It Is Three Or Four Days' Journey From
Medina, And As Many From Rabegh In The Mountains.
The dates are brought
from thence in large baskets, in which they are pressed together into a
paste, as I have already mentioned.
[P.379]Although commercial dealings are pretty universal, yet few of the
inhabitants ostensibly follow them. Most of the people are either
cultivators, or, in the higher classes, landed proprietors, and servants
of the mosque. The possession of fields and gardens is much desired; to
be a land-owner is considered honorable; and the rents of the fields, if
the date-harvest be good, is very considerable. If I may judge from two
instances reported to me, the fields are sold at such a rate, as to
leave to the owner, in ordinary years, an income of from twelve to
sixteen per cent upon his capital, after giving up, as is generally
done, half the produce to the actual cultivators. Last year, however, it
was calculated that their money yielded forty per cent. The middling
classes cannot afford to lay out their small capital in gardens, because
to them sixteen or twenty per cent would be an insufficient return; and,
in the Hedjaz, no person who trades with a trifling fund is contented
with less than fifty per cent annually; and in general they contrive, by
cheating foreigners, to double their capital. Those, therefore, only are
land-owners, who by trade, or by their income from the mosque, and from
hadjys, have already acquired considerable wealth.
The chief support of Medina is from the mosque and the hadjys. I have
already mentioned the Ferrashyn, or servants of the mosque, and their
profits; to them must be added a vast number of people attached to the
temple, whose offices are mere sinecures, and who share in the income of
the Haram; a train of ciceroni or mezowars; and almost every
householder, who lets out apartments to the pilgrims Besides the share
in the income of the mosque, the servants of every class have their
surra or annuity, which is brought from Constantinople and Cairo; and
all the inhabitants besides enjoy similar yearly gifts, which also go by
the name of surra. These stipends, it is true, are not always regularly
distributed, and many of the poorest class, for whom they were
originally destined, are now deprived of them; the sums, however, reach
the town, and are brought into circulation. [Kayd Beg, Sultan of Egypt,
after having, in A.H. 881, rebuilt the mosque, appropriated a yearly
income of seven thousand five hundred erdebs for the inhabitants of the
town, to be sent from Egypt; and Sultan Soleyman ibn Selim allowed five
thousand erdebs for the same purpose. (See Kotobeddyn and Samhoudy.)]
Many
[p.380] families are, in this manner, wholly supported by the surra, and
receive as much as 100l. and 200l sterling per annum, without performing
any duty whatever. The Medinans say, that without these surras the town
would soon be abandoned to the land-owners and cultivators; and this
consideration was certainly the original motive for establishing them,
and the numerous wakfs, or pious foundations, which in all parts of the
Turkish empire are annexed to the towns or mosques.
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