← New Books Network
New Books Network
Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)
00:41:38
Loading summary
Transcript24 lines
- [00:01]
A
Ever feel like your brain just won't click? Onnit Alpha Brain is a daily supplement engineered to support memory, focus and mental speed. Made with science backed ingredients, Onnit Alpha Brain helps you lock in, tune out distractions and stay sharp. See what your brain can really do. Visit onnit.com and shop Alpha Brain to unlock your next level. That's O N N I T.com hello.
- [00:27]
B
Everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical, there are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
A
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Today, much of the Middle east is Arab, an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the near east to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration or conquest or something else? Historian Yosef Rappaport, in his book Becoming the Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle east, makes a different argument that the region's medieval peasants adopted the Arab identity in response to shifting political power, changing land rights and the spreading Muslim faith. Yosef of Queen Mary University, London, is a historian of the Islamic Arabic speaking Middle east in its Middle ages from about 15,000 CE. Among his publications are books on marriage and divorce in late medieval Cairo, in Damascus, on the 14th century religious reformer Ibn Taymiyyah and on medieval Islamic maps. So, Yousef, thank you so much for coming on the show. Today I talk about your book becoming Arab. You know, this book seems to have been written kind of in contrast to a traditional way of talking about how this part of the world, Egypt, Syria, kind of quote unquote became Arabic, but kind of what's the standard historic view of this? What's the standard way that people talk, people kind of think about this part of the world becoming Arab.
- [03:10]
C
Thanks first of all for having me on the podcast. The standard way is that Arab tribes came from the Arabian Peninsula and settled down in cities, villages, and gradually their identity then transferred in some kind of osmosis to the rest of the population of the Middle East. And some even say that the local mostly Christian population, in the case of Egypt and Syria, somehow disappeared, migrated, died off. I believe this narrative doesn't really make sense. I think that the association of tribes and clans with nomads is very dogmatic. And in many parts of the world, and I think your listeners know that in many parts of the world there are tribes that are sedentary, that live in villages. Many village communities are, have clan formations. So in fact, my book does go and say, well, there are a lot of village clans, but they didn't come about through the settling down of tribes. These clan identities and Arab identities were formed within village communities as a response to all sorts of changes around them and especially to changes in taxation and polit, political changes around them.
- [04:52]
A
So maybe we should actually kind of dig into what this means, you know, when we talk about medieval peasants in Egypt and Syria and this part of the world, you know, becoming Arab. What were they before and what did they turn into?
- [05:09]
C
That's an excellent question in the sense that what are we talking about in the early centuries of Islam? I think this is not always thought about. Clearly, the Arab Muslim conquest brought an elite, a military elite of people who mostly lived in the cities rather than in the villages. And they ruled over what was then in the Middle east, at least a mostly Christian population of cultivators, of peasants. And these peasants lived under this Muslim control. They adopted. Within three centuries, they adopted Arabic as their language. They spoke Arabic, perhaps they prayed in the local liturgical languages, but they spoke Arabic while retaining Christian identity. And for example, we have. How do we know this? We have, especially for Upper Egypt, the climatic conditions allowed for troves of papers. It's actually that time papyri, not yet paper that was survived from village communities, often in rubbish heaps, and then survived for a millennia. So when we actually find these troves of documents, sometimes hidden in jars or things like that, in Upper and Middle Egypt, we see that most of the names of the cultivators in these villages are Christian names, or specifically in Egypt, Coptic names. So these people were not on. And moreover, they didn't have a clan formation. Each of them paid. They were known to the government as a taxpayer. They didn't have a clan that organized them. They were a collection of villagers that lived in the same village, probably connected through marriage and so forth, but they did not have a collective identity. They were the people of that particular village, not members of a clan.
- [07:31]
A
So again, when we can talk about these peasants, what are they actually? Are they farmers? What rights do they have vis a vis the government? Again, when we talk about peasants, what do we mean by that term?
