Sultan, Caliph and the Renewer of the Faith

Sultan, Caliph and the Renewer of the Faith

Author: Mauro Nobili

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-19

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1108479502

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A significant re-examination of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, revealing it to be a crucial nineteenth-century source for history in West Africa.


Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith

Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith

Author: Mauro Nobili

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108802206

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The Tārīkh al-fattāsh is one of the most important and celebrated sources for the history of pre-colonial West Africa, yet it has confounded scholars for decades with its inconsistences and questions surrounding its authorship. In this study, Mauro Nobili examines and challenges existing theories on the chronicle, arguing that much of what we have presumed about the work is deeply flawed. Making extensive use of previously unpublished Arabic sources, Nobili demonstrates that the Tārīkh al-fattāsh was in fact written in the nineteenth century by a Fulani scholar, Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir, who modified pre-existing historiographical material as a political project in legitimation of the West African Islamic state known as the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi and its founding leader Aḥmad Lobbo. Contextualizing its production within the broader development of the religious and political landscape of West Africa, this study represents a significant moment in the study of West African history and of the evolution of Arabic historical literature in Timbuktu and its surrounding regions.


Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara

Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara

Author: Erin Pettigrew

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-31

Total Pages: 685

ISBN-13: 1009224573

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In this innovative new history, Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'ḥjāb - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously.


Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700-1750)

Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700-1750)

Author: Mohamad El-Merheb

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-08-16

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9004467637

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The present edited volume offers a collection of new concepts and approaches to the study of mobility in pre-modern Islamic societies. It includes nine remarkable case studies from different parts of the Islamic world that examine the professional mobility within the literati and, especially, the social-cum-cultural group of Muslim scholars (ʿulamāʾ) between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries. Based on individual case studies and quantitative mining of biographical dictionaries and other primary sources from Islamic Iberia, North and West Africa, Umayyad Damascus and the Hejaz, Abbasid Baghdad, Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria and Egypt, various parts of the Seljuq Empire, and Hotakid Iran, this edited volume presents professional mobility as a defining characteristic of pre-modern Islamic societies. Contributors Mehmetcan Akpinar, Amal Belkamel, Mehdi Berriah, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Adday Hernández López, Konrad Hirschler, Mohamad El-Merheb, Marta G. Novo, M. A. H. Parsa, M. Syifa A. Widigdo.


Black Soldiers in the Rhodesian Army

Black Soldiers in the Rhodesian Army

Author: M. T. Howard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-12-31

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1009348418

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During Zimbabwe's war of liberation (1965–80), fought between Zimbabwean nationalists and the minority-white Rhodesian settler-colonial regime, thousands of black soldiers volunteered for and served in the Rhodesian Army. This seeming paradox has often been noted by scholars and military researchers, yet little has been heard from black Rhodesian veterans themselves. Drawing from original interviews with black Rhodesian veterans and extensive archival research, M. T. Howard tackles the question of why so many black soldiers fought steadfastly and effectively for the Rhodesian Army, demonstrating that they felt loyalty to their comrades and regiments and not the Smith regime. Howard also shows that units in which black soldiers served – particularly the Rhodesian African Rifles – were fundamental to the Rhodesian counter-insurgency campaign. Highlighting the pivotal role black Rhodesian veterans played during both the war and the tumultuous early years of independence, this is a crucial contribution to the study of Zimbabwean decolonisation.


Plunder for Profit

Plunder for Profit

Author: Elijah Doro

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-04-30

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 100909839X

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"Exploring over a century of Zimbabwe's colonial and post-colonial history, Elijah Doro investigates the murky and noxious history of that powerful crop: tobacco. In a compelling narrative that debunks previous histories glorifying tobacco farming, Doro reveals the indelible marks that tobacco left on landscapes, communities, and people. Demonstrating that the history of tobacco farming is inseparable from that of colonial encounter, Doro outlines how tobacco became an institutionalised culture of production, which was linked to state power and natural ecosystems, and driven by a pernicious heritage of unbridled plunder. With the destruction of landscapes, the negative impacts of the export trade and the growing tobacco epidemic in Zimbabwe, tobacco farming has a long and varied legacy in southern African and across the world. Connecting the local to the global, and the environmental to the social, this book illuminates our understandings of environmental history, colonialism and sustainability"--


Child Slavery and Guardianship in Colonial Senegal

Child Slavery and Guardianship in Colonial Senegal

Author: Bernard Moitt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1009296450

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Original and innovative, this book tells the story of Senegalese children freed from slavery in 1848 only to be relegated to tutelle or guardianship. Bernard Moitt demonstrates that tutelle allowed slavery to persist under another name, with children continuing to be subject to the same widespread labor exploitation and abuse.


African Military Politics in the Sahel

African Military Politics in the Sahel

Author: Katharina P. W. Döring

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1009362259

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Based on extensive empirical research, Katharina P.W. Döring analyses the politics surrounding military deployments in the Sahel since 2012 and stresses the agency of regional organizations in African-led military interventions. Drawing on insights from critical geography, she considers the role that space plays in the power dynamics of the region.


Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda

Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda

Author: Marie-Eve Desrosiers

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1009224786

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Uses original archival and interview material to reconsider authoritarian politics in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide.