Abstract
Historically, Islamic sharia courts across the Ottoman empire used a document called a hujja for registering property transactions. In present-day Jordan hujaj are illegal, yet in Palestinian refugee camps hujaj continue to be used for inheritance, buying and selling houses, and demonstrating occupancy. This is particularly true in camps unrecognized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and deemed “squatter settlements” by Jordanian host authorities. This article contributes to the emerging study of property rights in Palestinian camps by focusing on the links between Ottoman property regimes, contemporary territorial claims, and legal pluralism. Using the case of a Palestinian camp built on land owned by the descendants of Ottoman Circassian refugees, the article illustrates how, on the one hand, Palestinians use hujaj to facilitate inhabitation of the camp; and how, on the other hand, private property rights intersect with the competing claims of refugees and the state, whose overriding power changed after the events of Black September in 1970. By historicizing the material processes of refugee land tenure and property creation, the article challenges the assumption that contested camps are part of the “informal” growth of Middle Eastern cities, thus, bringing so-called squatter settlements back into refugee studies, Palestine studies, and Ottoman studies.
Informality, Claim-Making, and Legal Pluralism
One day, during an interview with a Palestinian family living in a contested Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, I learned about the use of hujja contracts for installing new electric meter boxes. In order to connect a home to the power grid, the Jordanian Electric Power Company (JEPCO) required proof of occupancy. This presented a problem in contested refugee camps, whose residents, despite living in the camp for decades, have no right to the camp's land and therefore no right to own built property. In the place of title deeds, my interlocutors explained, JEPCO would accept a hujja, a form of contract between two parties that dates back to the Ottoman era and has been nullified by modern Jordanian law. As I continued my research, I learned that the use of hujaj (plural for hujja) was not a minor phenomenon. Within Palestinian camps, hujja contracts are commonly used for inheritance, buying and selling houses, establishing building guidelines, and demonstrating occupancy to various state entities. The power company was just one of many state agencies that in practice authorize hujaj as a form of proof, despite their extralegal status.
Using the hujja as its point of entry, this article highlights how legal constructions of contested Palestinian refugee camps operate under plural legal conditions, often as a result of colonial rule and a paradoxical endurance of precolonial legal regimes. This legal plurality challenges the trope of “informality” in contested Palestinian camps by demonstrating that “formal” and “informal” statuses are not opposed or contradictory; rather, processes of making claims to land and the built environment are more complicated than that dichotomy can encompass.
Muhammad Amin camp, the camp upon which this article focuses, is built on a plot of land that remains the private property of a Circassian Jordanian man, the descendant of late nineteenth-century Ottoman Circassian refugees. Like other contested Palestinian camps, it remains unrecognized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees, and is now deemed a “squatter settlement” by the Jordanian host authorities.
Since the 1960s, the emergence of “informal settlements” in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia has received significant attention among academics, policy makers, and practitioners.1 This trope of “informality” has taken on a powerful hold within literature about urban development and governance in the “Third World.”2 One strand of this literature, underpinned by a codified understanding of the law and the teleological movement toward individual private property, has argued that legalization (turning informal houses into legally owned assets) would help lift informal settlers and squatters out of poverty.3
The study of Palestinian refugee camps has also generated considerable scholarship. Yet, despite academic recognition of the camp as a space of politics, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to those camps that are unrecognized by UNRWA.4 Most scholars within this literature accept these camps’ official labels, referring to them as “informal,” “squatter,” “illegal,” “self-built,” or “spontaneous.” UNRWA labels thus continue to prescribe that the study of some camps is more legitimate than the study of others. Some architecture and urban studies scholars have called for “linking refuge and squatting” and “converging” camps and informal settlements.5 However, everyday realities in refugee camps are often more complex than a mere convergence of “informal” settlements and humanitarian camps. Rather than assuming “informal” refugee camps to be part of the illegal urban growth of Middle Eastern cities, this article historicizes their material processes of appropriation (appropriating empty land as a supply for housing; turning access into property), claim-making (land and the built environment are the resources given most attention to here), and contestation (the struggles of landowners in courts).6
An exception to the relative lack of scholarly research on property in Palestinian camps is Nadya Hajj's work. Drawing on new institutional economics (NIE), game theories, and the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behavior, Hajj shows how Palestinians rely on their own efforts to protect themselves and create property rights in UNRWA camps in Jordan and Lebanon.7 While Hajj's careful research stands as a significant intervention, her work atomizes the camp by accepting evolutionary thinking and NIE's assumption that property rights emerge organically from within the community. Because of this theoretical grounding, she also sidesteps the adversarial nature of property relations and dismisses historical developments in the legal constructions of property. With this article, I contribute to the emerging study of property rights in Palestinian refugee camps by putting legal complexity at center stage. By following property contestations and hujja documents at Muhammad Amin camp, I demonstrate how physically grounded claims to the built environment are created, dismantled, and recreated in convergences with plural legal orders across contesting legal regimes pitted against one another in interactions over territory. This focus foreshadows how camp residents are not self-contained within their own institutional arrangements; rather, they make claims outside the space and time of the camp, in various parts of the city, and with reference to older regimes of property.
As a result of my understanding of unrecognized camps as sites of legal contestation and plurality, instead of abiding by arbitrary and ahistorical classifications such as “informal,” “squatter,” “illegal,” “self-built,” and “spontaneous,” throughout this article I use the term “contested camps.” This is because, far from having a simple informality, the camp instead has a fraught and contested relationship to formality. Moreover, the built environment of the camp is not “self-built” (i.e., in the absence of governmental intervention, without control, contractors, or formal contracts); instead, it is built through “transversal” engagements with the state and its institutions by ordinary people, nonarchitects and contractors alike, using contracts.8 Since the Nakba of 1948 (Arabic for the “Palestinian Catastrophe”), Palestinians have continuously built what they call in “talking claims” and written documents a “camp” (mukhayyam in Arabic).9 In the 1960s, the Jordanian host authorities recognized the settlement as a refugee camp, planned to develop it, and recorded it as such in state archives. Today, the land's status as private property conflicts with the state's authorization of hujja use within it. The camp's landowners contest the government's lack of effective dispute resolution, and attorneys make their cases in court based on the presence of a Palestinian refugee camp on privately owned property.