- [07:46]
C
Yes, so in this part of the world, in Egypt and Syria and Palestine, the main crop is wheat and barley. These are the main subsistence crops. And then you have other field crops as well, such as flax, let's say, or broad beans. And then you have some cultivation of coarse trees. And rice begins to be produced in the early Islamic centuries, coming from India. So this is what they cultivate in the early Islamic centuries. So from the 7th century onwards until the 10th century, we can see that especially the evidence comes from Egypt, we can see that these mostly Christian cultivators owned the land that they cultivated. They had some freeholding, and they paid taxes, sometimes through tax farmers, some kind of people who mediated between them and the Islamic authorities, but they paid taxes on the land that they actually own. The big change happens from the 11th century, and it's completely parallel to the shift to what we still call feudalism in Europe. This big shift is that from the 11th century onward, there is a regime of land holding that is known in the Middle east as iqtah. And this iqta system means that the government has now taken over, or as the sultan, the ruler has taken over all of the fields in the land, all the cultivated fields, and the cultivators become tenants, and they usually pay their taxes to some kind of a military officer who receives a village, let's say, or several villages, in some kind of grant from the government, and he collects, effectively lease payments from these cultivators that are no longer landholders, but now our tenants. And this is quite similar to what happens in Europe at the same time in Western Europe, in terms of the status of the cultivators. But in the Middle east, what I'M arguing in this book is that the shift from landowners to tenants also meant that the peasant communities reorganize themselves as more cohesive units in which the central person is a headman or several headmen usually, and they are the one who negotiate a lease for the lands of the village with the representative of the government. So this means that the headman are now the central people around which a new social formation is formed. This is no longer a collection of individual cultivators, but we can see that very clearly in their fiscal sources. Now they are representative of what they see as a clan, as a group that has a collective name that is not connected to the name of the village. Each clan like that is now occupying a village of several villages and then leases the lands of these villages from the government and pays a lease effectively rather than a tax on the cultivation of these lands.
- [11:55]
A
So, you know, actually, I mean, and I want to get into kind of the various ways that that peasants adopted this Arab identity. But when you're looking at the sources, actually, could you talk a bit more about kind of how you chose your sources and how you found evidence of this identity shift in the sources that you picked for this book?
- [12:18]
C
I think this is a history. And of course this is the most exciting bit. And I think we tend to write the history from the top, especially from the medieval period. We have chroniclers usually sitting in Cairo or Damascus and telling us the grand political history of sultans. And when they talk about the countryside, it's mainly about these highway robbers or people who make trouble. So the real challenge for historians, and the most exciting part, is indeed to write the history from below. So how can we do that? One good way is looking at tax documents. Of course they are written by the government or government officials, but they give us often a very detailed micro level account of the people who were living in villages, their identities and how they pay their taxes as reflected in the structure. For example, if you look, we have a wonderful collection of tax or legal documents from the 14th century Islamic court of Jerusalem. And there we have several, for example, several documents from one village near today's Ramallah. This is the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Today in this village we see that the headman of the village commit to pay the taxes of the village or the lease. As I said, it's the. And then they commit to cultivate the lands of the village. They commit to maintain peace and order, law and order. So we can use these tiny fragments of legal fiscal documents to tell, okay, these are the people who pay the taxes they paid it collectively, and they are named as members of an Arab clan. But we have also auto. Autobiographies and biographies of people who were born in rural areas. And they tell about the identity of the people who lived around them when they were born in a village, whether in the Delta in Egypt or in the Beqaa, which is today in Lebanon. We have also histories of tribes, but these histories of tribes are often organized geographically, so that we hear wheatly villages were occupied by wheatly clans. So together, these are sources that come from below that tell us not what people in the cities fought about the villages, but rather how villages represented themselves to the authorities, sometimes how they represent themselves in a literary form, in autobiography. And even if we have the very interesting collection of monastery in the Sinai, St. Catherine Monastery, very famous one, and that includes a lot of complaints and arrangements between the monks and local Arab tribes or clans. So there, even though it's coming from people who are usually opposed to the clans or not the clans themselves, they also tell us how the clans and the Arab population was seen at the local level rather than from the city. And I believe this is possible. I think a lot of people feel that it is impossible to write the history of medieval peasants or other marginal communities. I hope my book actually shows it is exciting and possible to work with many little fragments of evidence to create a picture of rural societies in a dynamic full way.
- [16:29]
A
So let's kind of talk about some of the various ways that this formation of Arab identity kind of grew. And I think one of the ways is through. Is through resisting. I think some of the changes that were happening kind of to peasant life, you know, and, like, did peasants kind of engage in resistance and kind of. How did that connect to identity formation?
