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Cet article, centré sur l’usage du corps et le style vestimentaire, interroge ce que ceux-ci nous disent du respect des normes de genre et de la capacité, ou de la volonté, de transiger avec celles-ci ou de se les réapproprier à son avantage. Il se fonde sur une étude portant sur des femmes mozabites vivant dans leur territoire d’origine (le M’Zab), et dans un territoire d’accueil, la ville d’El-Eulma (Setif). La comparaison entre ces deux espaces permet d’éclairer et de mesurer le décalage entre les usages du corps et du vêtement selon le poids démographique et la force des liens de sociabilité. Le port du voile aḥouli, accessoire qui, au M’Zab, sert à l’invisibilité des femmes mozabites, se révèle accroître leur visibilité ailleurs, de sorte que celles-ci peuvent vouloir l’ôter pour gagner en invisibilité.

What role did enslaved East Africans play in producing and transmitting the occult sciences between East Africa and Oman? This article explores the relationship between enslaved East Africans and the occult sciences in the works of Nās.ir bin Abī Nabhān (1778–1846), a jurist and practitioner of the occult sciences who lived between Oman and East Africa. It argues that enslaved East Africans were instrumental in producing and disseminating valuable occult knowledge. The analysis informs how occult knowledge operated and circulated between the Arabian and African coasts, animated in occultist idioms, and was written in Arabic and Swahili. Moreover, it explores how East African and Omani actors articulated occultist knowledge by paying attention to the interlinkages between power dynamics and knowledge hierarchies during the expansion of the Bu Saidi Empire in the nineteenth century. This study explores uncharted waters in a transoceanic sphere by tracing translation processes and nonEuropean imperial knowledge production in the Indian Ocean world.

تُعدُّ الكلمة بمثابة بوابة تفتح على عوالم من الدلالات والمعاني المتعددة، وهذا ما أدّى إلى تأسيس علم مستقل يعني بدراسة الدلالة، حيث يركّز على فهم الكلمة ومعانيها واستخداماتها في سياقات مختلفة. تبرز نظرية الحقول الدلالية كأداة أساسية في فهم المعاني وكشف الأبعاد الدالة في النصوص. ونظرًا لهذه الأهمية، قررنا تطبيق هذه النظرية على قصائد الشاعر العماني سليمان بن علي العبري، وبما أن نصّه الشعري يتمتع بلغة غنية بالدلالات، تهدف الدراسة عبر المنهج الوصفي- التحلیلي إلى معرفة مدى تنوع الحقول الدلالية في شعره، وقد توصلت الدراسة إلى حقولٍ دالة على الطبيعة والمناظر الطبيعية، والحبّ والعواطف، والدين والروحانية، والحضارة والتاريخ، والسلام والتسامح.

Portuguese presence in the Gulf of Oman developed, in general, since the early sixteenth century. However, the Arab shores were constantly side-lined in favour of Hormuz, the centre of Portuguese operations in the region. That changed in 1622, when the island was lost to an Anglo-Persian force. That moment, the Portuguese chose Muscat as a regional base and, as such, the Omani world became fundamental for the consolidation and enhancement of the Portuguese position as a leading power. Yet, the rule of the Omani shores proved to be difficult and hazardous. The Estado da India’s decline in resources, increasing European competition and the rise of a new united Arab entity exacerbated those difficulties and, in a few decades, Portuguese control was reduced to Muscat itself. This study addresses some of the pivotal characteristics and events related to the Portuguese presence in the Arabian coast of Oman, from the loss of Hormuz to the fall of Muscat in 1650. Therefore, military operations, commercial undertakings, financial difficulties, political decisions, religious features and tense relations are at the centre of the narrative. This way, it would be possible to understand how the Estado da India elite in Goa and the Portuguese officials in Oman acted throughout this period. Portuguese-Omani interactions started well before 1622 and continued well beyond 1650, but the three decades addressed in this dissertation can be seen as their climax.

