| investigation. His object is rather to ensure an acceptable and speedy settlement, and if he fails, either side can appeal to court.(3) Paradoxically, registration of land may even make a settlement more difficult rather than easier. Peasants seldom register changes, whether by inheritance or by sale, of ownership of registered land. Hence, in cases of inheritance, they simply make their own ad hoc arrangements, which, though extra-legal, are in practice, at least for the time being, accepted by the village. But incomplete or disputed registration brings in the bureaucracy, as well as the courts, and may involve reference to Ankara. The legal situation is complicated by the fact that the ad hoc arrangements which the villagers make among themselves are seldom a strict application of the law of inheritance in the new code. The villagers are aware of the main provisions, namely that sons and daughters should take equal shares of the parental land, and that a surviving widow should take a quarter.(4) Since most men go to great lengths to ensure that they have children to survive them, and since even the childless often take a child from a close kinsman (5) and bring it up as their own, it seldom happens that a man dies without children to act as his heirs. There were no bachelors over the age of about 23 in the villages in which I worked, and very few landowning childless couples who no longer had hopes of having children. Land normally remains the property of the head of a household till he dies, and his sons stay in the household and work it with him. Thus people practically never own land before their father is dead. When the head of a household does die, the household and its land usually remains an economic unit for at least a few months, sometimes for years, depending on the size of the household, the amount of land, the personal relations between the brothers and between their wives, and so on. Very often, an ad hoc arrangement, in theory, is temporarily made between the brothers, since their sisters are now married, and not therefore at the time of the death of the father living in the household land. Such an arrangement, once made, is not easy to upset, and any attempt to do so by the sisters or their husbands will usually mean a dispute, indeed, this is one of the commonest types of dispute. Sometimes of course, sisters may be given a share of land at the first division— if, for example, there is plenty of land, and a sister lives in the village so that her marital household can make use of it. Alternatively, either at the time or later, the claims of sisters may be settled by a money payment. Quite often, however, sisters take no share of the land at all. Again, how much a surviving widow is given depends on circumstances. She may take a quarter of the estate; or if, for example, she has enough land of her own to keep her, she may take none. And I never heard of anyone in the village suggesting that a widower would not be fully entitled to any land his wife might have owned, though legally, like a widow he is only entitled to a quarter, (6) or the usufruct of half, |
| if his wife's children survive her. Most village divisions of inheritance would illustrate the point, and I will quote only one, very briefly, and with some simplification. In the last generation, Bilal, the head of one landowning household married the sister of his neighbour, Suleyman, the head of another, but she took no land as her share of her father's land. On Bilal's death, his only son, Ahmet, took over all the land; and on Suleyman's death the land was divided between his three sons, Yakup, Yusuf, and Zubeyr. Of these, Yakup and Yusuf married their kinswomen (father's sister's daughters), the sisters of Ahmet. Much later these two agreed with Ahmet to rearrange their land so as to give the women a share in the inheritance. They were to give Ahmet their father's sister's share, and receive their wives' shares from him. For all three households, the plan involved giving up land, but each would receive in exchange at least the equivalent amount. But the third brother, Zubeyr, whose wife was from a different family, would have given land but received none. He refused to agree, and has quarrelled violently, literally violently, with his brothers. Neither side wishes to go to law. Not only would the inevitable complexity and slowness of court procedure involve the litigants in much expense and inconvenience, but no one could be sure what the court would decide, or how much readjustment of land might turn out to be necessary. And so the matter rests, and like many, even in practice, disturbing the existing non-legal though hardly illegal, distribution of the land. This divergence between actual practice and the rules laid down by the law is not in most cases the result of ignorance or of disapproval. I am not sure what inheritance rules were practised in these villages before the introduction of the code. Apart from a few informants whom I had reason to doubt, people generally agreed that they had always divided inheritance equally between children. Whether by this they meant sons only or sons and daughters, was not clear. In practice sisters did sometimes take a share either in land or in cash. I could, however, find no evidence that they were ever given shares amounting to half that given to their brothers, though everyone in the villages knew that according to Islamic law, they should have been. According to Gibb and Bowen, (7) much land in the villages was, under the late Ottoman Empire, theoretically State land in which the individual 'owners' held rights of use, subject to a more or less fictional overriding 'ownership' by the State. The State was thus able to lay down non-Islamic rules of inheritance, since Islamic rules apply only to musk or full private property. Gibb and Bowen state that holdings normally passed on the death of the holder to his sons.(8) |
