Loading summary
Transcript64 lines
- [00:00]
A
Ugh. You said you were over him, but his hoodie's still in your rotation.
- [00:04]
B
It's time.
- [00:05]
A
Grab your phone, snap a few pics, and sell it on depop.
- [00:09]
B
Listed in minutes with no selling fees. And just like that, a guy 500 miles away just paid full price for your closure. And right on cue.
- [00:18]
A
Hey, still got my hoodie? Nope.
- [00:19]
B
But I've got tonight's dinner paid for. Start selling on depop, where taste recognizes taste list. Now with no selling fees, payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.
- [00:32]
A
Time is valuable.
- [00:34]
B
That's why Lowes blueprint takeoffs turn blueprints into quotes faster. Bring us your plans, and we'll generate itemized material lists to make quoting easier so you can get back to building. Plus, at the Lowe's Pro desk, you get access to thousands of building materials not sold in store. And when your order's ready, we'll deliver everything to the job site.
- [00:57]
A
Improving it's easy At Lowe's. Early birds always rise to the occasion for summer vacation planning, because early gets.
- [01:05]
B
You closer to the action. So don't be late.
- [01:07]
A
Book your next vacation early on VRBO.
- [01:09]
B
And save over $120.
- [01:11]
A
Rise and Shine Average Savings $141 Select.
- [01:15]
B
Homes Only five years ago, I was paying $65 a month for my subscriptions. Today, those same subscriptions cost $111, and I don't even use half of them anymore. That's why now I use Rocket Money to manage my subscriptions for me, the app gives you a list of all your subscriptions and reminds you of upcoming payments so you're not hit with any surprise charges. On top of that, it also sends you alerts when subscription prices go up, so you always know the price you're paying. If you decide you no longer want a subscription, you can cancel it right from the app. No customer service needed. And the best part is, Rocket Money even reaches out and tries to get you refunded for some of the money you lost. On average, people that cancel their subscriptions with rocket money save $378 a year. And overall, Rocket Money has saved its members $880 million in canceled subscriptions. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Go to rocketmoney.com cancel to get started, that's rocketmoney.com cancel rocketmoney.com cancel. For centuries, people have assumed that the Middle east became Arab when tribes migrated out of the Arabian Peninsula, conquered the region, and reshaped it in their image. But what if that story is wrong. Yosef Rapoport is professor of Islamic History at Queen Mary University in London. In his new book, Becoming Arab, he argues that most of the people in Egypt and the Levant who came to call themselves Arabs did not descend from conquering tribes at all. They were the same villagers who had farmed the same lands for centuries. What changed was not the people, but their identity. Rural communities converted to Islam later than most people think and gradually adopted Arab clan names and Arab dress and invented an epic origin story for themselves. Rooted in the Arabian Peninsula, Rapoport's work involves a revolutionary rethinking of the medieval Middle east and of the politics of identity that flow from it. I'm Thomas Small. This is my conflicted conversation with Yosef Rapoport. Hello, Yosef. Thank you for coming on the show. I'm really grateful to you for giving us your time.
- [04:08]
A
Thank you very much, Thomas. I'm so pleased to be on your podcast.
- [04:11]
B
Well, Josef, before we get into your fascinating research, first tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and how is it that you've ended up an academic studying the origins of Arab identity?
- [04:25]
A
So, I'm originally from Israel and my interest in the Middle east comes from a study for my own origins. I guess as part of the creation of identities in the Middle East, I've been interested in law, I've been interested in family life. In the Middle Ages, I tried to move away from the modern period, which is so heavily loaded with political discourse that make it very difficult to understand the actual working of society. So I find it easier to deal with the medieval period. And since 20 years now I've been interested in peasant life in the Middle Ages. I came across a very interesting text 25 years ago that describes villages in one province of Egypt in the 13th century. And since then I've been on and off working on peasants and peasants life and how they imagined their communities.
- [05:20]
B
Dear listeners, that may sound a bit dry, but I assure you Yosef's research into peasant life in the Middle Ages and the process whereby Middle Eastern peasants identified themselves as Arabs is incredibly fascinating and does have a lot to tell us about contemporary identities and indeed politics in the Middle east and elsewhere. So Yosef, your book Becoming the Formation of Arab Identity in the Middle east, it challenges the long held assumption that Arabness in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean was a nomadic import from the Arabian peninsula. And that matters because such assumptions shape how millions of people imagine their ancestry and the history of the region. If I've understood you correctly, you argue instead that Arab Identity emerged locally among sedentary peasant and village communities in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. And that's really the focus of your research, Egypt and the Levant. So Arab ident. He emerged among sedentary peasants there between the 11th and 15th centuries through various social, administrative, and cultural processes rather than mass migration. It's a very carefully argued story. And you draw on a fascinating array of medieval sources, which in itself shows just how much work there still is to do finding, cataloging and scrutinizing manuscripts in Arabic and other languages from that period to shed light on what actually happened during those crucial medieval centuries. You know, before we get into your argument, I want to ask a scene setting question, really. Do you think we underestimate how decisive the Middle Ages were in the Middle east, especially in forming the world we live in today, and the stories we tell about our origins and even the political and cultural boundaries that we take for granted?
