Page 185 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women’s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 173

not speak of another man’s woman by her personal name. To do so
is an invasion of privacy. Elsewhere in the lists when he makes
separate mention of land owned by women, it is as so-and-so and
his wife, or so-and-so and his sister, or the house or inheritors of
so-and-so. In X’s case it is indeed as her father’s child, who may in
part carry on his name and property, that she has her claim to the
estate, and the supervisor is correct not to list her as the wife of so-
and-so. It is possible, moreover, that in time her son may become
identified by some name indicative of his mother’s family line,
since nicknames distinguishing persons and families are not
uncommon. In short, even if the title employed by the man keeping
the irrigation records is quite perfect, unless one knows—as he does
—the history behind each name of the almost two hundred holders
of property, one cannot be certain that behind the names of men
there are not women.
The land of S and her sister, T, is another example. The irriga­
tion records in question date from a time slightly before S trans­
ferred her land to her sons, when both S and T were being paid an
annual sum by their brother in return for his use of their land.
Their parts in the family property had been marked off and deeds
of ownership given them at the time of the division of their father’s
estate, but in the records their land falls under their brother’s
name. Thus, although these records provide an accurate picture of
the distribution of landholdings by family groups—since the
purpose of these records is to register that the irrigation water due
on a holding was used and not to establish the details of ownership
—the honour code and simple expediency combine to hide from
public scrutiny land held in name or in fact by women. Any statis­
tical analysis of land tenure by women based on these (or like)
records would obviously grossly underestimate the amount of land
held by (or through) women.
The other type of public record that I was able to examine, that
is, government tax lists, is no more useful for assessing the propor­
tion of land owned by women, since much of the tax on land owned
by women is paid by men. For example, the tax on X’s land was
paid by her husband and so is listed under the name of her husband
and his brother. Thus, although the government scribe may well be
less concerned with the local honour code, the need for expediency
again results in a gross oversimplification in the patterns of land-
holding reflected in the tax records. And it is best not to consider
the question of who pays what amount and why. Nevertheless,
more proper names of women appear on the government list than
on the irrigation list, and some of the women on the tax list are not
on the irrigation list and vice versa. This lack of correlation is not