التاريخ السوداني والعثماني ودراسات العبودية والإمبراطوريات
الدكتورة بيان أبو بكر مؤرخة وكاتبة وباحثة أكاديمية سودانية–أمريكية، تنتمي إلى جيل جديد من الباحثين السودانيين الذين يدرسون تاريخ السودان في سياقاته الأفريقية والعربية والعثمانية والعالمية، مع اهتمام خاص بقضايا العِرق والعبودية والحدود والإمبراطوريات وتكوين الدولة الحديثة.
حصلت على درجة الدكتوراه في التاريخ من جامعة ييل الأمريكية عام 2026، وهي واحدة من أعرق الجامعات العالمية. وتعمل زميلةً في برنامج ماكس فيبر بالمعهد الجامعي الأوروبي في مدينة فلورنسا الإيطالية.
تتركز أبحاثها في التاريخ الأفريقي–العربي، والتاريخ العثماني، والدراسات السودانية، والتاريخ العابر للأقاليم، إلى جانب دراسة تاريخ العبودية والعِرق وتشكّل الهويات السياسية والاجتماعية. كما تبحث في الروابط التاريخية العابرة للصحراء الكبرى، ودور حركة رؤوس الأموال والتجارة والإمبراطوريات في تشكيل مفاهيم العروبة والسواد خلال القرن التاسع عشر.
مشروعها البحثي والكتاب المرتقب
يتمحور مشروعها البحثي الرئيس حول كتاب تعمل على إعداده بعنوان:
The Marketplace of Empire: Frontier Reform and the Making of Ottoman Sudan, 1840–1924 سوق الإمبراطورية: إصلاح الحدود وتشكّل السودان العثماني، 1840–1924
وهو مشروع مستمد من أطروحتها للدكتوراه، يضع السودان في قلب التاريخ العثماني والعابر للصحراء الكبرى، ويربط بين تجارة الرقيق، وحركة رؤوس الأموال، والإصلاحات الإمبراطورية، والمنافسة الأوروبية على الأراضي الأفريقية.
يعتمد البحث على مصادر ووثائق باللغات العربية والتركية العثمانية والإنجليزية، ويتناول السودان بوصفه ملتقىً للإصلاحات العثمانية، والحركة العالمية لإلغاء الرق، والتنافس الاستعماري على أفريقيا.
وتدرس الدكتورة بيان من خلال هذا المشروع أربعة مجالات تاريخية رئيسة:
1. السياسات المالية ونشاط النخب التجارية في مدينة سواكن. 2. الجهود الدولية الرامية إلى وقف تجارة البشر المستعبدين. 3. تمدد التجار والقادة العسكريين في المناطق الحدودية الغربية للسودان. 4. تحولات المؤسسات العسكرية وإنتاج المعرفة الاستعمارية خلال الحكم الثنائي الإنجليزي–المصري.
وتوضح دراساتها أن الجغرافيا السياسية للسودان لم تكن مجرد صناعة استعمارية خارجية، بل تشكلت أيضاً من الصراع والتفاعل المستمر بين النخب المحلية، والبيروقراطيات الإمبراطورية، والتجار، والشبكات الاقتصادية العابرة للحدود.
الكتابة العامة والمشاركة الفكرية
لم تقتصر إسهامات الدكتورة بيان أبو بكر على البحث الأكاديمي المتخصص؛ فقد نشرت مقالات وتحليلات تاريخية وسياسية موجهة إلى الجمهور العام في عدد من المنابر الدولية، من بينها:
The New York Times، Mada Masr، Middle East Report «MERIP»، وJadaliyya «جدلية».
وتتناول كتاباتها السودان والثورات العربية والإمبريالية والتدخلات الإقليمية والدولية، والعلاقات بين العسكرة والعنصرية وتكوين الإمبراطوريات المحلية والعالمية. كما تربط بين دراسة الماضي وتحليل الأزمات السياسية والحروب المعاصرة في السودان والمنطقة.
وشاركت في مؤتمرات وندوات وورش أكاديمية وثقافية تناولت تاريخ السودان وثوراته وتطوراته السياسية. ومن أبرز مشاركاتها تقديم سلسلة ورش بعنوان «تقليد الثورة السودانية» عبر مركز أفريقيا، تناولت فيها التاريخ الطويل للمقاومة والثورات والتحولات السياسية في السودان.