This understanding, and the argument of this article, draw on the scholarship on legal pluralism, or the “presence in a social field of more than one legal order.”10 This scholarship has offered a more sophisticated take on property than scholarship about informality and refugee camps. It moves beyond market-oriented ownership (the land titling that Hernando de Soto and his proponents argue for) to consider the wide variety of land tenures and the range of property documents that were introduced in different historical periods and continue to have relevance today. I draw on Boaventura de Sousa Santos's “porous” view of the law in the squatter settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Dupret’s and Webber's rejection of the static legalist boundaries formed by the state, and Solomon Benjamin's “occupancy urbanism.”11 Benjamin's work is particularly relevant because he identifies legal pluralism as a theoretical frame to explore the territorial processes that are deemed external to the “masterplan” (i.e., slums, squatters, informal sector, piracy) but that shape land development and disrupt master planning.12 To understand how individuals and groups make claims to land and housing, I follow Sikor and Lund's definition of property as “legitimized claims, in the sense that the state or some other form of politico-legal authority sanctions them,” what legal geographers and anthropologists call “gray zones,” “gray sovereignty,” and “gray cities.”13 I also draw on Kronenburg García and Van Dijk's processual approach to claim-making.14 Closer to this article's geographic and historical context, I build on Omar Razzaz's seminal work on the continued use of Ottoman hujja contracts to claim tribal lands in Jordan, and on the work of other scholars who have shown how hujaj continue to be used in post-Ottoman Arab nations.15
The legal pluralism represented by the hujja complicates the dichotomous understanding of “informal” and “official” refugee camps in a way that helps us put contested camps back into Palestine studies, refugee studies, and Ottoman studies. It also helps us better understand the actual dynamics of the functioning of the law across different types of Palestinian camps. At the same time, this application of legal pluralism and the focus on how processes of claim-making and the text of hujja contracts shape and translate into the built environment of Palestinian refugee camps help us broaden law's context to encompass physical structures, urban artifacts, and the architecture of refugee camps.
I begin this article with a description of the methods I employed during my fieldwork. In the first empirical section, I illustrate how Palestinians use hujaj to facilitate inhabitation of the camp. Then I bring the historiography on Ottoman land tenure and Ottoman refugees together with that on Palestinian refugee camps. In the final empirical sections, I examine land not just as market-oriented property but as a space of politics. I reveal how the private property rights of the Circassian landowner intersect with the competing claims of the refugees and the state, whose overriding power changed after the events of Black September in 1970. Finally, I conclude the article with reflections on how paying close attention to plural sets of legal possibilities might help us better understand the overlapping and competing claims to space in post-Ottoman societies.
The Materiality of Legal Pluralism
My engagement with Muhammad Amin camp began when I worked as an architect for a nongovermental organization (NGO). However, it was only when I started conducting ethnographic fieldwork and archival research that I began to see how contradictory claims to property unfold in the camp. My fieldwork focused on straightening out the camp's convoluted stories about property—the “epistemic murk,” in Michael Taussig's evocative phrase.
To this end, between 2012 and 2019, I conducted thirty oral history interviews. My interviewees were primarily first-, second-, and third-generation Palestinians originally from the mountain ranges of Hebron. I followed multiple entry points to reach interviewees who varied by age and gender, especially the elders and the mukhtar (chief) of the camp. The interviews were all carried out at people's homes and conducted in Arabic; most were audio-recorded. They ranged from thirty-minute one-on-one conversations to group discussions involving several family members over hours and days. To build trust, I shared information about myself, my Jordanian Balqawy origins, and my husband's origins in the mountain ranges of Hebron.
To give a textured account that focuses on ordinary people's lives and struggles, I asked my interviewees to recount their family's migration from Palestine, listening to what they felt was important without pushing for information. In using this approach, I took my methodological lead from historians of Palestine, particularly those who have focused on places and people marginalized by mainstream history. These include, most notably, Beshara Doumani's call for bringing the “silent” majority into the history of the Palestinian people, Rosemary Sayigh's use of oral history to historicize marginal experiences (such as those of women and refugees), and Adel Manna's focus on people's stories while recording the struggle for survival inside Israel.16
To further understand how interactions between diverse conflicting actors unsettle private property, I followed clues, cross-referencing information shared by my interviewees with other sources. A simple but pertinent illustration of this is the name of the camp. While people in the Arab region usually use the word mukhayyam to refer to refugee camps, typically followed by names of towns, villages, or neighborhoods, in this case the camp takes its identifying name from the landowner: Muhammad Amin Habjoka. The name appeared not only in oral histories but also in hujja documents. I followed the name to the landowning family, and interviewing them helped me to understand the history of land tenure and property disputes in the camp, especially during the turbulent years of 1970–1971.
The article's focus on hujaj came from a similar experience of following clues. During a four-hour-long interview with a Palestinian family, I learned about the widespread use of hujja documents for installing new electricity and water meter boxes. Then I checked these findings against interviews with municipal engineers and high-ranking employees of JEPCO and learned that the government approves the use of hujaj as an adequate means of proof for “formal” public utility connections.
In this following of clues, I have a methodological focus on materiality, which is the study of material phenomena, including physical objects, buildings, documents, and urban space. Scholars of Palestinian refugee camps such as Nasser Abourahme and Lucas Oesch have shown how objects such as cement, concrete, and roads represent fields of political struggle in which multiple actors are involved.17 This is also true in legal pluralism: scholars have recognized the “matter” of land claims. For example, Santos has shown that the material base (the elements of the contract, the paper, the writer) dominates that of the spoken word.18 Using a similar focus, but in the context of Delhi, Benjamin has illustrated how “occupancy urbanism” is both a material disruption to singular forms of property and is itself materialized by multiple de facto tenures.19 Matthew Hull, in his work on bureaucracy in Pakistan, has vividly captured how the circulation of official papers shapes struggles over land rights.20 It is, therefore, not surprising that a sociolegal reality is manifest in many objects, most tangibly in textual documents and architectural and urban artifacts. A focus on material artifacts entails the use of underutilized sources of primary evidence that will yield accounts of the materialization of legal pluralism and the spatialization of refugee camps.