- [07:19]
A
So I would say, of course, the Middle Ages are central to how we defined Englishness, how we defined identity throughout the world. And in fact, the Middle Ages is the era when we have the emergence of vernacular languages, the emergence of epics that shaped national identities. But I want to shift your questions and answers. What we are missing is often the countryside. What we are missing is often the peasants. And in the history of the Middle east in particular, the peasants have been completely relegated to the background as passive people who have no agency. And I don't know if you have ever walked the land, but most farmers I know are not like that. And most of the people in the Middle Ages were farmers and they had agency and they wanted to keep as much of their harvest as they could, and they created their own identities and they told stories. And this is, I think, what we mainly miss is the story of the people who work the land. The vast majority of the people in the Middle Ages, in the societies that we call feudal, in the sense of agricultural societies from Britain to China.
- [08:34]
B
That's really interesting. I mean, what you're pointing at is the extent to which urban literate people have dominated the way we understand the past because they were writing the books. You know, it reminds me of the fact that the word pagan, which comes from a Christian civilization, the word pagan, which we now think of as meaning polytheist, idol worshiper, or unholy barbarian, you know, that that word just means of the village initially. So you can see Christian urban dwellers kind of looking out at the great landscape stretched before them and sort of seeing these people as very different, rather scary and unimportant.
- [09:16]
A
Absolutely And I think that what we see is that the history was told, the history we read of the Middle Ages was initially told from. And then in Europe, I must say, European historians have tried to look from the bottom up. And this is what I'm trying to do in my book, because what I'm trying to do and what I've set out from the start is to look at sources that come from the villages themselves, to hear the stories that villagers tell about themselves and what tax collectors tell about them as well.
- [09:49]
B
Yosef, let's start at the beginning. In the early Islamic centuries, Arab didn't mean what it means today. It wasn't a civilizational category, and it certainly didn't describe most people living in the Middle East. Arab, as you show, referred primarily to certain tribal groups with genealogical ties to Arabia, pastoral, maybe semi pastoral groups who occupied specific ecological and political niches on the edges of the early Islamic empire. So before we go any further, can you sketch what Arab actually meant in, say, the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, and who would and would not have been understood as Arab in that world?
- [10:38]
A
Yes, it is a very tricky question because we don't have documents for the countryside that describe Arab people in this period. But what we can say with certainty is this. People who are speaking Arabic languages, who live in, in the Arabian Peninsula, came out with the Muslim conquerors in the seventh century. Some of them continued to be pastoralists, but of course, not all Arabs, even in the time of the Prophet, who himself was not a pastoralist, were nomads. And in fact, most of the Arab groups that came out of the Arabian Peninsula settled in cities. Islam was, in the early centuries, an urban phenomenon. It was something that emanated in the cities, that was established in the cities.
- [11:23]
B
Yeah, they didn't just settle in, they actually founded new cities.
- [11:26]
A
Precisely.
- [11:27]
B
Like Kufa and Basra and Fustat, which eventually kind of became Cairo.
- [11:32]
A
Precisely. So in fact, the early empire settled these Arab groups by their clans or their tribes in garrison cities or within neighborhoods in established cities like Damascus. We have very little evidence that this group settled as farmers in the countryside. In terms of archaeology, if you look at the archaeology of Palestine in this period, there's very little trace of Islam at all in the countryside before the end of the 9th century. If you look at documents emanating from villages in Egypt in the early centuries of Islam, farmers have Coptic Christian names. So as far as we can see, apart from some references in Chronicles, Arab people, meaning people who were speaking Arabic, who had connections to the Arabian Peninsula and who were organized into clans and tribes, were not in the early centuries. Generally they were the elite of the empire for several centuries and they mainly resided in cities.
- [12:35]
B
So you know, I know that the story is really complicated because Arabs or Arabic speaking peoples were not limited to Arabia, to deep Arabia, the deep peninsula. There were Arab principalities in the Transjordan and on the other side towards Iraq. Those principalities allied with the Romans, allied with the Persians. There must have been some settlement of Arabic speaking people from the northern Arabian desert, if you like. But these are distinguishable from the Arabs who led the conquests in the seventh century. I mean, how are we to disaggregate between Arabians from the peninsula, Arabic speaking or pseudo, semi Arabic, Nabatean, Aramaic speaking Arabs, People who were already on the borderlands of the settled areas or even in, you know, in the settled areas and the long established communities of, in Egypt, Copts in the Levant, Syrians, Levantines.