| Existing village society is strongly agnatic, or patrilineal, that is, people normally belong to groups to the members of which they are related in the male line only. The villagers often speak as though areas of village land were owned by these groups, that is, as though agnatically (patrilineally) related households owned contiguous plots of land, as in fact they often do. This implies, consistently with Gibb and Bowen, that brothers have normally shared land among themselves and excluded their sisters. My conclusion is that village inheritance rules have in the recent past not been Islamic, but have been simple and flexible. Usually, land is divided between brothers, but sometimes between brothers and sisters. Where landholding lines died out, the land would normally revert to brothers, or, in some cases, appears to have been taken over after a period by anyone needing it and having the man- power and ox-power to work it. This flexibility would explain why the villagers have accepted as equitable the new rules of the Code, which are roughly consistent with one of the existing village practices. I am confident they would not accept some of the details which I never heard mentioned in the villages, for example, the limitation which I have quoted above on the rights of a widower to his wife's land. But I did hear the new inheritance laws discussed in general and heard no disapproval on grounds either of religious unorthodoxy or of inequity. But theoretical acceptance of what they know of the new laws does not lead them to seek to apply the law when property owners die, still less to call in the official institutions to ensure that the law is correctly carried out. Without here entering upon a full discussion of village social structure I would like to suggest three relevant sets of facts, two in connexion with social relations within the village, and one with the relations between the village and the greater society, which make their own flexible informal system preferable to the rigid system of the Code and the courts. First, when a landowner dies, the people most nearly involved are all on the spot, living in his household, or at least in the same village or group of villages. These people have a multiplicity of relationships and of formal and informal rights and duties to each other. The readjustments which the removal of the head of a kinship group requires are considerable, and it is better to take these slowly, and work out the redistribution of property rights ad hoc, than to call in officials who will ruthlessly apply the legally correct rules, and force all the permanent and final rearrangements of ownership to be made at once. In fact, the village, by taking the readjustments slowly, often postpones indefinitely the 'correct' redistribution of property, and creates vested interests which are anxious to prevent this from ever happening. Hence neither at the time of the |
| death, nor later, are the people concerned or anxious to register the changes of property, or submit them to legal scrutiny. I do not know whether, in areas where the land has recently been registered, people then proceed regularly to register all changes of ownership, but my guess would be that in many cases they do not. Secondly, the law, though nominally acceptable, is not altogether in conformity with the agnatic structure of village society. Whereas adult sons remain with their father's household even after marriage, and work his land under his direction until he dies, daughters marry out, and live and work in other households. The brothers tend to regard the land which they have worked together as theirs, and are unwilling to allow parts of it to pass to their sisters' husbands' households. Moreover, the married sisters are not on the spot, and are not, as the brothers are, in immediate need of the land of their dead father, since they are supported by their husbands. Hence, as I have said, the brothers frequently divide the land between themselves at the time of the death. It is left to the sisters, sooner or later to upset this de facto arrangement, if they wish to—and if they can enlist sufficiently powerful support. In many cases, sisters and their husbands told me it would be disgraceful of them to stake a claim, since their brothers had barely enough land anyway. The longer they wait, the more difficult readjustment becomes. But apart from the inherent rigidity of the legal rules, the proper application of the law, especially where land is registered, means reference to officials, and the approval of a judge, which brings me to the third point, a much more general one. People living in rural communities all over the world are suspicious of urban educated classes. Calling in lawyers and officials is dangerous; not only does it mean expense and inconvenience, but one never knows what they might discover, how they will use their knowledge, nor whether they will even carry out their official acts in the way one had hoped and expected. This point applies to far more than matters of inheritance—it applies to marriage, for example, though I do not explicitly mention it in my discussion of marriage below. But not only do inheritance practices diverge from the formal law, even the sale of land sometimes takes a traditional form not legally recognized. In several cases, villagers claimed the return, at the original cash price, of a piece of land they or their father had sold. Such claims were not only common, but generally accepted; and land is still sold to raise immediate cash, for a price for which the vendor intends later to recover it. Though my inquiries on the point are not absolutely exhaustive, I am sure that no special documents or special oral conditions of sale were quoted in stating the claims. No villager gives up land |