From the Pages of the Defter (ص 157)
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- From the Pages of the Defter (ص 157)
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1858 Ottoman land law. This law made it obligatory to register land in a
registration bureau, while making it impossible to register mushd‘ property.*””
The heart of the area today known in Hebrew and biblically as the Judean mountains is Hebron.
And evidence from both Hebron’s sharia court records and the eml/ak register indicates that
there was musha in the hills of Palestine. It has been shown to have existed in the hills of
Ottoman Transjordan as well.”
Musha is communal ownership of property. Nothing more and nothing less. It can
involve periodical redistribution of those lands among shareholders, but the length of time
*°© The element of periodic
from re-distribution to re-distribution varied from place to place.
redistribution of land generated much scholarly debate in the past, primarily centered on
questions of whether it hindered development and progress, and whether it was a defensive
mechanism to ensure that village lands remained in villagers’ hands. The idea of a “musha
village”, however, is a sociological object more than a reality. For locals, the term simply meant
224 Waim Gerber and Ch. Pellat, "Musha’." In P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P.
Heinrichs. Eds. Encyclopaedia of Islam [EI], Second Edition. ( Brill Online, 2011). Accessed 4 December 2011.
www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-0808 . Print edition published 1993. A revised
entry on musha’ has not appeared in E/’s third-edition in progress. An earlier formulation of this argument
by Gerber can be found in his Social Origins (1986): 77-78.
For other examples of this line of argument see, for instance: Scott Atran, ‘Hamula Organisation and
Masha’a Tenure in Palestine”, Man, New Series, 21/2 (June 1986): 271-295; and also his “Le Masha’a et la
Question Fonciére en Palestine, 1858-1948”, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 42/6 (November —
December 1987): 1361-1389.
29 Mundy and Saumarez Smith, 156-163.
*°° amos Nadan, “Colonial Misunderstanding of an Efficient Peasant Institution: Land Settlement and Musha ‘
Tenuer in Mandate Palestine, 1921-1947”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 46/3
(2003), 322; Schaebler, 245.
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