Book launch - Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East

During the later Middle Ages, peasants in Egypt and Greater Syria came to view themselves as members of Arab clans that had originated in the Arabian Peninsula. They expressed their Arab identity by wearing Arab headgear, adopting an Arab dialect, and circulating a new genre of popular epic that told heroic tales of pre-Islamic Arabia. In Becoming Arab, Rapoport shows that the widespread formation of Arab village clans in late medieval Egypt and Greater Syria was a gradual process, the result of mass rural conversion to Islam and a new landholding regime in which peasants shifted from being landowners to being tenants. After the eleventh century, Middle Eastern villagers were turning Arab. Challenging traditional historiography of the Middle East, Rapoport argues that the pervasive establishment of Arab village clans was the most important development in the history of the Middle Eastern countryside in the Islamic era.

Chair: Anna Chrysostomides (QMUL)

Discussants: Arezou Azad (Oxford), Mohamed Saleh (LSE)

To register please visit Eventbrite.