Page 197 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women’s Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 185
seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the
day in the city until that day when she stood before the whole city, with
her head uncovered, crying and saying: ‘O women of Najran, my
Christian, Jewish, and Pagan companions, hearken. You know that I am
a Christian, and you know my lineage and family and who I am; and that
I have gold and silver and slaves and handmaids and field produce and
that I lack nothing. And now that my husband has been killed for the
sake of Christ, if I desired to marry another, I should not be lacking a
husband. And here I am saying to you that on this very day I am in
possession of forty thousand denarii, sealed and placed in my treasury
apart from the treasury of my husband, and jewelry and pearls and
jacinths, and there are among you women who, together with their
daughters, have seen these in my house.
IrfSn Shahid, The Martyrs of Najrdn: new documents, Brussels, 1971, 57.
(These documents date from the sixth century C.E.)
20. To date there have been no studies of pastoralists in Yemen. E. L.
Peters’ meticulous description of the transmission of property to women
among the Cyrenaican beduin suggests that precise field observation
among Arab pastoralists might lead to some qualification of the common
supposition that women have no right to land and are completely disinheri­
ted among such groups. As I understand his description in ‘The status of
women in four Middle East communities’, op. cit., Peters observes that
although women did not have rights to land, which was held by male
corporate groups, husbands gained certain rights of access and limited use
of the homeland of a woman’s father through marriage. Equally, although
women did not inherit directly from their father’s flocks, they were aware
of the Islamic statement of their rights to inheritance. In lieu of the portion
in inheritance, a part of the bridewealth was later paid to the wife rather
than to her father and was kept with the flocks of her brothers until such
time as she might transfer this to her sons.
21. This bab (al-rnunasakhat or al-munasakhah) is found in the two
texts of Zaydi fara'id I have consulted: al-Fadl b. Abi ’1-Sa‘d al-'Usayfirl,
K. al-Fa’id fi 'ilm al-fara'id, published in K. al-Azhar fi fiqh al-a'immat
al-atharoi Ahmad b. Yahya al-Murtada, Beirut, 1973, and in the section of
fara'id in al-Bahr al-zakhkhdr al-jdmi' li-madhahib *ulama ' al-amsar of
Ahmad b. Yahya al-Murtada, v.5, Cairo, 1949. N. J. Coulson (op. cit.)
makes no mention of this question so it is possible that it is not so recog­
nised in other codes (?).
22. Fara 'id were almost a branch of mathematical studies. The biographical
notes on the author of al-Fa 'id credit him with works on inheritance, arithme­
tic, surveying and astronomy. al-Fadl b. Abi ’1-Sa‘d al-‘Usayfiri, op. cit., 4.1
23. My analysis here is faulted by juxtaposing too directly the book
(fara'id) tradition and actual patterns of the division of property. I simply
do not know enough about the application of the law: the practical
steps by which an ‘alim (legal expert) proceeds in the division of an estate.
In the only discussion I had on this subject, the *alim indicated that as a
matter of principle he gave women a part in the family housing, and if there