In the late nineteenth century, abolitionists felt entitled to use all possible means to save the African victims of the slave trade. As European imperialism rose, abolitionism legitimized interventionism. This article explores how a major humanitarian movement could sanction colonial occupation and the violence that accompanied it. It also examines the position of African slaveholders who resisted the entrenchment of European rule and defended an order in which slavery was common. It focuses on two main actors: French Captain Leopold Joubert, Catholic royalist and former pontifical Zouave who supported Cardinal Lavigerie's Missionaries of Africa and Belgian King Leopold II's allegedly abolitionist endeavours; and Tippu Tip, a trader and slaver who, like Joubert, worked for self-styled abolitionists such as Leopold II and the Sultan of Zanzibar. The connected microhistories of these men show how the international problematization of African slavery fuelled both European imperialism and anti-colonial resistance, while also creating circumstances in which enslaved persons emancipated themselves. The article investigates the moral perceptions of individuals whose sense of self was predicated upon values embodied by Europe's monarchies, the papacy of Rome, and the sultanate of Zanzibar. Faced with what they perceived as existential threats to these institutions, they responded with rising radicalism.

تسعى هذه الدّراسة إلى رصد صورة متكاملة لبدو عُمان كما قدّمها كتاب «الرمال العربية» للمستشرق والرحّالة البريطاني ويلفريد ثيسيجر Wilfred Thesiger (1910 - 2003). وقد قضى ثيسيجر تسعَ سنوات مستكشفًا أفريقيا وبعض أقطار العالم العربيّ قبل أن يعيش مدّة خمس سنوات أُخرى (1945 – 1950) في جنوب عُمان برفقة البدو، والصّحراء.ويدين ثيسيجر لتجربته الثّريّة في اكتشاف إِحدى أقسى صحارى العَالم، والاقتراب من حياة مجتمع الهامش، إلى خصوصيّة علاقته ببدو عُمان، وعلى رأسهم «ابن كبينة» و«ابن غبيشة»، فمهّدوا له مهمّة عبور صحراء الرّبع الخالي مرّتين على نحوٍ غير مسبوق، وجسّروا المجتمعَ البدوي لمعايشة الغريب وتقبّله بينهم. كما يدين لهذه التجربة بجملتها بفضل تقريبه من أَسرار العالم الرُّوحيّ ليكشف وجهًا نقيضًا من الحياة مغايرًا للعالم المادّي المهيمن على أوروبا – كما يقول. يقدّم ثيسيجر تجربته هذه في مقالات نشرها متفرّقة قبل أن يجمعها في كتابه «الرمال العربية» (Arabian Sands). والمطّلع على هذا الكتاب يتبيّن صورةً لبدو عُمان تشفّ عن إعجاب ثيسيجر الشّديد بنبل أخلاقهم، وصبرهم وشجاعتهم وكرمهم وأمانتهم، وإيثارهم شظف العيش على رغده.لكن إلى جانب هذه الصّورة المشرقة المهيمنة على جملة تفاصيل تجربة ثيسجر بين بدو عُمان، والصّحراء، تحضر صور أُخرى تُرْسَمُ من تأفّفه من فضولِ البدو، وتنمّر بعض أطفالهم عليه لتخلّفه عن مشاركة النّاس الصّلاة، وغيرها.

This paper describes several episodes relative to the Rustamid dynasty (9th Century C.E.) where diplomacy, inter-group negotiation and mobility in Africa and towards the central Islamic lands was conducted with the help of Amazigh collaborators. By comparing these with later diplomatic exchanges (13th-14th Centuries C.E.) examples having in common the connection West-East, the ḥajj and/or the question of intra-Islamic leadership, this research examines such journeys’ broader implications for stablishing a Maghrebi distinctiveness in the practice of diplomacy in its broad sense, as both a chance for individuals’ mobility and a political tool within medieval North African dynastic governance. This research argues that some elements of the exchanges’ motivations and results between Maghrebi and Eastern dynasties are consistent during the medieval period, but the early ones are marked by the absence of an intra-Islamic system of mutual leadership recognition, while this isn’t the case in the later ones. It also highlights the composition of the diplomatic corps and the significant role of the Amazigh social network in facilitating diplomatic exchanges and other kinds of negotiation, as well as general mobility as a service rendered to the dynastic interests, though the North African space. These exchanges reveal the dynastic usage of flexible social networks of “diplomats”, mediators and enablers of mobility extracted from non-urban populations for several purposes, such as maintaining communication with other dynasties while asserting legitimacy in an intra-Islamic milieu, negotiating power within internal groups and even as interpreters of African languages. The findings underscore the distinctiveness of Maghrebi diplomacy, marked by both its integration of local tribal systems and participation in a broader intra-Islamic system, crucial for sustaining dynastic mobility and diplomatic activity in a West-East axis and within its African context.

