@article{TEXTUAL,
      recid = {5403},
      author = {Rapoport, Yossef},
      title = {The Rise of Provincial Arab Ruling Families in Mamluk  Egypt, 1350–1517},
      publisher = {The Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC)},
      journal = {Mamlūk Studies Review},
      address = {2022},
      number = {TEXTUAL},
      abstract = {The fifteenth century was an age of Arab power in the  Egyptian countryside. During the final century of Mamluk  rule, Arab or Berber groups acquired power and authority in  most provinces of the Delta and Upper Egypt, and become  more visible to us than in previous centuries, both in  chronicles and in biographical dictionaries. Arab elite  families were also the beneficiaries of more iqṭāʿ grants  and acted as officials of the Mamluk state, in some places  replacing the kāshifs or governors. Their status was  endorsed by the Ottoman conquerors, who formalized the key  role of Arab and Berber ruling houses in provincial  administration. This rise in the power of provincial Arab  elites is well known but has not yet received a systematic  study. While scholarship acknowledges that many Arab groups  were engaged in sedentary cultivation and that Arab houses  were co-opted into Mamluk bureaucracy, it still views them  as chiefly pastoralist and opportunistic. The Arabs are  seen as preying on the weakness of the Mamluk state, as  opposed to settled agriculture, and as a cause of economic  and political decline. This essay follows the rise of Arab  and Berber provincial houses in Egypt from 1350 up to the  end of Mamluk period. It makes three broad arguments that  seek to better integrate the history of the Arab and Berber  elites within wider trends in fifteenth-century Mamluk  history. First, I argue that the Arab families that came to  power in the fifteenth century emerged from within the  peasantry, either as the armed elements of village society  or landless peasants who lost their tenancy rights. Second,  I argue that the prominence of provincial Arab and Berber  ruling families in the fifteenth century should be seen as  coming on the heels of a series of earlier major Arab  revolts against Mamluk rule, mainly—but not exclusively—in  Upper Egypt, with mass peasant participation. Third, I  argue that the rise of Arab elite families was a side  effect of the decline of the iqṭāʿ regime in Egypt. The  fifteenth century saw a sharp drop in the number of  villages given out as iqṭāʿ, and a steep rise in the number  of villages either endowed as waqf or handed over to the  sultan’s private fisc. When the iqṭāʿ regime was in its  heyday, between 1250 and 1350, the officers of the Mamluk  army went out to the countryside to collect the land tax  directly, bypassing the need for a large provincial  bureaucracy and garrisons. After 1350, and especially from  the beginning of the fifteenth century, Mamluk power in  large parts of the Egyptian countryside was increasingly  limited. Instead, the state often devolved provincial  powers to Arab ruling families, in an admission of Mamluk  inability to collect taxes in several provinces in Upper  and Lower Egypt. Arab elites, brutally suppressed in the  first century of Mamluk rule, were now indispensable for  maintaining control and delivering agricultural surpluses.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/5403},
}