The Making of a Family Name

One of the difficulties of tracing family histories through documentary evidence during this period is that family names were not used by the overwhelming majority of the population, especially peasants. Usually, a male was referred to as x son of y; his son, as z son of x; and so on.^[39] Only the high-ranking political and religious families—such as Tuqan, Nimr, Jarrar, Jayyusi, Hanbali, Jawhari, Smadi, and Bustami, to mention a few—could boast of stable family names over the centuries. The middle and lower-middle classes, such as merchants and respected artisans, had a more complicated relationship with family names, because family names were, in a sense, a form of property whose value depended on the intimate connections between physical space, economic fortune, social standing, and cultural practices of the household.

The Arabic word for household, dar, refers both to an extended family and to an actual physical space. The latter was typically a building with high, thick walls facing the alleyways and streets. A narrow entrance led to an open courtyard ringed by several rooms (bayt, pl. buyut), each of which housed a nuclear family. Usually, income and resources were thrown together into one pot; and each nuclear family, headed by a son or younger brother of the patriarch, pitched in according to its capabilities and took out according to its needs. Each major life event, such as birth, marriage, or death, brought about a subtle shift in the internal balance among the family members; and the whole household would be restructured to reflect the new realities.^[40]

Households were under continuous pressure to reproduce a strong male line, in order to increase their wealth and social standing, maintain their unity, and concentrate their resources for business opportunities and other needs. This required discipline and loyalty to the collective, most often accomplished at the expense of the individual—especially female members, who were married off to cement new alliances and/or were sometimes deprived of their inheritance through various legal or illegal means in order to prevent the dispersal of the household’s wealth. The property of children not in their majority at the time of their father’s death, as well as of younger brothers in general, was sometimes appropriated by elders concerned with protecting the integrity of the household. The elders’ actions could also be interpreted at times as part of an agenda for increasing their own personal standing within the family and outside it.^[41]

As a rule, the coming and going of family names reflected the growing or fading fortunes of these households. Some family names disappeared, others were created by upstarts, and some were appropriated by poor folk who wished to attach themselves to a more powerful household.^[42] More often than not, however, family names fell victim to the household members’ very success in expanding their size and wealth; that is, the spawning of vigorous new branches which split off under a new family name.^[43]

The Arafats are such a case. Abd al-Razzaq Arafat’s grandfather, Shaykh Hajj Abd al-Majid, and his two paternal granduncles, Shaykh Salim and Salih (d. 1724), were referred to as “sons of al-Shahid” (awlad al-shahid) in the Islamic court records after their father, Ahmad al-Shahid.^[44] The origin of this family name, al-Shahid, is not known, but the facts that the name means “witness” and that most men in the al-Shahid family were religious shaykhs and/or respected callers-to-prayers (mu’adhdhinin) suggest that the original patriarch and perhaps his sons were frequent witnesses in the daily cases brought before the Islamic court. In any case, a waqf endowment and a hikr (lease) document, both transacted in 1737, indicate that the al-Shahid sons—one of whom was a grandfather of Abd al-Razzaq Arafat—had earlier lived in a single household in the Qaryun quarter and that additional rooms were built as the family expanded.^[45] To maintain the integrity of the household while it expanded outward, the three brothers endowed the entire property, identified in the court register as “the al-Shahid household” (dar al-Shahid), as a joint private family waqf, though they did not necessarily continue to live there. By the mid- to the latter part of the eighteenth century, Abd al-Razzaq’s father, Arafat son of Abd al-Majid (who, in turn, was a son of Ahmad al-Shahid), had already established his own household in the Yasmina quarter and, before his death, had endowed it as a waqf for the benefit of his male and female children.^[46]

The endowment of a household’s physical space usually indicates a watershed in a household’s restructuring as a result of a leap in family fortunes. There is no doubt that Arafat al-Shahid, Abd al-Razzaq’s father and already a hajj by the 1720s, had made such a leap.^[47] One need only mention that he fathered four very successful sons, who built on the family’s tradition by combining wealth with high religious and social status.^[48] All four came to be called in the Islamic court registers the “sons of Arafat.” In adopting the family name Arafat, taken from their father’s first name, Abd al-Razzaq and his brothers followed the normal practice of the times.

The key point here is that their sons and grandsons consciously decided not to follow normal practice of adopting the father’s first name as a family name. Rather, they defined themselves as part of the Arafat family by adopting that word as their family name regardless of their father’s first name. By so doing, they signaled the introduction into the larger community of a new family in the larger meaning of the word; that is, not just a kinship unit but also an economic, political, and social one. This was also an act of exclusion: by maintaining the family name Arafat, they signaled their successful branching off from the other descendants of “the sons of al-Shahid,” although they were part of the same kinship unit.^[49] In a sense, this was a declaration of intent on their part to draw boundaries within which family members were expected to cooperate and work in tandem on a range of social and economic issues through kin solidarity.