REBIRTH 181"Landowner" is a bit of a misnomer, however, because officially the sultan
owned every scrap of soil in his empire. He only leased out parcels of it to
favored people as "tax farms" (timars in Turkish}. A timar was a rural prop-
erty from whose inhabitants the timar holder was allowed to collect taxes.
Those inhabitants were, of course, mostly peasant cultivators living on the
land. Tax farmers had permission to collect as much as they wanted from
these people. In exchange for the privilege, they had to pay the govern-
ment a fixed fee every year. Whatever they collected beyond that sum was
theirs to keep; and there was no limit on how they were allowed to collect.
The government's share did not depend on how much the tax farmer col-
lected but on how much land was in the "farmer's" care. It was a tax on
land, not a tax on income. If a property produced beyond all expectations,
the tax farmer benefited, not the government. If a timar did poorly, the tax
farmer took the hit. If he could not pay his tax for a number of years in a
row, the timar was taken away from him and given to someone else.
After a successful campaign, the sultan might reward his best generals
by giving them timars. Typically, of course, except in newly conquered
areas, the sultan had to take a timar away from one person in order to re-
ward another. The fact that people could lose their timars meant that the
landed aristocracy was only semi-hereditary. Here then was another mech-
anism that promoted social fluidity and kept the Ottoman world in flux.
You might suppose that this timar system encouraged Ottoman aristo-
crats to wring peasants dry. After all, they got to keep whatever they ex-
tracted after paying the government fee. But the timar holders were not, in
fact, free to do as they wished, because the peasants could appeal to the
shari' a courts for justice, and these were a whole separate institution, a sep-
arate power base in society, controlled and staffed by the ulama. The no-
bility had no shortcut into it. If a family wanted to "place" a son in this
legal system, the son had to go through the same long process as anyone
else for joining the ulama, such a long process, in fact, that by the time he
made it, his social ties would mostly be with other ulama. So his interests
would be aligned with theirs and shaped by the ancient doctrine more
than by his clan or family roots.
Despite its pervasive power, however, the clerical establishment did not
own the religious life of Muslims in the Ottoman empire. Sufism contin-
ued to prosper as the religion of the masses, with most people claiming at