Hello everyone, my name is Ali Behdad and I'm the director of the
Center for Near Eastern Studies here at UCLA.
On behalf of my colleagues, I would like to welcome you all to today's workshop; I
wish we could be meeting in person.
With a long day of zoom sessions ahead of us, not to mention our collective Zoom
fatigue these days, I will be brief. First I would like to thank the Andrew Mellon Foundation
for the generous grant that has made this and all our initiatives
on the topic of minorities in the Middle East possible.
Now for those of you who may not be familiar with the Center for Near Eastern
Studies, CNES was founded in 1957 by the noted Austrian historian and arabist Gustave von Grunebaum
who came to UCLA as a Professor of Near Eastern history.
The center is one of the earliest research centers promoting
interdisciplinary studies of the Middle East and the Islamic world in the U.S..
What makes such a center as CNES successful, an important venue for the exchange of
ideas and the dissemination of knowledge about the MENA region within and beyond the
campus is the quality of its affiliated faculty whose cutting edge scholarship
and teaching brings fresh perspective on the challenges and cultural richness
of the region. And so I would like to take this opportunity to thank my
wonderful um colleagues Aomar Boum, Susan Slyomovics, Lamia Balafrej,
Kevan Harris, Luke Garland, and Asma Sayeed for their leadership on our Mellon grant
and their great work in organizing today's workshop.
I also would like to give a shout out to Johanna Romero, our program director,
and Christian Rodriguez, our program and outreach coordinator, for their
logistical support.
Now I would like to invite my dear friends and colleagues Aomar and Susan to introduce our project
of Minorities in the Middle East and the theme of this workshop. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Ali. Good morning, afternoon to everyone. It is a real pleasure to see so many
new faces and familiar faces in this virtual attendance.
My name is Aomar Boum. I am an associate Professor of Anthropology
and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA.
In my capacity as the Director of the Mellon Program on Minorities in the Middle East
at UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our third workshop
of this two-year pilot project.
This uh, the title of the workshop as as you've seen, "The Making of Minorities in
the Middle East and North Africa: Objects, Images, and
Spaces" which will be in two parts, this Friday and next Friday. And I'm
really lucky to have two amazing scholars who have the expertise to
actually, to organize and direct this project, my colleagues Dr. Lamia Balafrej and
Dr. Susan Slyomovics whom I will introduce later.
Our final workshop will be next May or this coming May and which will be
convened by my colleague Kevan Harris. It will be on minorities,
minoritization, pedagogy, and methods.
The focus of the program is, of the whole program of this two-year pilot program, is ethnic and
religious minorities in the Middle East and North Africa.
Using a series of scholarly lectures, workshops,
visiting senior scholar program, a major conference–
hopefully at the end of this year with an edited volume based on the
proceedings of the conference, pedagogical training for graduate student,
community based initiatives that provide opportunities for high schools,
community colleges, and universities to participate,
including free workshop and teaching material,
we hope that in the last few years, a few months and in the coming months to use the minority lens to
highlight the large social, political, cultural, economic, and legal issues
at the core of the new Middle Eastern and North African societies.
We use the framework of the margin, whether the minority and the
marginalized ethnic and religious groups, to understand the
socio-cultural shifts that the MENA region are undergoing today and the implications of these changes
for the study and the understanding of the region.
We hope that our programmatic initiative at the end of these two years promote better
awareness of the complex history and cultures of the Middle East.
Our program has already considered some of the indigenous, local,
Islamic theories of ethnicity and minority as an introduction to our understanding of the policies
adopted by state towards minorities and the influence of western discourses on minorities.
And I encourage you to look at our website, at the center's website. We've already posted
all the previous lectures and talks about what we've done
up to now. In addition, and during winter, spring, and fall 2020, previous participant and visiting scholars
lectured on a number of cases, of case studies
throughout the Middle East and North African region to describe and analyze
the historical relationship between minorities and states. Our UCLA graduate
students from different departments and disciplines have been involved in the development of
modules and syllabi on the topics. I want to acknowledge our graduate students from these
departments:
[...]
[...], Timothy Garrett, [...]
[...]
