Race, Gender and Slavery in the Mamluk Households of Eighteenth-Century Egypt The subject of this paper is household slavery among the Mamluks in eighteenth-century Cairo with a focus on the role of race in determining status within the Mamluk hierarchy. The issue of race is examined within the context of the dynamics in the household between men and women, the reproduction of gender asymmetry in the household and the role of Islamic law not only in regulating slavery but also in the construction of its social and cultural norms. Although the Mamluk system was a gendered one that privileged men, women were able to achieve a high degree of physical and economic autonomy. As former slave concubines who converted to Islam before their marriage, women had property and other rights that allowed them to become economically autonomous. Documents concerning women’s religious endowments clearly show that females identified as al-bayda were the concubines and wives of the Mamluks. Females identified as al-samra or al-sawda were neither concubines nor wives. Their endowments tended to be very small, often consisting of only one property, while the wives of Mamluks endowed large estates of lucrative income-producing property. The question then is whether the Mamluk system of the eighteenth-century defined elite status, particularly for women, on the basis of race, privileging white women and relegating black women to the lower ranks of the household. Available evidence indicates that the majority of male and female slaves brought to Egypt, purchased for Mamluk households and destined for elite status came from Georgia or Circassia. The evidence of their race or ethnicity comes from their names on legal documents such as waqfiyyat. On the basis of these documents, it appears either that the Mamluk system was a race-based system that privileged white slaves – women and men – from Georgia and Cricassia or that the Mamluks chose concubines/wives of the same ethnicity to construct a ruling class/caste distinct from the Egyptian population. The waqf of Khadija Qadin, former concubine and wife of a powerful Mamluk, provides some evidence of the latter. Only one man with origins in Sub-Saharan Africa is known to have achieved high status in a Mamluk household. Unlike women, Mamluk men did not name themselves in terms of their race or ethnicity. Evidence for this paper comes primarily from the waqfiyyat of 368 men and 126 women in the eighteenth century.

The paper I am proposing for the Middle East Studies conference is one component of a larger study on slavery in the United Arab Emirates. It began with field work on current domestic workers where I encountered former slaves socializing with their former mistresses. The second part addressed in a paper the issue of domestic slavery and the difficulties faced by the researcher because of the non-cooperation of the research subjects. Principally, this involved the refusal of former slaves and their descendants to discuss their experiences of slavery as well as the denial by UAE women that the servants in question were ever slaves. At this point I began to refer to domestic slavery as a “silent” moment in the history of the country. There is a reluctance to discuss domestic slavery in the country. Many explanations could be provided for such reluctance, among them the status current (previously slaves families and descendants of slavery) they benefit from. This “silence” along with a paucity of written records means that research on domestic slavery in the UAE needs alternative methodologies as well as sensitivity to the social and cultural context in order to uncover the history of domestic slavery. In my research, I used local collections of oral histories that address the subject of slavery indirectly and interviews with UAE historians and other academics. Another source that has provided important insights into the history and practice of slavery is novels by UAE nationals and local creative writings. Since I began this project, my greatest asset and, paradoxically, a possible liability has been my social capital as a UAE citizen by marriage and long-time resident in the country. Social capital creates a paradox for the researcher because on the one hand, it connects the society and the subjects of the research to the researcher, who becomes the embodiment of social sensitivity. This could then cause the researcher to refrain from addressing socially sensitive issues such as slavery.

Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanum of Shiraz This paper examines the life of an African slave, Fezzeh Khanum, in the household of Sayyid ‘Ali-Muhammad of Shiraz, known as the Bab, the founder of the nineteenth-century, Iranian religious movement known as Babism. Through an examination of her life, we can begin to fill the enormous gaps in our knowledge of the experiences of enslaved women in Iran. My paper also suggests that, despite a paucity of archival evidence, a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. African women were brought to Iran as slaves in large numbers, beginning in the nineteenth century as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade. As Thomas Ricks has noted, there is little scholarship on the subject of slaves, the slave trade, trade routes, collection stations, creditors, or slavery for the medieval, early modern, or modern periods of Iranian history. While there is no definite historical data on the number of slaves exported from East Africa as part of this trading network, estimates among scholars for the nineteenth century vary from between one and two million. Possibly two-thirds of these slaves were women and girls. In Iran, there was some use of male slaves as laborers for public works, and some were conscripted into the military. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, African slaves were mostly women, and almost always destined for residence in Iranian households as servants and concubines. Scholars of Middle Eastern slavery have warned about the limited value of Western legal distinctions when applied to the study of slaves in the Muslim world. Such concepts of “slave vs. free” are unhelpful when discussing societies which are not built around the idea of a secular state and protected rights, but rather built on concepts or kinship, belonging, religious authority, and hierarchies of dependence. The paper will discuss Fezzeh Khanum’s life as she lived at the center of the Bab’s household and family. Although she was honored, and even venerated by Babis, she remained subordinate and without a voice of her own. The paper will discuss how she was remembered in pious Baha’i histories of the early events of the religion and what these histories can tell us about African slavery in Iranian households and about the fate of individual slaves such as Fezzeh Khanum.

