Paris Round Table for ‘Semaine Arabe’
“Southern shores, Africa and the Arab world: the role of African sultanates in Early Modern history”
On Friday 11 March, Rémi took part in a roundtable devoted to the Sahelian sultanates, between the 14th and 16th centuries. Along with Hadrien Collet, Scientific member of the French institute of Oriental Archaeology of Cairo (IFAO), he discussed the development, functioning and actors of the sultanates of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on their interactions in the Global Islamic World, and on their relationship to the “Arab world” as it could be defined in the early modern period.
This lively event was organised in the framework of the yearly Semaine Arabe, or “Arabian Week” organised by the students of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. This year, the Semaine Arabe hosted an exciting discussion of relations between the Arabic World and Islamic and Arabic societies of Sub-Saharan Africa. The edition, entitled "Rivages Sud", aimed to look at Arabities beyond the traditional borders of the Arab world, taking the whole of Africa as its subject.
It sought to recognize the role of the African continent as a place of contact with Arab languages and cultures, beyond the traditional North African example. In fact, the whole continent has been and still is a space for the enrichment of Arabic language practices, and the integration of Africa with the Eurasian space has a long history of reciprocal exchanges. Mecca was not the only centre that united Africa and the Arab world: from the Mashreq to Madagascar, via the Maghreb and the ‘Bilad al Sudan’ (literally, ‘land of the Blacks’), economic, cultural, human, and even poetic exchanges forged links across long distances and fostered the inclusion of the African continent in the Early Modern Global World.
Integrating the African continent into wider global spaces is one of the challenges of this project. Rémi’s participation in this event was the occasion to expand on the trans-Saharan migration patterns between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the Islamic World, and to present the project to specialists of Islam and Africa.