Currently some of these students are designing a syllabus on Middle Eastern
diasporic minorities in the Americas, Europe, and Australia. I would like to thank the director of UCLA Center
for Near Eastern Studies Dr. Ali Behdad for his support,
to our grad, to all faculty and students.
Many thanks go to my colleagues and friends: Lamia Balafrej, Kevan Harris, Asma Sayeed,
Susan Slyomovics, and Luke Yarbrough for their work and commitment to this
program and student mentorship.
Huge thanks go to CNS staff Johanna and Christian
for their work on this program.
With that said, I would like to introduce my colleagues Lamia Balafrej and Susan Slyomovics, the organizers of
today workshop: The Making of Minorities in the Middle East and North Africa:
Objects, Images, and Spaces. Before coming to UCLA, Dr. Lamia Balafrej started at Wellesley
college, an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris.
She also studied literature and art history at the University of Mohammed V of Rabat, Morocco.
And Paris Sorbonne before receiving her PhD in art history from the University of Aix-
Marseille in 2013.
Dr. Balafrej specializes in the arts of the medieval and early modern
Islamic world with a particular interest in the intersection of labor,
materiality, and representation, as well as the relation between
aesthetics and ethics. Her first book "The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid
Painting, which was published by" Edinburgh University Press in 2019,
revealed how artists engage with self-reflection and theories of authorship in Persian paintings
using aspects of composition, facture, and representation to define
artistic authority.
Her current book project "Animated Instruments" addresses the relationship between the
body and instrument in medieval Islam. The book explores a range of issues which include
the presence and role of enslaved artists in courtly
workshops; the theme of the artist as a corporeal instrument in medieval sources;
the connection between slavery and courtly art and aesthetics; and the conceptual linkages between slavery
and technology.
Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from various institutions
including the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation,
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Smithsonian Institution.
Dr Susan Slyomovics is a professor of Anthropology
and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD
in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Slyomovics is a pillar of Middle Eastern and Northern
and Middle Eastern Studies in America.
It's the truth. I know Susan is smiling but it's the truth. She conducts research on the expressive
culture of the Middle East and North Africa, gender and human rights,
the overlap between oral and written literature, and the relationship between visual
anthropology and literature.
Dr Slyomovics is a leading scholar of visual anthropology in Middle Eastern
and North African studies. Since I don't
have time to name all of her publications, I would like to name a few relevant
publications to our workshop today. The first one is "The Merchant of Art:
An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance."
Second one is "The Living Medina in the Maghrib: The Walled Arab City in Literature,
Architecture, and History."
And two really interesting articles. First one is Perception.
"Perceptions, Not Illustrations, of Sefrou, Morocco: Paul Hyman's Images and the
Work of Ethnographic Photography," published in 2009. And the last publication is "Visual Ethnography,
Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria." It was published in an edited volume
titled, "Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land, and Voyage" in 2013. In addition to her wide ranging
and unlimited publications, we're very lucky to have Susan as a member of the Center at UCLA.
Dr. Slyomovics exemplifies the kind of unselfish senior professor
we want to have at UCLA as junior faculty including myself.
She's a great mentor, supports junior faculty, and trains many graduate
and undergraduate students in anthropology, NELC,
Arabic studies, Jewish studies, North African studies, photography and Middle Eastern studies.
That said, Susan, the floor is yours, Um.
My thanks to everybody for framing these two workshops. The second one is on Friday, March the 12th and for
these wonderful introductions and for valuable colleagues with which
we can work here at UCLA. So thank you all for the introductions.
Um, I'd like to introduce my role is and is to introduce uh panel number one.
So our first speaker is Professor Ruba Kana'an,
a historian of Islamic art and architecture who teaches Islamic art and architecture in the
department of visual studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She's currently engaged in
two areas of research: the intersections between art, artists, art production
and law in historical context, the representation of Islamic art in online museums
and galleries. Her professional experience is really vast: academia, museums, architectural practice,
community-based art education. Before joining UTM, she was the founding member
of the Aga Khan Museum's leadership team,
where she was head of its department of education and scholarly programs.
