The African Diaspora In The Mediterranean Lands Of Islam

From the ninth to the early 20th century, probably as many black Africans were forcibly taken across the Sahara, up the Nile valley, and across the Red Sea, as were transported across the Atlantic in a much shorter period. This work provides an introduction to this ""other"" slave trade.

"For every gallon in ink that has been spilt on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its consequences, only one every small drop has been spent on the study of the forced migration of black Africans into the Mediterranean world of Islam. From the ninth to the early twentieth century, probably as many black Africans were forcibly taken across the Sahara, up the Nile valley, and across the Red Sea, as were transported across the Atlantic in much shorter period. Yet their story has not yet been told. Slavery was a fundamental social assumption of Arab society at the rise of Islam and of the various Mediterranean societies in which Islamic culture developed. It was written into the shari'a, and was therefore considered a divinely sanctioned practice that mere human beings could not abrogate or interfere with. Black Africa was the earliest source for slaves and the last great "reservoir" to dry up; in the 640's slaves were already part of the "non-aggression pact" between the Arab conquerors of Egypt and Nubian rulers to their south, while as late as 1910 slaves were still being shipped out of Benghazi, supplied, it would seem, via as eastern Saharan route from Wadai (in Chad). By the seventeenth century blackness of skin of African origin was virtually synonymous in the Arab world with both the notion and the work 'abd (slave). Even today the word for Africans in many dialects of Arabic remains just that--'abid--"slaves." This book provides an introduction to this other" slave trade, and to the Islamic cultural context within which it took place, as well as the effects this context had on its victims."--Book cover

Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

A comprehensive study of African slavery in the colonies of Spain and Portugal in the New World.

From the ninth to the early 20th century, probably as many black Africans were forcibly taken across the Sahara, up the Nile valley, and across the Red Sea, as were transported across the Atlantic in a much shorter period. This work provides an introduction to this ""other"" slave trade.

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.

This book examines the global unfolding of the African Diaspora, the migrations and dispersals of people of African, from antiquity to the modern period. Their exploits, challenges, and struggles are discussed over a wide expanse of time in ways that link as well as differentiate past and present circumstances. The experiences of Africans in the Old World, in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds, is followed by their movement into the New, where their plight in lands claimed by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English colonial powers is analyzed from enslavement through the Cold War. While appropriate mention is made of persons of renown, particular attention is paid to the everyday lives of working class people and their cultural efflorescence. The book also attempts to explain contemporary plights and struggles through the lens of history.

This is the first book to provide an analysis of racism in the Mediterranean region. Ian Law reassesses contemporary processes of racialization, employing theoretical tools including polyracism, racial Arabization and racial Nawarization and drawing on new evidence on racism in North Africa, Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece and the Roma campland in Italy.