Page 195 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women’s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 183
participated openly in market transactions. If, in modern conditions of a
monetary economy and a developing competitive market for wage labour
in the oil states, continued constraints upon women participating in market
transactions threaten to reduce the female contribution to production and even
women’s control of wealth, in the traditional rural setting of family farming,
distance from the market place was a sign of high status and an expression of
the power and autonomy of the household to which a woman belonged.
6. These brief remarks will have to suffice here since I am still working
on the statistical analysis of these property owning groups.
7. Larger patronymic associations (called ‘asabah, habl, or bayt), what
are called lineages by some ethnographers, are not joint holders of property
in this area. The *asabah may make common cause against another *asabah
in political or irrigation disputes, but these are groups of greatly varying
size and internal cohesion. For example, the largest, most wealthy and most
spatially concentrated such ‘asabah in the community had been deeply
divided by a series of in-family murders over land. Although several men of
the family were prominent Figures in the community, none was a political
leader during the time I was in the community.
The only such large group (about 75 adult holders) that held land ‘jointly*
was bound by a family waqf. Although in principle the land was to be redis­
tributed per capita, even there redistribution was a problem, and it was
difficult to dislodge sons from land the father held. This particular waqf
had an interesting clause concerning women’s rights to land. The right of a
woman to land was equal to that of a man so long as she married within the
‘asabah! If she married out, she lost her rights. The word bayt (house) is
as loose as the English word and can refer to a household, an *asabah, or
simply those who bear the same family name even if no close ties exist
among them.
8. This change occurred even in the capital city. The occasional large
families that still exist in San‘a* no longer have the grain stores, formerly
amassed from extra-market accumulation of surplus, from payments by
sharecroppers. In the siege of 1904 Turkish forces broke into private houses
to obtain grain for the troops defending San‘a’; in 1968 the Republican
government distributed kerosene air-lifted to San‘a’. In the early years of
the century, foreign food aid was a very minor factor and the stores of food
—of energy—were in the private hands. See fAbd al-Wasi* al-WasFT,
Tarikh al-Yaman, Cairo, 1920, 198; and ‘Umar al-JawI, Hisar San ‘a
Aden, 1975, 24.
9. Compare the remarks of Tomas Gerholm who describes qat as a
‘democratic crop* compared to coffee in the Manakhah area: Tomas
Gerholm, Market, mosque and mafraj: social inequality in a Yemeni town,
Stockholm, 1977, 55.
10. Apparently substantial changes have been made in the Islamic law of
pre-emption (shuf‘ah) since the 1962 Republican regime. I am afraid that I
have not been able to see the text of this law but understand that the right
of shuf'ah has been restricted to joint holders of property and that no right
of shuf'ah is recognised for the owner of an adjoining property, even say,
the owner of a lower floor of a two-storey house.