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Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.
Chronicles the experiences, identity, agency and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries. Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa,...
A remarkable research accomplishment. Ali leads us through three strands of early Islamic jurisprudence with careful attention to the nuances and details of the arguments.
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.
A work of synthesis on plantation slavery in nineteenth century Sokoto caliphate, engaging with major debates on internal African slavery, on the meaning of the term "plantation," and on comparative slavery
Examines the transformative power of irony in the creation of Muslim Africa.
Becoming Walata is a pre-colonial history of social identity in Walata, an oasis in the southwestern Sahara. Using Arabic documents, some newly discovered, Timothy Cleaveland analyzes representations of lineage, ethnicity, and race, and argues that Saharans perceived these identities as mutable. Walatis transformed themselves through strategic alliances and intermarriage, then rationalized these changes through Islam. This evidence contradicts the European colonial model of Saharan society, which portrayed social relations as static and determined by patrilineal descent.
An anthropological study of Berber society and particularly the Rifian tribes of Morocoo, a Muslim society. This book deals with the background of these tribes, their settlement in various areas and contemporary issues.