Co-translator and editor Yossef Rapoport, Ph.D. 2002.

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Plates and Maps

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1 Date and Audience

Chapter 2 Structure, Contents, and Terminology

Chapter 3 The Mamlūk Genealogical Genre

Chapter 4 Migration and Provincial Elites in the Bayān

Chapter 5 The Berber Tribes

Chapter 6 The Bayān and Ibn Ḫaldūn

Chapter 7 Al-Maqrīzī, the Arabs, and the Bayān

Chapter 8 Afterlife

Chapter 9 Manuscript Copies of the Bayān (in approximate chronological order)

Chapter 10 The Edition

Plates and Maps

Abbreviations and Symbols

Critical Edition and Translation of al-Maqrīzī's al-Bayān wa-l-I‘rāb ’an mā fī arḍ Miṣr min al-a‘rāb = The Book of Clear Arabic Expression Regarding the Arab Tribes of Egypt

Facsimile of MS Or. 560 (Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek), Fols.66 a –77 b.

Bibliography

List of Quoted Manuscripts

Indexes