Islamic Law on Peasant Usufruct in Ottoman Syria ─ 17th to Early 19th Century

Joseph (international studies, Zayed U., United Arab Emirates) analyzes how 17th- through early 19th-century Hanafi law (official Ottoman law), as evidenced in legal opinions and legal commentaries from Ottoman-ruled Syria, legally defined sharecropping and tenancy agreements and tenant/landlord rights and obligations. Influenced by the theoretic approach to law suggested by Pierre Bourdieu, she analyzes the development of the law within the context of the power relations between various forces that include: the state and waqf (religious endowment) interests; the state, its local representatives, and agricultural producers; and waqf founders, beneficiaries, overseers, and cultivators (sharecroppers and tenants). Legal issues addressed include the relative influence of Ottoman state law and religious sharia law on shaping land laws, the structure of the land tenure system in the Syrian countryside, the differences between tenancy and sharecropping arrangement on state and waqf lands, the nature of tenant/sharecropper subjugation and dispossession and their regulation under the law, and the rights and limitations governing the tenant/sharecropping producers' access to the fruits of production. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Sabrina Joseph, Ph.D. (2005) in History, Georgetown University, is Associate Professor of International Studies and Co-Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University, Dubai, UAE. She has published on tenant land rights in Ottoman Syria and early modern France and on the application of law vis a vis Christians in the shari?a courts of Ottoman Greece in journals including: Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.