I do not, however, claim extensive knowledge of plural legal orders in Palestinian refugee camps. On the contrary, my work is limited, as is the case for all written texts and their authors.21 Further comparative research needs to be done on the use of hujaj across Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and, perhaps, even recent Syrian refugee camps. Such comparative work will provide valuable counterpoints to my study.
“This Camp is Full of Hujaj!”
The persistence of hujaj is emblematic of legal pluralism. Until the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of 1839–76, the hujja was the only written document effecting the transaction between buyer and seller and the only proof for registering property transactions.22 After the Ottoman reforms and the 1933 British Settlement of Land Rights, however, registration required a title deed (sanad) along with a hujja.23 In present-day Jordan, the use of hujaj has been declared illegal by the Department of Lands and Survey. However, a hujja remains a legally adequate means of transferring ownership for land that has not been settled and registered.24 This is because, as historian Nora Barakat argues, British and postcolonial policies toward land in Jordan preserved the ambiguity of the late Ottoman construction of property.25 This ambiguity is the background for the continued use of hujaj to legitimize claims to land.26 Therefore, while the formal Jordanian land system is centralized, several registers of legitimacy—Ottoman, Islamic, tribal, official, and international—are simultaneously mobilized and resorted to when dealing with land tenure and property.27 Understanding property relations in Muhammad Amin camp requires analyzing its internal structure and pluralistic legal relations with the official system.
One day, one of my interlocutors in the camp, a young man whom I shall call Karim, shared a hujja contract with me. I first met the family in their apartment on the third floor of a multigenerational building in the camp (see fig. 1). The family building is one of more than 300 buildings and around 1,200 households that together form the built environment and population of the camp.28
The piece of paper shown in figure 2 is the hujja that the family uses to prove homeownership. The handwritten headings on the piece of paper read, “In the name of God the Beneficent, the Merciful/Hujja of Apartment Ownership.” The hujja contract claims that Karim's father is the owner of the apartment. The main clause states that the first party (the older brother) agrees that the third floor of his house is the second party's property (the younger brother). Both parties agree not to build beyond the fourth floor and not to sell or rent except to male descendants. The first party waives his right to monetary return since the second party built the apartment. Both parties and three male witnesses sign the contract. In the absence of street names and building numbers, the house's location is described using cardinal directions, the names of next-door neighbors, a nameless public street, and the name of a nearby mosque.
In material form, the hujja is handwritten on paper, with the wording and arrangement of text resembling official contracts: the signatures of two or three witnesses as well as the buyer and seller. As Razzaz argues, by using the traditional term hujja instead of the generic legal term aqd, the contracting parties invoke the historical legitimacy of this form of contract.29 In the context of Muhammad Amin camp, Palestinians have also documented the existence of the camp within the written content of the hujja, as written in figure 2: “the third floor of his house in Jabal al-Nathif (Muhammad Amin camp).” And as geographer Ala Al-Hamarneh has shown in his work on UNRWA camps in the 1990s, hujaj are even recorded in real estate offices located within camps.30 In this sense, the hujja is not a mere application of an Ottoman document; Palestinians have consciously and strategically manipulated it. They have carefully used the document to articulate alternatives to siloed property systems and prove the existence of a Palestinian camp amid a lack of UNRWA recognition and continued irresolution toward Palestine and Palestinians.
Historically, hujaj were used for transferring the possession of land. But in the process of establishing property in the camp, Palestinians have also developed the role of hujja from a land sale contract to acquire new roles and meanings—namely, the act of owning and the regulation of what one can or cannot do with the thing owned, in this case, the house (but not the land). If one were to read the above hujja contract through a more interpretive lens, we could say first that it spells out the mutual obligations of buyer and seller in a practical way. Thus, it serves as a reasoned point of reference for future internal disputes around inheritance. Second, the hujja serves as a preventive measure. In this case, it is used to avoid damaging the multistory apartment building, explicitly prescribing that “both parties have agreed not to build on the roof of the fourth floor,” putting a limit on vertical expansion. In more technical terms, the hujja sets maximum building height. Third, the written text of the hujja is a description of space and spatial relations. Finally, the hujja is not isolated from the social construction of gender; women are written out of property under claims of preserving family lines and houses that male breadwinners have supposedly financed. The signatures of two male witnesses satisfy the requirements of the hujja. Therefore, in an area that supposedly has no order, where people violate laws, zoning ordinances, and building codes, the hujja acts as a calculated guideline for building construction and spatial description. The gendered nature of this hujja also reveals how historical documents are reinterpreted and redefined according to contemporary gendered differentials of property.
Clearly, those building guidelines were not developed in isolation from official guidelines. The hujja's guideline for height limits is the same as that prescribed by the National Building Code for Housing Zone D (the residential zoning ordinance for Jabal al-Nathif, the neighborhood in which Muhammad Amin camp is located); both specify that four floors is the limit.31 At the same time, from the point of view of the order of the hujja, the actual transaction only involves the house, but not the land, as exemplified in following the four-stories guideline and not the legal guidelines that concern land-to-building ratio.
A questionnaire distributed among one hundred of the camp residents confirms that hujaj are used for inheritance; house division, defining family members’ shares in apartment buildings; buying and selling between relatives; dispute prevention between male family members; proof of occupancy for utility connections; and permits for shops in apartment buildings. (The use of a hujja as a permit is comparable to the legal permits required to open a shop in a residential building). All questionnaire respondents deny ownership of land; 80 percent confirm Muhammad Amin as the rightful owner, while the rest attribute land ownership either to the government or UNRWA. Most participants use the word tabab (literally “occupation”) to describe their house's relation to the land. The questionnaire results also show that 90 percent of the houses are two to four stories high and that less than 5 percent are higher than five stories; street elevations confirm these responses (see fig. 3 for home sale announcements and a street view of the camp). I argue that these selective borrowings from official building codes in the now-illegal hujja format are instances of legal pluralism.
