General Events

Faculty and graduate students are invited to join a discussion of work-in-progress by Craig Perry (Emory University):  “Slavery, Abyssinian Diaspora, and the Civilian Elite in 15th-Century Mecca.” Lunch will be provided. Please contact Carol Symes if you would like to attend: symes@illinois.edu.

This is an article and set of accompanying Arabic to English translations based on a corpus of over 40 short biographies of enslaved and freed women who primarily lived in 15th-century Mecca and were bound to the households of ḥadīth scholars, judges, merchants, and other members of the civilian elite. The overwhelming majority of these women are identified as Abyssinians, though others were trafficked to Mecca from Nubia, India, East Africa, and beyond. Entries for these women are found in the biographical dictionaries of ʿUmar Najm al-Dīn b. Fahd (d. 1466) and Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497), two prominent ḥadīth scholars of their era who were well connected to other well-known authors of their era and to the ruling elites of Mecca. Though many of the individual biographies are terse in their descriptions of women's lives, the article argues that the method of collective biography (prosopography) allows for their greater contextualization and productive analysis. Collectively, these biographies shed light on the geography and geo-politics of the slave trade from Abyssinia to Arabia, the daily lives and socio-cultural roles of unfree women in elite Mecca society, and the ways that free men used slave-ownership to articulate and perform according to multiple masculine ideals. In its conclusions, the article highlights why slavery studies should remain at the center of the study of the medieval Middle East.