She currently teaches courses on the artist in pre-modern Muslim societies, the Silk Road, the
representation of Islamic art in museums,
and developing a seminar on decolonizing Islamic art.
Her title is: Exclusive Objects/ Objects of Exclusions. Representing Mosul
Metalwork and its Artists. I'm also going to introduce our second speaker and then hand the zoom room over to
Professor Kana'an. Our second speaker is my colleague
Professor Lamia Balafrej who, in addition to co-organizing these two
workshops, is Assistant Professor in the Arts of the Islamic World at UCLA. She specializes in the arts of
the medieval and early modern Islamic world, with particular interests in the intersection of labor,
materiality, and representation as well as the relation between aesthetics and ethics.
Her book was recently published called
"The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting."
It revealed how artists engage with self-reflection and theories of authorship
in Persian painting using aspects of composition, facture, representation to define
artistic authority.
Her current book project is on the intersected histories of art, technology,
and slavery in medieval Islam. Her title is "Slavery and the Image in Medieval Islam."
So I'm going to mute myself and hand this over to Professor Kana'an. Welcome Professor Kana'an.
Uh, thank you so much. I want to start by thanking the organizers uh,
I won't name you all; you're all friends.
And I just want to thank you all for uh this great idea and for inviting me to be
part of it uh.
I have on the screen 10 viewers that belong to a group of silver inlaid brass objects made
in Mosul in the first half of the 13th century.
Those brasses have characteristic stylistic features,
they're quite distinguishable, and they are a production of single, cultural milieu.
They're visually stunning and they're socially intriguing as they have
rich iconography of figural images and abundant inscriptions. They also take place of pride
in a museum and galleries. They are in short crowd pleasers. What I would like to
highlight in this presentation is that they are also a gateway into a past that sheds a light
on the complex notion of minority and the role of minorities in shaping visual culture
in the Middle East. Mosul metalwork demonstrates how this complexity gets flattened and obfuscated in a museum
context where objects are mainly categorized according to geography and
time. During the 13th century, the city of Mosul in the northern part of modern day
Iraq, became the center of silver-inlaid brass production. Mosul was what we now call a
multi-ethnic, multi-confessional city with a cosmopolitan marketplace.
Its population included Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, different groups of local Christians, Jews,
and ethnic backgrounds of Arabs, Turkmens, Kurdish, and
Kurdish backgrounds amongst many others mentioned in the sources.
For the silver-inlaid brassworks, we know
of 35 objects with signed by or attributed to 27 different artists.
What is unique, however, is that we have six objects bearing the name of two artists in a
visibly non-parallel working relationship.
A power relationship. A master and a subordinate.
While I'm currently working on the broad networked affiliations amongst the
metalwork artists of Mosul and their workshops,
I'll focus here on the artists who self-identify as ghulāms.
So how do we understand the word ghulām in the context of 13th century
Mosul. Let me start by say by stating that the use of the affiliative signature ghulām on medieval
metalwork is a unique phenomenon of Mosul. Nowhere in the known
metalwork corpus dating between the 11th and 15th century, anywhere between central Asia and Egypt
do we have any other signature of two metal work artists on the same object
or the use of the same of the name ghulām, the term ghulām.
So if the ghulām metalwork artist is a Mosul phenomenon, we need to understand what
what the word means
in Mosul itself in the 13th century. Uh, what what type of personhood are we
talking about? Is the person free or is the ghulām enslaved? For the benefit of time of
course, I will just limit this to two definitions. One based on
lexicography and one on chronicles. Um and for lexicography, I'll only talk about Ibn
Manzur's dictionary because of course it was finished in Cairo in 1220, so it's very close
in time and period and geography to
Mosul itself. So Ibn Manzur presents interrelated meetings of ghulām based on
the concept mainly on the concept of the eruption of feelings of lust
in an individual. And this notion becomes associated with youth and homo erotic lust in general,
at best of course exemplified by Abu Nuwas, the 9th century poet Abu Nuwas and his uh who's known
for his love of wine and moon companions especially the young beautiful ghulāms. From this
notion of the pleasing youth emerged other meanings such as
apprentice, servant, slave, and soldier.
