Communal land doctrine yielded in practice to aristocratic grants after conquest

Evidence

These fay’ lands were seen as the property of the Muslim community of which the Caliph was, so to speak, the trustee. In principle the Caliph could not alienate these lands, whether by gift or sale, since they were community property. In fact, the practice grew up whereby many of them were assigned by a form of grant to members of the Prophet’s family and to other prominent figures among the new aristocracy created by the Arab conquests. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 349

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Commodification of common land vaulted capital past landowner supremacy globally — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 258