this was the legal
pivot that left no exit for Ahmad – Fatima claimed now for the first time
that ʿAli’s sons had legally acknowledged and testified (aqqarū wa-iʿtarafū)
that their uncle had legally endowed these properties to Fatima during his
lifetime. Ahmad’s strong and categorical denial of Fatima’s claims could not
19 Dated August 20, 1837/Jamadi I 18, 1253.
20 “Tas.arrafat bihi istih.qāqan hala h.ayatihi wa-baʿda wafātihi bi-arbʿat sinı̄n.”
21 For a discussion of the three levels of ownership, albeit in a very different context, see Lucine
Tamimian, “Ain,” in Part-Time Farming: Agricultural Development in the Zarqa River Basin, Jordan,
eds. Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith (Irbid: Institute of Archaeology and Anthropol-
ogy, Yarmouk University, 1990). Tamimian’s ethnographic study of a village in Jordan notes that
families often postpone the formal devolution of land until it becomes clear which children have
survived and are able to take over. Meanwhile, land is distributed and worked according to which
households are available, regardless of potential inheritors – especially women and children, who
are taken into account in formal legal division but are expected to relinquish their properties soon
thereafter.
overcome the testimony of the four witnesses (twice the number legally
needed) she brought to court. All of these witnesses were inhabitants of
Tripoli, not Qalamon village.
Fatima’s performance in court was clearly a power play that had little to
do with the actual facts. It is certain that Fatima handed over to her cousin a
part of her father’s patrimony in 1814 and that some of these properties were
jointly endowed two and a half weeks later by ʿAli’s sons. It is also certain
that Fatima sold another part for 300 piasters in 1817. Therefore, she could
not possibly have controlled her father’s entire patrimony for four years
after his death. Further, it stretches credulity to believe that four men from
Tripoli had witnessed ʿAbd al-Qadir’s utterance at the same time almost
three decades earlier, and also witnessed together a legal acknowledgment
to that effect by ʿAli’s sons, as well as Fatima’s exercise for seven years of
her right of usufruct. And even if all that were true, one can only wonder
why Fatima never called on them to come forward while the dispute had
dragged on for years before. Still, and on the basis of this oral testimony,
the qadi at the time, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir Effendi Al-Hajj, who was not
from Tripoli, ruled in Fatima’s favor. He then helped her to construct a
competing bundle of documents for the disputed properties by ordering
that her father’s waqf should be certified in the form of a written deed and
that a copy should be officially recorded into the court’s registers (amara
bi-tastirihi wa tasjı̄lihi). On full display here are the workings of power
relations on the registers of the shariʿa court.22
The two opposing bundles of documents clashed again on March 17,
1842, when Ahmad sued Fatima in what turned out to be the final chapter
in this twenty-eight year dispute.23 Ahmad presented a narrative about the
legal transformations of ʿAbd al-Qadir’s properties, backed up by selectively
chosen original documents. The 1814 and 1837 lawsuits were summarized
in some detail and the sale of 1817 was emphasized. The joint endowment
of his father and uncles was not mentioned, nor was the 1838 lawsuit that
Fatima won. In response, Fatima’s legal representative, ʿAbdullah Muhsin,
presented the original deed of the 1838 lawsuit, as well as the registered
and validated waqf deed that the court produced that same year. In a clear
demonstration of public support, the man who stepped forward to testify
to the credibility of Fatima’s agent in court was none other than the shaykh
22 TICR 55:124–125, dated Rajab 20, 1254. As with the 1814 lawsuit, I initially became aware of this one
when it was mentioned in the last and final lawsuit in 1842. It took a while to find it in the Tripoli
registers, because it was chronologically out of place.
23 TICR 57:33–34.
of Qalamon village at the time.24 The qadi accepted the documents as evi-
dence and did not ask the plaintiff to produce witnesses. Rather, he imme-
diately ruled in favor of Fatima, and entered into the register a long opinion
by the local mufti supporting his position, thus creating two more docu-
ments for Fatima’s counter-narrative. The fatwa attempted to render coher-
ent inconsistencies in the evidentiary truth claims in competing bundles of
texts and oral testimonies by witnesses recorded in the court registers. For
instance, Fatima’s sale of nominally endowed properties in 1817 and the
qadi’s validation and recording of the sale were specifically addressed. The
fatwa stated that Fatima could hardly be blamed, “for she acted on faith
that the [qadi’s] ruling [to allow the sale of her father’s waqf ] is correct.”25
The text continues: “As to the acceptability of the qadi allowing the sale of
an unrecorded waqf to inheritor of the endower, it is bearable as a price for
a qadi’s license to interpret.”26 Rendered normative and instrumentalized
by the ruling, the notion of obedience based on faith demonstrated and
simultaneously subverted the power of the shariʿa court as the go-to arena
for negotiating relations between kin about things.
7.3 Understanding Fatima’s Determination

In the late eighteenth century, a mufti of Tripoli, ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili,
was asked to render an opinion about the following query. A successor
was needed for a recently deceased mutawallı̄ of a family waqf who was
survived by adult male and female children. How could one determine
who among the children was the most mature of mind and integrity (al-
arshad)? As a rule, family waqf endowments in both Tripoli and Nablus
conditioned the appointment of a mutawallı̄ on this criterion. All other
things being equal, it was usually understood that the oldest child of the
deceased administrator was the most qualified. Mufti al-Khalili’s answer,
however, came with a condition. The position should go to the oldest
male child, he wrote, because “the Law Giver [God] made females infe-
rior in intelligence and piety to males. If males are available, females do
not have the right [to become mutawallı̄ of a waqf ].”27 The point here is
not the opinion itself. Even if the mufti’s position on women was shared by
24 “fakhr al-s.uluh.aʾ wa-l-mashāyikh al-kirām al-sayyid al-shaykh Muh.ammad shaykh qaryat al-
Qalamon.” TICR 57:33–34.
25 “Wa ammā .sudūr al-bayʿ minha fa huwa mabnı̄ ʿala dhanniha .sih.h.at al-qad.āʾ.” TICR 57:34, dated
March 17, 1842.
26 “Wa ammā jawāz it.lāq al-qādı̄ bayʿ al-waqf al-ghayr musajjal li-wārith al-wāqif fa huwa mah.mūl ʿala
al-qādı̄ al-mujtahid.” Ibid.
27 al-Khalili, Fatawa al-Shaykh ʿAbd Allah al-Khalili, 22.
Understanding Fatima’s Determination 291
most ʿulamaʾ at the time, the fact remains that this view was certainly not
obvious to those who solicited the mufti’s opinion in the first place.28 That
is not difficult to imagine. We know from the registers that there was no
shortage of female mutawallı̄s in Tripoli. Females endowed roughly fifty
per cent of waqfs throughout the two-century period under study, and they
invariably designated themselves to that position. Moreover, a significant
proportion of family waqfs designated female children as the sole bene-
ficiaries and, therefore, also as mutawallı̄s for at least the first generation.
Fatima’s story is a case in point.
This is not to question the likelihood that a male beneficiary would be
preferred over a female for the position of mutawallı̄. Rather, it is to say that
the explanations for Fatima’s determination are often counterintuitive. For
instance, the determination should not be understood as an unvarnished
example of female agency. Hers is certainly not an instance of the struggle
by women against patriarchy in its various forms, whether it be the sup-
posed ubiquity of the patrilineal and patrilocal extended Arab family type,
Islamic rules of inheritance, or a male-dominated rural environment in a
village such as Qalamon. Rather, to understand Fatima’s eventual victory
in court, one must take into account the conditions of possibility of larger
forces, such as the class-driven legal contestations about the status of land
in Bilad al-Sham following the Ottoman conquest and the political econ-
omy of urban irrigated and highly commercialized agriculture. It was the
legal opinions of leading muftis in Bilad al-Sham, such as Khayr al-Din
al-Ramli (who was very involved in commercial horticulture), that made
it possible for the estate of Fatima’s father to be considered a form of pri-
vate property (milk) eligible to be endowed as waqf. This is not a minor
point, considering some of the lands were clearly outside the settled area
of Qalamon, and thus nominally government-owned (mı̄rı̄) until after the
Land Code of 1858.29 Moreover, all the properties, with the exception of the
house, were commercial enterprises devoted to the silk and soap industries,
much like in Tripoli’s green zone, in which women, as argued in Chapter 6,
were key players. Thus, Fatima’s insistence that she was the sole rightful
heir to her father’s estate did not require a singular act of courage or a rare
defiance of social norms. The shariʿa court registers of Tripoli are full of
28 For a reference to a lawsuit between a woman and her brother over who is more qualified to be the
mutawallı̄ (arshad), see Sinno, Madinat Saida, 464–465.
29 Around the same time, the Nablus shariʿa court also processed the purchase and sale to the ʿAbd al-
Hadi family of large swaths of mı̄rı̄ land in the western plains of Nablus. See Doumani, Rediscovering
Palestine, ch. 4. It is important to remember here that the court had no investigative power and was
obliged to accept the alleged legal statuses of persons and properties as long as these were established
through legal means, primarily witnesses.
examples of inheriting daughters managing the family business, usually via
co-cultivation contracts. Nor was she simply a tool in the hands of her in-
laws. There is no evidence that Fatima’s husband was driving the litigation.
Aside from a brief appearance in the first lawsuit, he did not take a visible
role in the legal proceedings, and her in-laws were nowhere to be found
in any capacity, whether as litigants or witnesses. Indeed, and since Fatima
continued to inhabit her father’s house long after his death, one can only
assume that her husband lived with her in a matrilocal arrangement.
The legal environment did not change in 1842. Nor did the basic social
norms of the village in which she lived. What changed was Fatima’s abil-
ity to mobilize power brokers in both Tripoli and Qalamon, and she did
so in ways consistent with the possibilities for economic and social power
that already existed in Tripoli for women from propertied families. In the
1838 lawsuit, Fatima produced twice the number of witnesses needed. All
hailed from Tripoli, not Qalamon, and all brazenly testified to what they
could not possibly have seen or heard. Honesty, piety, and moral upright-
ness may have characterized most witnesses in shariʿa courts throughout
the ages and all over the realms of Muslim polities. However, the case of
Fatima, like many others in Tripoli and Nablus, suggests that the shariʿa as
an everyday practice was also susceptible to, if not primarily driven by, the
power dynamics of unequal economic and social relations on the ground.
Taking these relations into account is crucial to gaining a fuller under-
standing of how propertied social groups in Tripoli and Nablus interacted
with the shariʿa court – via endowments, litigation, and other legal trans-
actions – to construct provincial social orders whose class structures and
forms of family organization varied across space and time.
Fatima’s determination and victory should not, moreover, be understood
as proof that the shariʿa court was a protector of the rights of women. Nor is
her story intended to demonstrate the argument, shared by many Islamists
and critical theorists alike, that the moral core of the shariʿa equipped it
with “efficient communally based, socially embedded, bottom-up meth-
ods of control that rendered it remarkably efficient in commanding willing
obedience.”30 Of course, there is some compelling truth to these claims.
It is true that the shariʿa granted women far greater property rights than
their European sisters enjoyed at the time, and women appeared frequently
in shariʿa court cases. Indeed, they were plaintiffs more often than defen-
dants in lawsuits with kin, especially in cases involving property devolution
through inheritance and waqf. It is also true that the court served, in some
30 Hallaq, Sharīʻa, 2. See Rapoport, “Review of Shariʿa.”