- [13:32]
A
This is excellent question. So I think the key issue is this. In the 9th century, many people of the conquered lands, people who were under the authority of the Muslims, started to speak Arabic. Started in the Middle east, not in Iran, but in Egypt and the Levant, People who were Christians started to speak Arabic. However, they did not adopt the ancestry of the Arabs and they did not adopt the clan structure that was typical of the Arabs. They were speaking Arabic, but were not identifying with the cultural and social organization that was associated with the Arabs, who were the elite in the cities. Arabian Peninsula itself remained Arab and also the border regions, as you say. But I'm mainly focusing and my story is about the peasantry and the village communities of Egypt and Greater Syria. And therefore I would just want to remind everyone that these are the majority of the people in a medieval society, the vast majority of the population.
- [14:37]
B
So most people in Egypt, Syria and Palestine at that time, most of them were peasants living in the countryside. And they did not see themselves as Arabs at that time, even if they had begun to speak Arabic.
- [14:50]
A
Precisely.
- [14:50]
B
So not only Christians like the Copts or Syriac speaking communities or Greek speaking communities, but even many Muslims, including Arabic speaking Muslims, didn't necessarily think of themselves as Arabs in a kind of ethnic sense connected genealogically to a clan that stretched itself back to the peninsula. Not at that time. Because becoming Muslim early on didn't automatically mean belonging to an Arab tribe or identifying as Arab. So before the big transformation that you're about to describe, the one that came later than I think most people think, how did ordinances, villagers in the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt actually understand themselves what were the identities that mattered to them in their daily lives?
- [15:36]
A
The village communities that we know in the early centuries of Islam are communities of peasants with small holdings who are not organizing their villages as clans. Of course, households were important, families were important, but we don't see them being organized into clans, into collective organization of a village life they owed to a local bishop, perhaps, if they were Christians and majority of the peasantry in Egypt and Greater Syria were still Christian up to the 10th or 11th century. And they were interacting with local monasteries where Christian lives continued very much so, as centers of cultural, religious production, manuscript production, and quite a lot of wealth going into the 11th century. So they were living as Christians in, one could say, not as communities or clan, but actually as small holders that had their own land and pay tax to a Muslim ruler or Muslim state on the harvest or the crops that they grew.
- [16:41]
B
I think this really challenges the way most people imagine those centuries, because these are the high water centuries of classical Caliphate Islam, like the Umayyad Caliphate, The Abbasid Caliphate, 1001 Nights, all of the romance of those centuries. And there's lots of literature from that time. But that literature, which is written in Arabic, written by Muslims, comes from the cities and is from what you're saying, more or less limited to an elite, an urban elite that had not yet transformed the countryside. Now that transformation happens after the 11th century. This is what your book is really about. You know, when people who had not previously been Arabs in identity began quite literally to become Arabs. And as you say, the drivers of that transformation was not mass migration or like tribal conquest or takeovers, but the way the state governed the countryside. Would you describe the beginnings of that process, which I think sort of started in the Fatimid Caliphate, which is based in Egypt but included Syria?
- [17:42]
A
Yes. So the big change is the shift from peasant private property to state owned land and the shift of peasant or cultivators from landowners to tenants. And this is something that we actually see in Europe as well. What is happening is that the state, the Muslim state, is now owning all of the land that is arable, that is going to be sold with crops such as barley or wheat, and it then leases this land to local cultivators. They do not own it. They have no stability in terms of their long term habitation and long term cultivation.
- [18:25]
B
So this is what's called the rise of feudalism when we talk about it in Western European contexts. And I've always imagined that in the west, feudalism is the result of barbarian invasions destroying the Roman kind of infrastructure or legal system and imposing their will by violence on the countryside, imposing a new relationship of ownership from private property to collective sort of state, if you like, state or lord owned property. Did something like that happen over the course of, like the election, 11th century that led to this change in the Middle East?
- [18:59]
A
I would say the main process is decentralization. So the early Islamic centuries are about a central state which collects taxes centrally, sends tax agents, and then collects the taxes from the peasants. What happens in the Middle east, and in a way it is similar to what is happening in Europe, is that the tax collection is decentralized and delegated to lords. In the Middle Eastern context, these are usually military officers of Turkic or Central Asian region. These people receive the rights to collect the taxes from certain lands for a certain period. This allows them to also lease the lands to the cultivators. And if they don't like this group of cultivators, they will lease it to another group of cultivators. If we look at it, and I think this is so important to look at it from the perspective of the cultivators, the peasant who owned the land, the Christian peasant who owned the land that I described a few minutes ago, then loses the right to the land and only leases it from the state, or more often, from a local lord or lord that is sent by the state. And therefore the whole relationship of the cultivators with the land changes. They are no longer owners of the land they cultivate, and therefore their identity is not defined by the place they live in, but by the group that they belong to.