التوثيق المعرفي للحرب السودانية
اهتمت الدكتورة بيان أيضاً بتوفير مصادر تعليمية تساعد الباحثين والطلاب والجمهور على فهم الحرب التي اندلعت في السودان في 15 أبريل 2023. وأعدّت منهجاً ومرجعاً تعليمياً بعنوان:
Seeing the World Through Sudan — رؤية العالم من خلال السودان
يضم قراءات ومواد تاريخية وسياسية تساعد على وضع الحرب السودانية في سياق أوسع يشمل الثورة المضادة ، والعسكرة، والعلاقات الإقليمية والدولية، وتاريخ تكوين الدولة والصراع على السلطة والثروة.
أهميتها الأكاديمية
تنبع أهمية الدكتورة بيان أبو بكر من قدرتها على إعادة وضع السودان في قلب التاريخ العالمي، بدلاً من التعامل معه بوصفه هامشاً تابعاً لتاريخ مصر أو الدولة العثمانية أو الاستعمار الأوروبي.
وتقدم أبحاثها قراءة تربط بين تاريخ السودان المحلي وبين تاريخ أفريقيا والعالم العربي والدولة العثمانية، وتوضح دور السودانيين والتجار والنخب المحلية والجماعات المستعبدة والمناطق الحدودية في تشكيل التحولات السياسية والاقتصادية الكبرى.
وبهذا تمثل الدكتورة بيان أبو بكر نموذجاً مشرفاً للباحثة السودانية المعاصرة، التي تجمع بين الصرامة الأكاديمية والكتابة العامة والالتزام بتوثيق التاريخ السوداني وإيصال قضاياه إلى الجامعات والمنابر الفكرية العالمية.
Post: #3 Title: Re: بيان بكري ابوبكر Author: Ali Alkanzi Date: 08-02-2026, 10:07 AM Parent: #2
إنه بابٌ قلَّ من يطرقه، وبابُ معرفةٍ وتأصيلٍ لوطنٍ يتمزق أمام أعيننا. وأحسب أن الدكتورة بيان قد بيَّنت، برسالتها هذه، كيف يكون التوثيق للأوطان. أحسب أنني التقيتها عند وفاة جدتها، والدة الأخ المهندس بكري، إذ أتيت لتقديم واجب العزاء. وكانت تلك أول فرصة أتعرف فيها إلى الأخ بكري وجهاً لوجه، وقد عرَّفني ببيان وعرفني باخوته. وما زلت أحتفظ بالصورة الفوتوغرافية التي التُقطت في ذلك اليوم. والتهنئة موصولة إلى جميع أفراد الأسرة والأهل في الحلفايا، وإلى كل من يكتب في سودانيز أون لاين أو يقرأه.
Sudan Will Not Be Left for Dead July 7, 2023 A close-up photo of a Sudanese woman wearing brightly colored traditional clothing, with a group of Sudanese people, some sitting and other standing, in the background. Sudanese refugees waiting to receive food rations from the World Food Programme (WFP), near the border between Sudan and Chad in May.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters Share full article By Bayan Abubakr Ms. Abubakr is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University. See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Times on Google Before the war, I’d only ever gotten on my knees and begged in order to pray. This changed when I found myself pleading to escape the annihilation swallowing my country whole. That is when the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Sudan momentarily became my God. Alongside the Saudi military, the ambassador was processing documents for a select number of passengers who would be allowed on an evacuation ferry to Jeddah. Getting to him appeared to be the only ticket out of Sudan. All our eyes were glued to the ambassador, and all of us clenched our passports to our chests. Somehow, a soldier picked me out of the crowd at Port Sudan and summoned me over. Before letting me through, the soldier told me that I could not sit on the chair next to the ambassador. I had to kneel. With dribbles of sweat crowning my face, I sucked my teeth, got on my knees and begged. In spite of my brief heresy, the Saudi ambassador told me that I wasn’t eligible for evacuation. That day, “foreigners” — those who were not of Sudanese descent — were the priority. The Saudi government reasoned that Sudanese people had families and homes in Sudan, so we could manage to survive. Never mind the fact that the Rapid Support Forces (R.S.F.) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (S.A.F.) — the two armed rivals that are battling for power — were destroying those families and homes. Not to mention the fact that the Saudi government, which has been legitimizing and funding the R.S.F. over the past decade, was partly responsible. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But the Saudis were not the only ones at fault. In October 2021, the R.S.F. and S.A.F. — which had once operated in the same national military force — led a joint coup that dissolved Sudan’s transitional government. A month later, the prime minister and the military signed a power-sharing agreement that codified the coup, further legitimized the military as a governing force, and delayed the transition to a civilian government. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Britain welcomed this agreement as a step in the right direction. They ignored the thousands of protesters who saw any type of military rule as unacceptable. More in Opinion New Alzheimer’s Test Is Cause for Hope and Caution New Alzheimer’s Test Is Cause for Hope and Caution If This Is Medical Freedom, Why Do I Feel Trapped؟ If This Is Medical Freedom, Why Do I Feel Trapped؟ It Is Banal, Bland, Thin and Didactic. We Can’t Stop Talking About It. It Is Banal, Bland, Thin and Didactic. We Can’t Stop Talking About It. Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse Since the start of the war on April 15, the R.S.F. and S.A.F. have agreed to — and broken — at least 17 cease-fires. The war has only grown more deadly. The city of El Geneina, home to over half a million people, has been described by doctors as “one of the worst places on earth.” Parts of Khartoum do not have running water or electricity right now. Evacuation remains difficult, if not nearly impossible. As this disaster has unfolded, international leaders have once again ignored the Sudanese people. This includes the more than 8,000 neighborhood resistance committees, trade unions, and women’s groups that participated in the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power, a blueprint for a bottom-up approach to democracy. The participants refuse to cooperate with the Sudanese military, which has orchestrated genocides and violence since Sudan’s independence in 1956, or with its dark offshoot, the R.S.F. The R.S.F. has a particularly sinister history. It was born of a militia that was originally commissioned by the government to quell a rebellion in Darfur and was later accused of committing crimes against humanity in the process. While the R.S.F. reportedly fell under S.A.F. authority in 2017, it kept some autonomy. Since then, the R.S.F. has steadily gained more power, arms and capital through likely affiliations with the Wagner group, the U.A.E., and Libya. It was inevitable that they would eventually come head-to-head with the institution that created them. When they did, millions of ordinary Sudanese people became collateral damage. I was one of them, forced to flee the country against my will. The international community tends to benefit from Sudan’s instability. The R.S.F. and the S.A.F. ’s respective control over what appear to be complex illicit trading and commercial networks doubtlessly enable Sudan’s dependence on imports. Since the 2014 signing of the African Union Commission and European Union’s Khartoum Process, the R.S.F. has played a major role in preventing migration to Europe through Sudan. The head of the R.S.F. has claimed, in that regard, to be operating under “the directives from the president of the republic to combat illegal migration.” While the international community has not formally partnered with the R.S.F., it may have inadvertently enabled the violence that the R.S.F. has used against Sudan’s most marginalized groups. Editors’ Picks Destination Weddings Are Moving Closer to Home To Save Japan’s Heritage Homes, People Are Shipping Them Across the World He Impressed the TikTok Star the Old-School Way: By Listening, in Real Life SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Grass-roots organizations such as the neighborhood resistance committees have provided the most consistent humanitarian responses to this war. In 2013, Sudanese activists created the resistance committees to organize against the regime of Omar Al-Bashir. Since then, these resistance committees have led the majority of pro-democracy protests across the country. This is nothing new — historically, they have refused to negotiate with the military in any capacity. Throughout the war, the resistance committees have been delivering medicine, food, water and shelter. They have also provided information about safe routes and evacuation possibilities. On May 22, the S.A.F. released a statement asking the committees to continue their work. Even the military acknowledges who the real arbiters of justice and aid are. These efforts alone will not be enough to reduce the destruction ravaging Sudan. Soon, the rainy season will come and bring its annual floods. There are reports that this year will see heavier than normal rainfall. This will no doubt accelerate ongoing internal displacement and the spread of diseases from Sudan’s dead. I eventually left Port Sudan on April 30, aboard a British convoy that a friend directed me to. Although the Sudan I have always known no longer exists, I have not lost hope. This dark chapter in Sudan’s history offers an opportunity to rethink how we got here and why — and what makes sense going forward. If the international community really wants to help, it needs to stop playing God. It must stop counting on military leaders to solve our problems and start directing support to the grass-roots organizations that have been our only salvation. Entrusting the R.S.F. and S.A.F. with Sudan’s future amounts to leaving its citizens for dead, but the international community still has an opportunity to support us in trying to take care of one another — as we always have. Bayan Abubakr is a Ph.D. candidate of history at Yale University.
