Introduction to the Special Issue

Ethiopia and Nubia in Islamic Egypt: Connected Histories of Northeastern Africa

Is a global history of northeastern Africa in the Middle Ages achievable? The global Middle Ages were added to the agenda of medievalists about a decade ago.¹ In the case study of northeastern Africa, the long-term history of Christianity in the area alone seems to justify such a challenging undertaking. Christian kingdoms resisted the seventh-century Arab conquests and the pressure of the Islamic empire south of the first cataract of the Nile and maintained their presence in Nubia until the fourteenth century. As for the kingdom of Axum in northern Ethiopia and present-day Eritrea, its collapse in the beginning of the eighth century did not prevent the persistence of Christian monasticism and the reemergence of an Ethiopian Christian kingdom in the eleventh century. Furthermore, the adoption of the same doctrine by the Nubian and Ethiopian churches, the Miaphysitism, and their common rejection of the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon (451), led them to maintain close relationships with the patriarchal See of Alexandria and the Coptic Church in Egypt. Christianity is indeed a framework available for the global history of northeastern Africa.

It is, however, surprising to note how few are the pieces of evidence of direct connections between the Christian societies of Nubia and Ethiopia in the Middle Ages. Their common faith and doctrine were voiced in different languages and scripts and did not favor the same figures of the holy history, even if some narratives did travel from one culture to the other.² The search for political interactions between the Christian kingdoms would have been in vain, without the single attestation of a letter received in Nubia in the 970s, by which the Ethiopian king requested his Nubian counterpart to intercede on his behalf with the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria.³ This counterintuitive historical disconnection has been increased by modern scholarship due to the fragmentation of research along linguistic lines and national boundaries. As a result, the only thing Christian Ethiopia and Nubia have in common is to be portrayed as besieged fortresses facing Islam and its expansion in the Middle Ages. If a global history of the area is to be achieved, it has to follow a different path.

The connected histories gathered in this special issue of Northeast African Studies fall within the ERC (European Research Council) project HornEast headed by the present author.⁴ HornEast intends to move scholarship’s boundaries by fully integrating the disconnected narratives of Ethiopia and Nubia’s history into the global history of the Islamic Middle East. In other words, the shortest way between the Middle Nile valley and the Horn’s highlands in the Middle Ages might have passed via Cairo, Mekka, or Jerusalem. It is not a matter of saying that no border lay between Islamic lands and Christian kingdoms in northeastern Africa at that time: obstacles to connections and exchange were numerous, giving added value to any item that eventually crossed these boundaries. It is about assuming (1) that the formation of the Islamic empire and the dissemination of Islam (considered as a belief system and a body of knowledge as well as a material culture) did foster a global process of integration and (2) that this process not only favored the flourishing of Muslim communities in the area but also the capability of Christian neighboring societies to connect to the global medieval world.

The hypothesis mainly relies on the underexploited potential of Arabic source materials (be they narratives, inscriptions, or legal documents) for highlighting the history of medieval Nubia and Ethiopia. Arabic sources are familiar to historians of northeastern Africa when dealing with geographic depictions and travelogues written by Muslim authors foreign to the area.⁵ But Arabic materials were also produced in Nubia and Ethiopia during the Middle Ages.⁶ Arabic has also become the main language and script of Middle Eastern Christianity since at least the twelfth century. It is no surprise to find Arabic medieval graffiti on the walls of Lalibela’s churches, one of the most revered Christian sites in Ethiopia.⁷ As...