From the Pages of the Defter (ص 79)
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- From the Pages of the Defter (ص 79)
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title, a landholder could use tax records to demonstrate his (or her) land tenure. Relying on
an 1871 notice issued by the Ottoman land-records department (defterhane) and a source
that drew on registration instructions in Arabic published for the public in the Tripolian
journal al-Jinan in 1872, Mundy and Saumarez-Smith describe the proscribed process of tapu
registration before the yoklama commissions as follows:
Once a village had been given notice [of the commission’s pending arrival]
the tapu scribe would seek a list of the souls of the village and any list of
property (tahrir-i emlak) compiled for the tax office. A council was to be
formed... . The council was to call persons in the order that their names
appeard in the list of souls (nufus). If registration of property had been
done for the tax office, then persons were asked for the receipts of
payment of vergi tax and other documents relating to the property. If
tahrir-i emlak had not yet been done, then all holdings were to be
investigated and made clear, with plots defined one by one... .°°>
Not only was it presupposed, then, that an emlak commission had preceded the tapu
commission, tax payments were unquestionably accepted as proof of ownership, whereas
other proofs were subject to investigation of claims. This was the theory of registration. That
said, Mundy has noted that in ‘Ajlun, although “the Ottoman reforms clearly aimed to unify
in one person the holder of title to land and the taxpayer ... reforms in the system of tax
collection often lagged far behind the mere introduction of title to land.”**° The opposite
135 Mundy and Saumarez-Smith, 70.
*® Martha Mundy, “Village Land and Individual Title: Musha’ and Ottoman Land Registration in the ‘Ajlun
District”, in Eugene Rogan and Tariq Tell, eds. Village, steppe and state: the social origins of modern
Jordan (London and New York: British Academic Press, 1994): 79.
62 - هو جزء من
- From the Pages of the Defter
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- Susynne McElrone
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