- [20:26]
B
I see. That's very interesting, you know, so I can see that. But then what process is initiated which over time leads them to identifying with a group that believes itself to be related in ethnic or ancestral terms to Arabian tribes.
- [20:43]
A
So there are indeed two different things that I identified in these sources and two different elements that combine to create this Arab identity. One is to create of a clan. All the cultivators of a village come to see themselves as part of a clan. This is the clan that has the lease or the tenancy right of the land. And this serves really, first of all, the function of allowing the people of this village to cultivate this land communally, negotiate how much tax they need to pay, and so forth. So this is one element, creation of clans. The second element is the creation adaptation of an ancestry of saying, we are not just the peasants who lived here for centuries, we are people who came from somewhere else and specifically from the Arabian peninsula.
- [21:37]
B
This becomes linked to a conversion to Islam. So part of this new relationship, where they go from being small holding peasants to tenants, working for lords, for emirs, for tax farmers, was that it encouraged the peasants to convert to ISL because for a long time they had remained Christians, say, or some other religion. But suddenly there are incentives, greater incentives for the peasantry of the region to convert to Islam, which encourages this kind of creation, this imagination imagining of a descent from the Arabian peninsula. Is that right?
- [22:13]
A
Once you converted to Islam, do you want everyone to think that your ancestors were Christians? It's much better for you to claim that your ancestors were in fact part of the Arab conquered the Middle east, that you have a pure Arab lineage that gives you much more prestige within an Islamic culture. If you are a convert, you want to erase the traces of your conversion. And that's true for almost any conversion in the medieval context. So a choice of an Arab prestige that comes from lineage is the most logical choice. If you're really lucky, if you're really powerful, you would claim that you are a descendant of the proof prophet. If you're not as powerful, you would say you are a descendant of a companion. Or sometimes you even attach yourself to a different part of the genealogy. I want to emphasize that Arabness existed before the 11th century. As we said, there was an Arab identity in the early centuries that was mainly urban, that was linked indeed to clan identities. It is not that these villagers invent a new identity as such. This is not creating a new ethnic group. They are attaching themselves to an existing ethnic group. So from being individual peasants in village communities, they are now clans, and these clans are now attaching themselves to this genealogical tree of Arab people.
- [23:43]
B
It's sort of strange to think that these people who had lived and worked that land for literally millennia, probably felt incentivized to erase that memory and that connection and adopt a new one. It makes me think of similar processes that happened across the Christian world. As people Christianized, it suddenly became very important, for example, that a certain apostle came to your region or a certain saint came to your region. You might go and try to get a relic of that saint and create a pilgrimage shrine. I can see how conversion builds new identities, which involves the loss of your old identity. Certainly here in England, so much of the deep pagan, pre Christian, English, Anglo Saxon past was lost. And the English began to think of themselves as related to people who left Troy at the fall of the Trojan War. And a whole new sort of world was invented for themselves where they grafted themselves on to a classical Christian Roman history. Something similar is happening in the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries in the Levant and Egyptian, by the peasants of those lands grafting themselves onto an Islamic cultural identity. Now, I want to pause for a moment on the Sinai. This part of your book really struck me on a personal level, because when I was a young man, I actually lived at the monastery of St. Catherine for a time, trying to discern whether I should become a monk there. And it was while working alongside the Bedouin, as they were called, laborers, in the monastery garden that I was first inspired to study Arabic. So I automatically thought back on those Bedouin when I reached the section of your book where you discuss documents from St. Catherine's Monastery from the 1160s or 1170s, and the sudden appearance in that region of Sinai of the Ayav, described by the monks as muwalladun. So these are people who the monks could tell had adopted an Arab identity, but they weren't seen as having true Arab pedigree. So can you talk us through what's happening here? This is a sign, a big sign of this process you're describing.
- [25:57]
A
St. Catherine Monastery is indeed a fascinating place. And the documents from there are just magical. The trace of Arabic documents from the monastery starts in the 1100s or 12 century, and what we see there in 1170, and it's actually associated with Salahdin, with Saladin and his conquest of Egypt and Syria. We certainly see a document where the monks are complaining that the local governor has hired people who they call orban, which is a form of the word Arab. And I will say more about it. And as you say these orban, they say they are muwaladun, which means half caste. So they say these are not really Arabs. And the word orban, which only appears in the 12th century, and this is a remarkable shift. It's a word that did not exist in classical Arabic. It's a word that emerges in the 12th century to describe precisely these hybrid identities of people who claim to be Arab. But actually, everybody kind of thinks, well, well, they're not really.