Understanding Fatima’s Determination 293
instances, as an arena for negotiating tensions in pursuit of communal har-
mony and order in bottom-up ways that transgressed imperial expectations
and protected the weak from the strong. It is also true that the shariʿa may
have, at certain moments, enjoyed near-hegemonic status in the minds of
Muslims prior to the advent of positive law via Western intervention and a
centralizing Ottoman state, both of which paved the way for imperialism,
colonialism, and unbridled state power. And, yes, the qadi presiding over
the Tripoli shariʿa court in 1842 did state that Fatima’s sale of waqf proper-
ties in 1817 was a consequence of her faith in the ruling of the court at the
time. But these instances and possibilities do not constitute robust evidence
for the moral consistency of the courts or the willing obedience of litigants,
much less a sweeping understanding of what constitutes a shariʿa society.
Rather, the qadi’s statement was a rationalization for invalidating one doc-
umentary trail and generating a competing one, largely in response to a
shift in power relations among the litigants. To be clear, there is no doubt
that the shariʿa was embedded into the practices of everyday life during the
1660–1860 period, and there is no denying the discursive power of Islamic
legal traditions. This is why this book examines the mutually constitutive
relationship between kin and court, as well as the social history of family
life as seen in the encounters between kin in court. But as Fatima’s case
demonstrates, the shariʿa court must also be seen as a state institution fun-
damental to Ottoman imperial governance and as the guardian of property
and power relations that reinforced local class and other privileges.
Finally, Fatima’s (and her cousins’) determination, which precipitated
four lawsuits argued before four different qadis, is not best understood as an
argument for an early modern legal pluralism –forum “shopping” in a free
market of courts, qadis, and schools of law – that was eliminated by the rup-
ture of modernity and a centralizing state.31 Nor is it an argument about the
“flexibility” of the shariʿa and the “pragmatism” of Ottoman governance,
both of which presumably account for the resilience and longevity of the
empire. True, there are many instances of propertied individuals in Tripoli
and Nablus who presented their case before different qadis or in multiple
31 “Legal pluralism” as employed here should not be confused with the use of this term to describe the
overlapping jurisdictions of shariʿa, Nizamiye, and other official courts in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. A detailed consideration of the question of pluralism in both its Ottoman and legal anthropo-
logical dimensions is beyond the scope of this study. Two seminal interventions from the perspective
of property relations are Huri Islamoğlu, “Politics of Administering Property: Law and Statistics in
the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” in Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East
and West, ed. Huri Islamoğlu (London: Tauris, 2004): 276–319 and Mundy and Smith, Governing
Property. For an insightful evaluation of this issue and the use of a case study to evaluate the theo-
retical implications, see Nora Barakat, “An Empty Land? Nomads and Property Administration in
Hamidian Syria” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2015), ch. 2.
legal venues in the hope of affecting legal outcomes. But for the most part,
the discursive force fields of Islamic legal traditions and the structures of
Ottoman governance through the shariʿa court determined the legal path-
ways that people walked and the destinations they could reach. At the same
time, outcomes very much depended on what one might call the “politi-
cal economy of legal practices,” which reflected contingent and regionally
diverse class, power, and property relations. Legal pluralism and pragma-
tism, therefore, do not really tell us much, conceptually or historically.32
Rather, they serve as backdrops for arguments about the singular impor-
tance of the transformations precipitated by Western epistemological and
colonial conquest, as well as Ottoman state centralization and administra-
tive reforms. There is no doubt that the diversity of the legal and political
gene pools, so to speak, were reduced by efforts to codify the shariʿa after
the 1860s. As argued in detail in this book, however, the Ottoman state’s
systemization of the operations and record-keeping of the shariʿa courts
over the centuries under the rubric of a cohesive system of justice is what
instantiated the empire in everyday practices and “Ottomanized” its sub-
jects. At the same time, the court’s very success provided these subjects with
the vocabulary, tools, and institutional mechanisms with which to imag-
ine and organize themselves as the inhabitants/people (ahālı̄) of intercon-
nected but discrete social spaces that gave the Ottoman Empire its texture
and meaning. During the 1660–1860 period, the legal practice of endow-
ing family waqfs, which were largely governed by communally embedded
shariʿa courts, lay at the core of socioeconomic and cultural processes that
produced and transformed the Ottoman Empire.33
7.4 Challenges
This project began with a simple question: How did property devolu-
tion as a system of social, legal, and pious practices reproduce and trans-
form family life in the Eastern Mediterranean during the early modern
and modern periods of Ottoman rule? The intellectual and political stakes
of this question are considerable. Perceptions of and knowledge produc-
tion about this region and beyond rest on frequently invoked, but not
32 Murat Dağlı, “The Limits of Ottoman Pragmatism,” History and Theory 52, no. 2 (2013): 193–213.
33 A robust legal history is needed in order to fully engage the vocabulary and discursive structures
of the shariʿa court registers in ways that are attentive to their discursive genealogies and histori-
cal contexts. The history of the court as a state institution prior to the mid-nineteenth century is
also required, especially from the perspective of the central Ottoman archives, as is a study of the
governance of the waqf system as a whole.
Challenges 295
historically grounded, claims about family and religion in the past. Lines
of inquiry framed as East/West and state/society encounters have, under-
standably, a strong purchase on the minds of most scholars and informed
observers, for the story of the modern world is largely one of state forma-
tion and European domination over much of the globe. At the same time,
this frame, regardless of political position or theoretical approach, creates
silences in the landscapes of historical research that privilege certain actors,
places, and times over others. It is precisely these absences that are, in the
words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “constitutive of the process of historical
production.”34
Fatima’s story, like those of others in this book, confronts these silences
and points to new lines of inquiry about the shariʿa, women, and moder-
nity from the comparative perspective of two provincial urban centers in
Bilad al-Sham in the 1660–1860 period. These lines look past the bina-
ries of East/West and state/society, and trouble the early modern/modern
schema. But many challenges face any attempt to write into history the role
of the inhabitants of this periphery’s periphery in shaping the formation
of the modern world. I have already alluded to the epistemological chal-
lenge: the dominant narratives are saturated by analytical vocabularies that
seek to explain the arrival of the modern as an outside-in and top-down
rupture. These vocabularies mask and even make conceptually irrelevant
the accumulated practices of Ottoman subjects in the construction of
selves, families, communities, and regional social spaces. No less formidable
is an empirical challenge: We know far too little about everyday life in the
Ottoman Empire, and the highly uneven nature of the available sources
makes it very difficult to develop a comprehensive and integrated perspec-
tive on property devolution.
The researcher is constantly groping in a dimly lit world when it comes
to many of the key dimensions of family life. True, there is plentiful evi-
dence on the relationship between people about things in the shariʿa court
registers and other legal sources. These sources, however, are meager, at least
for Nablus and Tripoli, when it comes to marriage contracts, gifts, wills,
and other means of governing flows of property from one generation to the
next. Moreover, these records relentlessly focus on immovable objects: res-
idences, agricultural lands and trees, and commercial real estate.35 As the
case study of Maryam’s final word suggests, however, moveable objects,
34 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 49.

35 An exception is the devolution of positions in the religious establishment and/or guilds to one’s
children, for which there are many available sources.
such as a copper pot and its lid, were extremely important for both mate-
rial and symbolic reasons. Crucial as they are to a fuller understanding of
the kinship/property/gender matrix, it is almost impossible to find out who
got what in terms of clothes, jewelry, and other household goods.
Of course, there is still enormous work to do in vital areas to which
the sources can speak, for the registers of the shariʿa courts and the central
Ottoman archives are unimaginably rich, and in any case, new questions
usually lead to new readings of existing sources. Labor-intensive research
is needed to map out the moneylending and contractual relations between
owners, renters, co-cultivators, and laborers. The same is true for own-
ership patterns regarding trees and land, water control and distribution,
the range of taxes and rental fees, and fluctuating market prices. Technical
and environmental information – climatic patterns, soil conditions, graft-
ing techniques, kinds and qualities of fruit-bearing trees, and the types of
plants cultivated between the trees – is also sorely lacking. We do know
more about the built environment, but we have barely scratched the sur-
face of the culture and politics of domestic space for all but the elites. All
of these issues are vital to understanding the political economy of family
life and household organization.
Much more difficult to find for the pre-1860 period are the types of
sources that allow serious inquiry into affective relations, subject forma-
tion, and other intangible aspects of kinship and gender relations for all
but a rare few individuals and small groups. The same can be said for
basic demographic, economic, and social data. When it comes to provincial
regions, we do not know population sizes, class compositions, migration
flows, occupational distributions, the sizes of economic sectors, wages, or
costs of living. Marriage patterns, household sizes, fertility rates, and other
types of data so important for family reconstitution techniques in Euro-
pean family history are also largely non-existent. This is not to mention
the largest challenge of all in terms of what can be made visible: under-
standing the meanings of family and kinship for urban dwellers without
property, as well as the millions in rural and pastoral-nomadic areas who
kept a distance from the gaze for the Ottoman state and its key local insti-
tution, the shariʿa court, at least until the late nineteenth century.
Yet another challenge is gauging the extent to which the findings in this
book can be generalized, if at all. Do the dramatic differences between
Tripoli and Nablus when it comes to certain aspects of property devolu-
tion represent opposite ends of a cohesive spectrum? Does Tripoli stand
as a model for all urban centers based primarily on urban agriculture in
Challenges 297
privately owned lands, while Nablus is typical of the quintessential market
town that depends on rain-fed hinterlands for its very lifeblood? Would
those generalizations hold for non-Muslim urban centers that shared the
same economic features? If local political and spiritual economies were so
formative of family life, does that mean that the diversity of the social spaces
that constituted the Ottoman Empire renders a general history of family
life impossible? And what implications, if any, does this historical study
have for family life in Bilad al-Sham during the long twentieth century?
It is tempting, in response to the last question, to argue that the central-
ity of the tension between the oral and the written in the disputes between
Fatima and her paternal cousins is a metaphor for the transition from the
early modern to the modern era. In the early modern period, some argue,
the moral order of the community was paramount, and oral testimony of
witnesses before the qadi of the shariʿa court was the backbone of adju-
dication in urban settings. In the modern period, by contrast, the writ-
ten word of the law – as codified, promulgated, and implemented by a
new and much more intrusive bureaucracy – ruled with a blind eye to all
but the interest of a centralizing Ottoman state. The temptation is strong,
for the period of litigation, 1814–42, spans the years before, during, and
after the Egyptian occupation of Bilad al-Sham (1831–40) and the promul-
gation of Hatt-ı Sherif of Gülhane (1839). The former conventionally marks
the beginning of the modern period of this region, while the latter is seen
as initiating the era of Ottoman reforms (tanzimat).
Social historians, however, have been loath, and for very good reasons,
to elevate these important and dramatic events to the status of full-scale
rupture. Many of the structural changes in socioeconomic life supposedly
inaugurated after the 1830s were already in play decades earlier; and many
of the new political and institutional arrangements did not make roots in
Bilad al-Sham until the late nineteenth century. The advent of centralized
state control over the institution of Waqf is a case in point. The establish-
ment of the Imperial Awqaf Ministry (Evkaf-ı Hümayun Nezareti) in 1826,
following on the heels of the destruction of the Janissaries that same year,
is usually posited as a turning point.36 But the changes associated with this
oft-cited moment in the governance of the waqf took decades to unfold.
36 The Auspicious Event, as that horrendously violent process of uprooting and repression came to
be known, marks the point of no return in the long-gestating attempts of powerful factions in the
central government in Istanbul to radically reconfigure the military, fiscal, and governance institu-
tions of the empire. For a study that marks it as a rupture between the early modern and modern
periods, see Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire.
The ministry, moreover, focused on the large imperial and charitable insti-
tutions, long considered an important stream of income and a major arena
for the expansion of political, social, religious, and economic power. In con-
trast, the smaller yet far more numerous family waqfs in provincial regions
remained under the radar for both the Ottoman and the insurgent Egyp-
tian governments in the 1830s and 40s. They were not subjected to a similar
degree of control until the period of French and British colonial rule after
the First World War.
Nevertheless, the timing and social life of the bundle of cases relating
to the dispute between Fatima and her paternal cousins do point to the
diachronic vantage point from which to consider the transformation of the
waqf/family/court/state nexus in the context of provincial time and space.
Without underestimating the significance of the period of Egyptian rule in
Bilad al-Sham and the introduction of Ottoman reforms in the 1830s, the
tipping point on the legal, administrative, and socioeconomic levels came
about in the 1860s, which is why this book ends with that decade. This
is when, for example, the reconfiguration of the legal landscape become
very apparent as the Ottoman state implemented new protocols for pro-
cessing, recording, and adjudicating cases in the shariʿa courts, introduced
new legal institutions such as the Nizamiye courts, and undertook the enor-
mous project of codifying Islamic law. This is also when the imposition of
the new administrative machineries for counting people, collecting taxes,
and governing property that followed on the heels of the 1858 Land Code
started to take root. And while capitalist relations, especially in commercial
agriculture and the commodification of land, have been picking up speed
since the eighteenth century, it was the Crimean War (1853–56) that ushered
in a much more expansive phase in economic transformation. The post-
1860s period also marked the beginning of a vigorous public discourse that
peaked at the turn of the twentieth century about what family means and
what is the place of women in society. That is, family and women became
the two central tropes for contested visions of modernity and for debates
about how societies ought to be organized.
Still another challenge is finding the appropriate conceptual vocabu-
lary for exploring how and in what ways the aggregate practices of prop-
erty devolution by commoners like Fatima and her cousins made a dif-
ference beyond their individual lives and the narrow regional history. The
family’s centrality to all dimensions of the human experience makes it a
very rich yet elusive site for historical inquiry. The dynamism, adaptabil-
ity, and unpredictability of family life, as well as the complex currents of
Challenges 299
temporalities that course through it, wreak havoc with all attempts at meta-
historical narratives. Several questions are relevant here. To begin with,
what are the most fruitful spatial and temporal units (in the sense of the
relations they embody, not as containers or lines) for in-depth and com-
parative analysis? If urban agriculture was the economic and social back-
bone of cities and towns such as Damascus, Tripoli, Sidon, and Rosetta,
for instance, then we may have cause to question the interior/coast and
rural/urban dichotomies that have organized much of the knowledge pro-
duction for this region. A related question is: What do the concepts
“family” and “kinship” mean in light of Maryam’s final word, Fatima’s
determination, Husayn’s design, Sayyid Hasan’s patrimony, and the com-
ing of age of Hamida’s children? As noted in the Introduction, most stud-
ies reserve “family” for the West and relegate “kinship” to the rest, thereby
reinforcing essentialist currents in knowledge production. This is why this
book has used both terms somewhat interchangeably. More difficult are
two dilemmas related to this question. First: How do we study family with-
out lapsing into tautology, considering that the very formation of family as
a social category was central to the period under study? The ways in which
we often think of what seems to be a natural and historically enduring
category are actually products of relatively recent historical circumstances.
Second, and in a more methodological vein: If family is a nexus for inter-
est and emotion, how can one enable analytical insights from materialist
and discursive approaches while recognizing their epistemological incom-
patibility and, at the same time, restraining their deterministic impulses?
The strategy of engaging in close textual reading via case studies combined
with quantitative analysis of patterns in the archives was largely conceived
of with the latter question in mind.
One can think of many other challenges, and perhaps the lines of inquiry
they open up will lead to results that contradict several of the findings
of this book. But at the very least, this comparative analysis of property
devolution practices brought into focus places, time periods, and historical
actors silenced by reigning approaches to the early modern and modern
history of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. It also revealed a complex
and dynamic world in which the propertied classes of Tripoli and Nablus
routinely resorted to lawsuits, family waqfs, and other mechanisms through
the shariʿa courts and beyond in order to devolve their properties. They did
so in ways that gave meaning to their lives by perpetuating their names,
securing them a good place in the afterlife, and providing for their rightful
beneficiaries. Through countless acts, they constituted the material and
discursive foundations for discrete alignments of kinship, property, and
gender relations, which, in turn, shaped the conditions of possibility for
the inhabitants of this region in the twentieth century. The determination
with which they pursued this quest affords us a glimpse into their lives and
inspires us to rethink and reimagine our own.
a p pen d ix
Note on the Tripoli Shariʿa Court Registers
There is more than the usual confusion about register numbers, years cov-
ered, and pagination when one looks at the Tripoli shariʿa court registers
(sijillat mah.kamat Tarabulus al-sharʿı̄yya). Ironically, this confusion is par-
tially due to the efforts by local scholars to photocopy and organize the reg-
isters during and immediately after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the
summer of 1982. Fearing that these invaluable records might be destroyed,
the scholars formed an informal group, Rābit.at li-Ih.yāʾ al-Turāth al-Fikrı̄
fi al-Shamāl (Association for the Promotion of the Intellectual Heritage of
the North), which received permission from the Tripoli shariʿa court qadi
at the time, al-shaykh Nasir al-Saleh, to photocopy the registers.1 From July
to September 1982, members of the Rabita – including Dr. Khalid Ziade,
Dr. ʿUmar al-Tadmuri, Fredrick Maʿtuq, Fadl al-Muqaddam, Harun ʿIssa
al-Khoury, and Muna Haddad al-Yakan – took shifts manually photocopy-
ing the first thirty registers, which they classified according to a system
that did not always match the court-assigned numbers of the originals.
The results are excellent despite the technical deficiencies of the photo-
copying machines. In 1983, Muna al-Yakan, with additional financial sup-
port from the Faculty of Letters and the Faculty of Social Sciences of the
Lebanese University, Third Branch, Tripoli, directed a team of employees
in photocopying the rest of the registers. For the most part, they kept the
actual court-assigned numbers, but occasionally they also used their own.2
A large debt is owed to these scholars for facing dangerous and difficult cir-
cumstances in order to preserve what is, arguably, Tripoli’s greatest textual
archival treasure.
Inevitably, photocopying and reorganization in a wartime situation
resulted in inconsistencies. Table A.1 summarizes the differences between
1 For more information, see the introduction to ʿUmar Tadmuri, Fredrick Maʿtuq, and Khalid Ziade,
Wathaʾiq al-mahakama al-sharʿiyya bi-Tarabulus: al-sijill al-awwal, 1077–1078 H. – 1666–1667 M.
(Tripoli: Lebanese University: Center for Social Sciences, Third Branch, 1982).
2 Interview, Khalid Ziade, Wednesday, June 21, 1995.
301
302 Appendix
Table A.1 Comparison of original and photocopied registers of the Tripoli
shariʿa court
Control
Years in Hijri CE (approximate) Court number Photocopy number number
1077–1078 1667–1668 1 1
1078–1079 1668–1669 2 2 (first half )
1088–1090 1677–1680 No number 2 (second half ) 3A
1096–1098 1684–1686 3 3 3B
1127–1128 1715–1716 5 4 (first half )
1136–1141 1723–1728 6 4 (second half )
1143–1144 1730–1731 7 6
1150–1153 1737–1740 8 7
1156–1157 1743–1744 No number 8 (first half ) 1156–1157
1158–1159 1745–1746 No number 8 (second half ) 10A
1159–1160 1746–1747 10 9 10B
1161–1162 1748–1749 11 (16) 10
1163–1164 1749–1750 12 11
1164–1165 1750–1751 13 12 &13 (pp. 93–244)
1167 1753–1754 No number 13 last section 1167
1168 1754–1755 No number 14 1168
1169 1755–1756 No number 14 (pp. 148–346) 1169
1170 1756–1757 No number 15 (first section) 1170
1170–1171 1756–1758 15 15 (also in 14)
1172–1173 1758–1759 No number 15 (second half )
1174 1760–1761 13 13 (pp. 249–262)
1174–1175 1761–1762 18 16
1175–1177 1762–1764 19 17
1177, 1180–1182 1764, 1766–1769 20 18 (first half )
1178–1179 1764–1765 21 19 (first third)
1179–1180 1765–1766 22 19 (last third)
1179–1181 1765–1767 23 20
1181–1182 1767–1768 No number 18 (second half ) 1181–1182
1182–1183 1768–1769 25 21 first half
1183–1186 1769–1773 7 21 (second half )
1187–1190 1773–1776 26 22
1192–1194 1778–1780 27 23
1194–1195 1780–1781 28 24 (first half )
1196–1197? 1781–1782 29 24 (second half )
1199–1200 1785–1786 No number 25 1199–1200
1203–1206 1789–1791 32 26 (second half )
1204–1205 1789–1790 31 26 (first half )
1206–1208 1791–1793 33 27
1208–1209 1793–1794 34 28
1215–1216 1800–1801 36 40
1228–1229 1813–1814 39 42
1229–1230 1814–1815 40 43
1230–1231 1815–1816 41 44
Appendix 303
Table A.1 (cont.)
Control
1231–1232 1816–1817 42 45
1232–1234 1817–1819 43 46
1234 1819–1820 44 47
1235 1820–1821 45 48
1238–1239 1823–1824 48 49
1239–1241 1824–1826 49 50
1241–1243 1826–1828 50 Not photocopied
1247–1250 1831–1835 55 52 55A
1251 1835–1836 53 54
1253–1255 1837–1839 56 55 56A
1255, 1257–1260 1839, 1841–1844 57 Not photocopied
1255–1256 1839–1840 55 31 55B
1256–1257 1840–1841 56 32 56B
1260–1263 1844–1846 58 33
1264–1265 1847–1848 59 59
1266–1267 1849–1850 60 60
1267 1850–1851 61 61
1268–1269 1851–1852 62 62
1269–1270 1852–1853 63 63
1270–1271 1854–1855 64 34
1271–1272 1855–1856 65 35
1272–1273 1856–1857 66 66
1273–1274 1857–1858 67 36
1274–1276 1858–1860 68 68
1277–1278 1860–1861 69 69
1281–1283 1864–1866 72 70
1283 1866–1867 83 Not photocopied 83A
1283–1284 1867–1868 No number Not photocopied 1283–1284
1287–1288 1870–1871 76 Not photocopied
1288–1289 1871–1872 77 73
1289 1872–1873 79 74
1289–1290 1873–1874 78 75
1290 1873–1874 80 76
1291 1874–1875 81 77
1291–1292 1875 82 78
1292–1295 1876–1878 83 79 83B
1295–1296 1878–1879 84 80
1296–1299 1879–1882 85 81
1298–1300 1881–1883 86 82
1300–1302 1883–1885 87 Not photocopied
1302–1303 1885–1886 88 Not photocopied
1303–1305 1886–1888 89 Not photocopied
(cont.)
304 Appendix
Table A.1 (cont.)
Control
1304–1305 1887–1888 90 Not photocopied

