Suchergebnisse

The origin of the land-equalizing community, the most important system of tenure in the nineteenth-century Levant, has never been explained. The evidence of language and the dynamics of factor relationships concur with the historical record: there was no scarcity of land. On the basis of a systematic comparison with the land-equalizing commune in Russia, the answer to the puzzle looms as the need to equalize a heavy burden of impositions. Indeed, villages whoselocation or political strength helped them resist taxation did not equalize holdings.Equalization was an adaptation to external demands, not a static vestigialinstitution.

In Part I of this article I noted that the farming out of capital resources to an entrepreneur for a share of the profits, which has always played a very important role in the Middle Eastern economy, never won unqualified approval by the jurists of medieval Islam; for on the one hand farming out on shares was held to be closely allied to thesharika(an institution of broad scope corresponding to the partnership) yet on the other it did not meet all the criteria by which asharikawas accounted valid by thesharî'a. The requirement it did not meet, the jurists felt, was full contractual equality between the parties — in this case the owner of the resources and his working partner or entrepreneur. Owing to the pressure of necessity, farming out on shares was validated, but on the rather shaky grounds of custom and precedent.

Notwithstanding five generations of legislators and administrators bent on westernizing the economies of the Ottoman Empire and of its successor states, Islamic patterns were so intimately woven into the fabric of community and society in the Levant that every aspect of economic endeavor beyond the area of daily contact with the West continued to be cast in the mold of the all-encompassing Sharî'a until after the Second World War.1 Nowhere was this clearer than in rural Palestine, where an economic organization framed in Islamic concepts, operating in Islamic terms, and embodying the problems and the promises of the Islamic view of doing business and carrying on production, withstood a century of confrontation with Western settlers, traders, and administrators and a quickly expanding implanted sector.