ISAP Online Public Evening Lecture: Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University London): The ʿĀʾidh Bedouin of the Sinai: Monks, Sultans and Tribesmen in St Catherine’s Documents (1169 - 1250)

Zoom link: https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/j/96836880994?pwd=V0dNR3ZYVFFMc1BrYlRMcmRRMHoxZz09

16 March 2021, 20:00 h (CET)

St Catherine’s Monastery holds over a thousand decrees, petitions and legal documents from the late Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. Prominent among these documents are petitions filed by the monks against infringements by local Arabs of the ʿĀʾidh tribal group. Modern historians tended to see these petitions as reflecting a perennial Bedouin threat, a product of the natural environment and of a nomadic way of life.

This view of the ʿĀʾidh tribal group doesn’t holds up. A close examination of the St Catherine corpus shows that the ʿĀʾidh were in fact a product of Ayyubid bureaucratic and security practices, a state-sponsored intervention rather than primordial pastoralist outlaws. The ʿĀʾidh appear to be newcomers to the Sinai Peninsula, and are not mentioned in any Fatimid-era documentary or narrative sources. The first references to a Bedouin threat coincide with the transition to Ayyubid rule in 1169, when the monks describe the ʿĀʾidh as ʿurbān, Arab auxiliary forces, and as muwalladūn, or half-caste. These first references to the ʿĀʾidh coincide with Saladin’s establishment of the fort of Ṣadr (Qalʿat al-Guindi), a site whose occupation history is well known through major excavations. Documents from the following century record the presence of ʿĀʾidh muqaddams, or auxiliary officers, at the monastery, and narrative sources confirm that the ʿĀʾidh were employed to guard the road to Ayla/Aqaba through central Sinai. Genealogical treatises, however, take note of the ʿĀʾidh only towards the end of the thirteenth century, and reveal considerable confusion about their lineage.

Instead of viewing the ʿĀʾidh as a timeless feature of the desert, the St Catherine corpus allows us a unique opportunity to trace the emergence of a new tribal group. Introduced to the Sinai by Saladin as auxiliary forces, the ʿĀʾidh were first seen as half-caste, and had no evident lineage to any major tribal confederacy. They were only incorporated into the Arab genealogical tree after a century of continuous employment by the Ayyubid and Mamluk sultans, a tribe manufactured by royal administration. The demise of the Mamluk empire leads to the disappearance of the ʿĀʾidh from Ottoman-era records, and their replacement by tribal groups that inhabit southern Sinai today, including the Jebeliya.

This keynote lecture is part of the Connecting Distant Worlds: The International Society for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP) Online Conference (Online, 15-18 March, 2021) more.

Access is free. If you did not install Zoom or do not wish to install Zoom, open the link given, answer "zoom.u.app open?" with Reject and instead choose the option "register with browser". Directly from Zoom: Meeting-ID: 968 3688 0994, code: 366097. Mac users do not use Firefox, but any other browser.