During an interview with Karim's family, his mother told me an anecdote that seems apposite to recount here. “In the camp,” she said, “there is a hujja for water, a hujja for electricity—this camp is full of hujaj!” When I asked what she meant, Umm Karim explained that in place of ithin ishghal (official occupancy permits), the municipality accepts hujaj as a demonstration of occupancy. Therefore, they receive electricity formally, rather than by informally connecting to the city's infrastructural networks (i.e., without meters). The questionnaire responses also show that all participants use hujaj to apply for utility services; they do so through the municipality and call it hujat bayt (i.e., home hujja). While visiting houses in the camps, I noted the widespread presence of electric meter boxes installed by JEPCO (see fig. 4). And as Karim, a law student in his early twenties, explained, buyers and sellers need to register meter transfers at utility companies in order to receive official transfer documents.
As alluded to above, the phenomenon of hujja use for utility meters is not an isolated event; it happens in relation to the official system. For example, a director at JEPCO confirmed the government's authorization for supplying connections, and had the following to say when asked about hujja use: “Camp improvement committees in municipalities issue service delivery for the camps. In the case of slums, people go to the municipality to get a ‘no objection’ letter stating that the municipality has no objection to supplying electrical current to the ‘name of applicant’ house. Based on that letter, we provide electricity—those who have a hujja use it.”32 This statement demonstrates the government's flexibility toward a settlement defined as “illegal,” as well as its authorization of hujja use. Geographer Myriam Ababsa has underscored how the government also used hujaj to calculate compensation levels during “slum” upgrading projects in Amman.33 It is fair to assume that the government's strategy is an adjustment to the widespread use of hujja documents and the need for utility connections. Ohoud Kamal, in her work on temporary spaces in Amman, calls this “state flexibility”; such flexibility sustains temporary permanence.34
Therefore, between legality and the “squatter settlement,” there is a middle space where the government sanctions “illegality.” It could even be said that the expression “this camp full of hujaj!” is metonymic of what it takes to inhabit a contested Palestinian camp for more than seventy years. Thus conceived, the camp is not an isolated environment, neither simply “illegal” nor a convergence of “squatting” and camps, but rather the result of complex overlaps of plural legal orders. As I show next, the government's adjustment to the status quo lessens considerable resentment toward the lack of legal resolution towards land tenure.
Excavating the Layers of Refugee Land Tenure
Grappling with the coexistence—and, at times, collision—of plural legal orders in Muhammad Amin camp requires historicizing them. Instead of following conventional periodizations of Palestinian refugee camps that begin with the Nakba of 1948 and the consequent creation of the UNRWA, I adopt Marwan Hanania's periodization of Amman's urban history, beginning with the late nineteenth-century North Caucasus migration and continuing to the city's accommodation of Palestinian refugees.35 Hanania correctly insists that there are significant continuities extending from the Ottoman to British and Hashemite rule, allowing and even perhaps making it imperative for the historiographies of Ottoman and Palestinian refugees in Amman to be examined together. I bring his time frame and scope into the present by examining the tenure of Muhammad Amin camp as it passed from being occupied by Ottoman Circassian refugees to Palestinian refugees under Hashemite rule.
Following the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman Wars, the Ottoman state received about a million North Caucasus Muslim refugees fleeing tsarist Russian expansion.36 Attempting to open up new areas for agricultural development after the empire's loss of its key agricultural region, the Balkans, the Ottoman government encouraged them to immigrate to its southern regions.37 The regions east of the Jordan River, which formed the modern Arab state of Jordan, were the southernmost area of refugee resettlement. The first wave of refugees to Amman, primarily Circassians and Chechens, arrived from Damascus in 1878.38 The government promised them tax-free land grants and assistance with agriculture.39
In Amman, the Ottoman government granted refugees subjecthood and gave them usufructory access to state land—sixty dunams of land to each refugee household of up to five people, and some eighty dunams to larger households (a dunam is the Ottoman unit of area equivalent to an English acre, still in use in Jordan to this day).40 After only twenty years of cultivation, refugees were allowed to sell or transfer usufruct rights to the state land that was given to them for free.41 The one noticeable change from Ottoman times to the British Mandate period was that between 1921 and 1948, some Circassian families formed new communities in Jabal al-Nathif and Wadi al-Surur.42 Muhammad Amin camp, the site of this article's case study, is located in Jabal al-Nathif, and many of the lands and houses of this neighborhood are still owned by Circassian families.
After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Britain's installment of the Hashemite monarchy to govern the new protectorate of Transjordan, Amman was chosen as the capital city. As a result, refugee lands began increasing in value, and many members of the Circassian community became wealthy and influential landowning families.43
In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, in which Palestine was divided into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.44 In 1948, Israel established itself over more than three-quarters of Palestinian lands.45 While Arab states reached a consensus that the absorption of Palestinians as nationals would undermine the demand for the right of return, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan sought to establish itself as the representative of Palestinians through national unity.46 Unlike in Lebanon and Syria, where Palestinian refugees were kept stateless, most Palestinians in Jordan (except Gazans) were granted Jordanian nationality.47 Most Palestinians sought refuge in Amman, including both elites (leading to an expanded middle class in the city) and members of the working and peasant classes. The latter predominantly settled in UNRWA camps or squatted on empty lands near the center or the edges of the city.48
Between 1949 and 1968, UNRWA set up ten refugee camps in Jordan, three inside Amman and seven across the country. Besides UNRWA camps, there are three Department of Palestinian Affairs (DPA) camps and eight contested camps.49 While UNRWA considers DPA camps to be unofficial, contested camps are deemed “squatter settlements” by the Jordanian government. Most camp lands—official, unofficial, or contested—were and still are owned by the descendants of Circassian and Chechen refugees, as well as members of Bedouin tribes. Here it is important to acknowledge the radically different ways in which Ottoman and Palestinian refugees were allowed to find shelter, build houses, and create property. In both cases, land was unquestionably fundamental to their resettlement. But in one case, the Ottoman state viewed refugees as permanent settlers and granted them agricultural land, which they cultivated, registered in courts as their private property, and eventually accumulated as assets. On the other hand, Jordanian authorities viewed Palestinians as Jordanian nationals with an international right of return to Palestine, and assisted UNRWA in establishing “temporary” refugee camps. Because the camps were considered temporary, their residents were dispossessed of the possibility of “legally” owning property and were left in legally ambiguous spaces, even as their stay in Jordan lengthened into permanence. Thus, as I see it, the key difference between the Ottoman empire's response to Muslim refugees and the Jordanian state and the international humanitarian regime's response to Palestinian refugees is the role of land: between the two responses is a shift from allocating land to permanent refugees to temporary expropriation for temporary refugees.