The Contradictions of Afro-Arab Solidarity(ies): The Aswan High Dam and the Erasure of the Global Black Experience By : Bayan Abubakr Nubian displacement is a known consequence of the construction of the Aswan High Dam (1960-71). Centering this displacement in histories of Afro-Arab solidarity, however, sheds new light on the hydropolitics that shaped the dam’s construction as well as on the contradictions of Bandung-era politics. The displacement happened while Egypt was flourishing as a central site of pan-African politics, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Third World solidarity project. Throughout this period, a number of Black intellectuals, radicals, musicians, and writers related to Egypt—real and imagined—through the shared history of struggle in the histories of Atlantic slavery and colonialism. The expulsion and resettlement of Nubians, however, is not typically contextualized in this moment of radical internationalism. This is peculiar considering that these histories of forced displacement are ultimately a history of the “afterlives” of slavery in Egypt, and a manifestation of the anti-Black logics that situate Nubians as one of the nation’s peripheral “others."[1]
In addition to the displacement of Nubians, regional legacies of slavery in the Afro-Arab world include the ongoing slave trade across Niger, Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria through Libya and the Mediterranean, “modern” slavery in Sudan, Egypt, and Mauritania, and the kafala system. Anti-Blackness and its enmeshment in north, west, and east African trade routes defined by slave labor and the slave trade are foundational to the histories of Africa and the so-called Middle East. To not acknowledge these histories in recounting Afro-Arab solidarities is to ignore the particular conditions of local racial discourses for the sake of narrating a universal subaltern experience. Where do Black communities indigenous to the Arabic-speaking world fit into what Alex Lubin refers to as the “geographies of liberation” that emerged through the making of an Afro-Arab political imaginary from the 1850s to the present day؟[2]
Nubia and the Formation of Modern Egypt
The displacement of Nubians was fundamental to the formation of the modern Egyptian state. Nubia historically existed and still exists in the land stretching from Aswan in modern-day upper Egypt to Dongola in modern-day northern Sudan. Mohammed Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor and de facto ruler of Egypt between 1805-48, dispatched his forces to conquer the Funj Sultanate (which included Nubian lands) and northern Sudanese riverine regions in 1820. He sought to eliminate a potential Mamluk threat in Dongola, find oft-rumored gold, and acquire enslaved people to build his modern army.[3]
Although slavery and the slave trade between modern-day Egypt and Sudan existed in earlier periods, closer attention should be paid to this historical moment. Ali Pasha’s campaign took place during the advance of French, Ottoman-Egyptian, and British imperial ambitions in Africa, the centralization of the Egyptian state, and the formation of popular discourses on belonging and non-belonging in Ottoman Egypt. Black enslaved people were transported to Egypt in caravans on routes from Darfur to Asyut; Sennar to Isna; the White Nile region; Bornu and Wadai through Libya and the Western desert; and the East African coast (via the ports of Massawa and Zayla) through the Red Sea.[4]
Where do Black communities indigenous to the Arabic-speaking world fit into what Alex Lubin refers to as the “geographies of liberation” that emerged through the making of an Afro-Arab political imaginary from the 1850s to the present day؟ Regional enablers of the slave trade, which included but were not limited to jallaba merchants, jurists, religious scholars, and the ruling elite, justified the enslavement of Black people through the racialization of Blackness as a paucity of civility, history, and worth. This was part of a long and established legal and intellectual tradition of anti-Blackness spanning northern and western Africa and their slave trading routes. Aristotelian theories about the climate’s effects on the body, deterministic Khaldunian theories of history, and economic and political factors steering African slave trading routes towards the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Gulf Peninsula, and the Indian Ocean supported what John Hunwick has referred to as a “religious ethnography,” a logic that equated the darkness of an individual’s skin with unbelief throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.[5] Over the course of the nineteenth century, in particular, these beliefs were augmented by the rise of Darwinism and the evolutionary sciences. Although there was an array of counter-discourses to this racializing logic, anti-Blackness was far too enmeshed in the political economies and social hierarchies of north, west, and east African slave trading routes to be seriously threatened or delegitimized by them.
Thus, by virtue of their Blackness, Nubians, despite not having been subjected to enslavement themselves, joined (primarily) western and southern Sudanese communities in serving as an immediate “other” to the postcolonial Egyptian racial identity. The trade of enslaved Africans was de jure abolished in Egypt in 1877 and again in 1895. It was in this supposed post-abolition Egypt, however, that “the employment of dark-skinned non-slave domestic laborers was associated with the prestige of slave ownership."[6]
Late nineteenth-century Egyptian nationalist discourses and debates were a means by which stereotypical, racist caricatures of “Blackness” could be performed, invented, and reified. Early nationalists accordingly sought to distance Egypt and Egyptians from these ideas of “Blackness” to help substantiate the claim that Egypt was worthy of independence from colonial rule. Eve Troutt Powell understands this as part of the “colonized colonizer” dynamic that existed between Great Britain, Egypt, and Sudan, with Egypt occupying an intermediary position in Great Britain’s colonial scheme. Colonized yet itself a polity able to colonize, the Egyptian state mobilized these ideations of Blackness to lay claim to Sudan and assert itself as a modernizing force that measured up to other “civilized” nations. Mainstream nationalist and anti-colonial discourses largely relied on colonial frameworks to demand decolonization, and the sovereign state internalized the racisms inherent to these grammars while also perpetuating those indigenous to Egypt. The enslavement of African peoples, the racialization of Nubians, and the colonization of Sudan shared a particular logic of anti-Blackness. Left unprocessed, the afterlives of slavery, colonialism (experienced and performed), and systemic racism seeped into the foundations of the modern Egyptian state.
