In the late nineteenth-century, Benghazi, along with other port cities in the African Slave Trade, became a site in which British representatives and local Ottoman officials collided over the fate of captured or runaway slaves. Such disputes always found their way to the higher echelons of the state bureaucracy and produced a network of documentation. In this paper, I look closer to the practices of documentation in the Ottoman archives. Rather than seeing diplomatic disputes between the British and the Ottomans as instances of diplomatic maneuvering, I see them as practices that mediate a culture of imperial rule. During the nineteenth century, diplomacy became a standard tool for the Ottomans to protect the empire against both internal and external threats. A similar case exists on the issue of slavery and slave-trade as well. In my paper, I take the case of a report written by the local authorities in Benghazi that refutes the British accusations. The back and forth movement of information between the imperial capital and Benghazi is not only about the production of imperial know-how; it is also about the creation of imperial subjectivities. By critically interrogating the ways in which documents are produced, classified, disseminated and stored in the Ottoman bureaucracy, I see archive not as a place in which truth is revealed but as a critical space in which truth is fought over. Hence, it is crucial to dissect the myriad ways knowledge is documented. To do so, I propose to watch for the language called for in such instances closely. Colonial studies have taken a keen interest in such processes of knowledge production in other contexts. In doing so, they have illustrated how power is lodged in relations between the governor and the governed. Such undertakings, most importantly, have tried to analyze the specific regimes of truth that govern what can be said and not said, that govern what fact and fiction are. I read these regimes of truth by looking at how a specific network of documentation (Ottoman) crisscrosses another one (British); how the presentation of the self, and the performance of being Ottoman and Muslim, find expression in the differing concerns and comportments of the state officials in Istanbul and Benghazi.

Tracking the Islamic diaspora in the antebellum United States has revealed notable instances of enslaved Muslim men who were literate in Arabic; however, no such evidence yet has been attributed to enslaved Muslim women. As a result, no systematic study of the presence of women of Islamic heritage in North America exists. This paper addresses their erasure and documents their probable presence through the digital documentation of nearly 50 girls and women named “Fatima,” after the Prophet’s daughter (d. 633). Despite orthographical variation, this feminine moniker appears frequently in three databases: “The Race and Slavery Petitions Project,” “The Afro-Louisiana Genealogy and History Database,” and the “ProQuest Law and Slavery Database.” Attested as a popular name in the Islamic world – and West Africa, where it is frequently attested among “African Names” in the “Slave Voyages” database, this feminine nomenclature survived the Middle Passage. This study proves that enslaved women named Fatima may be found in North America from 1774 to 1862. (For example, George Washington’s 1774 list of “taxable items” from his plantation records in writing the presence of both a “Fatimer” and a “Little Fatimer,” an enslaved mother-daughter duo.) However, the name of the Prophet’s daughter appears more frequently in digital plantation records and also among digitized petitions for manumission – and even self-emancipation. This is a first attempt at a larger digital project, which recovers where and when the power of Islamic naming survived as a form of agency among this enslaved female religious minority. On three large plantations two women named Fatima co-existed, a probable sign of mother-daughter linkages, which echoes the enslaver Washington’s precedent – and attests to maternal Muslim control in the naming of enslaved children. In Louisiana, the name Fatima (or in the original French language records, “Fatime”) proved popular among free women of color in New Orleans, where 38 women so-named existed. And, in 1862, a Fatima/Fatimey Milton signed official papers with her “X” to emancipate herself, just eleven days after it became legal to do so in Washington, D.C. Her petition, recorded by a clerk, reveals that she found freedom at the age of 46. These digital records offer a new approach to the study of race and gender among previously invisible enslaved Muslim women in the North American Islamic diaspora.

Ottomanists have recently started paying increasing attention to slaves of Christian-European origin in the service of the Ottomans ("renegades"). They established that European "renegades" did not sever ties with their past, but rather continued to interact with their families and Christian-European states. In fact, the Ottomans appreciated European "renegades" precisely for their military/naval, cultural, and linguistic skills acquired before their conversion, as many of them functioned as sailors, shipwrights, translators, diplomats, and intelligence agents. Thus, they were embedded in trans-imperial networks and regularly "mobilized their roots", in their capacity as military men in border provinces and raiding vessels, diplomats, and spies. These "trans-imperial subjects" or "Mediterranean go-betweens" who crossed frontiers and the Mediterranean "contact zone" were "cultural brokers" exemplifying the "well-connectedness" of the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe. It seems that a similar phenomenon existed already during the Mamluk Sultanate. The talk will focus on Cypriot and European/Anatolian maml?ks' involvement in interactions with Cyprus during the Mamluk Sultanate. Previous studies have shown that the movement of people between the Sultanate and Cyprus was routine, including maml?ks who settled in Cyprus after participating in military expeditions, some of them supposedly converted to Christianity but eventually returned to Egypt. Other studies discussed the identity and origins of envoys sent to Cyprus from the Mamluk Sultanate. However, while the role played by European/Anatolian maml?ks in Mamluk-Cypriot interactions is sometimes assumed on account of their familiarity with the culture of the opposing side, it is in great part undocumented. Based on Mamluk and European sources, and on information deduced from the names of maml?ks involved in military/naval and diplomatic interactions with Cyprus, I will suggest that most envoys, shipwrights, and captains were Europeans/Anatolians, and that Cypriot and European/Anatolian maml?ks were often stationed in frontier towns/ports, and participated in military expeditions to Cyprus. Some settled there and others moved back and forth from Cyprus to the Mamluk Sultanate.