- [27:05]
B
So just to make sure the listener understands. So this word orban, you can hear the araba there. So Arab, Araba. And then there's a new word, orban, which comes from that same root, araba, but it's new, and this is a sign that something new is happening.
- [27:21]
A
Precisely. So changing the word Arab to Orban seems to indicate that this is an identity that is being created, or it's a word that reflects a new identity and identity, identity of people who claim to be Arabs but do not have the kind of Arab culture and identity that existed in the previous centuries. And the monks themselves seem to be saying exactly that in the petition. These are muwal adun, a word that means half caste or half breed. They are not really Arabs.
- [27:57]
B
That's interesting. Now that's the Sinai moving over 100 years or so to the Fayoum. So the Fayum is a large agricultural oasis in central Egypt. And you talk about a document there from around 1245, a document that's almost like an Egyptian doomsday book. The doomsday book, for listeners who don't know, was commissioned by William the Conqueror in England. And it's this comprehensive census really of every farm and village in England at the conquest, and how much each farm produces in terms of taxable revenue and things. So this document from Fayum is similar. It lists every village, every canal. People grow what they owe in tax, how each community is organized. And it reveals something surprising. I suppose. Instead of being organized simply as farming villages, almost the entire population is now grouped into Arab clans. But these are not newcomers from Arabia. They are the same peasants whose ancestors had lived there certainly since Roman times. But now, by the mid 13th century, they're identifying themselves through Arab clan names. So this is another sign of this process, because there is no evidence of some mass migration disrupting settled life, you know, no takeover. So like for example, if there had been mass migration from Arabia to explain this sudden link of the peasants to Arab clans, maybe like place names would have changed or something.
- [29:29]
A
Precisely. So we don't see any. The names are remarkably Coptic. The names of the villages in the Fayoum depression west of the Nile remain Christian, and there's still monasteries. The places themselves remain in the same location, we can even tell that. But each village that grows wheat, barley, all the arable crops, each of these villages in a very consistent way is identified with one village clan. And this is happening in the 13th century, when this prosecution process of becoming Arab has now come full swing. Every village now is leasing its lands from a local amir, and then they have headmen, and the headmen are also the heads of the clan. And this also acts as a kind of local confederation in that several clans together come and organize the irrigation together and also act as protection against other clans in multi village confederacies. But there's no sign that something dramatic as population replacement happened. The landscape remains the same, the names of the places remain the same. It's only two centuries earlier that we have a lot of documents coming from the same places with Christian peasants. There's no evidence that Mass amount of nomads came suddenly to the Fayoum. And indeed what I'm trying to show you in the book, that not only in the Fayyum, the Fayyum has a wonderful example that we have a document, as we say, that describes it. But the same thing is happening all over Upper Egypt, all over Lower Egypt, all over Palestine. Where would all these nomads come from? There's no endless reserve of nomads to completely overrule the Middle East.
- [31:21]
B
So as you say, 200 years before, those same peasants were Christians and their villages were Christian. So somehow over the intervening two centuries, those peasants had first become Muslim and then decided were incentivized to adopt a new genealogy, organizing themselves as clans and then connecting those clans to a history that stretched back to the Arab invasions, the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. And when we turn to Palestine, you mentioned Palestine, there is a document or a number of documents from the Palestinian highlands from the early 1300s or so, where again, every Muslim village is organized around a single Arab clan with groups of headmen who guarantee taxes, oversee cultivation, keep the peace, act as the village's public face. So this is a recognizably medieval clan based collective world now, a far cry from what had been the case in the classical period of small landholdings, more private property, more family based organization. But in the Palestinian high, the nearby Christian villages, just as old, just as productive, have no clans at all. They're organized through the church instead. So this suggests that Arabness here is not a marker of descent from Arabian tribes, but a communal framework that Muslim villagers adopted as they entered Islamic legal and fiscal structures, almost taking the place of what the church had been for Christian peasants. Is that a good analogy? You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet. Like the just one tapping ridiculously fast action, sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts.
- [33:28]
A
That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it.
- [33:32]
B
To win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today@shopify.com win.
