In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted—or not—the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.
Tell This in My Memory
Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire
Eve M. Troutt Powell
264 pp.
10 b/w illus., 3 maps
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774166228
For sale only in the Middle East
$24.95
Related products
Caliph of Cairo
Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 996–1021
Paul E. WalkerOne night in the year 411/1021, the powerful ruler of the Fatimid empire, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, rode out of the southern gates of Cairo and was never seen again. Was the caliph murdered, or could he have decided to abandon his royal life, wandering off to live alone and anonymous? Whatever the truth, the fact was that al-Hakim had literally vanished into the desert. Yet al-Hakim, though shrouded in mystery, has never been forgotten. To the Druze, he was (and is) God, and his disappearance merely indicated his reversion to non-human form. For Ismailis, al-Hakim was the sixteenth imam, descended from the Prophet, and infallible. Jews and Christians, by contrast, long remembered him as their persecutor, who ordered the destruction of many of their synagogues and churches. Using all the tools of modern scholarship, Paul Walker offers the most balanced and engaging biography yet to be published of this endlessly fascinating individual. To some, al-Hakim was God incarnate, to others an infallible imam, to still others he was a capricious tyrant. This book examines myth and fact, document and opinion, to present the most complete and detailed history yet written of the life and times of one of the medieval Islamic world’s most controversial figures.
...read more
15 December 2012
Paperback
336 pp.15X23cm
$24.95
El Alamein and the Struggle for North Africa
International Perspectives from the Twenty-first Century
Edited by Jill EdwardsThis new collection of studies presents fresh insights into a war fought over unusually difficult terrain and with exceptional supply demands. From the ongoing Italian geomorphic study of the Alamein arena to individual memories of non-combatant Alexandrians, from the Free French to the seasoned colonial forces of Australia, India, New Zealand, and South Africa, and from vital naval engagements and the siege of Malta to the study of Rommel’s leadership and the Churchill–Montgomery duo, this book presents the reader with a detailed yet broad reassessment of the complexities of the war in North Africa between 1941 and 1943, its technology, philosophy, military doctrine, strategy, tactics, logistics, and the associated local and international politics. Writing from the perspectives of some of the many nations whose armies were involved in the conflict, fifteen historians bring to their work the precision of their national historical archival sources in clear and spritely narratives.
...read more
15 March 2013
Paperback
272 pp.55 b/w illus.
15X23cm
$34.50
Ayyubid Cairo
A Topographical Study
Neil D. MacKenzieThis comprehensive study, first published by the AUC Press in 1992 examines the structure of the Ayyubid administration in Cairo and the associated military, religious, and commercial milieux. It goes on to survey in detail the changes in the general layout of Cairo–in defenses, governmental and private buildings, water resources, religious institutions and cemetery areas, and markets and commercial establishments. Click here to download the free PDF.
...read more
Free e-book
208 pp.3 maps
14.5X23cm
Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt, 1218–1250
Kurt J. WerthmullerUsing the life and writings of Cyril III Ibn Laqlaq, 75th patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, along with a variety of Christian and Muslim chroniclers, this study explores the identity and context of the Christian community of Egypt and its relations with the leadership of the Ayyubid dynasty in the early thirteenth century. Kurt Werthmuller introduces new scholarship that illuminates the varied relationships between medieval Christians of Egypt and their Muslim neighbors. Demonstrating that the Coptic community was neither passive nor static, the author discusses the active role played by the Copts in the formation and evolution of their own identity within the wider political and societal context of this period. In particular, he examines the boundaries between Copts and the wider Egyptian society in the Ayyubid period in three “in-between spaces”: patriarchal authority, religious conversion, and monasticism.
...read more
1 July 2010
Hardbound
224 pp.8 color illus.
15X23cm
$34.50