TY - JOUR
AU - Hathaway, Jane
AB - M’hamed Oualdi’s first book, Esclaves et maîtres: Les mameloukes des beys de Tunis du XVIIe siècle aux années 1880 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011), based on his 2008 Université de Paris dissertation, was a tour de force, demonstrating how the institution of elite slavery defined Tunisia’s history as a province of the Ottoman Empire. This, his second book, is very different. At its core, it is a short biography of ‘General Husayn’, a manumitted Circassian mamluk who joined Tunisia’s ruling elite before exiling himself to Tuscany in the 1870s. When he died in Florence in 1887, his estate and even his remains became sources of contention among the French protectorate that had taken over Tunis in 1881, the Italian and Ottoman central governments, and various members of Husayn’s former entourage. The Ottoman empire conquered Tunis from the moribund Hafsid empire, propped up by the Spanish Habsburgs, in 1574. For the next several decades, Tunis, rather like Algiers, was dominated by a military officer class drawn largely from Ottoman Anatolia and led by an officer with the title dey. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, however, rural tax farmers with the rank of sanjak bey (bey) came to dominate the province. One dynasty of beys administered Tunis from 1705 through the declaration of the French protectorate in 1881. Under their rule, Tunis’ military and administrative elite encompassed an array of ethno-regional identities, including mamluks from Circassia and Georgia, and renegades and captives from the Aegean and Mediterranean islands. Key nineteenth-century reformers such as Khayr al-Din Pasha, Mustafa Khaznadar, and General Husayn himself came from such varied roots. This is the context within which General Husayn built his career, although Oualdi provides only a small part of this background information in scattershot fashion as the book progresses. The book consists of six core chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss Husayn’s life and the wealth that he accumulated in Tunis, the coastal district of Halq al-Wadi (La Goulette), Florence, and Livorno. Chapter 3 delves into his representation of the Tunisian administration in the (separate) legal cases against Mahmud ibn ʿAyyad and Nessim Scemama, two finance officials turned embezzlers who fled to Paris and the Tuscan port of Livorno, respectively, in the 1850s and 1860s. The Scemama case in particular obliged Husayn to cultivate patronage ties with key North African Jewish functionaries who could take advantage of the ties that Livorno’s Jewish community had for several centuries cultivated with Ottoman North Africa. Chapter 4 moves to the convoluted disputes over Husayn’s estate following his death, by which time Tunis was under French protectorate; the Ottoman and Italian governments battled the protectorate authorities and the Tunisian bey dynasty for control of Husayn’s assets. Chapter 5 considers the positions of his heirs and potential heirs, including the Tunisian state in the person of the governor Ali Bey (r. 1882–1902); two European women who belonged to Husayn’s household in Florentine exile and whose daughters he supported; the Bu Hajib ulema family, who administered Husayn’s waqf endowments in Halq al-Wadi; various Jewish creditors; and above all the intriguing (in all senses of the word) Algerian-French agent Léon Elmilik. Chapter 6, an epilogue, examines Husayn’s legacy in ‘colonial’ Tunisia. The book is composed in lucid, readable prose, translated from the French, at least at rough draft stage, by Adrian Morfee, as the Acknowledgments point out. The exposition of Husayn’s life, wealth, career, and estate does not proceed in linear fashion, however. Oualdi’s compositional strategy is to narrate an episode from Husayn’s experience, then link it to key topics in Ottoman, North African, or colonial history by quoting, often directly, from recent secondary literature. He ends each of the six core chapters by turning to fundamental questions surrounding the historiography of colonial and post-colonial North Africa. In most cases, however, these questions do not follow readily from the preceding discussion, so that ultimately there is a disconnect between Husayn’s story and these sweeping issues. In addition, Oualdi appears at numerous points to challenge—without, for the sake of non-specialists, providing contextual exposition—specific tropes and assumptions in the historiography of colonial North Africa, such as the lack of indigenous Arabic-language archival sources, and the notion that the colonized population’s situation must fall into the binary of oppression vs. resistance. Although the author asserts in the Introduction that the book’s purview extends to all of North Africa and even the Ottoman Empire as a whole, the study in fact focuses primarily on Tunisia and Tuscany. Even so, critical explanatory material on Husayn’s Tuscan exile, which forms the crux of the dispute over his estate, appears only belatedly. The duchy of Tuscany had long had a singular relationship with the Ottoman Arab provinces, largely because of its dynamic port of Livorno (a.k.a. Leghorn) on Italy’s western coast. By the time Husayn sought exile there in 1877, however, Tuscany was part of a recently unified Italy. This fact is not mentioned until ch. 4, which concerns Husayn’s estate. Exactly where in Tuscany Husayn lived is similarly vague until the same chapter, when we are told that he had three different residences divided between Florence and Livorno, and that he was buried in Livorno’s Muslim cemetery until his remains were exhumed and transferred