“I bought her and I named her”: Names, Ethnicity and the Experience of Enslavement In Mamlūk Society This paper is about the naming and re-naming of female slaves, whose natal names and ancestries had been erased, with unstable, non-Muslim, often non-human slave names, specific to categories of skin color. The profound implications of the formula, “I bought her and I named her,” become all that more significant when contrasted with the ritualized naming of the freeborn Muslim infant with an Islamic name. The names of female slaves, the Jewels and Gazelles, often described as “fanciful,” have been taken for granted in the literature. I approach the naming and renaming of female slaves rather as an aspect of what Orlando Patterson described as the “social death” of enslavement. Since my spotlight is on female slaves and the specificity of their experience of enslavement, the Yāqūts and Jawhars remain, for the moment, in the background. My research is grounded in a range of sources: biographical dictionaries, chronicles, certificates of audition (samāʿāt), and documents of pious foundation (waqfīyyas). All slaves in Mamlūk society were placed into two overarching categories of skin color: “white” and “black”, the latter including “black,” “brown” and “mulatta” (muwallada). Complex systems of subcategories of geographic/ethnographic classifications were subsumed under “white” and “black.” These categories and subcategories served to imagine and to organize the enslaveable non-Muslim “other” as did the names that were assigned to them, names divided into two separate pools of “white” and “black” slave names. Unlike the names of the freeborn, these names, at least the names of the “black” female slaves I have researched, were unstable. A Gazelle could become a Nightingale and then a Jewel. Her slave name did not become her own until she died or was manumitted. Naming is a serious business in any society. In Medieval Muslim societies, the name was an open book for anyone to read. So in a sense, my work runs counter to the title of Jacqueline Sublet’s Le Voile du Nome, the most serious study of Arabic names and naming to date. The names of slave women are often the only record we have of them. Their slave names, in the very instability and marginality of their naming, have much to tell us about the experience of enslavement.