Page 186 - Arabian Studies (V)

174 Arabian Studies V

so true in the case of the names of male holders and so is yet further
evidence of the hidden nature of women’s property.
There was another record of landholding—a register of the same
made about sixty years ago when the Imamic government inter­
vened in the distribution of irrigation water in the area. Unfortu­
nately, I was not allowed to work thoroughly with this document.
The man who held it was probably worried not only because I was a
foreigner but also because the document in some sense represented
his claim to the job of a min (Islamic clerk of the area), and that,
since I was associated with the major contender for this post, I
might pass the document to him. The private quality of this docu­
ment suggests the problems in examining and in interpreting the
‘private’ documentation of ownership and inheritance (the basa’ir
and fusul) stored in the trunks of most every home. With these
documents there is none of the sense of publicity that makes the
public records so unreliable a measure of the quantity of female
inheritance, but here there arise other difficulties.
Since these deeds of title remain in private hands and are not
registered with a state authority capable of enforcing the division
drawn up on paper, the paper title is hardly adequate to transfer to
a woman her part in the family estate. Furthermore, the division on
paper is very often only into proportional shares of the estate.
Women may not know what is in these documents unless they hold
them and get someone to read them. The same problem arises for
the many illiterate men, but they are more likely to have the docu­
ments in their hands. One woman explained that she only learned
of her share in the family house in San‘a’ when her brother asked
I her to appoint an agent (wakfl) for its sale. And this was in a family
with full documentation! Here the existence of documentation
clearly served to restrain the alienation of property by the more
powerful figure in the family, but in other cases where such an
imbalance of power exists, even if there are documents, a woman
(or the family she is married into) may not judge it worthwhile to
embark on a shari‘ah law suit to regain her property. In rural areas,
a traditional sharVah law suit did not so much promise an enforce­
able decision as threaten the gradual ruin of the contending parties.
Those of equal strength would be wise to settle in local court or out
of court.18
In short, one must be cautious about assuming that the text of
such fusul (documents of inheritance) represents the exact way in
which property is transmitted between family members. This is true
even among the major urban families, since similar, if less intense
tensions surround the inheritance of real property by townswomen
as they do among the farming women of the countryside. The