Demarcating the Border, Displacing Nubians
The 1899 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement formalized the border between modern-day Sudan and Egypt. Territories south of the twenty-second parallel were designated as being part of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. This border was drawn in the middle of several Nubian villages, and Nubian communities were consequently divided between the nascent nation-states. At the same time, Great Britain’s heightened control over the Nile Valley sparked its desire to regularize and control the flow of the Nile to increase the amount of water available for cotton cultivation. Basin irrigation could not sustain Britain’s extractive economic policies nor Egypt’s population, which almost doubled between 1850 and 1897.[7]
The British fulfilled their desires by building the Aswan Low Dam between 1898-1902, at the first cataract near Aswan. The dam’s retention of water submerged cultivable Nubian land, forcing the affected Nubian communities to leave their ancestral homes and move upstream. The dam was raised in 1912 and again in 1933, propelling the dam’s flooding farther into historic Nubia. Within this thirty-five-year period, fifteen Nubian villages were forced to abandon their livelihoods and relocate upstream, farther away from Old Nubia.[8] Between 1963-1964, the final and most monumental displacement took place with the construction of Aswan High Dam and its adjacent Lake Nasser (the dam’s reservoir). The Egyptian government forcibly displaced Nubia’s remaining forty-four villages shortly after the dam’s first construction stage was completed in 1964. According to the 1960 Egyptian census, this displaced around fifty thousand Nubians—the entirety of soon-to-be submerged Nubia’s population.[9] Nubia was wholly and completely uprooted in the making of the Aswan Dams.
Nasser formally announced the Aswan High Dam project during the nationalization of the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956. Together, these projects functioned as the exercise of postcolonial hydropolitics, or “water nationalism,” a term Jeremy Allouche uses to describe how “water bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures became naturalized as part of the nation-state imaginary, ignoring the marginalization of certain spaces and populations."[10] The construction of the Aswan High Dam embodied the promise of the future of the nation (already emboldened by the nationalization of the Suez Canal); Nasser referred to the High Dam as the “dam of glory, freedom, and dignity” that would “eradicate the dams of humiliation and indignity.” The dam would thus continue along the trail blazed by the Suez Canal and symbolize the free, self-governing, and self-reliant nation-state of Egypt. On the day its construction was announced, Nasser emphasized that “the [Suez] canal was dug with our souls, our skulls, our bones, and our blood…but instead of the canal being dug for Egypt, Egypt became the property of the canal.” He remarked that Egyptians would “never repeat the past.”
The High Dam submerged Nubian homelands in both southern Egyptian and northern Sudan. In 1963, displaced Egyptian Nubians were relocated to Kom Ombo, a city around fifty kilometers north of Aswan. The Sudanese government forcefully resettled forty-thousand Sudanese Nubians from their ancestral homes in Wadi Halfa, located on the border between Egypt and Sudan, to Khasm al Girba, located along the south-eastern border between Sudan and Eritrea.
The dam’s consequences also rippled throughout the diaspora. As “the ability of the Nubian land to support the population diminished, the reliance on remittances from the urban offshoots increased."[11] The dam’s violence, however, did not just manifest through forced, physical displacement and its economic consequences. To be made to exist in a country that is built on violence against your community is, in and of itself, a form of violence. To experience the destruction of your ancestral homeland as the nation’s raison d'être is a form of violence. This is a visceral force that operates beyond the nation-state framework. The construction of the dam separated and divided Nubian communities, their kinship networks, and the cultures that had lived between modern-day Egypt and Sudan for centuries. Furthermore, Nubians were not adequately compensated for their livelihoods lost in the building of the dam, and the cities they were forcibly relocated to lacked the necessary infrastructure needed to support fifty-thousand displaced persons. Nubians were displaced and neglected by the Egyptian state in the name of the Aswan High Dam and the manifestation of mainstream Egyptian nationalism.
