'Handbook of Mesopotamia. Vol. I. 1918' [‎189] (198/568)

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AGRICULTURE AND LAND TENURE 189
which it benefits. The mortmain lands of the Christian sects are
administered by their respective Churches.
(d!) MatruJceh: lands left unoccupied for the benefit either of the
general public or of the inhabitants of a particular locality.
(e) Mawat : waste lands which have been left uninhabited and
uncultivated from time immemorial.
(Questions touching the inheritance of lands or concerning
Moslem waqf are dealt with under the religious law of Islam
isheria).)
The whole question of landownership and land tenure in Meso
potamia is much complicated by varying local and tribal custom
and by the conflict between such custom and Turkish legal
theory. The view of the land question taken by the Ottoman
Government was strongly influenced by the doctrine that the soil
of Mesopotamia had become the property of the State by right
of conquest. Of the land thus originally acquired by the State,
part had since become tvaqf, part had been purchased or converted
to his private use by Abdul Hamid and thus become and
part had been sold to individuals under conditions of escheat in case
of failure of heirs (the so-called estates). There remained a
large proportion of the cultivated soil which, being regarded as
State domain, was treated as miri and let out on lease. Tenure,
however, was not regulated simply by the Turkish law of land, but
was further complicated by a heterogeneous mass of local customs,
which were still maintained and had to be recognized in the Turkish
courts.
By far the greater part of the cultivable land in Mesopotamia
is tribal territory. This applies to Irak, with the exception of the
country round Baghdad, the Shaft el-'Arab districts near Basra,
and the neighbourhood of some other towns; it applies also to
a great part of upper Mesopotamia. So far as was possible the
Turkish Government avoided formal recognition of tribal rights to
land. In Irak large areas occupied by Arab tribes were either miri
or sanlyeh ; when these tribes were powerful the Government had
in practice to allow the local sheikhs to occupy the land, and often
had considerable trouble in collecting its rent; when the tribes were
small and weak it attempted to set aside their claims, and the result
was acute agrarian discontent and disorder. The same difficulty
occurred on tapu lands, where the ownership of the proprietor, who
was often an absentee, was in many cases merely nominal.
Most of the cultivable area of Mesopotamia has been either
managed directly by some Government department [miri and saniych)