Social Status and Marriage Patterns

The Arafats’ success or failure as textile merchants depended on their ability to reproduce and expand the networks that connected their family to peasants in the surrounding villages, as well as to artisans, small retailers, and powerful political, religious, and merchant families in the city. An honored position in society—or what might loosely be called cultural capital—was, in this context, as crucial as actual wealth, or material capital. Indeed, the two were organically linked, and to separate them would project current ideas about boundaries back in time. The linkage between cultural and material capital was essential to the continuity of merchant networks, because the reproduction of these networks depended on the construction of a history through shared memory of particular events, whether actually lived or invented. A peasant could, for example, ask for a loan from a particular merchant by recounting a story of an experience that their respective fathers had shared by way of affirming the tradition of mutual trust that had long bound their two families together. Connections based on tradition, whether real or not, were crucial to a business based on the extension of credit because most peasants, as shall be seen, paid their debts seasonally, at harvest time. Conversely, a merchant might recruit potential customers by highlighting his status as a pious, trustworthy, and dependable figure who enjoyed wide respect. This might ease a peasant’s fears about the security of the arrangement (“This merchant would not risk his reputation by cheating me”) and would provide him with essential contacts within the city (“This merchant can open doors for me.”)

In other words, cultural capital was the glue that held these networks together. The surest way for merchants to accumulate this type of capital was through the cultivation of religious status, whether by means of education, marriage into a well-known family of religious scholars, service in a mosque, charity to religious institutions, or membership in a Sufi order. Combining a religious career with a business career was the norm rather than the exception and had the aura of a time-honored tradition. The religion-trade connection was so deeply ingrained, in fact, that the very language of merchants was, and still is, heavily coded with religious phrases. This does not mean that religion was used cynically as a tool of manipulation. Rather, it served as a medium of communication that reinforced actual or perceived attitudes and behavior. The aim was not to encourage popularity as much as to instill authority and respect, on the one hand, and to build a sound reputation for piety, honesty, trustworthiness, and moral uprightness, on the other. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries many of the Arafat men, like members of other established merchant families, were educated religious scholars, as indicated by their titles in the family tree, depicted in Plate 6.^[50]

Charity (zakat) was also important: it was a religious duty incumbent upon any Muslim with means, and it fostered a reputation for caring and generosity. According to the (admittedly sympathetic) recollections of Saba Arafat, “My grandfather [Hajj Isma‘il] made a habit of providing dinner for all mourners of a bereaved family and their friends in the neighborhood…[and] my uncle Ahmad arranged for quantities of freshly baked bread to be given free to the poor every Friday. His son, Tawfiq, gave the poor in his neighborhood a banquet during [the Holy Month of] Ramadan. The latter custom was followed by a few other merchants in Nablus.”^[51]

Marriage alliances were key, as well. In the case of the Arafats, the dominant pattern was intrafamily marriage: as a general rule, Arafat men married Arafat women, or gave their daughters to other Arafat men. This protected the property and wealth of the family from fragmentation. This pattern was perhaps already in place in the eighteenth century, but it certainly was practiced in the nineteenth century, as the various court documents show in cases involving the sons and daughters of the four brothers.^[52]

When the Arafat men and women did marry outside the family, the choices showed a clear preference for those individuals who combined high religious status with ownership of soap factories and, to a lesser extent, involvement in the textile trade. Abd al-Razzaq, for example, married into both the Hanbali and the Fityan families.^[53] The Fityanis had a long tradition of involvement in the textile trade and were also known as a family of religious scholars. Some of its members, for example, served as superintendents of the Nasr Mosque’s waqf properties from at least the eighteenth century until the latter part of the nineteenth century.^[54] The Hashim branch of the Hanbali family, meanwhile, produced some of the top religious scholars in Nablus during the Ottoman period. At the same time, they maintained a long tradition of involvement in soap production (see Chapter 5). These two qualities, especially the latter, were shared by most of the other families with whom the Arafats established ties through marriage: Bashsha, Qadi-Shwayka, Shammut, Sadder, Tamimi, Tuffaha, and Bishtawi.^[55]

The reasons for these choices are fairly clear. The Arafats come from a long tradition of educated religious figures; hence their wish to ally with families that enjoyed similar status. It is interesting to note, however, that the number of Arafat shaykhs declined markedly during the middle of the nineteenth century while the title sayyid began to be applied to almost all of them. The title of sayyid indicated descent from the Prophet Muhammad and, during this period, designated that the individual was exempt from certain taxes. A number of wealthy merchant families acquired the title of sayyid for the first time during this period, and it is highly likely that their claim of descent from the Prophet was an invented one. In this regard, the Arafats’ connection to the Hanbali family, which dominated the post of naqib al-ashraf, probably proved helpful.^[56] Indeed, the Hashims received the largest share of exogenous marriages.^[57]

Alliances with soap merchants and manufacturers were also of great importance. There was a critical link between the export of soap and the import of textiles, and some members of the Arafat family belonged to this privileged elite of soap merchants and manufacturers. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that marriage patterns and business relations of the first two or three generations who adopted the family name Arafat, inasmuch as they married outside the family, favored those merchant households whose primary regional trade networks were concentrated in Egypt—such as the Balbisi (originally from the town of Bilbays, in Egypt), Kawkash, Ghazzawi, Jardani, Bishtawi, Jurri, Darwish-Ahmad, Hanbali, Tamimi, and Tuffaha, among others. Until the 1840s Egypt was still the primary source of imported textiles. It was also the largest market for Nabulsi soap—and had been so since Mamluk times, if not much earlier. Not surprisingly, therefore, these merchants constituted a network of their own: their members had joint business ventures, were co-owners of urban commercial real estate, and frequently served as each others’ legal agents and witnesses.^[58]