ABSTRACT
As we have seen, the office of mukhtar was first established by the Ottoman law of Vilayets of 1864. 1 Prior to that date the villages of Palestine were governed by so-called shaykhs. The smallest official administrative unit was a na/Jiya - a group of villages, headed by a shaykh al-na/Jiya who was formally appointed by the Ottoman governor of the province. Officially he served as multazim - tax farmer - of the na/Jiya and he was supposed to keep peace and order, but in fact his authority was much larger. In the villages belonging to his domain, he had military power, arbitrated the disputes of the fellahs and inflicted punishment upon offenders; in short, he acted as a semi-autonomous ruler. The position of shaykh was the hereditary privilege of specific families and on the whole the central government was unable to change this situation. Most of these families had fortified their small palaces, situated strategically on the top of the hills which served as the centre of their government. Their fellahs enjoyed their patronage and protection and, in return, supported the shaykhs in whatever way they needed support. The shaykh al-na/Jiya used to appoint an unofficial representative in every village called shaykh al-qarya, who was supposed to help him collect the taxes; his remuneration was onequarter of the profit of the shaykh al-na/Jiya's three per cent, i.e., 0.75 per cent of the taxes which he collected.2 In the course of the eighteenth century the power of these local shaykhs had increased considerably and they had become virtually independent of the central government. 3
In the nineteenth century the Ottoman government tried to break the power of these shaykhs in order to establish a centralized administration with effective power all over the realm. At the time of the Egyptian occupation, IbrahIm Pasha executed some of the prominent shaykhs
who had revolted against Egyptian rule in 1834, and he established a post called na[ur to be occupied by nominees of the central government in the villages.4 Although this post did not survive the Egyptian occupation, the Ottomans apparently thought that the position of the shaykhs had been weakened sufficiently to establish direct rule in the villages. One of the ways to accomplish this was the Law of the Vilayets, which attempted to replace the village shaykh by the mukhtar. While the shaykh was a traditional political leader with judicial and military power over his clientele - the fellahs of his village or villages - the mukhtar was no more than a government official of the lowest grade, subordinate to his superiors in the hierarchy of the government administration.