Muhammad Amin Camp as Contested Space
Muhammad Amin camp was built on a plot of land that remains the private property of a Circassian man, the descendant of late nineteenth-century Ottoman refugees. The site plan (fig. 5), hand-drawn by municipal engineers, was issued on May 20, 1962, upon the request of Mr. Muhammad Amin Habjoka. The irregularly shaped plot of eighty-seven dunams (8.7 hectares) is shown to be vacant of buildings. Yet by the early 1960s, a portion of the camp was already built—not just with tents but with brick houses. In 1965, the state expropriated Muhammad Amin's plot of land to develop a housing project for the Palestinian refugees occupying the land. Muhammad Amin camp became the site of one of the government's Palestinian camp development projects. The aerial photographs that I acquired from the archives of the Royal Geographic Center confirm that by 1978 the land was fully built up; today's municipal GIS maps indicate some three hundred buildings and one hundred streetlight poles on Muhammad Amin's undivided plot of land. Muhammad Amin's family is now suing the state to obtain compensation for their property.
In my meetings with municipal engineers, they described Muhammad Amin camp's legal status in conveniently vague terms, such as “rented property,” ostensibly rented either by the king or the DPA. The latter is a misconception that echoes other statements I heard in meetings with community organizations and NGOs: “The DPA rents the land for ninety-nine years.”50 Studies of the camp reproduce such misrepresentations. For example, in a report written by a French consultant, we find this statement: “The King had rented the land to Ahmad Amin Habjoka, but has never given it to UNRWA.”51 A number of scholarly texts that take Muhammad Amin camp as an object of study sustain and circulate the same “fact” about land tenure.52 In all these accounts, the land's rental status is described in terms that avoid the messiness of land tenure, sidestepping questions vital to understanding property relations: From whom is the land rented? By whom? For how long? And on what terms?
The reason for this vagueness is the contestations over the camp's land. In 1965, the Ministry of Construction and Restoration, one of the organizational predecessors of the DPA, passed a measure calling for istimlak manfa'a (expropriation of property for public use) and temporarily expropriated Muhammad Amin's land to build refugee housing. (The DPA is the descendent of several government institutions, the oldest of which are the Ministry of Refugees [1949–50] and the Ministry of Construction and Restoration [1950–80], the latter focused on improving physical conditions in camps).53 The ministry's decision was part of the larger project of using the construction industry in national development planning.54 During this period, the refugee camp on Muhammad Amin's land was included in the government's construction projects. In fact, Oroub El-Abed, in her study of the integration of Palestinian-origin Jordanians in eastern Amman, writes that it was is recorded as “Muhammad Amin camp” in the DPA's archives of the 1950s, indicating that plans for the camp had been underway years before the expropriation of 1965.55
But the construction project was never realized; as a consequence, the expropriation contract, which was for just five years, was never renewed. However, at the outbreak of the 1967 war with Israel, the Jordanian government reinstated martial law.56 In a nation of three million people, many of whom were Palestinians, martial law gave the government broad powers. As Joseph Massad writes, “curfews were imposed in Amman and other cities, politicians were arrested, Parliament dismissed, parties banned . . . and the constitution was suspended.”57 Only in 1989, after more than twenty years of martial law and several days of riots in the south of Jordan over price hikes and political repression, did the king reinstate parliamentary rule.58 By this time, the rightful owner of the camp land, Muhammad Amin, had died. During those twenty-plus years, his family could not pass down or sell the property.
Kamal Jalouqa, a Circassian academic and urban planner who worked for the municipality for more than twenty years, introduced me to the Habjoka family. I met Nabil Tou, Muhammad Amin's son-in-law, a Circassian man in his early sixties, in the family's villa in the hills of Jabal Amman (one of the areas to which the rich migrated in the 1950s, while the poor dwelled near the city center).59 When I asked about the land, he answered: “The camp is a ‘ashwayiya (slum). It is illegal. After the initial five-year contract [in 1965], no other expropriation occurred. The land was never returned. The ownership of the land has never been transferred. The land cannot be used. People cannot be removed. . . . Every three years, we go to court. . . . I feel like I cannot do anything, constantly dragged into courts. Today, the land is worth millions.”60 The family's claim to the land is so complicated because, although the state construction project was never realized, the temporary camp nevertheless became permanent. During the martial law period, Palestinians continued to build housing on the land; and, as I described earlier, they solidified their claims to their property through the only means at their disposal: hujja contracts.
