Page 187 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women’s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 175

consolidation of family property under a leading individual was
probably as important in the establishment of his base of power
among the great urban families,as among cultivators. On the other
hand, not being mere husbandmen, these families could rather
more easily re-distribute title to land at various intervals, and their
women could own land farmed by sharecroppers, remaining aloof
from the problems of a woman directing cultivation in an area of
traditionally predominantly male farming. For this reason, and
bearing in mind the difficulty for the poor or those with little land
were a woman to inherit a slice of an already tiny pie, one divisible
only with hardship, one has every reason to be sceptical of a clear
cut, rule-like distinction between the practices of one group
following tribal custom and one Islamic law in this regard. To a
certain extent the distinction between Islamic and tribal practices
may always have been the difference between what is possible for
the rich and what for the poor, between what is possible for
merchants and what for farmers. Their ideals may not have been so
entirely different.
Such a suggestion in no way conforms to what older Islamic
tradition (exemplified by the document discussed below) had to say
on this subject. This tradition distinguishes between one group
among which Islamic laws were enforced and another which
resisted these laws. In the first case, the alienation of a woman’s
inheritance constitutes an individual case of abuse; in the second,
the alienation is evidence of a general local custom refusing women
a part in the family estate. This tradition views the Qur’anic injunc­
tions (and their exposition in texts of fara’id) as a positive innova­
tion of God’s law that must be enforced by Islamic authority.19 In
this view the fact that some women inherited real property in a
farming area close to San‘a’ was the result of the area having long
been subject to the influence of Islamic law and legal personnel
from the city. This argument implies that in more isolated areas,
still untouched by the forces of urbanization old or new (‘where
gabilis are still g a bills') women would not inherit.
Much of traditional Islamic analysis of society is built about the
implicit opposition of an idealised tribal pastoralism with an
equally idealised Islamic urbanism, thereby glossing over the
complexities of the greatest part of society, the farming areas. It is
indeed among pastoralists that women are likely to have least claim
on land or flocks through inheritance and where a division of
classes of property according to sex is likely to be most strongly
marked, though detailed studies may reveal that even among
pastoralists, a woman does have some claim on her father’s estate
after marriage.20 As we have seen, in farming communities as well,