And the term ghulām used in the Arabic context of of the Jazeera in north Iraq and in Egypt,
the term Ghulām was also used independent of age when it came to
soldiers and prisoners. As for Chronicles, Ibn al-Athir who died in 1233 who's the main
chronicler of Mosul of course, he wrote the universal
history of Al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh and also he brought a brilliant single
volume history on the rulers of Mosul. He uses the term Ghulām for men of different social status, different
religious, groups, different ethnicities different occupations,
including at some stage um you know [...] but I want to quote one single sentence because of course it
um it defies what we understand and assumed by the word Ghulām. He used this Ghulām to refer to
Muslims, Byzantines, [...] Christians, [...] and Africans whom he refers to as
Aswad, Turks, and Daylamites. And in one case he refers to a, and I quote, "grudy haired-"
sorry, "ruddy red-haired blue-eyed ghulām." [...]
What this demonstrates then, that Ghulāms
of Mosul were not a single type of ethnicity of individual and they were active members of the
production and exchange community of the city. So Muslim societies had
clear hierarchies between the legal rights and obligations of Muslims and non-muslims.
Trade relationships however were surprisingly more egalitarian.
According to most jurists working between the 11th and 14th centuries, any person who is rational, is equally
qualified to carry out any aspect of commercial
trade including commissioning, making, and trading of objects, and of course this
includes hiring other people to work with you. From a legal perspective then, the range of possible actors
in any commercial transaction includes male and female individuals
who can be free or enslaved in one of the three categories of enslavement that
you see here on the screen. So I think the question that comes is in what capacity would a
subordinate to a workshop master be able to sign their name on object like the six who signed Ghulām
on these brasses from Mosul.
On the screen are three known brasses from the workshop of ibn Mawaliya
that operated between 1200 and 1232 in Mosul.
The brasses are related stylistically as well as by signature of the artists.
And while I have addressed the implications of these signatures elsewhere,
what I just want to point here that, Qasim ibn 'Ali
who signed the met ewer um was probably an enslaved individual with a
contract towards freedom. What we call mukātab.
The mukātab is a category of slave who is trained in a specific craft and a and
given an agreement or a contract towards freedom in return
for a defined amount of work. Usually measured by objects,
objects produced or by a time period served. According to the 11th century
jurist al-Shirazi, mukātab is usually preferred for someone whose
ability to gain profit is known. To date, I know of a single
confirmed mention of this form of temporary "industrial
slavery" if you like um in the in the Middle East region
mentioned by Ibn Abi Usaybi'a work on physicians written in Syrian in the first half of
the 13th century.
Now unlike other types of slaves, a Mukatāb has ownership rights as well as the right to
own– to sign their name. I'm sure many other Mukatābs will come into light, but
we still haven't done the research on that yet.
The second workshop I want to briefly mention here highlights the complex
social and confessional nature of Mosul.
The three brasses on the top are signed by Ahmad al-Dhaki who was operating between
1220s and the 1240s in Mosul. And the
bottom two are signed by his ghulām. The louvre
basin and the Homberg ewer on the top right are decorated with images
of saints and representations from the life of Christ.
They are also signed by a Muslim artist.
They are two of around 20 objects from the first half of the 13th century
with Christian themes that were made in Mosul and Damascus. Until the last decade
brasses with Christian images have been interpreted solely
within the framework of mobility and portability that are embedded in theories of a
global art history that to quote [...], I quote,
"Valorize the hybrid and amalgam artifacts that best manifest the connection between different cultures
and aesthetic notions," end of quote.
Recent work, especially publications by [...], [...]
and [...] amongst others highlight the local nature of these images
and their relationship to the local Syrian Orthodox Church of Mosul about which I'm sure
we'll hear more next week with Ethel Wolper in part two of this workshop. What
matters here is that these brasses bear witness
to the multi-factional context of Mosul and the joint visual culture of
its people.
So the Ghulām signature on the brasses on the bottom row
increases the complexity of this image.
The signature on the bottom candlestick and the met ewer here mentioned the name of the ghulām Ibn Jaldak and
his master Ahmad al-Dhaki. Ibn Jaldak is referred to by his kunya, that is the name of his–
of his son as Abu Bakr and referred to and by the reference to his father
through the latter's [...], Al-Hajj Jaldak.