The 1960s state involvement, and the construction thereafter, also figured in the oral histories of camp elders—but they told the story differently. The site plan shown in figure 5 was collected from the personal archive of Al-Hajj Yousef Abu-Awwad, an elder who is also the camp's mukhtar (chief).61 Using the torn, taped, glassine-wrapped document as a reference, the mukhtar narrated the following:
In 1962, the decision to evacuate and demolish the camp area was announced in favor of Muhamad Amin Habjoka, the rightful owner of the land, leading camp residents to sign a petition of appeal and write a letter to King Hussein in 1963 to describe the camp's situation. In 1964, the minister of construction wrote a letter to the minister of justice pleading for the police to stop terrorizing the residents. Later that year, King Hussein gave an order to provide electricity for the area. In 1975, eleven years later, he instructed the provision of sewage. The main reason behind the random (ʿashwayi) growth of the camp was that after the newspapers declared the royal will to acquire the eighty-seven dunams of land to develop housing units for the refugees [in 1965], nothing happened for five years. So the residents started building randomly without abiding by the Jordanian codes for building.62
The mukhtar gives nuance to the history of land tenure, showing the resident-state negotiations that preceded the expropriation of 1965, where Nabil's story of the camp starts. One could also suggest that the mukhtar's use of the carefully preserved hand-drawn map as background is in itself a counterclaim to the site plan's neat representation of an unbuilt plot of land. While Nabil's account narrates state intervention from the landowner's perspective, the mukhtar's gives a “view from the bottom.”63 By putting the two stories side by side, the dynamic processes of land tenure are revealed. Across the two men's stories, the state's actions seemed to be of two minds: on the one hand, recognizing the landowners’ property rights as exemplified by land expropriation, but on the other hand, authorizing the residents’ contestations of demolition and incrementally supplying the infrastructure for camp construction to continue (connection to the city's electricity network in 1964 and to the water network in 1975).
These stories break down the state as a monolith and reveal an instance of legal pluralism. The state that possesses the legal power to bestow legitimacy on some claims and illegitimacy on others is overridden with overlapping claims and counterclaims— the sympathy of state officials, the petitions of Palestinian refugees, and the competing interests of the landowner whose right to property is lost. Such complexity demonstrates how property is not just individual rights to a parcel of land (rights to use, derive income, inherit, protect from illegal expropriation, etc.) but constitutes a paradoxical relationship, in which claims over land seem to develop proportionally to the state's efforts to recognize “legal” claims and authorize “nonlegal” property documents, as Christian Lund points out.64 Here, land tenure is constituted of the overriding interest of state power, the competing rights of the landowners, and the overlapping claims of the inhabitants. Such an understanding of property differs from Ananya Roy and Donald A. Krueckeberg's notion of the “difficulty” or “complexity” of property, which is premised on more evolutionary logics and anxieties toward urban planning in informal settlements.65
Land Tenure in the Shadow of Black September
The claims, contestations, and lawsuits between Circassian landowners, camp residents, and the state are also heightened because of the political history of Palestinian guerilla groups in Jordan. Between 1968 and 1970, the fedayeen (Palestinian militant organizations that adopted armed struggle) virtually developed a state within a state in Jordan. Based in the refugee camps, the fedayeen threatened King Hussein's authority, directly confronting Jordan's sovereignty. When the Jordanian army sought to disarm the camps, guerilla-government confrontations occurred, and the army put a brutal end to the guerrilla groups.66 These events came to be known as Black September, a defining point in the country's nation-building project and one of the most consequential episodes in the region's history.
Despite their importance, these events remain an obscured and an understudied topic.67 Since this struggle over control, the government has expanded state control and authority. In order to maintain political stability, the government has discouraged court challenges, as exemplified by Nabil's assertion that the family could not use the legal system to regain control over their property. Although, as an attorney informed me, martial law does not prevent courts from considering lawsuits.68
While battle lines were not strictly along ethnic lines (both Palestinians and Jordanians supported the fedayeen), there was noticeable ethnic tension in Nabil's narrative. Midway through our interview, Nabil got up to show me bullet holes that remain visible on the front façade of his father-in-law's villa. The villa is located in one of the neighborhoods where the army-fedayeen confrontations took place. These inflections were perhaps partially related to the Circassian communities’ largely pro-Hashemite position; perhaps they were also related to the security Nabil felt confiding in me because of my identity as a Jordanian of Balqawy origin (rather than Palestinian origin). During those years, the Jordanian state pervasively represented refugee camps as “independent republics” encroaching on its sovereignty and as a political risk to the country's stability.69 The theatricality of the state's power to crush Palestinian nationalist insurgency was displayed in newspapers. For instance, the images of hanging fedayeen or the like were front-page news alongside headlines about defending against violence and chaos in Al-Ra'i (a newspaper that at the time transmitted the government's point of view).70 As a result, many Circassian landlords have deployed their Circassian identity as loyal Hashemite subjects to leverage their cases and have expressed horror at the Palestinian squatters whom they wanted to evict.
Frustration, and perhaps even resentment, toward the camps and the judicial system became more pronounced as a result of the landowners’ inability to cash in on the decade of land speculation, a period in which the capital earned during the Gulf oil boom of the mid-1970s began to pour into the country, making its most obvious mark through a construction explosion in Amman and the display of the wealth that a portion of Palestinians retained from their migration to Gulf countries. This continuing inability to accrue value from the property is reflected in Nabil's comment that “today, the land is worth millions.”71
Strikingly, in Nabil's reconstruction, the land whose value as property is lost is directly connected with the rupture of 1970. He said: “In 1970, during the September war, the country was put under martial law. Courts were suspended. I left Jabal al-Nathif [the neighborhood where Muhammad Amin camp is located] in 1971. I was born and raised there. It was a nice neighborhood. Most of the neighborhood were Circassians. We did not know who was Palestinian and who was not until the fedayeen entered. The neighborhood changed.” In Nabil's story, it is as if his family's loss of the right to use and benefit from the land as a market commodity collapses with his childhood memories of Jabal al-Nathif as a historically Circassian neighborhood intruded on by the fedayeen and the Palestinian camp. In other words, in the shadow of Black September, property becomes a site of ethnically encoded politics.
Since the reinstatement of the parliament in 1991, Muhammad Amin's children, along with the other predominantly Circassian landowners, have been suing the government for some resolution that would involve buying, renting, or evacuating the lands. These lawsuits have been the topic of several pamphlets and newspaper articles.72 Today, the landowners sue the government every three years to receive retroactive compensation.