This promise of decolonization had global resonance. It inspired Langston Hughes to write his character Simple as being so affected by the victory over the canal in a column in the Chicago Defender titled “Simple’s World of Black and White,” that he declared that “the Suez is the same as mine, since it belonged to my boy Nasser who is the Adam Powell of Egypt."[12] Egypt was at once a global symbol of liberation and local participant in violent anti-Black infrastructures. Egypt positioned against the colonial order, #####alent in stature to the African American struggle for liberation, was far more flattering (and visible on a global scale) than Egypt as a state still reckoning with its own traumas, contradictions, and inherited and locally invented technologies of violence. This imagining of Egypt as a site of a singular historical experience, however, is reliant on the idea that the world is dichotomously divided into subjugated and subjugators, oppressed and oppressors. This bidirectional understanding of power continues to shield the violence done to Nubian communities through the construction of the Aswan High Dam from global scrutiny.
Preserving Nubia
The ethnographic and archeological projects initiated before and after the construction of the Aswan High Dam focused more on the loss of Nubian antiquities and relics than they did on the forced displacement of Nubians from their ancestral lands and heritage. In doing so, these works helped to frame the dam’s construction as a necessary enterprise for state development rather than a violent force against Nubian communities that was part of Egypt’s histories of state-sanctioned anti-Blackness.
This was the case with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) “International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960-1980).” UNESCO’s initial 1960 request to the global community to support the campaign garnered a fair amount of aid and support, but not enough to fulfill the scope of the project. The appeal itself was an ode to a romanticized, ancient Nubia on the verge of ruin, and UNESCO made it clear that this ideation of Nubia, as the site of a long-gone civilization rather than the present lands of an indigenous population, was the only Nubia that would be “saved” by the campaign.[13] UNESCO later revised the appeal to include the following: “In return for the international assistance given, the Government of the United Arab Republic is offering not less than fifty per cent of the finds excavated in Nubia, authorization to carry out further excavation in other parts of Egypt, and the cession of precious objects and monuments, including certain Nubian temples, for transfer abroad. The Government of the Sudan, for its part, is offering fifty per cent of the finds from excavations to be made in its territory.”
According to UNESCO’s 1958-1961 Director-General Vittorino Veronese, Nubian heritage no longer belonged to Nubians, but was a “treasure of the universe [that was] entitled to universal protection."[14] Following the publication of this iteration of the appeal, forty-seven UNESCO member states contributed over forty million dollars to the campaign’s twenty-year run. The bulk of the funds came from the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and Italy. Unsurprisingly, the campaign’s most lucrative “saves”—the temples of Debod, Taffa, Dendur, Ellesvia, and Kalabsha Portico—were given to museums in Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, Italy, and Germany, respectively. UNESCO sanctioned and created a platform for what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay refers to as the “kernel of imperialism’s archival modus operandi” to legitimize the theft of Nubian relics from Nubian communities. The UNESCO appeal, as well as the nation-states enabling the organization’s approach, violated “existing forms of being-together and of inhabiting the world through the separation of objects from people and their transformation into embodiments of foreign classificatory categories that determine the fate of their displacement, extermination, exploitation, appropriation, or preservation."[15]
Although UNESCO identified the relics as elements of Nubian heritage, they described them as if they were not the belongings and livelihoods of living Nubian communities. This was largely due to the fact that researchers associated with the campaign “relied on the notion of ‘salvage anthropology,’ which saw the Nubians as a traditional, tribal group on the brink of change and whose identity needed documentation lest it be lost forever."[16] Key to the erasure of indigenous groups and their rights is their forced displacement from the objects that symbolize their relationship to their lands. This allows for a distinction between the “past”—defined by archeologists, engineers, museum curators, and ethnographers—and the “present.” The relics came to belong to the “world” and became part of an imagined universal heritage the moment Egypt became a nation-state.
It was at this moment that Egypt’s formally outlined borders became the most significant determinant of an individual’s relationship to the lands within them. Nubians could not be “of Nubia” in a way that was recognizable to the international landscape of the 1960s. Nubia was not a recognized sovereign entity and therefore did not exist. By all means and figures, Nubians were either Egyptian or Sudanese. This rendered Nubian artifacts—whose owners were alive and present—part of an ambiguous ancient past so removed from the “modern” idiom of world order that they became part of universal history. The concept of the “universal” operates to flatten the contours of history to fit into modernity’s logics in such a way that communities that exist outside its temporality are violently denied their entitlements to their legacies and their right to reject the nation-state’s monopoly on subjectivity. Thus, when Nubia and its artifacts are relegated to the ancient world, the reparations and rights owed to Nubians are more easily dismissed. UNESCO and the Egyptian government’s respective approaches to the displacement of Nubian communities were mutually-reinforcing. UNESCO was able to facilitate the global #####ng of valuable Nubian monuments and the Egyptian government was bolstered in its efforts to dictate and police the ways “Egyptians” could identify themselves with “Egypt.”
