From the Pages of the Defter (ص 200)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 200)

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informal contract or engender a valid contractual settlement.*** For example, frequently in
the Hebron court of the late-nineteenth century did the heirs of a soldier or government
clerk bring litigation against a government official, charging that the official owed a small,
personal debt to their deceased relative. Also mentioned during the course of the case was
the deceased’s unpaid salary, still held at the treasury (sundug al-khazina). Unfailingly, the
accused would acknowledge the debt but deny that the litigants were valid inheritors of the
deceased. The inheritors were then given the opportunity to have their relation to the
deceased documented. In this type of case, complainants had two goals, neither of which
was explicit in the way the case was framed and recorded. First, the deceased’s relatives
wanted to have their relation to the deceased and status as legal inheritors substantiated.
Second, they desired to establish legally that the deceased had assets in the treasury, as well
as the amount of these assets. The ruling proving their status and acknowledging the
fictitious debt on the part of the official also established a contractual obligation to pay to
the inheritors the deceased’s salary held in the treasury, even though this was not explicit in
the ruling.???
The most transparent examples of procedural fictions in Hebron were petty
litigations between notables that took place on dates of religious significance, such as the
38 The subject is a main theme of Ghazzal’s Grammars of Adjudication: The Economics of judicial decision
making in fin-de-siécle Ottoman Beirut and Damascus (Beirut: Institut Francais du Proche-Orient) .
Quotation on p. 16. See especially typologies of these cases outlined in Table 2-2, pp. 164-167.
°° The case mentioned above regarding the clerk at the Court of First Instance is one such case.
183

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From the Pages of the Defter

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المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

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