Becoming Arab: a book launch.Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University of London)
When:
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Venue:
External
Book here (www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/yossef-rapoport-book-launch-becoming-arab-tickets-1987899032519)
Join us for the launch of Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab: The formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East (Princeton UP, 2025) to discuss 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)
Purchase Becoming Arab at 30% off with code P329 at press.princeton.edu
Venue: Maths Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London E1. Followed by a reception. The Maths Lecture Theatre is 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 (www.qmul.ac.uk/media/qmul/docs/about/Mile-End-campus-map.pdf).
Contact Katy at RSHC for information (k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk).
Supported by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between Birkbeck, University of London and Queen Mary University of London.
Contact name: Katy Pettit
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