ABSTRACT
From the second half of the tenth century onwards the rural society of the Near and Middle East underwent fundamental changes. For a variety of reasons, army officers in many cases no longer received their pay from the public treasury. Instead, they were assigned districts where they collected taxes as remuneration for their services. This practice - already described by Kha~~at in the ninth century (see chapter 1, section 3 above) - tended to obscure the difference between tax and rent. 1 Through it the peasant proprietors came to have a landlord who derived his revenue from the taxes they had to pay to him, of which only a part reached the public treasury. 2 The landlord was thus put in a position that allowed him to treat the taxes paid by the peasants as his private revenue. Furthermore, the landlord was often powerful enough to exercise coercion.1 With reference to the situation in Iraq under the Buyids in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Ashtor says:
Theoretically the fief holder had no judicial authority over the peasants, but in fact his position made him the patron in all respects . . . The land tax being amalgamated with their rent was collected by the feudal lords. Many peasants surrendered their estates to them in order to redeem themselves from ever growing extortions and new taxes, and became simple tenants. 4
The question as to whether or not this is feudal practice need not detain us here. What is important in this context is the fact
that, with regard to the small peasant holdings, the difference between tax and rent ceased to exist Indeed, the number of small peasant holdings consequently diminished, 5 a development which started in Iraq in the tenth century, but also became the outstanding feature of Egyptian agriculture from the twelfth century onwards.6 The Hanafite legal doctrine on the khariij payer as an owner of private landed property is hardly applicable to the Egyptian peasants of the Mamluk period (12501517 A.D.) The Hanafite legal doctrine of rent, according to which the obligation to pay rent can only result from use of land under a contract, is also not applicable to the relationship between landlord and peasant during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. In the place of small peasant holdings large estates came into being through three factors: the transformation of tax assignments into private property/ .the investment of capital in the buying of land from the public treasury either as tax assignments8 or as proprietary rights with regard to state lands" and the granting of private ownership of state lands to members of the ruling dynasties. 10 The private landed property which thus came into being became one of the major sources for the formation of waqj land. 11 The transformation of state lands into waqf by members of the ruling dynasties gave rise to a special legal category, the waqf ir~iidi. 12
Beginning in the Fatimid period (tenth to twelfth centuries) at the latest, Muslim rulers tried time and again to confiscate the auqiif and to treat them as lands belonging to the state. 13 This tendency reached its climax under the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II who tried in the 1470s to 'sultanise' all arable lands including those of the auqiif He recognised only orchards, vineyards and plantations as private property or pious foundations ( auqiif). All arable lands were considered to be state property ( miri). Mehmed II and his vizir were later murdered which may have in part resulted from their attempt to 'sultanise' waqf lands. 14 His successor restored part of the lands to their former status as pious foundations. 15 Nevertheless, until well into the second half of the sixteenth century the Ottoman system of land tenure was clearly based on the assumption that arable lands belonged in principle to the state. Ownership rights of private persons or pious foundations were recognised only if sufficient proof for them existed. Consequently, verifying the validity of property deeds became one of the strongest weapons which the public treasury had for controlling arable lands. In the course of verify-
ing the deeds, the authorities could refuse to acknowledge the claims to private property or waqf rights on arable lands and instead incorporate the lands into the public domain. 16 This method was applied to the Arab countries that were taken over at the beginning of the sixteenth century, especially in Syria, 17 conquered in 1516, and in Egypt, conquered in 1517.
