Tradition of Knowledge in the Mamluk Period – II

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DOI :10.26650/B/AA07AA25.2024.033.002   IUP :10.26650/B/AA07AA25.2024.033.002    Full Text (PDF)

The Quraysh of the Circassians: Constructing Circassian Ethnicity in the Court of Sultan Qāniṣawh Al-ghawrī

Christian Mauder

 While research about ethnicity in the Mamluk Sultanate has made significant progress in recent years, our knowledge about how Circassian identities were constructed, ascribed, and perceived in the Mamluk lands is still quite limited. The present paper addresses this situation by examining the construction of Circassian ethnicity within a particularly well-documented elite environment, namely the court of the penultimate Mamluk ruler Qāniṣawh al Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) who, like many members of the late Mamluk military elite, had been brought to Egypt as a Circassian military slave. The paper argues that in the highly competitive social space of the late Mamluk court, it was not only Circassian identity in itself, but also the status of one’s lineage group among the Circassian ethnos that could be used to define and legitimate a person’s position in the Mamluk political system. The findings of the paper thus challenge the assumption expressed in earlier publications that Circassian identity alone was important in late Mamluk political culture and call for a more nuanced understanding of what it meant to be called a Circassian in the Mamluk Sultanate. The paper thereby demonstrates that an exclusive focus on ethnic macro groups such as the Circassians is insufficient for grasping the full complexity of Mamluk concepts of ethnicity. Rather, researchers also need to pay attention to how internal divisions within these macro groups were imagined and evaluated.


Keywords: Mamluk Sultanate, Historiography, Ethnicity, Circassia, Legitimation, Identity, Court Culture, Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī

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