- [33:45]
A
Well, you described it very well. The analogy with the church. I'm not sure how what was exactly the role of the church in the Christian peasants. So I, I cannot completely confirm the the comp. But this is precisely that. And the case of Palestine is interesting because these are really in the highlands around Jerusalem, around Hebron. So these are not places that are Close to the desert, people who know the Middle East. Your listeners would know that when we discuss the Sinai or discuss the Fayum, these are places that are close to the edges of the desert. And commonly people would say, well, people from the desert came over, and this is through contact with the desert. But these are the highlands, these are places, places in the mountains that are as far as the desert as you can be in the Middle East. And there we see the same pattern as in the Fayoum, that you have Muslim villages, each identified with an Arab clan, each led by headmen, that is exactly as you say, have these political roles, protection roles, taxation roles. And you have Christian villages which do not have clan identity and are organized. It seems Muslims, they're not having that same kind of social organization, as far as we can tell from the document. And they are, of course, not Muslim. Now, it is very possible, and this is what we see the difference in. I want to come back to the land itself, what people are growing. So when people are growing orchards that require many, many years of investment, they are more likely to remain Christian. They are more likely to remain individual landowners, because you are not going to get. It's not effective to lease an orchard just for a year or two. This is a long term investment. But crops that are annual, like wheat or barley or flax, this is the kind of land that was least annual. And in this case, people didn't own the land and therefore their leases were collective, the taxes were collective. So we have here a very interesting dynamic process where the kind of cultivation determines the long term social and religious identity of the cultivators.
- [36:10]
B
That is very interesting. You know, it's. So it's this sort of granular observation of the data that suddenly sheds a lot of light on a constantly evolving picture. I mean, we think of the past as sort of static, but of course it wasn't. As we'll discuss in a second, you know, these changes, this change of identity amongst the peasants of the Middle east was sort of revolutionary in some ways. It was a tremendous change. And even though they quickly began to think of this change as having happened in the 7th century and they associated it with the coming of Islam, the religion they had adopted and which they loved and probably practiced, that wasn't entirely true. And in the meantime, you know, they're adopting Arab clan names, as you said, they begin adopting Arab dress. They adopt specifically Arabian speech patterns which they didn't have before and which Christians didn't adopt. The Muslims adopted it. And again, not because they had actually literally come from Arabia, but because by adopting these markers of Arab identity, they were made legible to the state and they could involve themselves in collective bargaining and collective representation in a new form of legal arrangement. Now, one of the most surprising things in your work, which I liked very much, is the role played by Arabic popular epics. So these are tales that are set to some extent in an early Islamic period, or a kind of imagined early Islamic period. Stories of the great warrior Antar and all of these. But they're not really survivals from that period. They haven't been orally transmitted down the centuries. They become widespread much later, right at this moment, when rural, recently, let's say, converted Muslims in Egypt and Syria are organizing themselves into Arab clans.
- [37:56]
A
Precisely. I also like this part of my book very much. I think it's very nice to read the jokes and the folktales of the Middle Ages. It's always a pleasure. But what we suddenly see when we read them is that these are not just stories. There are ways to create ident. And again, looking from the point of view of these villagers who have now converted to Islam and now claim this Arab identity. But how do they know what it means to be Arab? How do they know how to behave as Arab? How can they project this Arab identity in a way that is legible to others? And the best way to do that is through epics. And the idea of the epic and this, you can think of great epics of the past and in the English context, Robin Hood, which is medieval creation epics are ways of creating a group identity. They always start with how the group started, and they describe how the group organizes itself and reacts to others. So the stories of Antar, this black hero of a pre Islamic tribe, are made up in the 12th and 13th century. They did not exist before Antar was known as a figure of Arabic poetry in the early centuries, but as a popular epic that was recited in rhymed prose as we know it, from the 12th, 13th century. And we have the first manuscript from the 15th century, but it was mainly in oral stories. This emerged in the 12th century, precisely at the time in which these rural communities are saying, we want to be Arab, tell us how to be Arab. So you have these storytellers who come around the villages and tell them in rhyme prose the story of the Arabs, how they emerge and how it. What are kind of the values of hero of the Arab tribe. And this hero is black, and it's very important that he is black. And that is a different kind of level in the story in which he Is an outsider that is accepted into the community or into the clan.
- [40:08]
B
It's really interesting. You know, listeners may think that this is hard to believe, But I'll remind you, dear listeners, that like, let's say in the United States in the early 20th century, when, through migration across the 19th century, a huge mass of people were becoming American. They were to some large extent rejecting or forgetting or disavowing their European or other past, and they were becoming American. How? Well, it's at this time that you suddenly have an explosion of cowboy and Indian stories. It's at this time that you have the pilgrim father story of the mayflower and the Thanksgiving holiday becoming an important marker of American identity. So we see only a hundred years ago storytelling being invoked, epic storytelling, to help forge new identities. So something similar was going on then.
- [41:00]
A
Yeah, I think the example of American identity and the way it is formed through stories and actually today, I think also through films and movies in American culture. And I think the example of films and movies is similar to the popular epics because it's really a story that comes not through a written text, but actually through this experience in which you identify with a hero. And this creates what the culture, the identity of the group that you want to belong to. And the popular epic which was told in the community over what I show were new types of pottery, a new bigger pot that you could cook communal meals with. And over these large gatherings, you could tell the stories of antar in the same way you watch movies in the pre video time and you listen to them together. And that created the group identity and that created a sense of where we are from. We are coming from the Arabian peninsula because the stories are set in the Arabian peninsula in either pre Islamic or early Islamic times. And this is the story of how are the Arabs coming together as well as fighting each other in the past. And this is who we are.