Both of these systems together for the name of
for the name of for the name reference suggests that Ahmad or Abu Bakr is a free man. That reference to this
father al-Hajj in itself is not sufficient for us to
identify him as a free man as slaves can perform pilgrimage if given permission.
More recently, I came– I learned to ident– I came to learn more
about the identity of Ibn Jaldak.
In a work on the companions of the prophet called [...], [...] reports
the name of the ahadith narrator with whom he
has worked in person in Mosul. The name is, you see it here, Uthmān Ibn Abī Bakr, ibn Jaldak al-Mawsili.
Considering that Ibn al-Athir died in Mosul in 1233,
this locates this Ibn al-Hajj Jaldak also in Mosul within a decade
of the making of these two objects.
This Ibn al-Hajj Jaldak then is the son of the ghulām who signed the candlestick and
the ewer.
The picture we have here is of a learned and free family. The father is a free
man who performed his pilgrimage. The son is a member of the workshop
of Ahmad al-Dhaki, a metalwork artist signing his name as ghulām and the grandson is a hadith narrator.
Clearly ghulām here is an affiliative reference to workshop
pride and solidarity, what we call [...] rather than servitude or slavery.
I'd like to conclude by highlighting that Mosul silver in laid brasses
opened a world of possibilities for unpacking and exploring the notion of minorities in the Middle
East.
The systems of classification and categorization that we inherited in both academia and museums tend to
flatten and obfuscate the complex notion of communal identity. They do not confirm to a grand
narrative, and usually that narrative is identified by
time or place. While the Mosul brasses are celebrated, exhibited and continuously studied, their
potential forquestioning systemic framing of identity remain elusive. In academia,
portability as a framework for exploring images and motifs
that cross cultural boundaries tend to supersede explorations
of local context and local identity. But the change is happening in the field and the recognition of Mosul's
complexical identity is growing in the academic field. In
museums however, the problem of representation is more endemic.
In recent days, I revisited for the purpose of this presentation, I revisited
the museum websites of many of the Mosul brasses whose decoration portrays
Christian themes or signatures of potentially enslaved artists or artists
that form a subordinate category.
All objects are usually placed within a narrative of Islamic art or Arab art as
the names of the galleries you see on the screen and the museum you see on the
screen indicate.
And in most museums, labels are sparse and they focus on object, state, and
place of creation. And sometimes praising its beauty and techniques.
Some museums highlight Christian themes and invariably refer those to those as evidence of religious
tolerance in 13th century Mosul. None to my knowledge refer to the multi-ethnic and
multi-confessional local identities. So the question I want to leave us with
here is uh can the Mosul brasses afford us a tangible opportunity to
explore modern minority identities in the space of the museum. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Dr. Kana'an. Our next speaker is Dr. Balafrej and um
you have this Zoom room.
Thank you, Susan and Aomar so much for these generous
introductions and thank you Aomar and uh thank you also Ali Behdad for spearheading this initiative. And
thank you to Johanna Romero and Christian Rodriguez for
their uh support and their help in organizing these events. My talk today
is part of a larger project of mine in which I explore the connections between slavery, art, and
technology in the medieval Middle East. And one line of inquiry that
I've been following addresses the depiction of labor
in general and slave labor in particular in book painting and across a wide area of media.
So I've been collecting images of slaves from the medieval Middle East
and I will share with you a couple of examples
today. But first of all what do we know about slavery in medieval Islam?
Of course slavery in the pre-modern Middle East cannot be seen through the lands of ancient
or modern slavery. Societies of the medieval Middle East were not slave societies to use David Finley
Finley's distinction but rather societies with slaves.
That is to say slaves were not central to the economy
by contrast with American plantations, for example.
Generally slavery was a rather low volume phenomenon, yet I would like to add it was quite
pervasive and could be found in several social realms including the domestic,
the military, and the courtly spheres.
Slaves were servants, maids, nurses, and sexual partners in well-to-do households and
courtly contacts, slave agents working for merchants, scribes, performers, soldiers, persons of
trust in military and political spheres, sometimes placed in the highest ranks.
