The Confidence Tax: Why Reviving Syria's Ottoman Endowment Records Will Cost More Than It Recovers

Key takeaway. The plan reads as asset recovery. Its real effect is a tax on the credibility of every title deed in the old city, and the bill falls on the reconstruction Syria can least afford to slow.

In early 2026, Syria's Ministry of Endowments announced that it would comb the Ottoman archives held in Turkey to find, reclassify, and charge market rent on historic endowment property, the waqf, in the old centres of Damascus and Aleppo. The reported scope is large: some 7,000 properties in Damascus and 18,000 in Aleppo, including, by one account, more than half the area of the Hamidiyah and Midhat Pasha souks. To the owners living and trading on that ground, the message landed as a threat. If a register compiled under a vanished empire can outrank a modern title deed, the "green tabu", then ownership in the heart of two cities has suddenly become provisional.

Let me be fair to the ministry first. A transitional government is short of money, and property that genuinely belongs to a public endowment should earn its keep rather than sit idle or under-rented. The goal is reasonable. The instrument is the problem. Reaching into a century-old imperial ledger to settle ownership in a living city is not a tidy administrative exercise; it is a gamble whose costs are easy to underestimate and hard to reverse.

The argument is not that the prize is small

There is a tempting way to dismiss all this, and an earlier version of my own argument leaned on it: the late-Ottoman city was tiny next to the modern one, so the recoverable estate must be trivial. Around 1900 the territory that is now Syria held perhaps 1.7 million people; today it holds about 26.5 million. The historians who reconstruct those figures, Justin McCarthy and Kemal Karpat among them, are the first to call them approximations, so any ratio built on them is shaky. But the deeper flaw is not the arithmetic. It is that population counts floor space, and floor space is not value.

The properties in question are not a random slice of the old city. They sit on its most valuable ground: the covered markets, the prime frontages, the historic cores where a square metre is worth many times one in a postwar suburb. Half of the Hamidiyah souk is not a rounding error.

And the premise that endowment property was ever marginal is simply wrong. Beshara Doumani's work on what he calls the golden age of the family waqf shows it as a central institution of urban property in Greater Syria for generations; Timur Kuran notes that in some regions of the Ottoman Empire the majority of real estate was tied up in endowments. The estate was large. That is exactly why the question cannot be settled by gesturing at scale. It has to be settled by weighing what can be recovered against what recovery costs, and that second number is the one almost no one is counting.

A map of a city that no longer exists

Start with the most basic obstacle, which is not how much waqf once existed but how little of it can now be found. A hundred and twenty-five years separate the Ottoman registers from the present, and in that time the buildings they describe have been demolished for wider roads, merged, subdivided, rebuilt, and altered past recognition. They have also passed through one legal order after another: late Ottoman, French Mandate, independent Syria, each with its own way of recording who owned what. Michael Provence's study of the Damascus registers shows how poorly the Ottoman and Mandate records reconcile even for specialists working carefully and at leisure.

A courtroom does not work at leisure. To act on a claim, the state must show that a specific parcel, held today by a specific owner, is the same asset an imperial clerk described before the First World War, and that no lawful sale in the intervening century broke the chain. For most of the portfolio that proof does not exist. The ministry may know in the abstract that a quarter was once endowed. Knowing which of today's deeds to overturn is a different thing entirely. The binding constraint here is not the size of the prize. It is evidence.

The system the nineteenth century already rejected

There is a structural irony beneath the practical one. The waqf was built to be permanent and unbending: once dedicated, the property could not be sold, and its trustee was bound to honour the founder's wishes in perpetuity. That rigidity is not an incidental flaw, it is the whole design, and it is also why the institution aged badly. Kuran's account is unsparing. As the centuries passed, founders' frozen instructions fitted a changing economy worse and worse; trustees bent the rules until the system's legitimacy frayed; and governments, seeing assets locked into uses no one could alter, found them ever easier to confiscate. By the nineteenth century, the founding of European-style municipalities amounted to a verdict on the waqf as a way of running a city: it did not work.

So consider what the present plan actually proposes. It would switch that system back on, in the twenty-first century, against a functioning private land registry. It reaches for precisely the perpetual, inflexible form of tenure that the region's own history records as a liability. This is not a return to a golden age. It is the revival of a model its own custodians eventually abandoned.

The confidence tax

Here is the cost that dwarfs the rest, and the one the recovery framing hides.

The visible price of the plan is litigation: thousands of contested claims grinding through the courts, almost certainly costing more in adjudication than the disputed rents would ever yield. That is real, but it is the small bill. The large one is what the plan does to confidence.

