Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire

by Eve M. Troutt Powell

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Egypt, Africa, Sudan, Race, Middle East

264 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 2012

About the author

Eve M. Troutt Powell is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (2003). In 2003, she was a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant.

Reviews

[Royce Ratterman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a troubling ever-present concern lurking in the background of everyday life to always be aware that Mohammedan slavers could cross any horizon imaginable at any time throughout the continent of Africa... and that concern would remain actively alive for hundreds of years. This work details the lives and recorded accounts of some of the individuals whose lives were affected by the slavery practices of each of their times. This record also contains great notes, a bibliography, and an index.
Types of slaves vary, but there has always been a marked difference between enemies taken in war as opposed to other types. Today's world lets defeated foes return home just to return to attack another day. "He who kidnaps a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, shall surely be put to death." -Exodus 21:16

Excerpts:

"They (the slaves) identify Arabic as the language of despotism, a language in which slaves answer orders or sing cheerful songs but never one in which the slave's true past and identity can be articulated."

"These Arabs were in the habit of showing off their slaves to each other, as civilized men might show off their dogs or horses." (Salim)

"As they move up the socioeconomic ladder of opportunities created by the secular schools and institutions of Muhammed 'Ali, a generation of men with the ambition of 'Ali Mubarak Pasha or Huda Sha'rawi's father often chose to marry Ottoman women or to purchase Circassian (white) women as concubines, a practice they shared with their Turkish-speaking elite counterparts in cities like Istanbul... the Caucasus was the world-renowned source of male and female slaves, employed for concubinage and sexual services."

"As we walked through the streets of Jaffa, he became more confidential, and questioned me, with great interest, about my faith... 'Why are you a Christian? Why would not Mohammedanism satisfy you?' ... 'Because the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ is a religion of love--the religion of Mohammed is not!' ... 'The Lord Jesus Christ laid down his life for sinners, but the Mohammedan religion makes those who believe in it take away their lives of other men.'"

"The lives of the other morette, all redeemed by missionaries or Monsignor Comboni himself, put Italian Catholic missionaries well ahead of other Europeans in their zeal for abolition and their ability to create training institutions for liberated African slaves."

A nice work to accompany:

-Slavery in the Islamic World by Mary Ann Fay
-Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire by Madeline Zilfi
-Race and Slavery in the Middle east by Terence Walz & Kenneth Cuno
-Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 - by R. Davis (Author)
-Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam by Kecia Ali
-The Natashas: The Horrific Inside Story of Slavery, Rape, and Murder in the Global Sex Trade
-Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East by Ehud Toledano

[Museveni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great first person narratives tied together to create a very vibrant image of a world with slaves. It left some questions open for me though which I was hoping to explore, especially around the relationship between race and slavery in Sudan, Egypt, and the Ottoman world. The book briefly mentions large racial categories such as "Black" and "Abyssinian", without defining how they relate to today's Western constructs of race. In particular, would it affect the (Northern) Sudanese and Upper Egyptians who we would view as black, but were slave-traders in the book? This is especially interesting since "Tell This" suggests rules on not enslaving Muslims were occasionally ignored.