Khaled Esseissah

Biography

I am a historian of Islam, colonialism, slavery, race, and gender, with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century West Africa. I am currently working on my book manuscript, Activating Emancipation: Race, Slavery, and Islamic Respectability Among the Ḥrāṭīn in Colonial Mauritania. This book tells the unpreviously told story of Ḥrāṭīn men and women who worked to dramatically improve their lives and those of their communities during the colonial period. Occupying a lower social status due to their being associated with slavery, I argue that Ḥrāṭīn have long labored to assert their freedom and claim religious, political, and economic power in the polity. The book thus works to reinsert Ḥrāṭīn into the historical narrative, demonstrating how they took advantage of opportunities during the colonial period to try and shape their lives and fight against racism, religious marginalization, economic exploitation and social hierarchy. By tracing the lives of particular individuals through each chapter, the book uses these biographies to shed light on issues that shaped the lives of the broader Ḥrāṭīn community as well as to trace the ways through which they responded to colonialism more broadly and sought to affirm their emancipation. A Ḥrāṭīn myself, I illustrate how the Ḥrāṭīn employed a range of strategies to secure their positions, including collaborating with or resisting the French, asserting their religious identities, exercising communal agency to support each other, and garnering respectability. I also pay careful attention to Islam, illustrating how it is employed differently by different groups. While historically in Mauritania the faith was used to justify slavery and racial hierarchy, Ḥrāṭīn drew on it to demonstrate their piety, expand access to Islam to other marginalized individuals, and to justify their free status.

This book is significant because it challenges conceptions of the Ḥrāṭīn as passive and marginalized, inviting us to question such narratives more broadly and to reconceptualize the ways in which people assert power and authority. It contends that they were major players in the colonial period, and as such they empowered their communities and significantly contributed to the building of modern Mauritania. Drawing on extensive oral histories, as well as archival documents and elements of public culture including poetry, I bring the Ḥrāṭīn to life and reminds us of their complexity and importance in Mauritanian history.

I have also begun working on a second book project, tentatively entitled Subaltern Intellectuals in Muslim Africa: Slavery, Artisanship, and Transregional Networks of Knowledge and Migration. This book unsettles long-standing narratives about Arabic literacy, manuscript culture, archival power, and Islamic knowledge production and preservation in Islamic Africa in the Sahara region (now Mauritania) by bringing due attention to the little-known phenomenon of scholars and scribes among the Harāṭīn and Mʿalīmin (craftspeople) communities. Using a wide range of oral and written accounts, this study explores the significant contributions these groups made to advancing the scholarly traditions of African Muslim societies. Though racial and social structural barriers have contributed to the silencing of these groups, both in the past and the present, this study reveals that non-elite Saharan Muslims participated in various and complex means of spreading Arabic literacy, either by making the tools required for knowledge production and preservation, such as wooden tablets and pens (as was the case for muʿalīmin), or by providing unpaid services for elite families (as was the case for Harāṭīn). My historical fieldwork also verifies that the Mʿalīmin and Harāṭīn were not incidental in the process of knowledge production. Instead, they worked as professional copyists in libraries in fabled towns such as Tishīt, Walāta, and Nema. Historical records also show that a cluster of subaltern Saharan Muslims was well versed in Islamic sciences and Arabic literature. They wrote books on different important subjects related to Arabic grammar, fiqh, and poetry. In so doing, Harāṭīn and Muʿalīmin communities immensely contributed to manuscript culture and produced Islamic knowledge often attributed to the families of knowledge from zawāyā (clerical) groups in Mauritania. This research will de-center Saharan intellectual history by looking beyond zawāyā communities, and thus deepen our understanding of subaltern Muslims’ role in the production and preservation of Islamic manuscript and intellectual heritage.

Education

Ph.D., Indiana University-Bloomington
M.A., Bowling Green State University
D.E.A., Université de Cheikh Anta Diop
B.A., Université de Nouakchott

Selected Publications

• “Enslaved Muslim Sufi Saints in the Nineteenth-Century Sahara: The Life of Bilal Ould Mohamoud,” The Journal of African History, 62:3 (2021).
• “Paradise is under the Feet of Your Master”: The Construction of the Religious Basis of Racial Slavery in the Mauritanian Arab-Berber Community,” The Journal of Black Studies (2016): 1-21.

Invited Talks & Research Presentations

• “Race, Enslavement, and the Making of Unequal Citizens of the Global Ummah,” Panel on Afro-Arab Social Inclusion at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson International Center (April 5th, 2023).
• “Mawālī, Craftspeople, and the Making of a Subaltern Muslim Intellectual Community in Mauritania, from 1800- to Recent Times,” New Actors in Muslim Africa Symposium, the University of Florida, Gainesville (April 14-15, 2023).
• “The Racial and Cultural Construction of Blackness and Whiteness in the 19th-Century Sahara,” “New Scholars Series” Histories of Race & Ethnicity in Africa, History Department, Connecticut College (December 2, 2021).
• “Harāṭīn Reformist Intermediaries in Colonial Mauritania, 1902-1960,” trans-Atlantic Black Liberation Series will be hold online at the Program of African Studies, Northwestern University (November 2021).
• “The Ulama of Bilad Shinqiti and their Roles in Disseminating Islamic Learning outside Africa.” Paper presented at the Conference on New Directions in the Study of Islamic Scholarship in Africa, at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, October 5-6, 2017

Selected Awards

•  Postdoctoral Fellowship, History Department, Duke University (declined, 2021)
• The Council of American Overseas Research Centers/National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship (2020)
• College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Fellowship, Indiana University (2018)
• Richard A. Horovitz Fund, Institute of International Education (2016)
• Carnegie Saharan Crossroads Fellowship, Council of American Overseas Research Centers (2016)

History Courses

• History 201 – The Historians Craft: Islam in the African Diaspora – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 225 – Jihad Movements in Africa – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)