Another major difference with the Atlantic slave trade is that slave origins were quite
varied and scattered. The only basis for enslavement was a person's foreignness. So anyone could actually
become a slave as long as they were an outsider. Slaves in the medieval Middle East originated from various
parts of Africa, Europe, Anatolia, Transoxiana, South Asia, and so on. Moreover people could slip
in and out of the category of slavery for some slaves
though not for all. There was some sort of access to social mobility.
Rise to power is well attested in the case of military stability
and we know quite a bit for example about the dynasty of the Mamluks which was
founded by former slaves.
So all in all we know quite a bit about military slavery, um and we also know
quite a bit about slave entertainers, musicians, performers,
and these slaves were quite ubiquitous in courtly context.
In the field of Islamic art for the medieval period,
there has been a bit less of research, though I'm really very grateful for
Ruba's research on slave artisans.
And until recently I would say that most of the research
in the field of medieval Islamic art has dealt with slaves that were monumented
and went on to become rulers and thus patrons of the arts.
And um actually both military and courtly slavery and the phenomenon of
the freeman ruler are actually reflected in this image which was produced in the city that
Ruba focused on, Mosul in the early 13th century. The painting is a frontispiece piece,
which means that it opens a manuscript and thus it does not illustrate any particular text.
Instead it shows the likely patron of the book, uh you see him here, Badr al-Din Lu'lu'
who was the ruler of Mosul in the early 13th century and he was of Armenian origin
and a former slave of the Zangid ruler of Mosul. Badr al-Din Lu'lu' is surrounded by members of
his court.
The scene is also framed at the top with angels.
You see two angels here as well as musicians here at bottom. You see from right to left
a harpist, a tambourine player, a flute player, another tambourine player, and a road player.
It is very likely that these figures were meant to represent female slave entertainers, an institution
that is again well studied, especially for the early islamic period. So
this image in a way shows the continuation of that institution of the female slave entertainer into the
medieval period.
Female slaves were trained to become
highly skilled musicians and dancers and so on. And one of the sources that has been used by
scholars to study this phenomenon is the 10th century Kitab al-Aghani, the Book of Songs.
The text that was actually, as you can see here, interestingly enough copied in the
manuscript that this image opens. And it's a book that
contains many sections and anecdotes about female slave performers. And I'm just putting on the
screen here um two books uh that are among the most recent scholarly publications in English
on this topic.
So now I've been looking at images of slaves with three questions
in mind. My first question is what can these, what can images tell us
about the history of slavery in medieval Islam? Can images be approached as
sources for the study, for example, of the functional origins of slaves in
medieval Middle Eastern societies? My second question is, can images tell us anything
or material culture generally about slavery beyond the courtly
and the military spheres? Slavery has rarely been examined outside the spheres in Islamic art history and
and when it has, as I said earlier, scholars have tended to focus on the
spectacular cases of patrons such as Badr al-Din Lu'lu' or
[...] in Egypt. So how do we move beyond the courtly and can we learn anything about more mundane
and more silent forms of exploitation by looking at images and objects? And my third question
is, why were slaves represented in images?
And this was not the case of all minorities. I've found for example that
free women are much less common in visual representation. Images were not as diffused as written
artifacts at the time.
Moreover um their highly constructed forms of representation. They are very
selective in their content and they also create their own ideas
and discourses through color figure placement composition and so on. So another goal then would be
to consider slavery's function in pictorial representation,
the role slaves were made to fulfill not just in society but within the order of the image.
Let me now look at this image from a manuscript that was made in the early 13th century in either
Egypt or Syria. The book was probably made not for the court
but for an urban elite and sold at a book market.
The manuscript is a copy of the famous Mawamat of al-Hariri, a celebrated
collection of 50 stories narrated in rhyme prose. Each Maqamat or story tends to follow the
same pattern. Al-Harith, the narrator,
comes across an eloquent but duplicitous character Abu Zayd who uses linguistic and rhetorical
skills in order to extort money out of his audience. In the story
illustrated here, Abu Zayd whom you see here shows up at a judge court with a servant
who is named ghulām in the text and you see him here. And Abu Zayd claims that the
servant killed his son, Abu Zayd's son. The painting represents the judge
here on his chair with to his, to his right al-Harith. Abu Zayd and al-Harith here. Abu Zayd and the ghulām.