- [42:21]
B
You know, Yosef, you have no reason to know this, but I'm actually a convert to orthodox Christianity. And I go to a church here where I live that belongs to the patriarchate of Antioch, so Arab orthodox. And just a couple of weeks ago, the bishop circulated a letter in which he encouraged us converts to adopt what he called Middle eastern eating habits. He encouraged us to eat communally, to have big platters of food brought to the table from which everyone takes. So I promise you, Yosef, this kind of thing is still happening where if you're going to be an orthodox Christian attached to the patriarch of Antioch, a kind of. Now, in the patriarch's mind, or in the bishop's mind, a kind of Arabness, a kind of Middle Easternness is required. Again, something similar happening in the late Middle Ages. One of the most revealing pieces of evidence you describe is Ibn Taymiyyah's reaction to what he saw was happening in the Syrian countryside around the year 1300. Now, Ibn Taymiyyah is a friend of conflicted. We did a whole series on his life. He's a fascinating person. In the evidence you've discovered, Ibn Taymiyyah starts encountering these rural Muslim villagers who are suddenly calling themselves, you know, Qays or Yaman. They were suddenly naming themselves after Arab tribal factions, legendary, even Arab factions from the distant past. And they're using these labels to organize feuds, to prosecute collective retaliation, to form political alliances. And Ibn Taymiyyah is sort of appalled here. He's like, this isn't genuine. This isn't real ancestry. It isn't even really Islam. He's concerned that it's a return to jahiliyya, to the time of ignorance, a kind of manufactured tribalism, which for Ibn Taylor, a civilized, urban Muslim elite figure, thought was a backstep. He didn't really think this was good. So isn't that an extraordinary piece of evidence that this process that you are narrating did in fact occur?
- [44:32]
A
So this sudden appearance of Kaist and Yemen confederacies and people fighting each other in the name of tribal confederacies that go back to the Arabian Peninsula seven or eight centuries earlier, it happened suddenly in the 1300s, late 1200s, and Ibn Taymiyyah is one of the best witnesses for that. This is showing that, in fact, tribal or clan identity was the main political power in the countryside, that Islamic law, which is administered from the cities, didn't matter in many aspects of political life or social organization. These rural communities organized themselves, in the absence of a strong state, into communities that had to protect each other and fight each other over resources, and then allied themselves with people further afield, sometimes even with the sultan or the rebels against the sultan. But they were fighting each other in the name of these collectives that had really nothing to do with Islamic law administered from the cities which Ibn Taymiyyah was upholding. There's a nice comparison here, I think, with football, in that being kais or Yemen or belonging to a clan meant a very strong allegiance to that particular group, and you went to battle with each other. However, everyone, by being kais or Yaman or belonging to a clan, you also belong to a larger culture. And the comparison to football is that each club has, has their own fans and they would have a great rivalry with other clubs. But they all recognize a shared culture of football that is in some ways an alternative culture. But the sense that there is a broader culture of football in which each person or each club or each group are in conflict with each other. But in fact the division between the clubs, or coming back to the Middle Ages, the clans is the very fundamental to this culture that is being created. The conflict between clans, the conflict between Kaist and Yemen, also defining what it means to be Arab.
- [46:43]
B
And of course, you know, Today in the 21st century, these clan based networks of identity and rivalries which can lead to real conflict, are seen on the ground participating in politics in places like Syria, which underwent a fragmentation, a period of radical decentralization during the civil war war during which these clan based ways of organizing were sort of like activated and sometimes are activated in a big way. And though Syrian or trans Syrian into Iraq or trans Arabian or these families who they cultivate their wheat fields, they cultivate their small gardens wherever they live, in the hills outside Aleppo or in the Jazira between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Euphrates river, they think of themselves as members of Arab clans a lot of the time. And they might think that this actually literally stretches back to the seventh century and before. But what you're saying is it emerged and was constructed more recently than they think, not through migration out of Arabia, but through Islamization, shaped by fiscal and legal state machines, machinery shaped by the erosion of centralized state power in the various waves of crises that attacked the Middle east and so forth. So by the end of the 15th century, the early 16th century, Egypt, Greater Syria, the Middle east, they were all covered with Arab village clans. A world that barely existed in the 11th century, but had suddenly become dominant three centuries later, later. And this was a revolutionary transformation because it had real political consequences.