1305–1306 1888–1889 91 Not photocopied
1306–1307 1889–1890 92 83
1307–1308 1890–1891 93 Not photocopied
1308–1309 1891–1892 99 Not photocopied 99A
1309–1311 1892–1894 95 Not photocopied
1311–1312 1894–1895 96 Not photocopied
1312–1313 1895–1896 97 Not photocopied
1313–1314 1896–1897 98 Not photocopied
1314–1316 1897–1899 99 Not photocopied 99B
1316–1317 1899–1900 100 Not photocopied
1317–1318 1900–1901 101 Not photocopied
1318 1900–1901 102 Not photocopied
1319 1901–1902 No number Not photocopied 1319
1319–1321 1902–1904 104 Not photocopied
1321–1323 1904–1906 105 Not photocopied
1322–1324 1905–1907 108 Not photocopied
1323–1324 1905–1906 106 Not photocopied
1324–1327 1906–1909 109 Not photocopied
1326 1908–1909 No number Not photocopied 1326
1329 1911 111 Not photocopied
1330 1911–1912 113 Not photocopied
1330 1912 112 Not photocopied
1334–1339 1914–1921 118 Not photocopied
1337–1339 1918–1921 119 Not photocopied
the original and the photocopy collections. Of course, the “originals” are
themselves copies of separate documents (h.ujja) issued by the court to indi-
viduals for a fee. These copies were recorded in rough chronological order
on folios, which were collated. Since the onset of Ottoman rule five cen-
turies ago (1516/17), and up to the present, these registers have been housed
in the offices of the Tripoli shariʿa court. The same is true for the reg-
isters of the Nablus shariʿa court. Over this long period, on at least two
Appendix 305
occasions, registers were recombined, renumbered, and repaginated. In
some instances, a single page of a register can have three different num-
bers, written decades apart. Thus, and aside from loss through fire, flood,
and other catastrophes, a certain organic fluidity characterizes the archiving
system of the shariʿa court as a locally rooted Ottoman state institution.
The photocopying process of 1982 and 1983, however, is radically dif-
ferent from previous moments of reorganization. Characterized by par-
tial duplication and multiple locations, this process constitutes a rupture
in terms of how the shariʿa court registers were governed, perceived, and
used. First, and most important, there was no longer simply one collec-
tion that existed solely within the court. Four copies were made. One
is kept in the shariʿa court. A copy each are kept in the libraries of the
Faculty of Letters and the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Lebanese Uni-
versity, Third Branch. The fourth is housed in the Tripoli public library in
Qasr Nawfal. The university and the library made the collections available
to researchers. Moreover, Tripoli shariʿa court register number 1 was tran-
scribed, published, and distributed widely outside of Tripoli. When only
one copy of the records existed, the authority of the qadi and the religious
establishment governed who would have access to what is still considered
by many to be a living archive that holds the secrets of property rights to the
built environment of the old city and its surrounding orchards and olive
groves. But with the wartime duplication of the records, the older author-
ities were effectively bypassed and access was governed by municipal and
university administrators.
Second, the moment of duplication came at a time of sharply increasing
interest in local history during the Ottoman period among scholars from
the Balkans to Egypt. Much of that interest focused on the shariʿa court
registers, widely perceived as an extraordinarily rich source for recovering
that history. Consequently, almost all researchers on Ottoman Tripoli since
1982 have worked with the photocopied collections and cited their work
accordingly. To add to this complexity, microfilm and digital copies of the
photocopied collections were made by various individuals and institutions
over the years. They may not all be the same, as it is easy to make mistakes
when duplicating such a large archive. This proliferation makes it all but
impossible to establish a single unified system for referencing the registers
of the Tripoli shariʿa court in academic studies.
Third, not all extant registers and folios were photocopied. There is a
content difference between the photocopies and the originals. As Table A.1
shows, forty-one registers dating from the Ottoman period were not pho-
tocopied in the early 1980s. In addition, and as indicated earlier, the
306 Appendix
Table A.2 Tripoli shariʿa court registers: photocopy collection, Qasr Nawfal
Pages and
Number Hijri CE notes∗
1 Early Shawwal 1077–Rajab March 27, 1667–December 155

14, 1078 30, 1667
2 Shaʿban 26, 1078–Rajab 19, February 20, 367
1079 1668–December 22, 1668
Rabiʿ I 5, 1088–Jamadi I 14, May 7, 1677–June 23, 1679
1090
3 Shawwal 28, 1096–Jamadi I September 27, 1685–March 197/199
1098 1687
4 End of Rabiʿ I 1127–end of April 5, 1715–May 21, 1716 108
Jamadi I 1128 February 10, 1724–February 150 (109–
Mid-Jamadi I 1136–early 15, 1725 258)/158
Jamadi II 1137 Total: 258
5 Mid-Rabiʿ II 1141–mid- Mid-December 1728–early 177
Shaʿban 1142 March 1730
6 Shawwal 1, 1143–Muharram April 9, 1731–July 8, 1732 189
15, 1145
7 Rabiʿ I 1150–Safar 8, 1154 June 29, 1737–April 26, 1741 358/479
8 Shawwal 1, 1156–end of November 18, 1743–June 20, 332
Jamadi I 1159 1746
9 Dhu al-Qaʿda 2, November 16, 1746–October 194
1159–Shawwal 5, 1160 10, 1747
10 Jamadi I 16, 1161–Ramadan May 14, 1748–August 18, 295/292
4, 1162 1749
11 Ramadan 15, 1163–Jamadi I August 17, 1750–April 8, 1751 188/189
13, 1164
12 Jamadi I 9, 1164–Shawwal 21, April 4, 1751–August 31, 1752 310/319
1165
13 Muharram 15, 1166–end of November 21, 281/291
Muharram, 1167 1752–November 27, 1753
14 Muharram 1, 1168–Rabiʿ I 4, October 17, 1754–November 400
1170 26, 1756
15 Rajab 1, 1170–Rabiʿ II, 1171 March 21, 1757–January 10, 325
Mid Shaʿban 1172–Rajab 1, 1758
1173 April 13, 1759–February 17,
1760
16 Jamadi II 15, 1174–Dhu January 21, 1761–June 14, 205
al-Qaʿda 23, 1175 1762
17 Dhu al-Qaʿda 23, 1175–Rajab June 14, 1762–January 4, 377
1, 1177 1764
18 End of Jamadi II 1177–Rajab January 5, 1764–November 305/167
19, 1182 28, 1768
19 Dhu al-Hijja 1178–Rajab 15, May 22, 1765–December 17, 250/288/253
1180 1766
Appendix 307
Table A.2 (cont.)
Pages and
20 Jamadi I 8, 1179–Rajab 16, October 23, 1765–December 292/290

1181 8, 1767
21 Rajab 1, 1182–Rajab 1, 1184 November 11, 1768–October 327/385
21, 1770
22 Shawwal 14, 1187–Jamadi I December 29, 1773–July 1, 281
14, 1190 1776
23 Muharram 15, February 13, 1778–January 270/278
1192–Muharram 23, 1194 30, 1780
24 Muharram 20, January 27, 1780–December 269/173
1194–Muharram 10, 1197 16, 1782
25 Dhu al-Qaʿda 12, September 27, 1784–April 1, 123/101
1198–Jamadi II 1200 1786
26 Rabiʿ II 24, 1197–Jamadi II March 29, 1783–May 4, 1783 143/139
1197 September 20, 190/179
End of Dhu al-Hijja, 1789–November 17, 1791 Total: 335
1203–Rabiʿ I 20, 1206
27 Rabiʿ I 16, 1206–End of November 13, 1791–October 292/296
Safar, 1208 6, 1793
28 Rabiʿ I 1, 1208–Jamadi II 12, October 7, 1793–January 4, 169/160
1209 1795
29 Shaʿban 17, 1215–Shaʿban 3, January 3, 1801–September 3, 261
1225 1810
29A Same as 42
30 Rajab 8, 1241–Jamadi II 7, February 16, 1826–December 234/232
1243 26, 1827
31 Rajab 1255–Rabiʿ II 7, 1256 September 10, 1839–June 8, 132/135
1840
32 Rabiʿ I 7, 1256–Dhu al-Hijja April 19, 1840–January 14, 196/195
1257 1842
33 Muharram 10, 1260–Rajab 6, January 31, 1844–June 20, 276/275
1263 1847
34 Jamadi II 17, 1270–Ramadan March 17, 1854–May 19, 1855 270/271
20, 1271
35 Shaʿban 25, 1271–Jamadai I 5, May 13, 1855–January 13, 1856 214
1272
36 Jamadi II 17, 1273–Dhu February 13, 1857–August 4, 327
al-Hijja 23, 1274 1858
40 Dhu al-Qaʿda 13, 1215–Dhu March 28, 1801–March 25, 151
al-Hijja 1217 1803
42 Rabiʿ II 24, 1228–Safar 15, April 26, 1813–February 6, 170/171
1229 1814
43 Rabiʿ I 1, 1229–Rabiʿ II 23, February 21, 1814–April 4, 304
1230 1815
(cont.)
308 Appendix
Table A.2 (cont.)
Pages and
44 Rabiʿ II 20, 1230–Rabiʿ II 29, April 1, 1815–March 29, 1816 225

