Yossef Rapoport is professor of Islamic history at Queen Mary University London, and author of Rural Economy and Tribal Society in Islamic Egypt (Brepols 2018).
Abstract: Like his teacher Ibn Khaldūn, al-Maqrīzī has been pre-occupied by the history and the representation of Arab tribesmen as political actors. On the one hand, he repeatedly views the ʿurbān as a threat to law and order and berates rulers who fail to suppress them. On other hand, the Arabs are seen as a link between contemporary Egyptian society and Islam’s origins in the Arabian Peninsula.
Al-Bayān wa’l-iʿrāb ʿan mā fī arḍ Miṣr min al-aʿrāb (“The Clear Arabic Expression regarding the Arab Tribes of Egypt”), completed in 841/1438, represents al-Maqrīzī’s fullest historical exploration of these conflicting approaches. In its form, the work follows a distinct Mamluk genre of administrative genealogy, with tribes listed according to their geographical location, province by province. Al-Maqrīzī traces the history of these sedentary Arab and Berber tribes, listing their lineage as well as the history of their settlement in their present locations.
Al-Maqrīzī’s conclusion is that the tribesmen who presently live in Egypt are not the descendants of the Arabs who came to Egypt during the conquest. Instead, most of these tribal groups first emerged in the Fatimid and the Ayyubid eras. This conclusion contradicted the self-representation of contemporary Arab tribesmen, who viewed themselves as heirs to the line of the Prophet and to the chivalrous values of pre-Islamic Arabia. While his Khiṭaṭ shows that the conquering Arabs stamped their mark on Fusṭāṭ, his Bayān denied rural Arabs their claim to superiority over urban elites.
This paper is based on our revised edition and a first modern translation of the Bayān.
