Journal Article

Muslim Slaves in Europe Activating Diplomacy from Below \In the Early Modern Period\

Nouhaidi, AbdelAziz

2024

Overview

Across the span of the late 15th to the late 18th centuries, thousands of Muslims fell prey in the hands of European slave-dealers. While in bondage, they were condemned to a lifetime of servitude and initiated to a series of humiliating rituals. These rituals were intended to maintain their social death and loss of cultural and social connectedness. Yet, surviving documents reveal that these Muslims were not to acquiesce to such politics of desubjectification. They were more than eager to regain their personhood and interaction with their communities of origin. Their pleas, which were constantly crisscrossing the Mediterranean in oral and written form, induced their kinfolks to activate every channel that shall bring them freedom. This very fact rendered their enslavement into a cross-cultural trade wherein sanctions obstructing contact between Muslims and Christians were overwhelmingly transcended. To further explain these points, this paper looks into surviving archives to illustrate how the scores of diplomatic delegations and the lobby groups of fakkakin (slave ransomers), involved in ransom operations, created charged zones of cross-cultural contact. It discusses how these browbeaten Muslim slaves, whose pleas made the creation of such social spaces possible, were capable of uplifting their voice and activating \"diplomacy from below\"-what set them apart from Spivak's subalterns. Equally significant, it explains how their legacy can submit proof that shall forcefully challenge contemporary historiography dispersing their plight into the shadows of history.

• Publisher: محمد أبيهي
• Subject: أوروبا / العالم الإسلامي / العصر الحديث / تاريخ العبودية