Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean ed. by Terence Walz, Kenneth M. Cuno (review)

tatabbu‘ al-rukhas and talfiq were employed, as well as the Ottoman learned hierarchy’s apparent opposition to these practices, suggest that the legal transactions recorded in the sijill reflect the legal interests and concerns of different groups, the Ottoman learned hierarchy being only one of them. It is hoped that future studies, building on Ibrahim’s insights, will examine the multiple layers of the sijill in an attempt to identify where and how the interests and concerns of the Ottoman learned hierarchy are reflected in this textual corpus. Finally, it is worth dwelling on the use of the term “pragmatism.” Although Ibrahim uses this term fairly consistently and clearly, as he draws on a large corpus on legal pragmatism, one may ask what makes “pragmatic eclecticists” more pragmatic than their colleagues who opposed the practices of tatabbu‘ al-rukhas, talfiq and takhayyur. Only if we understand what these jurists tried to achieve and what interests they sought to defend, can we start examining the “pragmatism” of their decisions and strategies. These, however, are minor issues in comparison to Ibrahim’s achievement . It is hoped that the book will start new debates about the nature of Islamic law in the last seven centuries, a remarkably understudied period in Islamic legal history. Guy Burak Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.12 Terence Walz, and Kenneth M. Cuno, eds. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in NineteenthCentury Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010. xiv + 256 pp., 2 maps, 15 b/w photograph, 10 tables. Cloth, $39.50. ISBN: 9789774163982. One of the differences between migration in the eastern Mediterranean in 2015 and in 1815 is that the majority of those fleeing warfare in 2015 do so as free, un-enslaved people. The journey to the African coast and to Turkey still has a high mortality rate over land and sea. Some refugees are following some of the slave caravan routes from Lake Chad, the Upper Nile, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea to the major slave transit points of Benghazi, Northern Egypt, Istanbul, Kos, and Malta. While in 2015, the Ottoman Empire slave markets are not the final destination, there Book Reviews 429 is a resurgence of slavery if some suspicions about Boko Haram and Islamic State activities have merit. World-system or comparative world history analysis , UN and EU refugee agency analysis, and even national security analysis can benefit from a deeper historical context for these modern crises, a context found in Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of TransSaharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno have a carefully edited volume that coheres around several themes. Recurring topics include the transition between Turkish and European imperial values, slave soldiers, life in transit locations, the 1860s as a notable decade, urban and rural patterns of slavery , gender, and productive, reproductive work, and sex-work by women, eunuchs and children of both genders. Some contributors used quantitative analysis of census records while others used qualitative sources such as police records, oral histories and travel narratives. The dynamics of race and slavery in the Ottoman Middle East herein invite dialogue with Atlantic world history and current Mediterranean migration pathways. Emad Ahmed Helal’s “Muhammad Ali’s First Army: the Experiment in Building an Entirely Slave Army” addresses a military similar to Muley Ismail’s Abid al-Bukhari or Cromwell’s New Model Army. Helal treats Muhammad Ali’s reconfiguration of the Egyptian army and the training of these recruits in European tactics as seen in archival sources and biographical materials. He winnows European biases to present history as lived experience rather than as remembered. Terence Walz’s “Sudanese, Habasha, Takarna, and Barabiru: TransSaharan Africans in Cairo as Shown in the 1848 Census” is a quantitative study of the free and enslaved population in two Cairo districts. While the data about women’s lives lead to his suggestion that Abyssinian women were more fertile, a comparison with data about urban...