1231
45 Jamadi I 1231–Dhu al-Hijja March 30, 1816–October 31, 383/382
19, 1232 1817
46 Dhu al-Qaʿda 23, 1232–Rabiʿ October 4, 1817–January 8, 234/239
I 11, 1234 1819
47 Safar 2, 1234–Dhu al-Hijja December 11, 1818–October 212/217
23, 1234 13, 1819
48 Muharram 1235–Shaʿban 15, October 20, 1819–May 29, 196/191
1235 1820
49 Shaʿban 23, 1238–Ramadan May 5, 1823–May 1, 1824 156/155
1239
50 Ramadan 8, 1239–Rajab 6, May 8, 1824–February 14, 211
1241 1826
52 Muharram 1247–Shaʿban 3, June 12, 1831–December 5, 168/166
1250 1834
54 Shaʿban 1250–Safar 23, 1253 December 3, 1834–May 29, 356/357
1837
55 Rabiʿ I 1253–Jamadi II 25, June 5, 1837–September 5, 233
1255 1839
59 Muharram 1264–Shaʿban 3, December 9, 1847–June 25, 284/281
1265 1849
60 Muharram 17, 1266–Jamadi I December 3, 1849–March 6, 370/382
3, 1267 1851
61 Rabiʿ I 15, 1267–Rabiʿ II 26, January 18, 1851–February 18, 265/257/258
1268 1852
62 Mid-Rabiʿ I 1269–Safar 1269 January 8, 1852–November 348
29, 1852
63 Jamadi II 7, 1269–Shawwal March 16, 1853–July 21, 1854 281
25, 1270
66 Muharram 11, 1272–Shaʿban September 23, 1855–April 9, 309/311
14, 1273 1857
68 Dhu al-Hijja 16, April 19, 1858–August 24, 300/331
1274–Muharram 25, 1276 1859
69 Dhu al-Hijja 27, July 17, 1860–March 16, 1862 356
1276–Ramadan 1278
70 Shaʿban 7, 1281–Safar 9, 1283 January 6, 1865–June 23, 467/466/493
1866
73 Jamadi II 17, 1288–Safar 25, September 3, 1871–May 16, 436
1289 1872
74 Rabiʿ I 11, 1287–Dhu al-Hijja June 18, 1872–February 5, 424/422
6, 1289 1873 Includes
three-
page
index
Appendix 309
Table A.2 (cont.)
Pages and
75 Dhu al Hijja 1, 1289–Shaʿban January 31, 1873–September 392/393

2, 1290 25, 1873 Includes
two-page
index
76 Muharram 4, March 2, 1873–March 3, 1874 350/339
1290–Muharram 14, 1291 Includes
two-page
index
77 Dhu al-Hijja 19, February 7, 1874–October 379
1290–Ramadan 8, 1291 19, 1874
78 Shaʿban 10, 1291–Rajab 23, September 22, 1874–August 339
1292 25, 1875
79 Rajab 24, 1292–Muharram 4, August 26, 1875–January 8, 353
1295 1878
80 Muharram 7, 1295–Shaʿban January 11, 1878–July 31, 1879 364/335
11, 1296
81 Shawwal 1, 1296–Muharram September 18, 357/355
27, 1299 1879–December 19, 1881 Includes
three-
page
index
82 Ramadan 13, 1298–Dhu August 9, 1881–October 21, 288
al-Hijja 19, 1300 1883
83 Safar 6, 1306–Jamadi II 14, October 12, 1888–February 5, 319/371
1307 1890
∗
The X/Y/Z format is used in cases where there is a discrepancy in the page numbering
systems. X refers to actual number of pages, as best as can be determined from scans of a
manually photocopied copy of the photocopies, as well as scans of the photocopies. Y and
Z refer to hand-inscribed number(s) of unknown provenance written on the last page of
the register. I am grateful to Christian Sassmannhausen for cross-checking this table, for
alerting me to discrepancies with his records, and for providing additional information.
As the frequent striking over of page numbers indicates, each count (hand, photocopy, or
scan) carried out over the years contains the risk of error. Some discrepancies, therefore,
cannot be resolved without further research. In such cases, I relied on my own counting.
binding, numbering, dating, and pagination of the photocopy registers

sometimes differed from those of the originals. In one instance, some folios
were photocopied twice and bound into two differently numbered regis-
ters. The range of years covered in each bound photocopy register was indi-
cated on the spine, but these dates did not always match the actual years
because the dates were determined by looking at the first and last recorded
310 Appendix
Table A.3 Nablus shariʿa court registers
Number Hijri CE Pages
1 Early Jamadi I, 1066–mid Dhu February 26, 1656–August 362

al-Qaʿda, 1068 14, 1658
2 Early Rajab, 1096–mid-Shaʿban, 1100 June 1685–June 1689 437
3 Rabiʿ I 22, 1101-mid Rabiʿ I, 1103 January 3, 1690–November 194
22, 1691
4 Ramadan 15, 1135–early Shawwal 1138 June 19, 1723–June 2, 1726 351
5 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1, 1140–end of Shaʿban June 10, 1728-March 19, 1730 186
1142
6 Muharram 1213–Ramadan 1222 June 1798–November 1807 370
7 Shaʿban 1223–Rajab 1232 September 1808–May 1817 402
8 Jamadi II 1232–Dhu al-Qaʿda 1245 April 1817–April 1830 432
9 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1246–Rajab 1255 April 1831–September 1839 417
10 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1255–Safar 1263 January 1840–January 1847 307
11 Safar 1263–Rabiʿ II 1266 February 1847–January 1850 193
12 Rabiʿ II 1266–Rabiʿ II 1277 February 1850–October 1860 382
13A Mid Rabiʿ II 1276–Jamadi II 9, 1280 November 11, 1860–October 278
22, 1863
13B Jamadi I 1, 1280–Rabiʿ II 25, 1282 October 14, 1863–September 244
17, 1865
14 Rabiʿ II 21, 1282–Dhu al-Hijja 19, September 13, 1865–April 13, 336
1284 1868
15 Dhu al-Hijja 15, 1284–Rajab 4, 1286 April 9, 1868–October 10, 396
1869
16 Jamadi II 25, 1286–Shaʿban 29, 1287 October 2, 1869–November 387
2, 1870
17 Ramadan 1, 1287–Dhu al-Qaʿda 16, November 25, 1870–January 792
1290 5, 1874
cases. A closer examination reveals that the registers consist of chronological