What is significant about the oral histories and material artifacts taken up here is how they expose the transformative impact of the events of Black September on land tenure. On the one hand, the national narrative of Palestinian camps encroaching on state sovereignty and the state's authorization of continued construction pitted the landowning family against the camp. On the other hand, the lack of official resolution toward the land pitted the landowners against the state. Processes of claim-making also showcase how identity (Circassian counterclaims to property) and historical documents (Palestinian hujja use) are deployed to leverage interests.
Conclusion
In Muhammad Amin camp, what a property is on one layer is not what it is on another. The history of Ottoman legal regimes and the layers of land tenure interrelate in manifold ways. Camps emphasize what Nasser Abourahme calls “politics of inhabitation,” when the camp itself becomes the site of a politics of everyday life that takes shape around the act of spatial inhabitation.73 I argue that the histories and layers of land tenure, property, claim-making, hujaj, construction, and infrastructure in Muhammad Amin camp underscore similar notions of inhabitation. The key difference, however, is that inhabitation is mediated by the continued adaptation of Ottoman regimes of property. It emerges through ongoing dynamic encounters between buildings and their constituent actors and elements: inhabitants, landowners, state officials, engineers, historical events, contracts, documents. Therefore, as I have shown, the framing of legal pluralism and the focus on its material artifacts—handwritten hujaj, preserved site plans, electric meters, petitions, lawsuits, bullet holes, GIS maps, ads spray-painted on walls—is more illuminating than the flattening lenses of “informality” and “squatter settlements” and the assumption that in the absence of state law, “illegality” is the norm, thus foreclosing other legal possibilities.
The historical and contemporary realities on the ground in Muhammad Amin camp reveal a politics of inhabitation that creates property from the depository of another property regime. It is within the collision of plural legal orders that Palestinians stake claims to space through appeals to other property regimes, ultimately challenging the legal centrism of the Jordanian state. I contend that relating Ottoman regimes of property to post-Ottoman plural legal orders—that is, putting side by side what are usually told as entirely separate stories, temporally and on opposite sides of the law—may help us understand the overlapping and competing claims over land and housing in refugee camps in post-Ottoman societies. By historicizing the official construction of the camp as a “squatter settlement,” I aim to do away with usages of “informality” that conflate textured and varied property and legal regimes in contested spaces. Such a case and the legal pluralism I study put the “squatter settlement” back into Palestine studies, refugee studies, and Ottoman studies.
The consistent production of hujaj as instruments for all things concerned with property is one of the several ways through which Palestinian refugees fight the politics of dispossession and repossession in Jordan.74 Considering the risks involved in disclosing information about property, secrecy is part of the repertoire that the inhabitants of Muhammad Amin camp deploy. After all, fear of illegality is also the fear of possible loss of property. The history of land tenure, dense with claims and counterclaims, points to the plurality of political positions and paranoias: the camp as the quintessential space of Palestinian guerrilla movements, the camp as illegal. In the shadows of a now-obscured struggle over control and its entanglement with the decade of land speculation, land disputes become a site of meaningful inquiry. Therefore, we have to look through multiple layers, archives, and narratives. Such histories illustrate the power of land not just as an object but as a layered web of relations, in which notions of property are thoroughly enmeshed in contested practices of building, petitioning, suing, resisting, archiving, and performing state sovereignty. It could even be said that the layered history of land tenure itself is a witness to the histories of dispossession and repossession that go hand in hand with wars, refugee influx, and periods of urban growth and economic boom.
Notes
During this time, Latin American cities were a leading center for debate on housing policy, illegality, community development, and self-help. For example, architects such as John Turner have written extensively on housing, community organization, and slum upgrading programs in Peru. Other noted scholars and practitioners affiliated with the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard University include Lisa Peattie, William Doebele, and Reinhard Goethert. For particular reference to Jordan, see Al-Daly, “Informal Settlements in Jordan Upgrading Approaches Adopted and Lessons Learned.”
For an excellent analysis of the making of the third world as a site of underdevelopment, see Escobar, Encountering Development.
A key interlocutor is Hernando de Soto, whose arguments about “unlocking” economic stagnation via legal ownership of property in the informal settlements of the developing world have been received with worldwide praise. See the discussion in Kuyucu, “Law, Property, and Ambiguity.”
Legal geographers and sociologists have shown how, in Palestinian camps, the Agambian “state of exception” is resisted on the level of everyday practices. See, among others, Sari Hanafi's work. Along similar lines of inquiry, urban studies and architecture studies scholars have underscored the central role of space in analyzing the relations between Palestinian refugees and power structures. See, e.g., Ramadan, “Spatialising the Refugee Camp”; Maqusi, “Acts of Spatial Violation”; Abourahme, “Assembling and Spilling-Over.”
As scholars of property have shown, appropriation is also about making claims. Contestation, in turn, is about countering those claims. The general gist of this appropriation, authorization, and contestation process is turning access to land and other resources into recognized property. Sikor and Lund, “Access and Property.” For an excellent discussion of claim-making as the common ground between access and property, see Kronenburg García and van Dijk, “Towards a Theory of Claim Making.”
Hajj, Protection amid Chaos. New institutional economics is influenced by the seminal work of Elinor Ostrom, which has opened the door to a systematic analysis of institutions and property rights. For game theories, see, for example, Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. This tradition is influenced by the work of Max Weber on the relationship between property, law, and economic efficiency.
For transversal engagement with official logics in peripheral urban areas, see Caldeira, “Peripheral Urbanization.”
For an excellent discussion on the practice of claim-making, including “talking claims,” “grounding claims,” and “representing claims,” see Kronenburg García and van Dijk, “Towards a Theory of Claim Making.”
Santos, “The Law of the Oppressed”; Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann, and Wiber, “The Properties of Property”; Webber, “The Grammar of Customary Law”; Dupret, “Legal Pluralism.”