Think of it as a tax. Not a tax the ministry collects, but one it imposes on the credibility of every deed in the affected districts, and through them on the city's capacity to rebuild. The mechanism is well understood. Timothy Besley's work on property rights and investment, and a long line of studies after it, finds that when owners believe their title can be taken from them, they stop putting money into it: the fear of expropriation suppresses investment as surely as any levy. In a transitional economy the effect is sharper still, because the capital that rebuilds cities like these is unusually mobile and unusually nervous. Much of it belongs to a diaspora deciding whether to come home, and to foreign investors who can place it anywhere on earth. Show them that a registered freehold in central Damascus can be reopened by a file from the 1900s, and they will not argue the point. They will simply invest somewhere the ground does not move.

That is why the damage does not stay with the named owners. A government that reopens title in the busiest commercial quarters of its two largest cities has told the whole market that title is negotiable. The research on post-conflict recovery is blunt about the consequence: secure rights to housing, land, and property are not a reward that follows reconstruction, they are a precondition for it, shaping both whether the displaced return and whether anyone funds the rebuilding. Jon Unruh's study of Syrian land tenure and the work of UN-Habitat on the same question arrive at the same place. The confidence tax is levied first, and it is paid by the recovery.

The lever already in the ministry's hand

None of this means the endowment should go unfunded. It means the ministry is reaching past the obvious tool to seize a dangerous one.

A great deal of genuine waqf property is already let on long leases of the hikr kind, where the endowment took a lump sum up front and kept a small annual ground rent in return. Those rents were fixed in nominal terms long ago, and inflation has since hollowed them out; some now come to about a dollar a year. There is the fiscal opportunity, sitting in plain sight. Re-rate those leases towards market value and the endowment earns real income, from property it indisputably owns, without touching a single private deed. It is revenue without expropriation, and it carries none of the confidence tax.

The ministry has, in fact, already shown it can tell the difference. It has used administrative decisions to strip spurious Ottoman-era charges, old tithes and dominion dues, from properties that were never truly endowed. An institution that can recognise where the archive misleads can recognise that the archive is the wrong instrument for reassigning ownership in the first place. The argument is not that the ministry acts in bad faith. It is that it has picked up the costliest tool on the bench when a safer one was already in its hand.

What the records cannot show

Two honest limits. The ministry publishes no full register of what it holds, so every figure here, including its own potential yield, is an estimate rather than an audited number. And the headline property counts, the 7,000 and the 18,000 and the share of the souks, come from advocacy and press reporting, not an official inventory; I have treated them as indicative and would not build a case on their precision. The scholarly claims, about the scale of historical waqf, its rigidity, and the link between secure title and investment, rest on firmer ground. The contemporary administrative details rest on Syrian and regional reporting, and should be read as context rather than settled fact.

The real edge

Strip the dispute of its two loud framings, patriotic recovery on one side and covert expropriation on the other, and a quieter question remains. A state rebuilding from war has one asset it cannot buy back once it is spent: the belief of its own citizens, and of its returning sons and daughters, that what they own, they keep. The Ottoman archive offers a marginal, unprovable, slow-yielding return. The price of chasing it is to be the first authority in the new Syria to teach everyone that a deed can be reopened.

I think that trade is plainly a bad one. But the part I would most like to see contested is the size of the confidence tax, because it is the number no one in this debate is yet trying to estimate, and the whole case turns on it. If it is smaller than I claim, my argument weakens with it. I would rather see that figure argued over than win the point by default.

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Sources and further reading

• The current initiative and the property figures are drawn from Syrian and regional reporting, including Western Syria Development (2026), Enab Baladi, and the Syria Report housing, land and property portal, alongside the ministerial and Decision No. 1104 details. These are treated as indicative context, not verified primary findings.
• The scale and history of waqf as urban property: Beshara Doumani, Endowing Family: Waqf, Property Devolution, and Gender in Greater Syria, 1800 to 1860 (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1998).
• The rigidity of the waqf and why states moved away from it: Timur Kuran, The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law (Law & Society Review, 2001) and The Long Divergence (Princeton University Press, 2011).
• Registry discontinuity: Michael Provence, Ottoman and French Mandate Land Registers for the Region of Damascus (Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 2005).
• Property rights and investment: Timothy Besley, Property Rights and Investment Incentives: Theory and Evidence from Ghana (Journal of Political Economy, 1995).
• Secure tenure as a precondition for post-conflict recovery: Jon D. Unruh, Rural Land Tenure Resilience in Postwar Syria (Land Use Policy, 2021); UN-Habitat and the Global Land Tool Network on housing, land and property rights in Syria (2023).
• Population figures: Justin McCarthy (1981) and Kemal Karpat (1985) on late-Ottoman demography; United Nations World Population Prospects (2024) for the current estimate.
• The hikr lease and its nominal rents: waqf-law sources and the Institute for Palestine Studies account of Ottoman endowment property in Jerusalem.