ABSTRACT
For very few periods in Islamic history do we possess such an abundance of historical sources, such a mass of first-rate records, documents and texts as for the history of Egypt under the Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasty. In subjecting even a part of this vast Arabic source material to an analysis and investigation, to a thorough search for economic and social data, we meet frequently and repeatedly with the term KarimI, which is used mostly in connection with and as a qualification of a merchant and occurs mainly in the form of "tajir al-Karimi", or, in plural, "tujjar al-Karim."1)
This term, KarimI, which has no meaning in Arabic, remains still unexplained and has thus far defied any attempt at a satisfactory and acceptable solution. The suggestion to explain the word as a designation of the very commodity in which the merchants did specializenamely, pepper and other spices-does not hold ground2); nor does the explanation that KarimI is to be regarded as a corrupt form of the word "Kanem", the name of a territory inhabited by Negro tribes in the West Sudan.3) This latter suggestion, though accepted by E. Quatremere4) over a century ago and then by other European scholars5) and has since then entered the Arabic dictionaries,6) is also untenable. Nothing in the sources -supports such an explanation and everything speaks against it, since the merchants who were designated as "KarimI" did
1) Ibn Battuta uses the rather strange plural form akarim; see later Note. 2) E. Littmann refers to the Amharic Kuararimd as a possible ethymology
(Orientalia, Vol. 8, Rome, 1939, p. 176); see E. Blochet's reference to the Assyrian word Karkuna "ambre jaune" (Revue de POrient Latin, Vol. 8, iyoo/ 1901, p. 540).