- [16:54]
C
Yeah. So, Indeed, from the 13th century, we have major rebellions that are described by the chroniclers in the big cities in Cairo, let's say, as big Arab rebellions. So we're talking from 1250 to 1350, major rebellions that are, in fact, in Egypt specifically, that are, in fact, the most significant threats to the sultans of Cairo during that century. And those familiar with European history, of course, know that this is also the period of the great peasant rebellions in England or in France. And the reasons are, I do believe they are similar in that these are cultivators that are being reduced to the status of tenants subject to heavy taxation by a centralizing, in this case, a centralizing regime of the sultans of Cairo, the Mamluk sultans of Cairo. And the Arab identity is the way to mobilize the resistance to the government, to the taxation officials, it doesn't take. It takes a different form from what we see in England or in France. Here, the peasants do not identify in the rebellions as, first of all, Falachin or peasants. They are first of all identify as members of clans and of Arab tribes that come together to resist the government. And this, what is a clan or tribe? It is a method of mobilizing kingship ties, whether real or fictional, to create a sense of solidarity. And this is the use of the Arab identity in these major revolts. All the peasants who see themselves as Arabs, and I argue that in this period, most of the peasants of Egypt and Syria see themselves as Arabs. So peasants who see themselves as Arabs call upon each other in the name of this shared Arab identity to resist taxation, to resist what they see is unjust practices. And I did, and I would argue in, I argue in the book, that they are actually quite successful in that eventually, after 1350, after the major outbreak of the Black Death in 1350, the government, the Mamluk government, indeed with rose from the countryside. And some of these Arab clans and tribes assume power, effective de facto power in major parts of the Egyptian countryside, also in Palestine. And the representative of the government allow them to have effective autonomy in these areas. So this is how I see Arab identity as masking, in a way, if we look at the sources, when they talk about Arab rebellions, we are actually, we should understand them as peasant rebellions, but the peasants are using Arab ties of kingship and Arab solidarity to mobilize on a large scale against the government.
- [20:37]
A
And then how does Islam fit into this conversation? I mean, you know that at the beginning of this process, it's mostly Christian. And one assumes that by the end of this process they're mostly Muslim. But how does the, you know, did conversion to Islam come first? Did it come after the era by Dan? Like how. Where does the, where does the spread of Islam fit in here?
- [20:58]
C
This is the second major change of this period in which, as you say, the countryside becomes Muslim. It was not Muslim, let's say, by the 10th century. Not only I mentioned the names of cultivators, but also when we have archaeological surveys that are done today in Palestine, Israel, you see that churches, monasteries dominated the countryside up until the 9th, 10th centuries. And it is very different from the 13th century when you have village mosques, much more common, local shrines for Sufi or mystical saints. All of that is very clear, that the countryside became Muslim. I think that Islam comes before the Arab identity. So I think that what happens is that as these communities adopted Islam, and they adopted Islam for probably economic reasons, cultural reasons and so forth, the new converts want to erase their traces. After you converted from Christianity to Islam, your grandchildren don't want to be known as the children of Christians. They want to be known, and they prefer to be known as prestige members of our community, of the Muslim community. And the best way to achieve that is to claim lineage from the Arab conquerors, because Arabness has this value. Within the Islamic tradition, if a peasant family or clan is very powerful, it can claim descent from the Prophet himself, and they can be called saids or sharifs. Others, less powerful clans would claim descent from other branches of the tribes that participated in the conquest in the seventh century. Claims of lineage are not a reflection of actual historical memory. They are reflection of power relation in the here and now. This is an observation by anthropologists all around the world. The same happened in this era. Claims of Arab identity happened when communities of peasants who are now Muslims, wanted to erase the traces of conversion and wanted to raise their prestige within the. Within a Muslim society. And we have a lovely account from an autobiography of a Syrian, a man who eventually came to Cairo, but he had to leave his village when he was 12 and his father was murdered in a clash between villagers in his area not far from Damascus. And he tells us, we know that we are all part of the clan of Banu Hassan. I'm now trying to show that we are also descendants of one of the companions of the Prophet. It. And I would use my knowledge of the Islamic tradition to show that. So we can see how they're actively trying to find a lineage, to find a prestigious ancestry in order to promote their status in the here and now.
