Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat

Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat was a wholesale textile merchant in Nablus, Palestine that upon his death had a large debt. To pay off the creditors, a carefully detailed inventory of his belongings was drawn up, and some of the items mark the contours of regional and local trade networks of a typical textile merchant in Nablus during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat was a textile merchant, as were his three brothers. This concentration almost surely means that their father was also a textile merchant, for one‘s line of work, as a general rule, passed from father to son. Most likely, the textile connection went farther back, because their father‘s paternal cousin, Shaykh Sulayman al-Shahid, traded in textiles and had a shop in Khan al-Tujjar.

Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat died bankrupt in December 1810, leaving behind a wife, thirteen children, and a large debt. To pay off the creditors, a carefully detailed inventory of his belongings was drawn up and registered in the Nablus Islamic Court. A close look reveals some interesting items: 82 coffee cups in his home; 65 varieties of textile products in his warehouse (hasil); the names of 102 individuals who owed him small amounts of money, including 39 peasants from at least 20 different villages; and a short list of individuals, mostly soap producers, to whom he owed large amounts of money.

These items mark the contours of regional and local trade networks of a typical textile merchant in Nablus during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, a significant proportion of the 65 types of textiles were locally manufactured, but the bulk was imported from two places: Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Damascus. These two places had long been the primary destinations for Nabulsi soap, and it was not a coincidence that Abd al-Razzaq Arafat died indebted to soap producers. He, like other wholesale textile merchants, financed his imports partly by purchasing soap in Nablus and selling it in Egypt or Damascus.

As to the 39 peasants, it is very likely that each, at one time or another, had stayed a night or two at Abd al-Razzaq Arafat‘s house after spending long hours in his shop choosing wedding wardrobes. Equally likely, they sipped coffee from his 82 cups while they joyfully celebrated the evening away—the payment postponed until harvest season. As shall be seen, the provision of food and lodging were only a small part of a complex of extra economic relations cultivated by merchants in order to construct and reproduce the local trade and clientele networks that literally carved the hinterland into geographic spheres of influence and that were passed from father to son.