Al-Bayān wa’l-iʿrāb ʿammā fī arḍ Miṣr min al-aʿrāb is an influential treatise on the Arab and Berber groups that inhabited the Egyptian countryside in the late medieval period. The work brings together al-Maqrīzī’s life-long preoccupation with the history of Egypt and his parallel interest in the history of the Arabs, pitting the lineage-based ideology of Arab rebels against the Mamluk elite of manumitted slaves. Over the past century, the Bayān has been repeatedly deployed in public debates about the Arab identity of Egypt. This book offers a critical study of the treatise in its fifteenth century context, an academic edition, and a first translation into English.
Lahcen Daaïf, Ph.D. (2004), is research fellow in Islamic studies at the laboratory of Ciham (CNRS)/Lyon 2. He has published several articles including: “A Mamluk legal document” Anlisl. (2014) and “The barā'a: reflections on the function and evolution of the structure of the receipt” AnIsl (2017).
Yossef Rapoport, Ph.D (2002), is Professor of Islamic History at Queen Mary University London. He has published on Islamic legal history, medieval Islamic maps and the peasantry of the Islamic Middle East, including Rural Economy and Tribal Society in Islamic Egypt (Brepols, 2018).
Acknowledgments List of Plates and Maps Abbreviations
Introduction
1
Date and Audience
2
Structure, Contents, and Terminology
3
The Mamlūk Genealogical Genre 1 Al-ʿUmarī
4
Migration and Provincial Elites in the Bayān 1 The History of Arab Migration to Egypt
2 The Arab Rebellion of the Šarīf Ḥiṣn al-Dīn Ṯaʿlab
3 Arab and Berber Provincial Elites: Awlād al-Kanz and the Hawwārah
5
The Berber Tribes
6
The Bayān and Ibn Ḫaldūn
7
Al-Maqrīzī, the Arabs, and the Bayān
8
Afterlife 1 Printed Editions
2 The
Bayān in the Contemporary Arab World
9
Manuscript Copies of the Bayān (in approximate chronological order)
10
The Edition
Plates and Maps
Abbreviations and Symbols
Critical Edition and Translation of al-Maqrīzī’s al-Bayān wa-l-iʿrāb ʿan mā fī arḍ Miṣr min al-aʿrāb
Bibliography List of Quoted Manuscripts Index of Names (People and Places) Index of Technical Terms Index of Sources in al-Bayān wa-l-iʿrāb ʿan mā fī arḍ Miṣr min al-aʿrāb Facsimile of MS Or. 560 (Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek), Fols.66a–77b
All interested in Mamluk historiography, the medieval history of Egypt, and the Arab and Berber groups that inhabited the Egyptian countryside in the late medieval period.