- Eirik Hovden
(anthropologist, University of Bergen. Norway)
Constructions of legitimacy in waqf with focus on water management
18.01.08 to 15.04.08
I am Phd fellow at the University of Bergen. Norway. I started my project the 01.10.08 and it will last for three years. I have planned at least two different periods of fieldwork in Yemen and at the time of writing there is three weeks left of the first period. The first two months were used reading and gathering relevant Arabic material and generally focusing on improving my language skills. I have mostly read material related to waqf fiqh, well aided by my teacher Mohamed Abdulsalam Mansour. In the last month the focus has been on trying to find waqf documents and other similar historical material related to water management both from private sources and from the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Guidance. This has been more difficult than anticipated. Even with a written permission from the minister, the practical access to the sources has been very limited until now.
Since there is very little in the western academic literature about the waqf system in Yemen, I plan to use a substantial part of my thesis as a general introduction to the history and organisation of waqf in Yemen based on Yemeni secondary sources and especially focus on the recent changes. The main theoretical focus will be on the sources of rules and legitimacy. Here the waqf documents, the waqf registers (miswaddat) and waqf fiqh are the most important sources. I also hope to apply a general anthropological perspective and to make use of my position as an outsider to try to describe how different actors adapt to the system or try to resist it. The recent changes in the waqf system and practices and possibly changing and closing of individual waqfs are very interesting. Since I wrote my masters about local water management and the use of the rainwater harvesting cisterns in Hajja, I hope to use water supply as cases as it is important to relate the general system of waqf to specific resource management to better understand what values are at stake for the different involved actors. Thus I will try to use cases related to the sabil, birak/mawajil, abar, maintenance of the ghuyul and in general water services provided for the public benefit. So far I don’t plan any publications until the end of the second field period (Oct 08- Apr-09) when I hope to have gone through more primary material.
I am very glad to be part of the CEFAS because of the academic and administrative standards and the resources available to the visiting researcher. I hope to exchange with Mohammed Jazem on waqf literature, since he is a specialist of this kind of documents, and look forward to the remaining work.
