The Mafia-Antimafia Seesaw

Abstract

Scholars dispute the origins of the word mafia although it is generally thought to have entered the Italian language during the Arab occupation of Sicily in the ninth century AD. It may be derived from ma afir, the name of an Islamic tribe which dominated Palermo in the period. The word mahias meant ‘arrogant’ or ‘insolent’; mahà signified stone cave, while mafie were caves of volcanic rock between Trapani and Marsala used by the Arabs in the eleventh century to flee from Norman oppression, hence an Arabic word for ‘place of refuge’. In fifteenth-century Tuscany a malfusso meant a petty criminal, while mafia or maffia in Florentine dialect signified poverty and misery. In Sicilian dialect mafiusu or marfusu was widely used to mean an arrogant person, with overtones of manliness or bravado. The first documented appearance of the word as an organized band of delinquents was in 1863 when a play called I mafiusi di la Vicaria di Palermo — about the escapades of a criminal band in Palermo’s Vicaria prison — opened to popular success in the city and was taken on a national tour to equal acclaim.¹ In 1865 the word made its first official appearance when a Sicilian police officer registered the arrest of a suspect on the charge of complicity in a Mafia crime, ‘un delitto di mafia’.² Those who belong to the organization do not in fact call themselves Mafia but Cosa Nostra, (our thing) and its members ‘men of honour’ or ‘men of respect’.³