Page 189 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women’s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 177
fara’id. Where this is so, the basic questions about women’s rights
to inherit are of two kinds. This paper has tried to treat both of
these, but a more rigorous and systematic analysis would require
much more precise comparative information than was available
here. The first set of questions are the general ones: at a compara­
tive level, the relationship between different modes of the transmis­
sion of family capital and the mode(s) of production within which
the family seeks to reproduce itself; and at the level of a single
community, the inter-relation of the mode(s) of production, the role
of the family capital in the basic productive activities of the society,
and the manner in which family capital is transmitted across gene­
rations.
The second set of questions concerns the interpretation of Islamic
regulations advanced by local and central authority and the capa­
city of the central authority to enforce its interpretation. In tradi­
tional Yemen, although the interpretation of the Qur’anic injunc­
tions developed in the texts of fara’id was one of a peculiarly
mercantile turn of mind, there is every evidence that such minute
division of an estate was rarely carried out even in the town, let
alone the countryside.23 At the same time as the local (Islamic)
scribe was ready to provide some documentation for a division of
property, centralising authority was incapable of imposing
anything like the hair-splitting sub-division prescribed by fara’id
texts. This inability lay at the root of the vehemence of older
Islamic polemic in Yemen concerning women’s inheritance and
even today underlies the terms in which many a long established
city dweller will speak of the customs of the countryside.
A legal document published by E. Rossi illustrates the problems
in interpreting such traditional statements concerning women’s
rights to inheritance in rural areas.24 This document takes the form
of a series of questions posed to a legal expert and his answers to
those questions. It is concerned with the proper relations between
good Muslims and men of the Islamic state and ahl al-taghut.25 By
ahl al-taghut the author refers to those countrymen who resort to
tribal law and tribal judges rather than to the Islamic and who
commit a number of wrongs: they deny women their inheritance;
they acknowledge the right of a cousin to oblige his father’s
brother’s daughter to marry him even if she is unwilling; they
commit murder and then take revenge two, three, or four times
over; they employ free men without wage as if slaves; and they raid
each other’s animals. Several questions are posed. First, are the
lands of such people to be considered dar harb, or dar fisq, or do
such men have the status of munafiqun?26 Then follow more
specific questions: is it licit that the believer seize the possessions of