Black Nationalists, Malcolm X, and Nubia
Given the layers of dispossession and anti-Blackness at play in the displacement of Nubians between 1960-1971, it is ironic that the zenith of Malcolm X’s political ideology is often imagined as having been reached during his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca and trips across Africa and the so-called Middle East, and in particular Cairo. It was in Mecca that the Malcolm X depicted by Alex Haley first reckoned with the transformative and unifying power of Islam. It was there that he prayed side by side with Muslims “whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, and whose hair was the blondest of blond."[17] To Malcolm, this practice symbolized the oneness of humanity, and in turn, the oneness of God. He saw what he referred to as an “eastern” Islam that protected the societies that were its oases from the evils of racism. He believed that this Islam had the potential to function as a fundamentally anti-racist ideology that could engender true brotherhood, understanding, and recognition between white and non-white communities in the United States. Islam was the praxis of anti-racism.
The power of this “eastern” Islam was so totalizing that in Cairo, Malcolm wrote that “there were people of ‘all complexions, but…no ‘color’ problem—one family, yet all shades…I met thousands of people of different races and colors who treated me as a human being.” He declared the city an “‘example for [the world].’"[18] In Malcolm’s eyes, Islam was the world’s most powerful antidote to the problem of the color line. He attributed anti-Black racism in the lands of “eastern” Islam only to “where, and to what extent that … area of the Muslim world has been influenced by the West."[19] This idea was originally expressed to him by Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, an Egyptian diplomat and the first secretary-general of the Arab League.
As Hisham Aidi has noted, Cold War neoconservative politics were profoundly influenced by Black nationalists’ embrace of the struggle for decolonization in the Arab world.[20] Bernard Lewis, prominent orientalist and scholar of Islam, wrote that the Islamic beliefs “which [Malcolm] had acquired prevented him from seeing the ‘Alabama-like quality’ and ‘Southern impression’ of Arab life."[21] Published in Race and Color in Islam in 1971, this view was a product of Lewis’ staunch support for the state of Israel following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and argument that Islamic civilizations were inherently anti-Black and racially discriminatory. Accordingly, he failed to realize that it was not Malcolm X’s zeal for Islam that was clouding his judgment, but his inability (or reluctance) to expand his analysis of race and power to encompass the historical trajectory of Afro-Arab racialisms.
This analytical framework persists in the present commemorations of Malcolm X’s trips to the Arabic-speaking world. In 1992, David Graham DuBois contextualized Malcom’s trips to Egypt as being shaped by “the mass accumulation of human beings of color [in Egypt], in which white folks are a minority—a precise and distinct minority.” “[This] brotherhood, the oneness of experience” was of the most “important things” to an African-American at the time.
Nubia and the Afro-Arab World
DuBois’ emphasis on the “oneness of experience” invites us to consider the limitations inherent in current historiographical framings of Afro-Arab political solidarities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These histories are important and critical in their own right. But in rigidly focusing on the legacies of colonial subjugation shared by modern-day African and Arab nation-states, the intertwined histories and intellectual genealogies of African American and Palestinian struggles for liberation, and dominant ideologies and grammars of Third-Worldism, they obscure the historical reality and lived experience of Afro-Arab peoples and communities. In these analyses,[22] it is not an “eastern” Islam that forms the bridge of solidarity uniting the two distinct regions, but the external oppression wrought by white supremacy and Western imperialism. Inherent to this logic is the separation of two discrete, fixed and unchanging worlds: a majority Black and “African” one; and an “Arab” one. But there are communities that transcend the racial, geographic, and sociopolitical boundaries of these imagined African and Arab worlds.
Further, the narrow focus on Euro-American forces and technologies of power diminishes the legacies and logics of the anti-Black racisms that are indigenous and fundamental to the formation of the Afro-Arab world. By “Afro-Arab” world I do not mean the countries existing between the disciplinary borders of the fields of “Middle Eastern” and “African” studies—often limited to Sudan, Tanzania, Djibouti, and Somalia and sometimes including Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco—nor am I referring to the Afro-Arab “political project” generated by Third World intelligentsia.Rather, I am invoking the layered histories of both regions. What is conventionally thought of as the Arab world could not exist without its ties to the African continent, and vice versa. To separate these worlds would be to both ignore the fundamental role that natural geography and the environment have played in shaping the region and neglect the histories of the slave trade, migration, and enslavement alongside the intellectual traditions and cosmologies shared throughout Africa and West Asia.