clumps with internal gaps, and these are not always organized in sequence.
Table A.2 re-dates each register to reflect the actual chronological range of
the bulk of recorded cases. Fortunately, the gaps in the time periods cov-
ered by the registers are smaller than was previously thought. The missing
years after the first register are roughly as follows (Hijri): 1080–87, 1090–
95, 1099–1126, 1129–35, 1141, 1145–49, 1154–55, 1191, 1198, 1201–02, 1210–14,
1217–27, 1236–37, 1244–46, 1252, 1279–80, and 1285–86.3 Table A.3 does the
same for the Nablus shariʿa court registers.
3 I hasten to add that there is no consistency in the number of recorded cases per year. They fluctuated
widely over the centuries, even where the registers are completely intact. This is but one of numerous
factors – including the changing personnel and protocols over the centuries – that need to be taken
into account by researchers when studying the registers.
Appendix 311
During the summer of 2000, I worked with Dr. Bariʿ Daher on a prelim-
inary indexing of the original registers housed at the Tripoli shariʿa court,
spurred on by a pile of unbound folios recently found in a storage room.
In addition, I systematically compared the numbers, dates, and paginations
of the original registers with those of the two photocopied collections kept
at the local state university and the municipal library. As Table A.1 shows,
there are gaps and inconsistencies in the indexing of the original court reg-
isters. With its permission, I made photocopies for the court of all the
registers and folios up to 1870 that were missed in the original round of
photocopying in the early 1980s. I also submitted the information summa-
rized in Table A.1 to the court and to the staff that oversees the photocopied
collections.
In light of this complexity, the citations in this book, with the exception
of citations of folios and registers that were missed during the photocopying
process, reference the numbering and pagination of the collection in the
Qasr Nawfal Municipal Library. This is to enable other researchers, most
of whom have no access to the originals, to examine the accuracy of my
work more easily than would otherwise be the case.
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NOTE
See the Appendix for a fuller accounting of the Tripoli and Nablus shariʿa court
registers.
SERIAL ARCHIVES
Tripoli shariʿa court registers (sijillat mah.kamat Tarabulus al-sharʿiyya), numbers
1–70.
Nablus shariʿa court registers (sijillat mah.kamat Nabulus al-sharʿiyya), numbers
1–17.
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Index
ʿAbd al-Hadi family (Nablus), 90, 92, 93, 123, ʿAli, Mehmet See Mehmet ʿAli Pasha
125, 152, 156, 196, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, Aleppo, 2, 27, 88, 145, 147, 161, 189, 192, 250, 251
234, 261, 291 ʿAnklis, Maryam, 1–16, 18, 20, 21, 38, 43, 88, 102,
Sulayman, 92, 156, 220, 221 233, 295, 299
Abu Hanifa, 84 appelations (see status title (laqab))
Abu ʿAli River, 28, 116, 239, 240 Arab family type, 17–19, 192, 283, 291
acknowledgement (see iqrār) arbāb al-basātı̄n (proprietors of the orchards),
Acre, 30, 189, 250, 251 255
affective relations, 7, 16, 40, 53, 210, 228, 296 archival anthropology, 3
afterlife, 5, 14, 117, 138, 156, 163, 173, 299 archives, 4, 17, 20, 21, 34, 35, 36, 38, 43, 48, 51, 54,
and mabarrāt (good deeds), 105, 118, 154, 162 55, 60, 66, 73, 87, 97, 98, 284, 299, 305
and temporality, 44, 159, 178, 204 and copying practices, 54, 55, 69, 108, 175,
agency, 5, 36, 49 289
and women, 4, 291 and photocopying of, 301–311
Agmon, Iris, 3, 17, 59, 78 as communal textual memory, 43, 48, 54, 60,
agnates, 2, 6, 53, 67, 70, 73, 81, 117, 130, 190, 199, 64, 69, 71, 101, 284, 288
205, 221, 237 family papers, 17, 228, 261
absence of male heir, 265 imperfections in, 37
agnate gap, 44, 140, 146, 149 locally-generated, 17, 101, 228
and exclusion from family waqfs, 131, 137, 190, of shariʿa court, 35, 36, 38, 48, 51, 53, 54, 60,
197, 206, 207, 222 69, 101, 228, 284, 296, 305
and inheritance, 65, 124, 125, 136, 163, 191 organization of, 59, 301–311
joint waqfs by, 82, 140, 146, 149, 152, 187, 236 Ottoman, 54, 94, 97, 294, 296
lawsuits between, 82 patterns in, 37, 40, 59, 299 see also: shariʿa
right of taʿas..sub, 129, 278, 286 court registers
agriculture, 181, 268 ʿArrabeh, 123, 217
and impact of Egyptian invasion of Bilad artisans, 32, 141, 165, 173, 226, 258
al-Sham, 215 shops of, 233, 237, 268
commercialization of, 149, 186, 215, 217, 235, tools of, 205, 268
258, 291, 298 ʿas.abı̄yya (family solidarity), 130, 248
See also: arbāb al-basātı̄n (proprietors of Asad, Talal, 20
orchards), canals, citrus, green zone, h.ākūra ʿAsbiyya family (Tripoli), 129–132
(garden), irrigation, karm (vineyard), ashrāf (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad),
mulberry trees and mulberries, muzārʿa 115, 206 see also: naqı̄b al-ashrāf
(sharecropping), trees, urban agriculture, al-Azhar, 74
water ʿAzm family (Damascus), 254–255
ahālı̄ (inhabitants, people), 48–53, 54, 284 and urban agriculture, 255
and communal textual memory, 43 connections to Tripoli, 254
Ottomanization of, 294
akhı̄ bābā (guild warden), 169, 171, 174 Badawi family (Nablus), 48, 49, 73
Alawite, 31, 39 Badran, ʿUthman, 160
333
334 Index
bakeries, 91, 118, 120, 121, 124, 176, 203, 217, 220, Bishtawi family (Nablus), 139, 149–152, 165, 285
268 Burin, 72, 153
Baqara family (Tripoli), 239, 264–268 bustān (orchard), 6, 28, 33, 83, 94, 95, 135, 137,
Baraka family (Tripoli), 166–185 150, 171, 174, 175, 180, 189, 190, 211, 213, 225,
ʿAbd al-Latif, 179, 180, 184 226, 233
Ahmad, 169, 176, 178 and waqf endowments, 6, 89, 95, 106, 107,
and constitutive waqf, 167, 168, 172, 174, 108, 111, 120, 124, 126, 135–137, 164, 202, 212
179 and women, 33
and honorific titles, 167 as emblematic of political economy of Tripoli,
and investment in waqf, 185 82, 270, 271
and Khalwatiyya Sufi order, 166, 171, 178 as first item listed in waqf, 15, 106, 107, 111,
and religious establishment, 169, 170, 175 175, 212, 270
and social status, 166, 167, 176, 179 See also: arbāb al-basātin (proprietors of
and tanners’ guild, 166, 170, 172–174 orchards) citrus, mulberry trees, and
and waqf fatwas, 180, 181, 182 mulberries
as ashrāf, 166
as heads of guilds, 169 Cairo, 27, 74, 90, 147, 274
as qadis, 167 canals, 111, 116, 176, 211, 224, 239, 240, 254, 255
Hasan, 172–185, 299 capitalism, 19, 20, 24, 40, 217, 252, 261, 283,
Ibrahim, 167, 170 298
Muhammad, 167 and commercial agriculture, 186, 260, 298
Saleh, 167, 175, 176 and family organization, 44, 140, 215–222
Sayyid Darwish Muhammad Effendi, 285 and waqf beneficiary patterns, 140, 152
Sayyida ʿAbida, 171 charitable waqf (khayrı̄), 33, 53, 60, 76, 85, 86,
Shaykh ʿAbd al-Samad, 167 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 99, 110, 111, 133, 135, 142,
ʿUmar, 167, 171 146, 156, 159, 164, 172, 174, 186, 220, 231,
Barakat, Nora, 20, 293 232, 248, 256, 269
Barbar, Mustafa Agha See Mustafa Agha Barbar childbirth, 7, 14, 114
al-Bared River, 224, 242, 254 children, 2, 17, 18, 25, 44, 47, 54, 61, 64, 65, 66,
Barsa, 287 67, 68, 69, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82, 100, 104, 106,
bathhouse, 85, 118, 120, 124, 126, 127 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 135, 136,
bayt (see house) 139, 149, 151, 160, 161, 162, 163, 172, 174,
Bayt Iba, 72 176, 179, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193,
Bedouins, 141, 192, 248, 296 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205,
Beirut, 2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 42, 88, 90, 184, 224, 207, 208, 210, 212, 214, 218, 221, 222, 226,
238, 251, 252, 256 271, 282, 287, 290, 299
Bekfatin, 233 absence of male heir, 6, 43, 105, 131, 136, 189,
Bethlehem, 26 205, 206, 207, 209, 265, 277
Bilad al-Sham, 27, 38, 47, 94, 114, 181, 224, 229, and vertical transmission, 136, 137, 185, 199,
239, 247, 250, 252, 256, 271, 275, 278, 285, 222
287, 295, 297, 298 as sole beneficiaries of waqf, 176, 191, 193, 211,
administrative division of, 159 277, 282, 291
as region, 2, 16 custody of, 35, 77
definition of, 2 future children as beneficiaries of waqf, 121,
Egyptian rule of, 41, 92, 93, 123, 145, 166, 188, 129, 176, 178, 190, 192, 200, 208
215, 216, 217, 220, 258, 278, 287, 297, 298 Christians, 24, 26, 30–31, 142, 144, 251, 263
geography of modernity, 27 property devolution strategies of in Tripoli, 31
Ottoman conquest and rule of, 43, 96, 228, citrus, 28, 106, 145, 203, 224, 247, 249, 263,
291 281
Shafiʿi legacy in, 94 and green zone in Tripoli, 15, 32, 82, 107, 135,
social spaces in, 40, 53, 158, 271 225, 226, 228, 240, 251, 252, 257, 259
Bilad Bishara, 39 and waqf endowments, 106, 111, 166, 202, 238,
binaries, 24, 25, 26, 28, 200, 225, 295 252, 281
coast/interior, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 225, and women, 265
294–295 export of, 32, 135, 140, 187, 213, 252
Index 335
class, 59, 63, 73, 83, 94, 101, 105, 136, 138, 140, Damietta, 25, 149
141, 142, 148, 156, 164, 170, 186, 194, 205, dār (see house)
207, 214, 225, 228, 230, 232, 238, 253–259, daughters, 6, 7, 31, 60, 67, 94, 104, 106, 115, 129,
261, 264, 280, 291, 292, 293 131, 136, 146, 160, 161, 178, 185, 190, 196,
and muftis, 228 198, 202, 207, 210, 212, 213, 222, 227, 239,
and pattern two waqf, 205 265, 271, 292
and status titles, 143 and absence of male heir, 6, 129, 131, 136, 189,
and surnames, 248 205, 206, 207, 209, 277, 282
and waqf endowers in Nablus, 144 and exclusion from waqf, 17, 124, 151, 193, 195,
and waqf endowers in Tripoli, 144, 148, 230, 214
232 and Islamic rules of inheritance, 121, 207, 208
Bahjat and Tamimi’s assessment of, 257 and loss of beneficiary status after marriage,
in Nablus, 32 68, 124, 126, 193, 214, 221
in Tripoli, 32, 83, 94 as epiklerates, 136, 190
waqf as mechanism of formation of, 93, 135 as waqf beneficiaries, 6, 7, 14, 15, 111, 121, 125,
ʿaskarı̄ (military), 94 126, 129, 131, 161, 190, 193, 206, 207, 208,
clothing, 7, 30, 150, 296 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218, 277, 284
coastal cities, 24, 25, 26, 236, 247, 256, 263 shares equal to males, 17, 111, 193, 195, 208,
co-cultivation contracts, 259–264 209, 212, 222, 282
and social mobility, 146, 226, 230, 239, 257 daʿwa (lawsuit), 21, 35, 48, 52, 54, 55, 67, 68, 69,
and urban agriculture, 32, 45, 225, 257 70, 71, 72, 73–83, 94, 99, 100, 105, 129, 133,
and women, 146, 226, 230, 231, 233, 239 138, 142, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 239, 276,
coffee houses, 121, 150, 220 279, 282, 283, 284–290, 299
colonialism, 19, 25, 26, 38, 53, 86, 100, 230, 263, and alignment of property relations, 22, 35, 53,
274, 283, 293, 294, 298 72
consultative assembly (see majlis al-shūrā) and inheritance, 53, 63, 64, 65, 72, 77, 78, 81
contracts (see co-cultivation, mughārasa, salam) and social composition of litigants, 80–82
cotton, 226, 234, 261 and waqf, 63, 77, 79
court (see shariʿa court) and women, 78, 80, 82, 286, 292
cousins, 65, 71, 72, 78, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 163, as narratives, 73–83
280, 281, 285, 298 between agnates, 82
and exclusion from family waqfs, 6 between kin, 18, 21, 22, 43, 48, 53, 64–73, 77,
and inheritance, 74 78, 80, 81, 82, 129, 181, 276, 279
and joint waqfs, 120, 236 differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 80–83
and lawsuits, 70–72, 82, 277–280 frequency in court registers, 71, 74, 76, 82, 252
and marriage, 177, 214 women as plaintiffs, 78, 81, 292
joint waqfs by, 44, 140, 149, 187, 282, 289 death, 14, 21, 47, 61, 71, 72, 105, 108, 111, 120, 122,
maternal, 162 136, 137, 150, 160, 179, 188, 206, 212, 234,
paternal, 6, 7, 148, 162, 176, 192, 206, 221, 222, 278, 280
234, 236, 237, 267, 276, 280, 281, 284, 285, and division of household, 82
297, 298 and head of household, 43, 72, 111, 127, 179,
Crimean War, 298 289
criminal cases, 35, 64 and timing of lawsuits, 72
Cuno, Kenneth, 228–230 burial costs, 14
custody, 35, 76, 77, 78 commemoration, 14
debt, 2, 6, 35, 78, 114, 235, 254
Dağlı, Murat, 20, 169 difference, 21, 24, 36, 37, 73
Damascus, 30, 86, 97, 98, 225, 238, 254, 256, 260, definition of, 37
268, 299 political economy of, 21, 32–34
and middle class, 258 spiritual economy of, 21, 33–34, 159
and regional trade, 149, 238, 250, 274 discursive analysis, 20, 37, 139, 299
and urban agriculture, 247, 268, 299 and epistemology, 37, 283, 294
comparison of Nablus and Tripoli to, 27, 28 and Islamic tradition, 34
Salihiyya quarter in, 98, 158 See Ghuta district and methodology, 37
(Damascus) divorce, 35, 64, 198, 210, 214
336 Index
documents (see h.ujja) family waqf (dhūrrı̄, ahlı̄), 22, 33, 53, 73, 87, 129,
Druze, 31 231, 277, 285, 294, 299
dry farming, 16, 225 administrators of (see waqf administrator)
and beneficiary patterns, 24, 31, 54, 122, 138,
early modern period, 4, 21, 28, 32, 38, 40, 68, 89, 147, 177, 187, 190, 194, 197, 204, 227, 233
94, 141, 153, 156, 158, 159, 169, 170, 197, 199, and capital investment in, 179
228, 231, 283, 293, 294, 295, 297, 299 and class, 53, 140, 141–146, 148, 156, 164, 166,
golden age of family waqf, 22 186, 194, 202, 205, 207, 232
Egypt, 98, 111, 123, 188, 228, 229, 238, 258 and class formation, 135, 136, 138, 145, 230
1834 revolt against, 123, 189, 217 and duration of, 61, 279
economic impact of rule of Bilad al-Sham, and family formation, 132, 153
145, 189, 215 and gender, 15, 104, 128, 132, 146–149, 153, 156,
political impact of rule of Bilad al-Sham, 166, 186, 201, 210, 222, 224, 282, 296, 300
189, 216, 287 and kinship, 22, 34, 45, 83, 84, 92, 93, 103, 104,
rule of Bilad al-Sham as rupture, 189 122, 132, 138, 145, 153, 210, 214, 279, 299
endowments (see family waqf, waqf) and lawmaking, 179
epiklerate, 136 and provincial life, 53, 279, 283, 298
and temporality, 2, 10, 61, 83, 204, 279, 288
fallāh. (peasants), 16, 26, 28, 32, 142, 217, 225, and urban agriculture, 93, 222, 265
226, 230, 234, 235, 237, 257, 258, 260 and women, 45
family, 248, 259, 279, 299 as a social act, 44, 103, 135, 138, 157, 186
and gender, 3, 4, 5, 16, 21, 23, 31, 34, 37, 40, 43, as act of piety, 136
48, 55, 77, 82, 103, 132, 138, 153, 156, 201, as family charter, 44, 54, 103, 105, 138
210, 222, 223, 224, 279, 282, 283, 296, 300 as means of establishing family firm, 15, 149,
and notion of modernity, 18 151, 226, 234–238
and patrimony, 6, 48, 64, 70, 82, 104, 106, beneficiaries of, 15, 17, 43, 45, 68, 79, 87, 101,
107, 123, 130, 131, 132, 135, 140, 153, 172, 174, 103, 104, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 125, 126, 127,
184, 185, 189, 190, 199, 201, 202, 203, 209, 129, 131, 136, 137, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 161,
210, 212, 213, 218, 227, 239, 271, 281, 282, 163, 164, 176, 177, 180, 182, 185, 188–201,
289, 299 202, 206, 209, 211, 212, 213–223, 224, 228,
and religion, 18, 21, 33, 71, 93, 98, 105, 119, 151, 230, 249, 266, 271, 276, 279, 280, 282, 291,
154, 178, 227, 232, 283, 295 299
as a firm, 15, 70, 149–152, 226, 234–238 constitutive, 44, 92–93, 107, 138, 140, 163, 205,
as corporate unit, 44, 66, 68, 70, 108, 139, 212, 215, 217
279 disciplinary, 44, 138, 139, 140, 153–160
as linear trajectory, 23 division among beneficiaries, 101, 111, 122, 180,
branches, 119, 121, 176, 217 181, 211, 218, 219
conjugal, 18, 45, 108, 131, 140, 163, 177, 187, exclusion of females from, 31, 45, 68, 70, 80,
192, 197, 202, 204, 222, 226 124, 146, 151, 152, 193, 195, 196, 205, 214, 215,
extended, 17, 18, 25, 33, 44, 108, 125, 131, 191, 218, 222, 225, 233, 236, 237
192, 291 flexibility of, 22, 44, 101, 138, 185, 186, 193, 279
fragmentation of, 65–67, 125, 135, 214, 271 golden age of, 22, 43, 53, 86, 103, 132
modern, 19, 140, 152 governance of, 53, 60, 83–100, 185, 279
nuclear, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 152 joint, 48, 68, 119–122, 140, 146, 149–152, 186,
organization of, 24, 46, 140, 224, 292 187, 201–204, 208, 217, 236, 282, 285, 286,
reconsolidation of, 65–67 288, 289
reproduction of, 3, 21, 23, 93, 104, 107, 156, mathematical symmetry of, 137, 178
210, 222, 231 motivation for, 73, 113, 135, 137–138, 152–166,
strategies of reconsolidation, 73 193, 201, 207
surname, 92, 119, 164, 248, 275 place of succession in, 93, 232
traditional, 19, 152, 192 registration and notarization of, 60