- [24:43]
A
You know, it's funny, you kind of talk about, like, people using Arab identity, I guess, to. Well, in that case, I guess to settle a dispute. You know, the other ways it seems like the Arab identity comes through is when, I guess the peasants are. Like when the peasants say we're Arab, which means we're not Turks, I guess we're in charge. Who became in charge kind of of this region over time. I mean, like, how much was this change driven? I guess, in terms of a negative reaction, so not a positive sense of we are this and we are this, but more we are not this and we are not the Turks who are ruling over us. I mean, how does that process play out?
- [25:24]
C
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And of course, I think we all know that we have multiple identities and Each one of us, and we are using them in different ways throughout our interactions with others. And often our identities are created, as you say, in reaction or are manifested in reaction to the opposing identities, to people who are in some kind of competition with us. In the case of these medieval, late medieval peasants, we have very nice accounts, for example, by an Italian resident of Alexandria in the 15th century who says, the big divide in Egypt is between the Turks and the Arabs. And the Arabs are the lords of the countrysides. That's what he says. And they say about the Turks, look, these Turks have no lineage. We Arabs are descendants of the Prophet and the Prophet nation. These Turks are not. And these Turks, most of them, are slaves who came from outside. Well, we are the people of the land. So this is another way to mobilize Arab identity as a way to oppose. The rule of the Turkish Mamluk Sultan. Mamluk military officers, or former slave Mamluk are former slaves in order especially to gain more autonomy in the countryside to pay less taxes. And we see this very clearly in these reports. The rebellions themselves are often, are being promoted in the name of anti Turkish sentiment. But I would say that it's more common for these communities to mainly focus about the ancestry as a way to promote their status within the wider Muslim order. This is not mainly anti Turkish, this is my finding in the book. It is mostly about promoting the status in Muslim society as well as claiming clan or forming clans that would help them in fiscal matters as well as in protection against other villages and in mobilizing against tax collection.
- [28:15]
A
And so, you know, at, at the end of this whole process, you know, at the end of the kind of centuries that you cover. So we know where we started kind of where. Where do we end up, you know, after all these changes have been made, you know, how are peasants in Egypt, peasants in Syria? How are they different from when they started this process, like two centuries ago? And, and, you know, and how, you know, is expressed in kind of what they wear, what they do. You know, what are peasants like when we come to the end of the historical period you cover in your book?
- [28:46]
C
Yeah, so indeed I cover in. I start from the 11th century and go up to the end of the 15th century. And I think the change is absolutely absolute transformation. Of course, as far as the crops go, the changes are not to be that large. Wheat and barley are still the main crops. There's more sugar at certain periods. But these are. There's no changes to the landscape as much as changes to the human landscape to the Way these societies organize. And in the end of the 15th century, the sources show that most villages and most peasants are Muslim. And in almost every village that had field crops, that every Muslim village with a Muslim population or Muslim majority that had field crop, majority of the villages they were identified, identified themselves as belonging to Arab clans, usually one clan per village. And they wanted to show that they are Arabs. So they would claim this ancestry, but they had also to perform it. You need to perform your identity. And we see that of course, today in our modern Bedouin communities, you see the performance of identity for wearing keffiyeh, which is now become a more widely spread symbol, or drinking finjans of coffee. These two items did not exist in the period I'm talking about. There were other ways of expressing and performing your Arab identity. And that was usually in the way you dress. So we have actually this is the illustration on the COVID of the book. You, those who identified as Arabs and those who wanted to identify as Arabs, just tucked the trail of the turban under the chin in a certain way. And we see that in the illustrations from the period that when an illustrator wanted to identify some type or some figure as Arab, they have a different way of tucking their turban. They don't look different in terms of the race, for example, or the color of the skin. Other ways was to pronounce certain words in a certain way, to have a dialect that could be identified as Arab. And we hear account of how Arabs pronounce the letter kaf, which they pronounced at the time as ga. And today also is identified as what we call today as a Bedouin dialect. And major scholars of the time say, look, if you want to sound like an Arab, you need to pronounce this letter in such a way so that people will think you're Arabic. And perhaps the most important thing in terms of literature, this is the time when you have the major, the appearance of the major popular epics in Arabic. And these epics are very popular to this day, but they only appear in the 12th century. They are, of course we have some manuscript of them from the 15th century, but of course they were orally transmitted and epics, and that's true for many civilizations, including the Chinese, which I know a bit, is that these epics, medieval epics, created a sense of community. And when villagers, peasants, were illiterate at the time, were listening to these stories, which often were set in pre Islamic or early Islamic Arabian peninsula, they learned how to be Arab, how to have the values that were associated with Arabness. Epics create communities, and this is their social function. And this is exactly what we see in the medieval period, you know, maybe.
