Page 184 - Arabian Studies (V)

172 Arabian Studies V
stayed at home and had cared for her parents obtained her father’s
hidden cache of silver coin, the existence of which she long denied,
so that A eventually succeeded in getting a small fraction of it. This
cash has allowed X to purchase yet more land, including the land of
her husband’s brother, and to build a large house, far larger than
the sizeable section of the joint family house A had received.
Opinions about this woman are a little divided. Is the extra­
ordinary force of her character compensating for the ineffective­
ness of her husband? Or does she simply possess a rare personality,
as one woman remarked, both man and woman? A man who
served for a while as irrigation supervisor observed: ‘Were she a
man, the shaykh would be nothing to her.’ She was also fortunate
in what one might call her reproductive career, having a surviving
son, D, and four daughters. Her son and daughter (D and V) were
recently married in an exchange marriage to a powerful household.
The lot of Y could not be more different from that of her formid­
able sister. Her land was never separately marked off but simply
added to her husband’s. None of her children survived, and her
husband took a second wife who bore the one surviving son. In
fact, the mistress of A’s household is R, the daughter of his sister,
and the two older wives have been described as baziyyahs, that is,
as women who care for small children, nannies. If the expression be
allowed, Y has been defeated on all counts. She married her ibn al-
'amm and has no brothers in her father’s household to protect her;
she has no sons or even daughters to make her cause theirs and no
control over the land in principle her inheritance from her father. I
once asked Z whether A ever gave his wife anything for her land,
which was worth a good deal. Z quoted A as having once answered:
‘What would she do with it?’'

The documentation of women’s share in the inheritance
X is exceptional in controlling her lands with an iron fist and in
directing the cultivation of these lands, as well as other plots she
has taken in under sharecropping agreements. In the irrigation
records I have seen, her property is listed, however, under the name
of her deceased father.16 When I asked the irrigation supervisor
who wrote these lists why he had given the name of a deceased man,
he replied: ‘Or should I put down a woman’s name (ismmar*ah)l
This supervisor, a local man of quite exceptional integrity,
certainly did not mean by this remark to deny X’s right to inheri­
tance. He is a man who really tries to live by the honour code, and
accordingly, in his mind’s eye, the records he keeps are for the
community of his political equals (men) before whom a man does