Yossef Rapoport Book Launch: Becoming Arab:

How late medieval Middle Eastern peasants adopted Arab cultural identities and formed village clans

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)

The event is supported by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between Birkbeck, University of London and Queen Mary University of London.

Purchase Becoming Arab at 30% off with code P329 at press.princeton.edu

The discussion will be followed by a reception at the Mathematics building foyer, 6.30 - 7.30.

The event will take place in the Maths Lecture Theatre, on the ground floor of the Mathematics building on Mile End Road. The Mathematics building is indicated as number 4 on the Mile End campus map found here: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/qmul/docs/about/Mile-End-campus-map.pdf

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