Historicizing betwixt and between the fields of Middle Eastern and African studies is of the utmost urgency and is necessary to excavate the histories that are lost in the artificial bordering of the Afro-Arab world. Aimé Césaire’s 1956 letter to Maurice Thorez declaring his resignation from the French Communist Party is useful for articulating the stakes of this project. He wrote: “I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal.’” This dilution is a key to the historicization of Afro-Arab solidarities. The nuances of local histories have been sacrificed in attempts to articulate the ties that bind subjugated peoples and spaces to one another. This helps to narrate the history of a “universal” subaltern experience largely shared by non-Western and/or non-white nations and peoples as the most formative and disastrous event of violence. Local histories are diluted and written off as inherently secondary to and less important than the event of Western imperialism. This approach enables a global parochialism that cannot accommodate the multiplicities of Blackness and the global Black experience. Here, understanding Nubian displacement in and through a local Egyptian hydropolitical project sheds light on how racism operates as a technology on multiple levels, and offers an analysis that crosses those levels.
If we are able to hold on to the fact that multiple, competing, and sometimes contradictory axes of power can exist in a single space and understand that the identities of oppressed and oppressor are never fixed and always historically contingent, we can see more fully how the displacement of Nubian communities was able to take place amid the articulation of Afro-Arab solidarities and present more clearly the multi-layered nature of violence in a space as dynamic as the Afro-Arab world. In propagating the notion of an emaciated subaltern universalism, we silence the complexities present in the lived experience of Afro-Arabness and Africanity in the Arabic-speaking world. Instead, we must reconfigure and interrogate our current geographies of liberation.
[This piece was originally published in POMEPS STUDIES.]
[1] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 24.
[2] Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of An Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 9.
[3] Emanuel Beška, “Muhammed Ali’s conquest of Sudan (1820-1824),” Asian and African Studies 28, no. 3 (2018): 32.
[4] Gabriel Baer, “Slavery in Nineteenth Century Egypt,” The Journal of African History 8, no. 3 (1967): 441.
[5] John Hunwick, “Islamic Law and Polemics over Race and Slavery in North and West Africa (16th–19th Centuries),” in Shaun E. Marmon, ed., Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 46.
[6] Elizabeth A. Smith, “Tributaries in the Stream of Civilization: Race, Ethnicity, and National Belonging among Nubians in Egypt,” Ph.D. diss., (New York University, 2006), 61.
[7] Claire Cookson-Hills, “The Aswan Dam and Egyptian Water Control Policy, 1882-1902,” Radical History Review 116 (2013): 62-63.
[8] Nicholas S. Hopkins and Sohair R. Mehanna, The Nubian Ethnological Survey: History and Methods (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011), 5-9.
[9] Hussein Fahim, “Basic Information on the Newly Settled Nubian Community in Kom Ombo, Upper Egypt: Report Prepared for the Egyptian General Organization for Land Reclamation (EGOLR),” (Cairo: Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo, 1974), 22.
[10] Jeremy Allouche, “State building, nation making and post-colonial hydropolitics in India and Israel: Visible and hidden forms of violence at multiple scales,” Political Geography 75 (2019): 6.
[11] Hopkins and Mehanna, The Nubian Ethnological Survey,10.
[12] As cited in Vaughn Rasberry, Race in the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 211.
[13] Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and kharyssa rhodes, “The Study of Race and Racism in the Nile Valley,” in Race and Identity in the Nile Valley: Ancient and Modern Perspectives eds. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and kharyssa rhodes (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2004), xiii-xx.
[14] As quoted in Roger-Pol Droit, Humanity in the Making: Overview of the Intellectual History of UNESCO, 1945-2000 (UNESCO, 2005), 132-133.
[15] Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 174.
[16] Samantha Allen, “Nubians and development, 1960-2015,” MA thesis, (The American University in Cairo, 2014), 21.
[17] Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, “Letter from Mecca,” The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Random House, 1964), 391.
[18] Stephen Tuck, The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 11.
[19] El-Shabazz and Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X,385.
[20] Hisham Aidi, “DuBois, Ghana, and Cairo Jazz: the Geo-politics of Malcolm X,” in Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics eds. Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam, (London: Routledge, 2018), 428.
[21] Ibid. See also Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 3.
[22] For example, see Akinsanya Adeyoe, “The Afro-Arab Alliance: Dream or Reality؟” African Affairs 31, no. 301 (1976): 511-529; Keith P. Feldman “Towards an Afro-Arab Diasporic Culture: The Translational Practices of David Graham Du Bois,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 31 (2011): 152-172; Lubin, Geographies of Liberation; Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).