Yosef Rapoport, “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, 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 century, Rapoport contends, Middle Eastern villagers were turning Arab.
These Arab village clans were not merely administrative regimes imposed from above; villagers enthusiastically embraced their new identities. New converts to Islam adopted Arab lineages to claim status and as a counter-identity to urban-based Turkish elites. Arab identity was used by clans to mobilize rural uprisings against the ruling sultans and to resolve disputes among villagers. Challenging traditional historiography of the Middle East, which views Arab clansmen as pastoralists whose identity separated them from that of the wider peasantry, 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.
“A potentially field-changing book that will appeal to a wide audience of scholars working on rural history, ethnicity, and the Middle East.” – Adam Sabra, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Becoming Arab presents a paradigm-shifting argument that challenges traditional perspectives of early Islamic conquest, migration, and displacement. It does so very successfully by proposing a model of gradual transformation and, particularly since the beginning of the second millennium, of social reconstruction to explain the dominant presence of Arab identities in the Middle East.” – Jo Van Steenbergen, Ghent University
“This groundbreaking work, rich in evidence, is essential reading for anyone interested in identity formation in the Islamic Near East and its socioeconomic underpinnings.” – Ahmad Al-Jallad, author of The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia
Yossef Rapoport is professor of Islamic history at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society; Rural Economy and Tribal Society in Islamic Egypt; and Islamic Maps.
Published (US): Nov 18, 2025
Published (UK): Jan 13, 2026
Copyright: 2025
Pages: 368
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691210636/becoming-arab