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

How late medieval Middle Eastern peasants adopted Arab cultural identities, and formed village clansDuring 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, Yossef Rapoport argues that this proliferation of Arab village clans did not come about through mass migration and displacement but reflected an internal transformation.Drawing on extensive documentary, literary, administrative, and material evidence, 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 centu