- [48:32]
A
So first of all, I want to say that no clan, no ethnic identity is primordial. Everything was created at some point. And clans, specifically tribes, which are based on this idea of common ancestry. So the genealogy that underlies them is often a reflection of social relations. It is not the genealogy, it is not who your great great grandfather is that defines who you are allied with, but it's the other way around. You decide that your ally or your in law is now also your common clansman. Genealogy is the product of society, at least in the long term. I agree that in terms of the changes in the countryside, and one could say for the majority of population of the military Middle east, this change in the identity of the villagers in Egypt and Syria is the most important change that happened in the Islamic period. In the countryside, it's simply the most important period. Instead of Christians, they become Muslim. Instead of relating their ancestry to the land where they are, they claim to be migrants from somewhere else instead of seeing themselves as part of unified. So they are part of an Arab culture. But each village has their own clan. It creates an endemic culture, which we shouldn't underestimate, an endemic culture of feuds between village clans. That is part of the social structure that is being emerged. It shaped so much of the countryside and in fact in there for the majority of the population, population of Egypt, in Greater Syria, of the Middle east to the modern period. But I also want to say that the traces of the pre Islamic, pre Arab past, as you know, were never erased. People know in Egypt, certainly people know in Palestine that they are also descendants of the place. They know that and I think they hold that commenting on modern national culture in these places is that they hold this in a kind of duality. They claim to be Arabs and they claim of course, pride in that, but also they are proud of being Palestinian as people off the plates because of the political context. Egyptians are very proud of being the descendants of the pharaohs the same time as being saying we are Arabs. People hold dual identities all the time. Time, don't we?
- [51:09]
B
All of us, frankly, Yosef, people are conflicted in the Middle east about these questions. You know, the 19th century, the rise of nationalism and whole new stories of understanding the past, often contradictory stories play a role in modern day contemporary identity as well. We don't have time to talk about that. And your book isn't about that. As you said you wanted to look not at the modern period, which is so often looked at, but the medieval period. And you know, I've learned a lot from the book. I thank youk so much just to sort of make it very relevant. Your book does challenge, you know, some powerful assumptions that continue to shape political debates today in the Middle east, especially in the Levant, let's say. But Egypt and elsewhere too, people still make claims that Arab speaking, or Arab or Bedouin as they sometimes call communities, are recent arrival or that their identities are too fluid, too constructed to support deep historical ties to the land. Medieval history can be invoked to say that Arabs only appeared in certain regions after the Islamic conquest. So they don't have long standing claim to those landscapes, not as long as others, et cetera. So Your work suggests the opposite, that the people, the countryside people, the majority of the population of the Middle east who became Arabs in the Middle Ages, were overwhelmingly the same villagers and farmers who had been rooted in those landscapes for centuries. I don't think it's hard to see what the political implications of your research are.
- [52:51]
A
Yep, I completely agree that there's something ironic in that these communities were telling about themselves that they are migrants, that they came from somewhere else. And this is true from the Anglo Saxons and the Germans and all sorts of people. But now this is used against them in a couple of ways. One is, as you say, the national one, that these people don't have the same right to the land because they arrived from somewhere else. Which is first, I show in my book it's not true. But actually, how can you, at the end of the day justify these kind of claims for the Middle east or anywhere else but more locally? So I said there are two ways in which these myths of migration are used against them. The more local one is that communities of what we call today Bedouin, of people who have Arab identity in the sense of clans and attachment to tribal structures, are being, especially in Israel, but also in other Arab countries, are being expelled from lands that have been cultivated for many, many years because courts say, well, you are Bedouin, you don't have attachment to the land. And my book, which was not my intention, but shows how many medieval communities who saw themselves as Arab, who were organized by village clans, were as sedentary as anyone else. And, and the fact that people call themselves clansmen doesn't mean that they are not attached to the land. So this is something that is very real and happening at this moment in time when people, because of this myth of migrations, are being uprooted from lands they have been cultivating for many, many years.
- [54:39]
B
Well, Yosef Rapoport, thank you so much for coming on Conflicted and sharing your deep research into a much neglected part of Middle Eastern history history for sharing it with us, I really appreciate it.
- [54:50]
A
Thank you so much for this very interesting discussion.
- [54:55]
B
That was Yosef Rapoport, professor of Islamic History at Queen Mary University in London. His new book, Becoming Arab is well worth reading and remember for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message heard production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzie Andrews. This Precedence Day, upgrade the look of your home without breaking your budget. Save up to 50% site wide on new window treatments@blinds.com blinds.com makes it easy with free virtual consultations on your schedule and samples delivered to your door fast and free. With over 25 million windows covered and a 100% satisfaction guarantee, you can count on blinds.com to deliver results you'll love. Shop up to 50 off site wide, plus a free professional measure during the President's Day Mega Sale Last chance happening right now@blinds.com terms apply.