to Istanbul some four months after his death. How Tuscany navigated within the new Italian nation-state never comes up, even though the parallels with Tunisia’s own transition to nation-state status would seem compelling. Better contextualization would likewise have added comprehensibility to Oualdi’s evocation of other key historiographical themes, notably Tunisia’s administrative status, the household as a framework for Ottoman provincial society, Islamic reformism, and the role of the Jewish minority in colonial society. The ambivalent relationship between the Ottoman imperial government and Tunisia in the late nineteenth century, both before and after France’s declaration of a protectorate, would seem to lie at the heart of Husayn’s story. Even before the nineteenth century, Tunis had exercised a degree of administrative autonomy from Istanbul that neither Algiers nor Libyan Tripoli exhibited. In the late 1870s, however, the Tunisian statesman Khayr al-Din Pasha briefly became Ottoman Grand Vizier, as Oualdi notes on p. 91; it was he, we learn on p. 99, who engineered the transfer of Husayn’s remains to the tomb of the reforming Ottoman sultan Mahmud II, even well after his tenure as Grand Vizier had ended. The contretemps over Husayn’s nationality—the Ottoman central authority claiming him as an Ottoman, the French backing the Tunisian governor in insisting he was Tunisian—resulted from this ambivalence, which likewise surfaced in the cases of other Ottoman subjects who found themselves under European imperial rule, as Lale Can’s book Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) has shown. Yet the nature of Ottoman provincial administration, routinely misconstrued in the case of North Africa, is never systematically addressed. Where European territorial encroachment is concerned, the author neglects to draw a clear distinction between a colony and a protectorate. Algeria after 1830 was a colony of France. Tunisia under French occupation after 1881 and Egypt under British occupation after 1882 were protectorates. Protectorates were still under nominal Ottoman rule, and it seems clear from the discussion of Ottoman intervention in the dispute over Husayn’s estate that the Ottoman central authority did its best to exploit this ambivalent status for its advantage. More analogies to the Egyptian case would have clarified this point. In similar fashion, discussion of the Ottoman elite household, a combined kinship-clientage network, falls somewhat short in relation to Husayn’s web of contacts and dependents. In ch. 5, Oualdi draws an apt analogy between Husayn’s Italian paramour Angiolina Bertucci, the mother of his daughter, and a household head’s concubine, yet her marriage, following Husayn’s death, to his client ʿAmr Bu Hajib follows the long-established trajectory of a mamluk or client marrying his patron’s widow. Chapter 6 does a better job of showing how the pattern of inter-household marriage alliances linked Husayn to leading Islamic reformers via his own marriage to Khayr al-Din’s daughter and the Bu Hajib household’s connections to legendary reformers Muhammad ʿAbduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. The marriage of Angiolina’s brother-in-law, Khalil Bu Hajib, to Princess Nazli, daughter of Egypt’s Khedive Ismail, reinforced this reformist connection since the princess hosted salons frequented by reformers and modernizers. More awkward are Oualdi’s attempts, also in ch. 6, to link Husayn’s Jewish agent and, later, creditor Léo Elmilik, who went to outlandish lengths to intervene in the general’s estate, to historiography on Jewish populations under Muslim rule. He concedes, rather lamely, that Elmilik does not fit the tropes of tolerance vs. persecution or of the model minority that have traditionally dominated the historiography of non-Muslims under Muslim rule—although, as he points out, these paradigms have received a vigorous critique in recent years. It would have been more effective to find a pattern that Elmilik does fit, perhaps that of a polyglot, multi-talented member of a minority community who took advantage of the fluid national and imperial identities, as well as financial and legal innovations, wrought by French expansion and Italian unification. In the end, it is almost as if this slender volume could have been two books: one a historical contextualization/problematization of Husayn’s life and death, similar to Omri Paz’s recent Who Killed Panayot? Reforming Ottoman Legal Culture in the 19th Century (Routledge, 2021), the other an historiographical discussion of North African history in the colonial era. Either one, however, would have required quite a bit of additional context to fill in the connections that appear only in sketchy outline in the present work. I admire M’hamed Oualdi’s scholarship a great deal and agree with Malika Zeghal of Harvard, who in one of the back-cover endorsements calls him ‘one of the best scholars of the Maghreb’. The material he has uncovered on General Husayn is fascinating and could indeed serve as a springboard to a rethinking of North African historiography. His book would serve that purpose much more effectively, however, if it were expanded and reorganized. © The Author(s) (2022). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A Slave Between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa. By M’hamed Oualdi
JF - Journal of Islamic Studies
DO - 10.1093/jis/etab075
DA - 2022-01-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-slave-between-empires-a-transimperial-history-of-north-africa-by-m-560G6Sfqvf
SP - 277
EP - 281
VL - 33
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -