Page 95 - Arabian Studies (I)

Bay a si rah and Bayadir 81

Bidar (plural bayadir), so far as the writer has been able to
establish, is a word used only in Oman today and originally it
contrasted with a now obsolescent hanqan (pronounced han-garl):
for example in the Sumayil area, where the term hanqan is now no
longer in general use, there are two neighbouring hills, one small and
the other large, called qismat al-biddr wa'l-hanqan, a joking reference
to the differences in the share received by the bidar and the hanqan.
Generally where hanqan is used today it simply means a wealthy
man (cf. also Reinhardt, 1894, 98); but this in fact is an extension
of its rather more specialised original meaning which may still be
traced through particular usages. For example labourers in Muscat
call their work contractor hanqanna (our hanqan), as do small
shopkeepers of Yanqul when referring to their principals in the
regional port of Salim: in interior Oman hanqan means a landlord.7
When asked about the word one of the leading scholars of Oman
stated that, unlike bidar (which is used in SalimT’s Jawhar), it is a
term that is not used legally, and said that indeed he had never even
seen it written. However in the list of notables in the Minhaj
al-Talibin8 it occurs as the nisbah of one of the earliest ‘ulama’ of
Oman: it also appears in a judicial ruling by Ahmad b. Maddad (mid
16th century) in the plural form handqirah with the meaning of
property owner on an irrigation system (Sa’ighI, fol. 323v). These
spellings dispel any lingering doubt that hanqar(i) could be a cognate
of Khunkar, a word used in mid-Persian for a lord and by the
Ottoman Sultans as part of their title. Its etymology, the writer
believes, goes back to the extremely ancient word engar, which is
almost as old as agriculture itself: 4Engar gehort zu den altesten
auf-ar endenden Substratwortern und bezeichnet einen altesten
Berufe in ZweistromlandIt is in continual use from the time of the
Fara text right through to the last Babylonian period but it appears
to have undergone certain changes of meaning during that time.
Fundamentally an engar simply meant a ploughman (Pfli'iger) but
one who was a free farmer, working his own land and supplying his
own seed. Later he became a Gutsinspektor, a trusted man who
worked privately, without an overseer, for the temple and palace: in
certain special cases he was a farm bailiff (Salonen 1968 (pp 28, 310
ff, 343 ff, et passim)). It is as a landlord, but a landlord of the
Sasanid feudal dihqcin class, that the term hanqan was originally used
in Oman, the writer believes. It was he who employed the bayadir
whose special baddrah duties were renumerated by the qismat
al-biddr, a fixed payment in kind. The bidar (ex officio) was neithera
landowner nor a tenant farmer (indeed could the word etymologically
indicate his landless status i.e. bi without, ddr property?): rather was
he an agricultural labourer who carried out certain specific duties