In the 1890s, a girl of unspecified West-African origin found herself in the care of a group of Catholic Missionaries stationed in the Algerian Mzab community of Ghardaïa calling themselves the Soeurs Missionaires de Notre Dame d’Afrique (or ‘Soeurs Blanches’). The missionaries dubbed her Mabrouka. Though she arrived speaking neither French nor Arabic, she was eventually able to share her story, from her kidnapping, to her trans-Saharan voyage with her Tuareg captors, to sale into slavery in the Mzab Valley, to her ‘ransom’ by the missionaries. The nuns published her account for French audiences in a pamphlet entitled “Mabrouka: Histoire d’une petite négresse.” Many such women and girls passed through the stations of the Soeurs Blanches during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, often given the same moniker of ‘Mabrouka.’ The Soeurs Blanches were established in the 1860s as the ‘feminine wing’ of the all-male ‘Pères Blancs,’ and within some ten years, sisters were recruited from across the francophone world to evangelize Muslim women. This paper considers the intersecting histories of the suppression of slavery and the re-articulation of kinship and ‘family’ in colonial Algeria through a study of these missionary stations and the women whose lives they briefly touched and often recorded. The experiences of these ‘redeemed captives’ are re-created using material from French colonial archives as well as published and unpublished letters, periodicals, diaries, and photographs from various missionary archives. Though slavery in the French Empire was outlawed in 1848, the trans-Saharan trade persisted, and French military forces continued to intercept Tuareg slave caravans passing through the Mzab. For the Catholic sisters, these sub-Saharan women figured as perpetual “orphans,” lacking kinship ties and social networks, and were thus ideal candidates for conversion. Moreover, these “redeemed” individuals became crucial to the formation of Christian households, or 'ménages Chrétiennes,' the cornerstone of their greater mission to “reclaim North Africa” for the Roman Church. In the Mzab, most of the captives ‘redeemed’ by the missionaries were women whose status either as slaves or as wives was often unclear. While the material and legal distinction between marriage and slavery in this time and place was (and remains historiographically) murky, the missionaries’ efforts were based on an understanding of all Muslims as polygamous and all Muslim women as slaves/concubines. Thus, monogamous marriage was a critical element of the missionaries’ redemption narrative. The women themselves, however, did not always acquiesce to the missionaries’ ambitions.

My paper builds on my research and publications on gender and class in the study of Islam in Africa”. In the paper I am proposing for MESA, I engage in a comparative analysis across time – 1877 to 1994, and across space – from North Africa to East and West Africa, based on three case studies including my own of a Moroccan concubine. My analysis roots an understanding of the experience of Islam in Africa within the household where leading male figures of so-called ‘public’ Islamic society lived their religion next to and in interaction with mothers, wives, sisters and slaves, in their own families. It argues that those who are seen in traditional studies of Islam in Africa as marginal, namely women and slaves, were in fact central to the process of defining the experience of “being Muslim” over time and space. In their households, usually hidden from external eyes, they shaped how Islam was lived around them. This paper attempts to address the question of what is Islamic about slavery in Muslim societies, which was originally raised by Fred Cooper in his 1981 article "Islam and Cultural Hegemony: the Ideology of Slaveowners on the East African coast.” In this paper, I engage in a comparative study based on three case studies, each well known among Africanists: ‘Baba of Karo, a free Hausa woman of Northern Nigeria, 1877-1951); Bi Kaje, a free Swahili Woman of Mombasa, Kenya,1890-1981/2; and Fatma Barka, a slave then freed woman of Goulimine-Southern Morocco, (1900/1994). The first is a narrative collected and constructed in 1948-50 by the anthropologist Mary Smith; the second is a biography based on interviews by the historian Margaret Strobel in the 1970s, and the last is my own series of interviews with Fatma, a Malian slave and concubine to a Moroccan merchant, and her family in 1993-19944. From this research, spreading over the second half of the 20th C, I will attempt to derive insights into what the experience of being female-mistress and/or female-slave can tell us about twentieth-century ‘Islamic Slavery’ in West, East and North West Africa, respectively. In concluding, I will return to Cooper’s seminal question and suggest how looking at class and gender in the context of the household contributes to answering it.