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Pensée 4: The Fruit of the Africanist Contribution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
Extract
Recently I completed an initial foray into the underutilized 1848 census of Egypt that was commissioned by Muhammad ʿAli in the last years of his long rule. This enormous unpublished document provides a fascinating bird's-eye view of Cairo in the middle of the 19th century, permitting one to snoop into thousands of households, great and small, in Egypt's greatest and largest city to see a population undergoing profound social transformation. Here we find ordinary Egyptians, each identified by gender, age, nationality, civil status, occupation, religion, and relationship to the head of the household, living in houses, tenements, wakalas (caravansaries/residential hotels), mosques, and slums in a fantastic maze of streets, alleys, and byways. Here may be located various nationalities that contributed to the city's rich tapestry: Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Nubians, Sudanese, and Maghribis; Christians as well as Muslims and Jews; merchants and artisans; and soldiers, servants, and slaves.
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References
NOTES
1 “Taʾdud al-Nufus Mahafazat Masr,” 44 ms vols., located in the Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Qawmiyya, Cairo.
2 Raymond, André, Artisans et commerçants du Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1974)Google Scholar.
3 My admiring but slightly critical view of Raymond's great study drew attention to some misconceptions. Walz, Terence, “Egypt in Africa: A Lost Perspective in Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975): 652–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 The enormous surge in studies of slavery has acted as a spur: see Lovejoy, Paul E., ed., Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2004)Google Scholar. The work of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples headed by Lovejoy is particularly noteworthy. John Hunwick reviews recent developments in “The Same but Different: Africans in Slavery in the Mediterranean Muslim World,” in The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam, ed. John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2002). See also Powell, Eve M. Troutt, “Will That Subaltern Ever Speak? Finding African Slaves in the Historiography of the Middle East,” in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, ed. Gershoni, I., Singer, Amy, and Erdem, Y. Hakan (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006), 242–61Google Scholar.
5 Terence Walz, “Habashis, Sudanese, Barabra and Egyptians: Living Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Cairo as Shown in the 1848 Census.” Paper presented at Middle East Studies Association annual meeting 2008, Washington, D.C.
6 John Hunwick, “The Religious Practices of Black Slaves in the Mediterranean Islamic World,” in Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam, ed. Paul Lovejoy. Also see Natvig, Richard, “Some Notes on the History of the Zar Cult in Egypt,” in Women's Medicine: The Zar/Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond, ed. Lewis, I. M., al-Safi, Ahmed, and Hurreiz, Sayyid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 178–88Google Scholar. This research was recently used by Toledano, Ehud R., As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
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9 See, for instance, Lydon, Ghislaine, “Writing Trans-Saharan History: Methods, Sources and Interpretations Across the African Divide,” Journal of North African Studies 10 (2005): 293–324CrossRefGoogle Scholar.