From the Pages of the Defter (ص 247)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 247)

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two years. This was the interest on the loan, and it equaled 709.5 kurus, precisely 29.6
percent of the loan.*°
Interest rates did vary, of course. The orphaned daughter of a Dhikrin villager from
the al-Sus family lent 1,614 kurus to a family relative from the village. The “gift” he arranged
for the orphan, the price of a silver watch (242.25 kurus) was exactly 15 percent of the
#26 Familiarity may have played a role in the lower interest rate. However, when a
loan.
shaykh of the al-Hasasneh family of the village of Shuyukh borrowed, through the offices of
the Orphans’ Fund (sunddgq al-aytam), 2,348.5 kurus from the orphaned children of a relative
of his from their village in 1911, his interest, in the form of Tangth al-Hamidiyya, a book of
fatwas “purchased” from the court judge for a period of three years, cost him 750 kurus,
“2” These few, representative examples serve to demonstrate
equal to 32 percent of the loan.
that the moneylending system was an integral part of local society, that its procedures and
parameters were well established, and that people from all strata of Hebron urban and rural
society regularly took loans on credit on fairly similar terms and did so through official
channels, in these cases, the sharia court.
“5 HR A/ 129 / 88 (12 al-OQ’ada 1312 / 7 May 1895). Mahmoud Yazbak has noted the purchase of fictional
objects — books, watches, etc. — as interest in the sharia courts of Nablus and Jerusalem. See his “Muslim
Orphans and the Shariaa in Ottoman Palestine According to Sijill Records”, JESHO 44/2 (2001): 130-3).
lris Agmon likewise observed the same frequently in the Haifa and Jaffa sharia courts of the turn of the
twentieth-century. Personal communication (2012).
“6 HR 3 / 96(?) / 235 (Ghara Ramadan 1286 / 9 September 1869) .
“7 HR 22 / 47 / 79 (16 Dhu al-Hijje 1329 (AH) / 24 Tishrin Il 1327 (maliyye) / 7 or 8 December 1911). The
full title of the book by Hanafite Muhammad Amin b. ‘Amr b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, known as Ibn ‘Abdin, is al-
‘Uqud al-Dariyya ft tangth al-fatawa al-hamidiyya.
230

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From the Pages of the Defter

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Susynne McElrone

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