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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Description: Today, much of the Middle East is āArabāāan identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest?ļ»æ
Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his bookĀ Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle EastĀ (Princeton UP,Ā 2025),Ā makes a different argument: That the regionās medieval peasants adopted the Arab identity in response to shifting political power, changing land rights, and the spreading Muslim faith.ļ»æ
Professor Yossef Rapoport of Quee...