Summary
A Nablus family of textile merchants whose experience over more than a dozen generations is the case study of Chapter 2 of Beshara Doumani’s Rediscovering Palestine: they catered primarily to the peasant mass market of Jabal Nablus, built their trade on culturally reproduced local and regional networks, and branched off from the al-Shahid family in the eighteenth century by fixing Arafat as a hereditary family name (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1173-1284). The family is stated in the book to have no relation to Yasir Arafat (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 207-233).
Details
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The textile line runs from Ahmad al-Shahid (late seventeenth-early eighteenth centuries) through his great-grandson Abd al-Razzaq Arafat (d. 1810) and Abd al-Razzaq’s three brothers, all textile merchants; Sayyid Sa’id Arafat (d. 1847), Kamal al-Din Arafat (twice mayor of Nablus, 1912 and 1915) and Tawfiq Arafat, still Nablus’s largest textile merchant as late as 1960, continued it (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1231-1284).
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The strongest line descends from Muhammad Arafat through his great-grandson Hajj Isma’il Arafat, six of whose seven sons became textile merchants working from two large stores in the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1231-1284).
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The family branched off from the “sons of al-Shahid” (awlad al-shahid): Arafat son of Abd al-Majid established his own household in the Yasmina quarter and endowed it as a waqf; his sons were called the “sons of Arafat,” and their descendants consciously kept Arafat as a fixed family name regardless of the father’s name, signalling a new family in the economic, political and social sense (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1231-1284).
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The dominant marriage pattern was intrafamily, protecting property from fragmentation; outside marriages preferred partners combining high religious status with soap-factory ownership — the Hanbali and Fityan families among them — and favored merchant households whose regional trade networks concentrated on Egypt, including the Balbisi, Kawkash, Ghazzawi, Bishtawi, Hanbali, Tamimi and Tuffaha families (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1231-1284).
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In the mid-nineteenth century the number of Arafat shaykhs declined markedly while the title sayyid was applied to almost all of them; Doumani says the family’s claim of descent from the Prophet, like that of a number of wealthy merchant families then, was highly likely invented (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1231-1284).
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Their peasant customer villages shifted over time: Abd al-Razzaq’s came primarily from Kafr Qaddum, Jamma’in, Til and Ya’bad; Hajj Isma’il’s included Kafr Qaddum, Jaba, Tammun and Dayr Istiya (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1366-1491).
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Credit risk ran both ways: Abd al-Razzaq died bankrupt in December 1810, and two of Hajj Isma’il’s sons also went bankrupt, unable to collect from peasants (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1173-1230, lines 1366-1491).
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The family produced Nablus’s first professionally trained doctor (Nu’man Sa’id), pharmacist (Nur al-Din Sa’id) and architect (Tawfiq Abd al-Fattah), all educated in Istanbul early in the twentieth century, according to Saba Arafat as cited in Chapter 2’s notes (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1492-1686).
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Muhyi al-Din Arafat, nephew of Abd al-Razzaq Arafat, shifted his resources from textiles to soap in the later 1820s, buying the Hallaqiyya soap factory from Asa’d Beik Tuqan for 6,000 piasters in December 1829 and houses above it for 4,500 piasters in March 1830; his wife Ruqayya’s 27,431-piaster loan of September 14, 1835 made her legal owner, but her January 1847 suit to invalidate his 1840 sale of the property to Yusuf Zayd Qadri for 50,000 piasters failed on two male witnesses’ testimony (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3891-3984).
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Muhyi al-Din Arafat is listed among the leaders of the soap-manufacturer’s guild in 1839, classed among the merchant-family infiltrators who finally acquired factories after many years in the soap trade (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 4101-4215).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Hajj Isma’il Arafat, Khan al-Tujjar, Kiswa, Nablus, Jabal Nablus