While ghulām could designate both free and enslaved servants, I would argue that here ghulām who
in this particular maqamat is a slave since the judge
offers to buy him. Indeed, the judge is distracted by the youth's attractive
appearance and so instead of condemning, him he makes a purchase offer. I have a few remarks here.
The ghulām slave is light-skinned.
You see him here. This does not betray his free status
since slaves could be both light-skinned and dark-skinned. And as historians have
noted, the majority of slaves at that time were either
Turks and Circassians who were brought from Anatolia in the Black Sea region
or black Africans who were brought mostly from Ethiopia and East Africa. And
this leads me to my second point since indeed, as you can see, the picture here also contains
a dark skinned bystander placed on the other side of the judge's chair
symmetrically opposed to the light-skinned ghulām. The servant is smaller
in size than the other characters and he was placed at the border of the page.
He has no function in the story other than holding a fly whisk.
In fact he's not mentioned by the text.
This might have been unintended but I do think that the image
creates a contrast between on one hand the light-skinned slave boy described as
beautiful and whom the judge gets enamored with and on the other hand, the silent,
peripheral servant who stands outside the realm of social exchange.
The painting obviously also raises the issue of skin color.
We know that skin color was not a determinant of slave status in the
middle ages and this is confirmed by this image
which presents both a light-skinned subaltern and a dark-skinned subaltern.
The picture however suggests an intersection between skin color and
social hierarchy.
In this and other paintings, I would argue, skin color seems to operate as a
visible marker of social difference if not as a splitting device emphasizing
a binary of insider and outsider. And I can show you
another example here even though it doesn't exactly relate to slavery but
I think it sheds light on possible
intersection between skin color and the division of labor. And
this is a painting from another manuscript of the Maqamat.
It represents the sailing ship that takes al-Harith and Abu Zayd to [...] in Maqamat
number 39.
There are eight crew men and six passengers here whose members appear on
the upper deck and in the hold, uh here and here. The leftmost figure may be the captain,
here, directing the crew. There is an obvious contrast between
crewmen and passengers whose heads here are peeking out of the cabin porthole.
all travelers are light-skinned and wearing a turban, visual stereotypes
that point to Arab ethnicity.
And so I do think that again the painting produces
the image of a world in which light-skinned passengers are seen traveling uh or conversing as
in the earlier example, while black bodies uh black-bodied subjects hustle here to bring them to destination.
So in conclusion, I would just say that paintings seem indeed to be helpful sources for
learning more about several aspects of slavery in
particular and the division of labor more generally
in the medieval Middle East. One, they confirmed that slavery was a pervasive
phenomenon one that also characterized the domestic sphere.
They also confirmed that slavery was a
stratified phenomenon,
but slaves were perceived differently according to their function and possibly
their skin color.
Images suggest indeed that there is a kind of overlap between skin color, social
hierarchy, and the division of labor, including among slaves.
And images can also tell us about skin colors function in pictorial representation which was my
third question as a visual sign.
In these two paintings for example, skin color functions to emphasize several binaries: insider and outsider,
Arab and non-Arab, traveler or a raider and worker, and more generally, leisure and labor,
speech, and action. A common thread is the use of the black body.
Again, I'm talking here about the order of the image, the way skin color
functions as a semiotic phenomenon within the pictorial field
and um. So a common trend, thread is this use of the black body as the embodied bearer
of movement, action, and labor, and as the reversed
image, the dialectical other of the Arab subject. And I'll stop here, thank you
very much.
My thanks to both our speakers.
Thank you Susan for moderating.
It's, it's just wonderful to hear the way you're, you know inadvertently, your two
topics really reinforce each other.
And I guess the last you know just thought
to think about for uh moving on to the next panel is the overlap between
slaves and minorities which opened up for us in relation to who's an artist and what
they draw and do they self-represent. So thank you for
two really wonderful presentations.