- [33:00]
A
To kind of close things off. I mean, we, we. We've talked about kind of where, you know, where these peasants kind of ended up. And, you know, it's probably difficult to kind of jump all the way to kind of the modern era and talk about kind of, are there any res of this today? But I mean, do you still see kind of evidence of these shifts, these changes kind of in the modern era? I mean, now that Egypt and Syria are. I mean, they now very openly style themselves as Arab nations? You know, I mean, and even if not, I mean, do you think there's kind of something that you've learned in this process that can tell something about identity formation kind of more generally?
- [33:42]
C
Yeah, of course, we have these modern concerns in our mind. There are three things I would like to highlight, perhaps. One is the distinction between Bedouin and Arab today. Bedouin communities are minority communities, people who identify as Bedouin. They often call themselves Arab today. But in modern, especially Western languages, we tend to translate that into Bedouin precisely because we want to distinguish between Arab nationalism, which is based on mainly the Arab language, the Arabic language, and this pervasive clan structure. And Bedouin culture that is today is seen as distinct also by its practitioners or people who identify as Bedouin Here. I would say first that the Arab identity of the Middle Ages was wider than the Bedouin identity of today. So what we see is how Arab identity changes over time. It is. I think it's obvious that this is a social construction that depends on a wide range of factors, and it can expand and contract and change meaning over time for the Bedouin of today. What I think my book shows is, again, something that's been said a lot, but I think I show it historically as well, that Bedouin communities were often sedentary, had lands. And today a lot of Bedouin communities are driven out of their lands. And in Israel, it's very Israel, the state of Israel, it's very clear. But it's also in Arab nations around it. Bedouins are driven out of the lands, and they claim that they are nomads, and therefore they have no claim over, no permanent claim over their lands. So my book shows that even in the Middle Ages, people who identified as Arab, meaning which in many ways was similar to what we see as Bedouin today, had lived in villages. That the claim that because people identify as Bedouin, they have no rights to the lands that they are cultivating is A modern invention that is used very, in very arbitrary way and sometimes ruthless way against Bedouin communities. But my book is indeed about a wider issue of Arab identity. Arabness changes over time. And what my book hopefully shows that it can be more expansive, that it's not racial, it's not about coming from the Arabian Peninsula, it's about people adopting it, becoming part of his Arab identity, of his Arab solidarity over time. And this can change again. And perhaps my book can help show how this Arab identity can be expansive also in historical memory. And of course, Egyptians, Palestinians, these are the two main countries that appear in my book. They know that their history includes pre Arab and pre Muslim layers. This is not something they deny. It's just that often the way these layers connect to each other is not very clear. It's seen as opposing poles of their identity. While I hope that my book shows that there's some kind of continuum, that there could be a reconciliation between the pre Islamic and pre Arab identities and the longer history of these very ancient civilizations.
- [37:51]
A
So with that, I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Yossef Rappaport, author of Becoming the Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East. Joseph, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [38:15]
C
Thank you. So I have published books on medieval Islamic maps and I really enjoyed working on medieval Islamic maps. And these are available in mainly, I'm afraid, in hard copies. So very little it is straight online. But some of my articles about the peasants are found online through my webpage at Queen Mary University, London. My next project is to write a history of Palestine before the Zionist or Israeli Arab conflict. I want to write a history of Palestine in the Arab conflict after Jesus, after the Bible, after the Old New Testament, from the period from 300 to 1800, which will tell for general audiences, not only academics, a history of the land and how that area became what it is today through its material remains telling. A history that is often overlooked.
- [39:36]
A
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter Ick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asianreviewbooks.com and find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter @BookReviews Asia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more author reviews at the New books network and newbooksnetwork.com we're on all of your podcast apps, Apple podcasts, Spotify, rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends, support us interviewing those running in around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news and who's coming up on the show. But before then, Josef, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [40:08]
C
Thank you.