Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about how the institution functioned; who became enslaved, how did the slave trade work; how were its victims treated? Craig Perry seeks answers to those questions by delving deeply into the Cairo Geniza, a trash repository which by serendipity preserves for us tens of thousands of private, legal and commercial documents from the 11th-12th centuries. With these, he comes to a number of surprising conclusions about the workings of medieval slavery in the lands of Islam.
Middle East
Historians are usually loath to ask “what if?”, but in The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Georgetown’s Mustafa Aksakal gets close.
Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait in 1983, of an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father, whose own mother, a Christian, was displaced to Beirut at the formation of Israel. He was raised between various countries, including Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Before he published his first novel he worked as an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in conflict zones from Yemen to Syria and Iraq. He is also queer. Various biographical strands thus combine to make him more qualified than most to explore the maxim: the personal is political.
Where does Greece belong? Many look at the ancient Greek ruins of Athens, and see the cradle of Western civilization. But much of Greece’s history actually looks eastward to the rest of the Mediterranean: to Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Palestine. In his book The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East, Sean Mathews argues that it’s best to think about Greece as belonging to the “Near East”—and doubly so with today’s more complicated geopolitics.
Back in the (pre-EU) day, the American Government and US corporations would place Greece into a Middle Eastern or Near Eastern department; I seem to recall my 1980s-era employer doing so, to the (mild) annoyance of its Greek distributor. Europe was more tightly-defined in those days.
In Egypt’s eastern province, the annual Arabian Horse Festival celebrates the deep historical connection between the province, the Arabian horse, and the settlement of Bedouin tribes in Egypt during the 7th century. Except that, according to Yossef Rapoport’s new book, Becoming Arab, this perceived connection doesn’t represent a historical event, but rather a lengthy process of ethnogenesis. For the conquering Arab armies settled in the cities of Egypt, not in the countryside, where Islam remained a minority religion for centuries. Yet today, many Egyptians consider themselves scions of ancient Arab tribes, just as they see their horses as pure blood Arabs. How and when did this Arab identity take hold in Egypt?
The Assassins and the Templars: two groups that are now part of popular legend–and not just because of Assassin’s Creed, the massive video game franchise starring the former as its heroes, and the latter as its villains.
In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western India and, eventually, back to the Gulf. Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still.
Slavery has been a ubiquitous practice throughout much of world history–and the Muslim world was no exception. Slave soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs can be found throughout Muslim writings—which, as Justin Marozzi points out in his book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, ends up giving us a selective and narrow view of who slaves were, and what they did.
The Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) is a literary festival and cultural event for the general public, but it is preceded each year by the Sharjah Publishers Conference, a rights marketplace and networking opportunity for publishers from around the globe.
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