See also: family waqf, household, property shurūt. (conditions), 101
devolution social composition of endowers, 24, 44, 68,
family history (as a field of study), 18, 24, 25, 46, 82, 138, 139, 140, 141–146, 148, 152, 186, 195,
224, 296 227, 269, 271
Index 337
state attempts to regulate, 86 Greater Syria (see Bilad al-Sham)
supplemental, 44, 138–139, 140, 160–163, 205 Greek Orthodox, 26, 30, 31
timing of, 103, 104, 124, 154, 162, 168, 194, green zone, 106, 117, 175, 231, 252, 271, 272
207 and coastal cities, 228, 247, 258, 263
use of by Christians, 31 and irrigation, 171, 242
women as administrators of, 184, 190, 211, 265, and political economy of Tripoli, 15, 32, 83,
291 163, 211, 226, 238, 239, 248, 256, 264, 265,
fasting, 134 267, 291
Fatimids, 29, 84, 158, 159 and private property, 228, 238, 244, 258,
fatwa(s), 181, 285 297
and lawsuits, 67, 180 and urban agriculture, 239
and waqfs, 63 in Damascus, 247
as sources, 38 see also: mufti(s) in Nablus, 239
food, 235, 240 size of, 226, 240
and power relations, 7 Griffith, Zoe, 20, 95, 96
and region, 39 guardianship, 151
as constitutive of family, 7 guilds, 95, 156, 157, 165, 166–171, 172–174, 177,
distribution of as a good deed, 113, 154, 155, 231
173, 178, 184, 186, 203, 232
Foucault, Michel, 17, 20 Habala quarter (Nablus), 74, 206
France, 100, 298 hadith, 113, 173, 175
and silk industry, 250, 253, 265 Haifa, 2, 24, 25
export to, 250 h.ākūra (garden), 66, 118, 220, 248, 261, 268
merchants in Tripoli, 265 al-Halabi, Shihab al-Din, 181
Hallaq, Wael, 20, 275, 292
Galilee, 39 Hama, 2, 27, 42, 250, 251, 252, 254
gender Hanafi school, 6, 73, 83, 118, 136, 158, 177, 181,
and food, 7 182, 194, 231, 249, 261, 285
and kinship, 4, 16, 21, 31, 34, 37, 40, 43, 48, 55, and dominance in Ottoman Empire, 83, 94,
103, 138, 144, 153, 156, 210, 223, 279, 283, 206, 261
296, 300 and fatwas, 181
and property, 82, 103, 128, 225, 230, 268, 271, and juridical debates, 228
300 Hanbali school, 158, 159, 164, 206
and property devolution, 15, 16, 23, 45, 73, 77, Hareven, Tamara, 23
103, 121, 129, 131, 132, 158, 176, 190, 221, 222, Harfush dynasty, 158
226, 236, 279 Haseki Sultan Waqf complex, 85
and waqf, 15, 104, 128, 132, 146–149, 153, 156, h.as.r irth (probate inventory) (see tarika)
186, 201, 210, 222, 224, 282, 296, 300 Hatt-ı Sherif of Gülhane, 297
political economy of, 20 Hebron, 27, 39, 92, 220
study of, 17, 18 see also: property, as gendered heir(s)
genealogy absence of male, 6, 43, 81, 105, 129, 136, 189,
and lawsuits, 22, 284 205, 206, 207, 209, 265, 277, 281, 282
of property, 70, 78, 104, 165, 281, 285, 286 hiba (gift), 2, 7, 21, 76, 79
al-Ghalayini family (Tripoli), 136 h.ikr (lease), 76, 99, 107, 135, 267
Ghuta district (Damascus), 228, 247, 268 historiography, 21, 37, 40, 251, 280
and middle class, 258 erasures and silences, 16, 141, 295, 299
as green zone, 247 Islamist, 17, 18, 283, 292
gift (see hiba) knowledge production, 18, 20, 294, 299
good deeds (see mabarrāt) Lebanese, 251
Goody, Jack, 22, 23, 134, 136, 188, 192, 225 nationalist, 17, 18, 19, 26, 170, 251, 283
grains, 33, 226, 229, 230, 234, 257, 261 of Tripoli, 42
grandchildren, 106, 111, 112, 119, 126, 160, 163, Orientalist, 18, 26, 170, 283
167, 171, 172, 198, 205, 209, 212, 213, 277 periodization, 40
grandparents, 48, 53, 68, 88, 115, 116, 124, 129, ruptures, 17, 20 see also: binaries
150, 160, 171, 172, 174, 177, 202, 212, 282 Homs, 2, 27, 42, 158, 189, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255
338 Index
house (dār, bayt), 6, 47, 66, 89, 108, 111, 118, 119, in-laws, 2, 53, 65, 70, 77, 78, 81, 117, 163, 179,
120, 122, 124, 126, 127, 129, 150, 151, 160, 198, 200, 210, 292
175, 176, 190, 200, 206, 207, 209, 210, 213, and lawsuits, 78, 81
237, 271, 291, 295 and property fragmentation, 237
as compound, 33, 118, 121, 123, 127, 150, 175, iqrār (acknowledgement), 2, 6, 7, 14, 55, 65, 76,
207, 217, 219, 220, 226 79, 100, 148, 151, 237, 255, 281, 289
as emblematic of family type, 25 irrigation, 32, 33, 85, 116, 117, 124, 127, 149, 170,
as emblematic of Nablus property devolution 175, 225, 226, 231, 239, 251, 252, 258, 269, 291
strategies, 15, 17, 66, 82, 108, 270 and orchards, 15, 31, 45, 83, 91, 106, 107, 115,
as headquarters of family firm, 15, 150 135, 175, 202, 203, 212, 213, 225, 228, 229,
as marker in urban geography, 164, 230, 231, 238, 239, 240, 244, 247, 251, 258
270 and productivity of mulberry trees, 251
courtyard residence, 211 canals in Tripoli, 28, 95, 111, 135, 171, 242, 255,
lawsuits over, 66 284
naming of, 165 maintenance of, 255
household, 210 Iskenderun, 247, 250
joint, 45, 66, 119, 120, 122, 125, 140, 149, 152, Islamic court (see shariʿa court)
285 Islamic jurisprudence, 3, 249 see also: Hanafi,
multi-nuclear, 33, 125 Hanbali, and Shafiʿi
patrilineal, 33 see also: family and land status, 229, 231, 260, 261
h.ujja (court-issued document), 2, 10, 20, 52, 175, Islamic rules of inheritance (see ʿilm al-farāʾid.
200, 249, 261, 266 al-sharʿı̄yya)
as bundle, 35, 38, 289 Issawi, Charles, 26, 259
as serialized legal transactions, 3 Istanbul, 25, 27, 30, 45, 86, 90, 94, 95, 96, 98,
copies, 52, 54, 69, 101, 289 147, 152, 161, 192, 232, 252, 256, 297
critical reading of, 3 istibdāl (waqf exchange), 59, 61, 76, 99
imperfections of, 37 and qadi of Nablus, 123, 220
original, 52, 54, 65, 69, 71, 101, 266, 267, 279, use of during Egyptian rule in Nablus, 123
286, 289 İzmir, 25
recording protocol of, 34, 97
use of as evidence in court, 51, 69, 130, 280, Jabal Khalil (see Hebron)
290 see also: shariʿa court registers Jabal al-Nusayra (Alawite Mountains), 39
Husayni family (Tripoli), 44, 105–117 Jabal al-Quds (see Jerusalem)
constitutive waqf, 107 Jabal ʿAmil, 39, 158
Husayn, 88, 105, 132, 137, 299 Jaffa, 2, 24, 27, 252, 261
mathematical symmetry of property janissaries, 95, 215
devolution and family waqf, 117 al-Jawhari, Ibrahim, 55
piety, 108 Jenin, 141, 217, 261
Jerusalem, 2, 27, 30, 39, 71, 85, 91, 142, 147
ʿibādāt (acts of worship), 84 jewelry, 7, 11, 296
Ibn ʿAbidin, 38, 63, 180, 228, 229, 279 Jews, 26, 30, 31, 142, 176
ʿilm al-farāʾid. al-sharʿı̄yya (Islamic rules of Johansen, Baber, 4, 20, 59, 84, 180, 229, 230, 231,
inheritance), 6, 21, 48, 111, 160, 189, 191, 266, 267
193, 197, 204, 285, 291 jurisprudence (see Islamic jurisprudence)
inheritance, 286
and probate inventories, 2, 7, 35, 114, 138, 148, karm (vineyard), 66, 206, 229, 268, 281
197, 238 kātib (scribe in shariʿa court), 3, 83, 116, 213
inter-vivos, 44, 64, 70, 136, 163, 185, 192, 199, al-Khalili, ʿAbdullah, 287
282 and fatwas of, 38, 64, 69, 71, 219
partible, 65, 237 views about women, 290
post-mortem, 48, 64, 70, 91, 191, 197, 199, Khammash family (Nablus), 44, 55, 92, 117–128,
207, 218, 222, 278, 282, 288 159, 216, 286
use of waqf to transgress Islamic rules of, 2, as qadis, 83
34, 111, 136, 208 see also: ʿilm al-farāʾid as ʿulamaʾ, 119
al-sharʿı̄yya (Islamic rules of inheritance) branches of, 119, 121, 122, 126
Index 339
compound of, 118 legal practices, 3, 4, 16, 20, 21, 22, 40, 51, 53, 54,
constitutive waqfs of, 120 64, 70, 227, 231, 239, 283, 294
genealogy of, 119 legal traditions, 5, 36
Mustafa, 83, 92, 118, 119, 120, 220 life cycle, 33, 43, 74, 104, 138, 201
Shehadeh, 121–122, 125, 126 litigation (see daʿwa)
ʿAbd al-Wahid, 83, 92, 119–128, 140, 216
as qadi, 219 mabarrāt (good deeds), 74, 112, 115, 127, 128, 134,
kharaj, 229 184, 233, 286
Khatuniyya School (Tripoli), 165 and disciplinary waqfs, 44, 153–160
kinship, 138, 280, 296, 300 and distribution of food, 186, 203, 232
and court, 4, 20, 43 and funding of religious establishment, 33,
and gender, 4, 21, 23, 31, 34, 37, 40, 43, 48, 55, 118, 156, 159, 178, 232
103, 138, 144, 153, 156, 210, 223, 279, 282, and holy days, 105, 135, 173
283, 296, 300 and moral order of kinship, 33, 132, 153,
and lawsuits, 22, 43, 77 156
and legal practices, 4, 16, 21, 22, 40, 54, 70, and recitation of Qurʾan, 137, 186, 203, 232
283 and spiritual economy, 33, 232
as interchangeable with family, 23 and women, 14, 203
blood and non-blood, 22, 23, 53, 83, differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 105,
248 127, 132, 139, 156–157, 177, 186 see also:
fictive, 40 thawāb (heavenly rewards)
moral and disciplinary order of, 22, 44, 103, majlis al-shūrā (consultative assembly), 143
132, 153, 279 Mamluks, 27, 29, 84, 85, 91, 95, 135, 158, 159, 164,
mutually constitutive relationship with court, 229, 249
20, 35, 43, 48, 54, 73, 96, 101, 280, 284, 293 Marj Ibn ʿAmer, 217
see also: ʿas.abı̄yya Maronite, 26, 31, 251
kitchenware, 7, 11, 14, 296 marriage, 108, 121, 132, 174, 177, 193, 205, 207,
Kura district (Tripoli), 27, 106, 107, 117, 247, 253, 214, 234
275, 287 and business networks, 117, 237
as property devolution strategy, 177
labor, 106, 156, 224, 226, 229, 230, 239, 248, 249, companionate, 202
257, 258, 259, 265, 267, 271 contracts, 117, 295
land status exogamous, 82, 212, 215, 271
1858 land code, 234, 298 non-marriage as strategy, 125
and irrigation rights, 247, 249, 264 preparation of trousseau for, 7
and juridical debates, 228 re-, 160, 201, 207, 212
boundary between rural and urban, strategies of, 21, 81, 93, 116, 132, 136, 198, 210,
231 215, 236, 237
commoditization of, 40 unmarried women, 68, 125, 126, 151, 161, 196,
ownership of land as separate from ownership 214, 221
of trees, 238 Marseille, 265
usufruct, 196, 214, 225, 226, 234, 258, materialist analysis, 3, 20, 37, 39, 170, 228, 299
289 matriarchs, 148
Lattakia, 27, 251, 254, 255 matriline, 112
lawsuits (see daʿwa) matrilocal, 198, 210, 267, 292
lawyers, 77, 114 mawlid al-nabawı̄ (Prophet’s birthday), 113
lease (see h.ikr) Mecca and Medina, 85, 91, 105, 107, 130, 143,
Lebanon, 16, 26, 28, 251, 272, 301 206, 233
nationalist historiography of, 251 Mediterranean, 17, 18
legal history, 3, 20, 35, 37, 87, 225, 228, 229, 234, coast, 275
261, 285, 294 Eastern, 21, 22, 25, 39, 64, 86, 132, 192, 226,
and Orientalism, 4 280, 283, 294, 299
as field of study, 3, 20, 22 Sea, 240
pluralism, 293, 294 see also: legal practices Mehmet ʿAli Pasha, 188, 215, 220, 256
legal maturity (see rushd) memory, 115, 119, 167, 288
340 Index
merchants, 71, 85, 91, 92, 95, 106, 170, 175, 188, Hanbali (Nablus), 159
209, 216, 226, 234, 256, 257 al-Husayn (Cairo), 74
and moneylending, 170, 226 Ibrahimi (Hebron), 92, 220
and political power, 140, 145, 152, 166, 217 Kabir (Great) (Jenin), 218
and religious scholars, 94, 95, 151, 200 Kabir (Great) (Nablus), 90, 206
networks with hinterland, 234, 236 Kabir (Great) (Tripoli), 106, 107, 111, 137, 211
relationships with villagers, 226 Nasir (Nablus), 118
Meriwether, Margaret, 17, 145, 155, 161, 192 Owaysiyya (Tripoli), 91
Messick, Brinkley, 4, 20, 87 Qalamon, 286
middle class, 83, 143, 214, 224, 258 Salahi (Nablus), 165
and co-cultivation contracts, 32, 146, 230, 239, Sat.un (Nablus), 124
256 Small (Jenin), 218
and social mobility, 140, 256, 264 Tah.h.am (Tripoli), 29, 106, 111
and urban agriculture, 32, 140 Tanners (Tripoli), 173
and waqf endowers, 53, 139, 145, 146, 186, 232 Tawba (Tripoli), 106, 107, 111, 137
in Damascus, 258 Tinal (Tripoli), 29, 106, 111, 112, 113, 164
in Tripoli, 33, 140, 146, 166, 202, 225, 226, al-Umayyad (Damascus), 97
229, 230, 232, 257, 258, 264 see also: arbāb Zubala (Tripoli), 116
al-basātı̄n (proprietors of orchards); zurrāʿ Mount Lebanon, 26, 39, 142, 242, 249–252, 259,
(planters) 260, 263
milk (private property), 15, 32, 45, 83, 84, 97, 99, muʿāmalāt (transactions), 84
101, 180, 218, 225, 228, 231, 238, 244, 255, mufti(s), 38, 55, 88, 159, 228, 285, 287, 290
264, 291, 297 and fatwas, 69, 182, 291
and green zone, 15, 32, 83, 225, 228, 238, 244, and lawsuits, 63
258, 297 and shariʿa court, 63, 69, 157
and status of land in Bilad al-Sham, 97 and waqfs, 63, 184, 219, 285 see also: al-Khalili,
mills, 91, 95, 118, 124, 126, 150, 217, 220, 233, 256, Ibn ʿAbidin, and al-Ramli
259, 268, 269 mughārasa contract, 230, 239, 259–260, 263, 264,
al-Mina, 28, 30, 31, 264 265, 267
al-Minya, 91, 116, 224, 233, 242, 254, 256 mulberry trees and mulberries, 6, 45, 82, 91, 106,
mı̄rı̄ (state-owned land), 33, 45, 95, 225, 226, 228, 135, 203, 225, 228, 248, 249, 251, 256, 259,
234, 291 260, 264, 265, 266, 275, 281
missionary influence, 24, 31 and coastal cities, 247
Miura, Toru, 98, 268 and co-cultivation contracts, 259–264
mixed waqf (mushtarak), 53, 87, 88, 90, 99, 142, and cultural life, 248
156, 186, 232 and middle class, 15, 32, 224, 264
modernity, 18, 19, 24, 25, 99, 140, 221, 280, 283, and Mount Lebanon, 249, 251, 252, 260
295, 298 and productive capacity of Tripoli, 247, 250,
geography of, 24–32 251
ruptures of, 17, 20, 41, 86, 293, 295 and silk, 226, 247, 248–253, 265
modernization theory, 17, 18, 23, 26, 86, 170, and waqf endowments, 249
230 and waqf endowments in Tripoli, 6, 15, 212,
moneylending, xvi, 40, 143, 167, 170, 177, 234, 238, 281
238, 257, 261, 296 and women, 33, 224, 239, 249, 259, 264
and political economy of Nablus, 16, 45, 186, as first item listed in waqf endowments, 212
225, 226, 257, 265 see also: bustān (orchard)
and rural surplus, 226, 234 Munās.aba (see mughārasa contract)
and urban-rural relations, 227, 234, 237 Munāsafa (see mughārasa contract)
by women, 238 Mundy, Martha, 37, 87, 225, 229
mosques, 85, 87, 88, 105, 117, 156, 157, 231, 232, musāqā (co-cultivation contract), 230, 260,
280 261
Argon Shah (Tripoli), 88, 106, 111, 164 mushaʿ (form of collective land ownership), 260
as waqf beneficiaries, 111, 113, 137, 206 Mustafa Agha Barbar, 91–93, 145, 152, 189, 287
ʿAttar (Tripoli), 29, 113, 178 mutawallı̄ (see waqf administrator)
Hajj Nimr al-Nabulsi (Nablus), 164 muzāraʿa (sharecropping), 229
Index 341
Nablus, 41, 47, 55, 65, 74, 76, 92, 100, 119, 123, Orientalism, 4, 17, 18, 169, 283
131, 150, 151, 160, 177, 193, 195, 197, 199, 213, orphans, 106, 114, 115, 137, 139, 148, 160, 186, 198,
215, 219, 232, 281, 282, 285, 286, 292 205, 212, 296
and charitable waqf (khayrı̄), 89 Ottoman Empire, 18, 24, 35, 84, 101, 138, 229,
centrality of the house, 120 253, 271, 281, 283, 294, 297
differences with Tripoli, 16, 24–32, 81 1858 land code, 234, 261, 291
Egyptian rule of, 92, 93, 123, 145, 216, 217, administrative division of, 29, 189
220 agrarian formation, 225
family firm in, 152, 234 and family waqfs, 298
green zone in, 239 and governance of waqf, 100
merchants in, 32, 33, 71, 82, 92, 140, 150, 151, and Hanafi school, 206
209, 216, 217, 226, 227, 233–237 and notable families, 93, 170
Ottoman administration of, 30 and shariʿa court as state institution, 5, 34, 36,
Ottoman reconquest of, 165 41, 51, 54, 60, 63, 69, 88, 96, 97, 100, 101,
political economy of, 15, 33, 45, 223, 225, 226, 103, 283, 293, 294, 305
227, 234, 236 and status of Arab lands, 291
population of, 29, 30 archives, 54, 94, 97, 294, 296
relationship with hinterland, 217, 226, centralization of, 40, 294, 297
234 destruction of the Janissaries, 215, 297
religious establishment of, 45 formation of Ottoman subjects, 51
similarities with Tripoli, 26–27 governance of waqf, 96, 283, 297
soap industry in, 120, 122, 145, 150, 152, 219, imperial waqfs, 298
256, 257 legal status of Arab lands, 228
spiritual economy of, 158 reconquest of Bilad al-Sham in seventeenth
trade networks as gendered, 235 century, 165, 169
waqf endowers in, 44 reform of, 20, 41, 298
Naffaʿ family (Jenin), 216 subjecthood, 35, 96, 97, 295
Napoleon, 41 survey of Arab lands after conquest, 97
naqı̄b al-ashrāf (steward of the descendants of Tanzimat, 40, 258, 297
the Prophet), 91, 156, 158, 159, 166, 167, 168, Owen, Roger, 252
171, 255
Nazareth, 26, 30 Palestine, 2, 16, 24, 25, 27, 92, 217, 228, 252, 261,
nāz.ir (see waqf administrator) 263, 265, 272
nephews, 70, 72, 82, 111, 114, 116, 131, 137, 139, 1834 Revolt, 123, 189, 216
140, 149, 151, 160, 162, 175, 187, 189, 190, archives in, 59
192, 198, 222, 255, 280, 288 parents, 18, 25, 44, 47, 65, 114, 122, 178, 191, 197,
nieces, 78, 160, 162, 198, 212 202, 210, 222
Nimr family, 74 care of by children, 14
nomads (see bedouins) transfer of authority through property
North Africa, 34, 192 devolution, 7
notable families, 91, 93, 145, 229, 260 patriarchy, 18, 210, 215, 217, 291, 292
and constitutive waqf, 166 patriline, 33, 65, 112, 151, 189, 197, 214, 281, 291
and succession in, 93, 94 patrilocal, 18, 291
peasants (see fallāh.)