The distributive political economy of contemporary Arab Oman yields a status-differentiated social infrastructure composed of elites who distribute and non-elites who, in many ways, rely on those distributions. The construction of communicative links within social infrastructures via the performance of sung poetry depends on the phaticity of the link being activated. For Omani poets, different linguistic performance genres telescope the vast social distance between elites who listen and non-elites who sing in different ways and with different results. Omani poets from the rural north of the country conduct cross-class social contact—conceptually “vertical” social infrastructural movement—by way of two contrasting genres of Arabic praise poetry: a one-off request or statement, the solo qasida, and a recognitive, addressive choral form that reciprocally establishes and evaluates such vertical relationships, the 'āzī. I argue that the metapragmatic distinctions that Omani poets draw between these two genres reveal a subtle phatic ideology that allows certain modes of communicative contact to index deeper, cross-class social ties within grand public performances, while simultaneously reinforcing tacit norms of elite avoidance of non-elites in everyday social intercourse.

This dissertation is a history of the Omani Empire focused primarily on the first half of the nineteenth century. I use the reign of Oman’s longest serving ruler, Saʿid bin Sultan (1804/6-1856), as a lens for highlighting the formative role the Omani Empire played in uniting the Atlantic and Indian Oceans into a shared oceanic marketplace, a crucial step in the emergence of modern global capitalism. It is based on archival research and published primary sources from throughout Oman, Zanzibar, India, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This work reveals the Omani Empire as a new, mostly overlooked space for seeing how entrepreneurs and statesmen combined imperial agendas, slave labor, and the singular pursuit of profit in uniting disparate markets into global circuits of exchange. Across six chapters, I unravel the process by which Zanzibar, the empire’s capital, became a monied metropolis bursting with entrepreneurs from throughout the world, trading in the most coveted consumer goods of the time. By using an oceanic framework, I bring into focus an entire history of empire and capitalism that has been largely overlooked by many Middle East and Islamic world historians because of a conventional adherence to terrestrial units of analysis. Most broadly, I aim to show how the makings of the modern world lie as much in places like East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as in places like England or New England. Accordingly, I use the Omani Empire as a platform for arguing that the formation of global capitalism resulted from relatively new maritime markets throughout the Atlantic Ocean being incorporated into the longer standing Indian Ocean world.

Manuscripts produced and used by Ibadi Muslim communities have been on the move in the Maghrib and beyond for over a millennium. Yet most Ibadi texts, including most extant copies of pre-modern texts, were copied from the 18th century onward. This means that any study of these manuscripts must address their early modern and modern histories, including their encounter with colonialism, their role in shaping post-independence nationalist historiographies, and contemporary efforts at manuscript documentation in the region. In this presentation, I follow the history of manuscript migration connected to Ibadi communities in the Jebel Nafusa through four intersecting themes. The first relates to the objects themselves, pausing to consider the history of their production, based on a survey of manuscript catalogs and data from recent digitization and documentation projects in the region. This dimension has migration at its core, since many “Nafusi” manuscripts were produced outside the Jebel Nafusa in other centers of Ibadi learning in Northern Africa. Continuing to follow the manuscripts as they moved through space allows us to trace the trajectories of their copyists and owners. Using exemplary private libraries today located in Djerba, Tunisia, I present a migrant manuscript trajectories that connect the Jebel Nafusa, Cairo, the Mzab Valley in Algeria, and the island of Djerba. I then turn my attention to an important but often neglected aspect of Maghribi manuscript histories; namely, their colonial legacies. Finally, I highlight the work done by local Ibadi organizations in the past two decades to document and to preserve individually and collectively owned manuscript collections.