Razzaz, “Contestation and Mutual Adjustment.” For hujaj in the late Ottoman state, see Barakat, Bedouin Bureaucrats; Agmon, “Recording Procedures”; Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine. For contemporary uses of hujaj in Jordan, see Al Naber and Molle, “The Politics of Accessing Desert Land in Jordan”; Ababsa, “Public Policies”; Al-Hamarneh, “Social and Political Effects.”
Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine”; Sayigh, “Women's Nakba Stories: Between Being and Knowing”; Manna, Nakba and Survival.
Benjamin, “Occupancy Urbanism.” See also Sai Balakrishnan's work on resolving land conflicts in India's corridor regions: Balakrishnan, Shareholder Cities.
Razzaz, “Contestation and Mutual Adjustment.” The use of hujaj has been documented across the Ottoman Empire. For example, Nora Barakat's work on property relations in late Ottoman Transjordan shows how, in the 1880s, the Salt Sharia court provided documentary evidence of property claims in the form of standardized hujaj.
As discussed in Barakat, Bedouin Bureaucrats.
These numbers are based on cross-checking between the Housing and Urban Development Corporation maps of the “squatter settlement” and Alnajada et al., Mapping Jabal Al-Nathif.
Al-Hamarneh, “Social and Political Effects.” Oesch also notes that Palestinian refugees in Jabal al-Hussein Camp pay utility companies for their consumption. Oesch, “The Politics of Temporariness and the Materiality of Refugee Camps.”
See Prime Ministry of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, “Kawdaat albina'i alwatani alurduny,” and Prime Ministry of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, “Nizam m‘uadal linizam alabnya wa altanzim fi madinati amman lisanat 2019.” For Amman's housing zones map, see Ababsa and Abu Hussein, Metropolitan Amman.
Radwan Al-Humaimat, director of JEPCO branch, interview by the author, February 6, 2021.
Hanania, “From Colony to Capital.” Anthropologist Seteney Shami calls this a “longer historical view” of Amman, and Rami Daher calls it the “multi-layered beginnings” of Amman's urban history. See Shami, “Re-searching the City,” 46, and Daher, “Understanding Cultural Change and Urban Transformations.”
Nora Barakat argues that the Tanzimat (reform) era Land Code of 1858 should be read in the context of seeking agricultural expansion and encouraging immigration to the empire's southern areas. See Barakat, Bedouin Bureaucrats. For more, see Mundy and Smith, Governing Property; Kamel, “Whose Land?”
Later arrivals, between 1880 and 1902, settled in different parts of what was then the village of Amman. Hanania, “From Colony to Capital,” 52–55. For more, see Hamed-Troyansky, “Circassian Refugees”; Shami, “The Circassians of Amman.”
See Lorenzo Kamel's work for an excellent historical counterclaim to the widespread claim that, at the time of the partition of Palestine, over 70 percent did not legally belong to the local Arab majority. See also Khalidi, “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution.”
On December 1, 1948, at the Jericho conference, King Abdullah of Jordan called for the annexation of what was left of Palestine to Jordan.
Massad, Colonial Effects.
Rafiq Khirfan, director general of the Department of Palestinian Affairs, interview by the author, July 7, 2021. The number of contested Palestinian camps is based on Ababsa and Abu Hussein, Metropolitan Amman.
Meetings with community organizations and NGOs in the camp conducted between 2012 and 2019.
For example, in a peer-reviewed article, the authors state, “The government negotiated leasing the land property for a hundred years from the owner.” Abed, Tomah, and Dumour, “Assessment of Slums’ Upgrading Interventions,” 4.
The DPA went from being under the umbrella of the Ministry of Refugees in 1949 to the Ministry of Construction and Restoration (1950–1980), then to the Ministry of Occupied Land Affairs (1980–1988), and finally to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1988–present). Rafiq Khirfan, director general of the Department of Palestinian Affairs, interview by the author, July 7, 2021. See also Al Husseini, “The Evolution of the Palestinian Refugee Camps in Jordan”; and “Department of Palestinian Affairs,” The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: Official Site of the Jordanian e-Government, https://portal.jordan.gov.jo/wps/portal/Home/GovernmentEntities/Ministries/Ministry/ministry%20of%20foreign%20affairs/department%20of%20palestinian%20affairs/department%20of%20palestinian%20affairs?entityType=ministry&lang=en&nameEntity=Department+of+Palestinian+Affairs (accessed April 7, 2022).
The 1960s were marked by the growing influence of the United States and an unprecedented influx of economic aid, what Paul Kingston calls “breaking the patterns of the Mandate.” For the master plans of Amman and the role of the camps in Jordan's national development planning, see Abu-Dayyeh, “Persisting Vision”; Kingston, “Breaking the Patterns of the Mandate.”
Nabil Tou, interview by the author, July 15, 2019.
A mukhtar is a chosen chief, an institution that goes back to the Ottoman era and is still part of Jordan's administrative hierarchy from the minister of interior, the governor, and the mutasarrif down to the mukhtar.
Al-Hajj Yousef Abu-Awwad, interview by the author, October 2013.
Massad argues that Black September was the last event to shake the Hashemite regime's foundations; Massad, Colonial Effects. See also Brand, “Palestinians and Jordanians.”
See, among others, Quandt, Decade of Decisions; Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State; Nevo, “September 1970 in Jordan.”
Attorney Mohammad Al-Qublan, interview by the author, August 2, 2021.
“Nafadha hukuma alai'dami shanaqan fi qatlati sultan al'atawna,” Al-Ra'i, August 1, 1971.
As Massad and Hanania have pointed out, the sense of materialistic loss is related to Circassians gradually losing the preferential and prominent political and military positions they used to occupy before the 1970s. Massad, Colonial Effects; Hanania, “From Colony to Capital.”
For a recent newspaper article and a recent pamphlet on this, see Abu Sabih, “Mukhayyam ‘almahata’”; Jamal, “Mukhayyam almahata fi alurdun.”
For Edward Said, the role of the intellectual is to show the multiple forms of Palestinian survival. Said, The Politics of Dispossession.