olive(s), 27, 106, 129, 150, 175, 206, 240, 247, 251, people (see ahālı̄)
252, 253, 254, 257, 259, 265, 268, 278, 286 periodization, 40–41 see also: early modern
and green zone in Tripoli, 82, 184, 202, 228, pilgrimage, 90, 106, 143, 144, 146
238, 240, 305 class status of those who perform it, 143
and soap industry, 32, 240 performance by women in Tripoli, 146
and waqf endowments, 88, 107, 111, 126, 150, political economy, 20, 21, 32, 33, 36, 37, 45, 46,
151, 163, 190, 209, 281 55, 82, 87, 105, 140, 170, 193, 223, 224–274,
in Nablus, 66 291, 294, 296
oil, 106, 113, 151, 234 and gender, 15, 16, 20, 33, 45, 223, 224–274, 291
press, 281 differences between Nablus and Tripoli,
orchard (see bustān) 224–228
342 Index
political economy (cont.) as constitutive of interpersonal relationships,
property devolution strategies, 16, 32, 45, 225 22
see also: spiritual economy, urban as performance, 1, 5, 16, 36, 43, 108
agriculture as source for social history of family, 21
port cities, 27, 149, 252 as strategic act, 3
positivism, 18, 23, 214, 222, 258, 283 definition of, 23
post-mortem, 48, 64, 70, 191, 197, 199, 207, 218, differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 45,
222, 278, 282, 288 132, 190, 197, 213, 222, 268, 282, 283, 296
Powers, David, 21, 164, 194 exclusion of females in family waqf, 31, 45, 68,
probate inventory (see tarika) 70, 80, 124, 146, 151, 152, 193, 195, 204, 205,
property, 16, 271, 300 214, 215, 218, 222, 233, 236, 237
agricultural, 6, 53, 66, 85, 95, 104, 114, 115, 116, fragmentation, 65–67, 135, 214, 237
124, 146, 150, 164, 176, 205, 268, 269 inclusion of females in family waqf, 45, 193,
and shariʿa court, 4, 24, 35, 64, 69, 77, 100, 226
116 inter-vivos, 44, 64, 70, 136, 163, 185, 192, 199,
as gendered, 15, 17, 23, 77, 82, 103, 104, 227, 218, 282
237 post-mortem, 48, 64, 70, 191, 197, 199, 207,
as realigned by lawsuits, 22, 35, 53, 72 218, 222, 278, 282, 288
as relations between people about things, 22 reconsolidation, 65–67
commercial, 6, 33, 53, 66, 85, 104, 107, 140, vertical, 136, 137, 177, 185, 190, 192, 222 see
150, 164, 176, 205, 237, 268, 295 also: daʿwa (lawsuit), inheritance, property
division of (qisma), 180, 263 devolution
family patrimony, 6, 48, 64, 70, 82, 104, 132,
189, 190, 203, 210, 212, 227, 239, 281, 282 qadi, 3, 19, 30, 35, 55, 59, 60, 76, 98, 107, 108,
forms of, 17, 66, 93, 288, 291 122, 123, 180, 181, 182, 184, 266, 275, 279,
genealogy of, 53, 70, 78, 165, 281, 285, 286 285, 287, 293, 297
immoveable, 2, 97, 132, 215, 220, 238 administrative responsibilities toward waqf,
moveable, 2, 7, 10, 67, 295 61
order of listing in waqf endowments, 15, 107, and oral performance, 69
111, 150, 165, 175, 176, 212, 270 and waqf governance, 184
residential, 53, 66, 72, 85, 104, 107, 125, 131, appointment of, 1, 98
140, 150, 151, 164, 175, 204, 205, 209, 210, definition of, 1
221, 268, 269 differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 30,
sale of, 2, 21, 35, 55, 65–67, 76, 79, 99, 132, 148, 83, 159
151, 164, 167, 219, 220, 237, 239, 281, 286, historiography of, 3
288, 290, 291, 293 in Nablus, 30, 47, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71,
status of trees, 101, 135, 226, 228, 238, 244, 248, 72, 92, 119, 123, 193, 216, 217, 219
252, 259, 260, 266, 271 see also: property in Tripoli, 1, 2, 5, 30, 95, 106, 129, 167, 169,
devolution 170, 171, 184, 190, 256, 280, 285, 286, 288,
property devolution, 6, 14, 53, 72, 190, 236, 249, 289, 290, 293
274, 280, 282, 283, 299 rotation of, 83
and absence of male heir, 105, 136, 189, 205, al-Qadri, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghani Zayd, 92,
206, 207, 209, 282 220
and family history, 21 Qalamon, 275, 281, 284, 286, 290
and family waqf, 3, 44, 45, 70, 93, 122, 124, al-Qalamoni family (Tripoli)
128, 131, 132, 138, 177, 185, 199, 205, 218, Ahmad, 276, 288, 289
222 Fatima, 275–283, 284–293, 297, 298
and gender, 16, 23, 45, 77, 103, 121, 129, 131, Muhammad al-Khabbaz, 276, 284, 286
158, 176, 190, 221, 222, 226, 236 Mustafa, 276
and Ottomanizing property relations, 43 ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Mudabbir, 275, 278, 280, 281,
and reconsolidation strategies, 82, 119 282, 284
and shariʿa court, 4, 24, 35, 40, 43, 55, 64, 69, Qasr Nawfal, 305, 311
73, 77, 100, 116 qisma (division) (see property)
as a social act, 36 qismat h.ifz. wa-ʿamāra (Preservation and
as act of worship, 88 Development Division), 180, 181, 182
Index 343
quarters shariʿa
as fiscal units, 29 codification of, 294, 297, 298
Qurʾan, 92, 102, 153, 163 shariʿa court, 19, 20, 34, 70, 83, 88, 95, 100, 114,
gendered implications of recitation of, 116, 122, 132, 137, 141, 157, 170, 200, 202,
155 225, 249, 279, 282, 286, 288, 292, 296, 297,
h.uffāz., 172 299
quoting of in waqf documents, 175 and Ottomanizing property relations, 43,
recitation of, 91, 112, 113, 154, 155, 178, 203, 99
232 and out-of-court settlements, 70, 74
reciters of, 115, 118, 137 and power relations, 53
sūrat al-tawhı̄d, 173 and rural communities, 141
Ya-Sin verse, 92, 113, 232 see also: mabarrāt and women, 1, 4, 81
(good deeds) as public records office, 35, 51, 284
as state institution, 34, 51, 96, 97, 103, 283,
Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, 32, 239, 260 284, 293, 294, 305
Ramadan, 134, 173 formation of Ottoman subjects, 96, 97
al-Ramli, Khayr al-Din, 38, 63, 180, 181, 182, 228, in Nablus, 48, 55, 82, 123, 213, 217, 219
279, 291 in Tripoli, 83, 106, 129, 135, 190, 255, 263, 264,
region, 296 278, 280, 293
as a social space, 27 legal status of people and things, 22
as unit of analysis, 39 local production of imperial space, 97
diversity of Eastern Mediterranean, 16 mutually constitutive relationship with kin, 5,
identity and belonging, 27, 39 54, 280
local political economies, 224, 280 oral testimony in, 15, 54, 55, 68, 69, 280, 289,
Reilly, James, 230, 239, 258 297
religious establishment (al-jihāz al-dı̄nı̄) Ottoman subjecthood, 51
and family waqf, 63, 84, 105 personnel, 34, 36, 310
and female waqf endowers, 233 reading aloud of records in, 52, 69
differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 33, registration and recording of waqf, 98
45, 157–160, 231, 233 relationship to local community, 59 see also:
funding of, 118, 156, 178, 186, 226, 228, 232, shariʿa court registers
279 shariʿa court registers, 2, 59, 76, 99, 108, 115,
workers in, 74, 87, 105, 119, 154, 156, 157, 159, 119, 131, 142, 166, 208, 260, 266, 286, 291,
164, 178, 231, 232 see also: mabarrāt (good 295
deeds), ʿulamaʾ archival keys to, 55, 69
residence (see house) as archives, 16, 35, 36, 52, 54, 60, 101, 228, 279,
rewards (see thawāb) 284, 289
right of purchase (see shufʿa) as communal textual memory, 43, 51, 54–64,
Rosetta, 299 71, 101, 284
rushd (legal maturity), 73 as source and object of study, 53
citation of, 311
Sabean, David, 22, 23, 37, 41 immersive reading of, 42, 167
.sadaqa (charity), 106, 153 location of, 59
Said, Edward, 19 margins of, 55
salam (forward-purchasing) contracts, 226, 234, originals and copies, 54, 101
238, 257 photocopying of, 42, 301–311
Samaritans, 142 recording protocol of, 2, 34, 51
sāqı̄ (irrigation canal) (see irrigation) study of, 34, 42
Sayfa family (Tripoli), 94 types of cases in, 54, 76
al-Sayih, Nazih, 83, 213 Shiʿism, 31, 84, 158
Schacht, Joseph, 4 shops, 66, 88, 95, 114, 118, 120, 124, 126, 150, 172,
Scott, Joan, 37 176, 190, 203, 205, 217, 218, 220, 237
scribe (see kātib) shufʿa (right of purchase), 78
secularism, 18, 19, 24 siblings, 55, 66, 82, 108, 111, 112, 114, 120, 121, 148,
Shafiʿi school, 158, 229, 260 149, 151, 160, 162, 170
344 Index
siblings (cont.) inheritance, 282
brothers, 44, 48, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, joint waqfs by, 196, 201–204, 208
205, 217 wives, 7, 18, 25, 65, 78, 93, 106, 111, 122, 125,
half-, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184 129, 131, 136, 146, 179, 190, 199, 200, 201,
joint waqfs by, 68, 119–122, 140, 149, 150, 187, 202, 206, 208, 212, 213, 222, 271
217, 236, 282, 285, 286, 289 status title (laqab), 122, 142–143
sisters, 104, 106, 112, 114, 121, 125, 137, 151, 176, Stoler, Ann, 38
177, 181, 184, 188, 200, 206, 211, 212, 213, subject formation, 59, 102, 139, 228, 282, 296
215, 218, 238, 267, 281 succession (see tawāruth)
Sidon, 2, 25, 42, 181, 189, 238, 248, 254, 256, 258, Sufism, 35, 74, 85, 137, 141, 156, 163, 165, 169, 174,
263, 269, 299 175, 177, 200, 220, 232, 233
silk, 7, 140, 226, 250, 256, 257, 260, 265, Khalwatiyya order, 166, 170, 171, 178
291 saints, 137
and class, 15, 253–259 shaykhs, 2, 15, 91, 92, 105, 233, 277
and Mount Lebanon, 250, 251, 263 Süleyman the Magnificent, 85
and mulberry trees, 226, 230, 247, 248–253, Sunni Islam, 24, 27, 30, 74, 84, 137, 141, 158, 281
257, 259, 260, 281 Syria, 28, 59, 100, 272
and taxes, 254
and Tripoli, 15, 32, 135, 213, 230, 247, 250, 252, Tantura family (Nablus), 205–206
264 tarika (probate inventory), 2, 7–14, 35, 114, 138,
and women, 140, 213, 230, 239, 257, 264, 265, 148, 197, 238
267, 291 tawāruth (succession), 93, 232
export of, 15, 32, 135, 250, 252 tax farmers, 171, 253
factories, 250 taxes, 15, 61, 87, 95, 107, 145, 173, 175, 255, 260
hilālı̄yyūn (itinerant spinners), 259 and olive season, 254
industry, 135, 238, 247, 250, 252, 253, 264, and silk season, 254
281 temporality, 2, 10, 83, 174, 204, 279, 288, 299
Ottoman investment in, 253 human time vs. God’s time, 61, 84, 279
price of, 265 tenancy, 66, 229, 230, 249, 258, 260, 265, 266,
processing, 257, 259 267
production of, 146, 187, 250, 251, 252, 263 textiles, 11, 14, 27, 149, 170, 227, 234
worm disease, 252 textual memory (see shariʿa court registers)
slaves, 93, 96, 160, 161, 296 thawāb (rewards), 105, 134, 162, 172, 173, 202
concubines, 197, 200, 221 tradition, 4, 5, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 31, 33, 34, 37, 115,
manumitted, 96, 160 117, 132, 133, 140, 174, 193, 199, 207, 231,
Smadi family (Nablus), 73–74 274, 283
soap, 106, 115, 121, 152, 216, 227, 234, 238, 257, 291 transactions (see muʿamalat)
factories of, 27, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 145, 150, trees, 6, 15, 27, 28, 32, 33, 82, 91, 92, 101, 106, 107,
151, 164, 219, 220, 237, 256, 268 111, 114, 116, 135, 163, 175, 184, 202, 206, 212,
sons, 48, 53, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 81, 220, 226, 228, 229, 230, 238, 239, 240, 244,
83, 93, 106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256,
122, 124, 126, 129, 131, 150, 151, 160, 161, 163, 257, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268,
165, 167, 170, 171, 193, 200, 201, 206, 208, 271, 275, 277, 278, 281, 284, 286, 295, 296
209, 210, 211, 214, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, and waqf endowments in Tripoli, 6, 111, 135,
227, 233, 236, 253, 255, 264, 275, 277, 278, 163, 175, 202, 212, 226, 230, 238, 249, 265,
281, 282, 285, 286, 288 281
adopted, 267, 271 as living property, 249, 252
exclusion from family waqf, 211 ownership of as separate from land, 226, 249
spiritual economy, 24, 32, 45, 157, 158, 231–233, Tripoli, 26, 42, 44, 69, 76, 100, 107, 116, 117, 130,
279, 281 134, 137, 138, 160, 177, 182, 188, 193, 195, 197,
spouses, 2, 65, 106, 129, 191, 197, 198, 238 199, 200–201, 232, 267, 277, 285, 286, 289,
exclusion from family waqf, 197, 222 292, 299
husbands, 6, 7, 14, 18, 25, 66, 78, 81, 125, 129, and middle class in, 226, 230, 232, 256, 257,
131, 137, 160, 161, 162, 163, 181, 190, 193, 198, 258, 264
202, 207, 210, 222, 227, 267, 282, 292 and relationship with al-Mina, 27
Index 345
and silk industry, 15, 32, 135, 213, 230, 247, 252, in Mamluk period, 85
264 registration and recording of, 61, 83, 98, 99,
and silk production compared to Mount 279
Lebanon, 250 study of, 86
differences with Nablus, 16, 24–32, 81 use of by Christians, 142
incorporation into Ottoman state, 159 See also: charitable waqf, family waqf, mixed
legacy of Shiʿism in, 158 waqf
middle class in, 224, 225 waqf administrator (mutawallı̄, nāz.ir), 16, 21, 22,
orientation toward interior, 27 25, 32, 60, 87, 88, 95, 136, 157, 177, 180, 181,
political economy of, 33, 225, 227, 238, 249, 182, 184, 190, 203, 211, 218, 219, 233, 256,
253, 257 263, 290, 291
population of, 29, 30 as appointed by qadi, 61, 182, 184
presence of Ottoman military class in, 30 meaning of al-arshad (most capable), 290
religious establishment of, 45 multiplicity of, 218, 221
similarities with Nablus, 26, 27 women, 184, 190, 211, 265, 291
spiritual economy of, 158 Waqf al-Haramayn, 85, 91, 107, 112, 233
status of women in, 33, 44, 81, 140, 204, 225, Waqf al-Sadat al-Misriyyin, 95, 233, 242, 256
230, 231, 239, 249, 256, 259, 264–271 see waqf endower(s), 7, 17, 19, 44, 68, 89, 103, 104,
also: green zone; urban agriculture 106, 108, 112, 120, 121, 131, 132, 138, 139, 141,
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 1, 295 146, 151, 155, 159, 162, 163, 177, 193, 194,
Tucker, Judith, 4, 20, 35, 38, 47, 236 204, 210, 227, 279
Tuqan family (Nablus), 145, 164, 205, 215, 221 and gender, 147–149, 186
and kinship, 45, 104, 138, 149, 186
ʿulamaʾ, 2, 91, 94, 105, 216, 233, 256, 291 differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 24,
in Nablus, 34, 74, 119, 158, 193, 209, 233 146, 186, 204, 271
in Tripoli, 33, 91, 107, 115, 116, 157, 202, 232 social composition of, 24, 44, 82, 120, 138, 139,
Umayyads, 27, 84 140, 142, 143, 144–146, 148, 152, 186, 195,
uncles, 65, 78, 82, 108, 114, 116, 124, 129, 140, 151, 205, 269, 271
175, 176, 284, 288, 289 was.ı̄ya (will), 2, 14, 21, 132, 278, 285, 288
maternal, 48, 54, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73 water, 120, 175, 176, 211, 226, 233, 240, 249, 254,
paternal, 66, 72, 112, 140, 149, 160, 174, 176, 255, 256, 257, 259, 264, 274, 296 see also:
187, 189, 192, 202, 222 irrigation, canals
urban agriculture, 15, 28, 45, 93, 135, 140, 149, as property, 244
167, 171, 175, 222, 225, 238–248, 252, 254, Weber, Max, 3, 225
258, 264, 296, 299 will (see was.ı̄ya)
women, 14, 283
waqf, 21, 59 and co-cultivation contracts, 230, 231, 233,
absence of those endowed by Ottoman 239, 257, 264, 292
officials in Nablus and Tripoli, 90 and lawsuits, 80, 82, 286, 292
and fatwas, 63, 67, 180, 181, 182, 285, 290 and shariʿa court, 1, 4, 81, 266, 286, 288,
and importance in urban society, 84 292
and notable families, 91 and silk, 140, 213, 224, 230, 239, 257, 264, 265,
and Ottoman rule, 85–86, 96–98 267, 291
and subject formation, 102, 282, 296 as buyers and sellers of property, 148, 237
and temporality, 83 as endowers of orchards, 6, 202, 233, 265,
and villagers, 141 268
as a social act, 3, 103, 133, 135, 138, 139, 160, as family waqf beneficiaries, 17, 68, 79, 121,
163, 165, 166, 187, 204 126, 129, 131, 148, 151, 190, 195, 199, 201, 210,
as act of piety, 60, 63, 83, 88, 102, 103, 108, 117, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218, 221, 237, 265, 271,
132, 137, 153, 157, 178, 186, 202 276, 282, 291
cash, 90, 269 as heads of families, 211
differences between imperial and family, 86 as inheritors, 65, 81, 136, 148, 190, 199,
governance, 54, 294, 297 268
historical significance of, 84 as managers of orchards, 213, 230, 231, 239,
imperial, 85, 86, 87, 95, 100, 297, 298 249, 257, 264
346 Index
women (cont.) Yasmina quarter (Nablus), 118, 120, 121, 126, 127
as plaintiffs, 78, 81, 292 al-Yunisi, Husayn Beik, 92
as property owners, 203, 212, 213, 226, 230,
237 Zamzami family (Nablus), 72
as sustainers of religious establishment in Zawiya district (Tripoli), 106, 107, 116, 117, 175,
Tripoli, 233 253, 257
as symbol of modernity, 298 Zaʿrur family (Nablus), 47–54, 64–73
as waqf administrators, 184, 190, 211, 265, ʿAwad, 48, 53, 65–72
291 Hakima, 70–72
as waqf endowers, 1, 44, 82, 139, 140, 146, 147, Hamida, 47–54, 64, 68, 69, 72, 77, 79, 81,
148, 161, 162, 186, 187, 195, 197, 204, 205, 100, 205, 299
206, 207, 226, 227, 233, 236, 268, 291 Hasan, 70–72
differences between Nablus and Tripoli, 44, Hijazi, 48, 53, 65–72
45, 81, 140, 146–149, 186, 195, 225, 227, 233, Ibrahim, 48
268, 269, 281 Khater, 68
exclusion from trade networks in Nablus, 235 Musa Qandul, 65
inclusion and exclusion from family waqf, 45, Nasir, 48
124, 131, 146, 151, 186, 215, 225, 227 Ziade, Khaled, 28, 93, 166, 301
restrictions on access to property in Nablus, Zionism, 26, 263
237 zurrāʿ (planters), 224, 257, 258

