Summary
Nablus textile merchant (d. 1903/1904), great-grandson of Muhammad Arafat of the Arafat family, whose business practices at the end of the nineteenth century anchor the second half of Chapter 2 of Rediscovering Palestine: he bought primarily Syrian and British textiles through Beirut and Damascus, operated individually rather than in joint ventures, and diversified into soap by buying a factory from Mahmud Hashim (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1285-1365).
Details
- Six of his seven sons became textile merchants; his shops stood in Khan al-Tujjar and in the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya, and he also owned olive groves and was a soap manufacturer (Chapter 2, note 25) (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1231-1284, lines 1492-1686).
- His first wife, Aysha Arafat, bore Ahmad and Amr; Shaykh Amr married Wasfiyya Hashim, studied at al-Azhar and in Istanbul, worked as a judge in Nablus until 1912/1913, then built a soap factory and stayed in the soap business until 1950. His second wife, from the Sadder family, bore five sons (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1285-1365).
- Peasant letters to him preserved in the Arafat Family Papers order wedding and holiday Kiswa goods on credit — from Jaba village (April 7, 1901), from Uthman Abd al-Wahhab and from Sa’id Hajj Zubayda (April 24, 1900) — and his customer villages included Kafr Qaddum, Jaba, Tammun and Dayr Istiya (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1173-1230, lines 1366-1491).
- His big house in the Qaryun quarter lodged peasant customers, women upstairs and men on the ground floor, until it was demolished by the British during the 1936-1939 rebellion (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1366-1491).
- His youngest son Najib Arafat (b. 1901) recalled: “I worked with textiles since I opened my eyes” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1285-1365).
- The well-to-do Dayr Istiya peasant Hajj Ahmad Isma’il Abu Hijli addressed him as “my brother,” acted as his agent and his as Hajj Ahmad’s, and sent him a leopard skin as a gift on his purchase of a new horse (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1492-1556).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Arafat family, Khan al-Tujjar, Kiswa, Nablus