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FAMILY LIFE IN THE OT TOMAN

In writings about Islam, women, and modernity in the Middle East,

beshara b. doumani is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Mod-

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

List of Figures page vii

1 Maryam’s Final Word 1

1.1 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of

1 Ottoman atlas, 1803: lands of Palestine and Syria xxi

2.1 Types of lawsuits in the early eighteenth century page 63

Debates on Islam, women, and modernity routinely invoke notions of fam-

Maryam’s Final Word

Were it but possible to be present at the remarkable scene that unfolded

Maryam Hajj Muhammad

First Husband (d.) Second Husband

Figure 1.1 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of appearance:

Maryam Hajj Muhammad

First Husband (d.) Second Husband

Figure 1.2 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of appearance:

waqf document a fourth legal mechanism: a probate inventory (tarika)

Jewelry (gold, silver)

Figure 1.3 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of appearance:

One-third of total to trustee, Wahbi Qazzaz to

Figure 1.4 Property devolution strategies of Maryam ʿAnklis, in order of appearance:

section that lists a deceased’s assets in a series of columns. Every item

Figure 1.5 Maryam ʿAnklis waqf (TICR 31:103)

Figure 1.6 Maryam ʿAnklis waqf (TICR 31:104)

1.2 Why Should We Care About Maryam ʿAnklis?

1.3 Property Devolution and Family Life

1.4 The Geography of Modernity

1.5 The Political and Spiritual Economies of Difference

1.6 Historicizing the Encounter between Kin and Court

1.7 Methodological Choices

1.8 Chapter Overview

Hamida’s Children Come of Age

The defendants appealed to the qadi to consult the archived registers of

3 NICR 4:277, 281. Both are dated end of Safar 1138.

Ahmad Nasir Ibrahim

Joint waqf (1648)

Hijazi Awad Abd al-Jawwad Hamida

Uthman Umar Musa

(F) Sayima Alqam Hamad Mustafa Dawud

common sense of community and territorial belonging.4 Attempts by mod-

Shops (all previously rented):

Sha r family residence.

al-Jawwad, near Al-Qamla family residence, co-owned by Abi-Majnuna Sons

Gharb Quarter, previously and long-ago occupied by Abd al-Jawwad

Gharb Quarter, built by Hajj Musa Za rur

owned by the defendants and other partners

Agricultural (all inside city):

1.2 qir (five per cent) of k ra (vegetable garden) known as Fasfus

1.2 qir (five per cent) of k ra known as al-Laymuna (lemon)

1.2 qir (five per cent) of k ra known as al-Dayri

Agricultural (all outside city wall to the west):

18 qir (two-thirds), both land and trees, in k ra known as Kafayif al-Zabb l

13.5 qir (roughly one-half) in karm known as Al-Gharabili

lawsuit in shambles, in Gharb Quarter

previously co-owned by Qutayfan sons

6 qir (one-quarter) of shop in Gharb Quarter, previously co-owned by al-Taww h

sons, near al-Qamla family residence

establishment of a state archive can be seen as a top-down version of the

Ahmad Ibrahim Nasir

Joint waqf 1648