Slavery at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Hudā Shaʿrāwī’s Memoirs as a Source of Social History?

Tolino, Serena (2023). Slavery at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Hudā Shaʿrāwī’s Memoirs as a Source of Social History? In: Moser, Kata; Tolino, Serena (eds.) Wissenskulturen muslimischer Gesellschaften. Philosophische und islamwissenschaftliche Zugänge. Festschrift für Anke von Kügelgen. Worlds of Islam - Welten des Islams - Mondes de l'Islam: Vol. 14 (pp. 419-438). Berlin: De Gruyter 10.1515/9783110767506-024

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This chapter aims at contributing to the debate on the role that ego-documents,
including memoirs, can have in reconstructing social practices of the past. Over the last twenty years, there has been a renewed interest in autobiographical
and ego-documents documents in the Middle East. What Georges Gusdorf wrote in 1956, namely that autobiography has been proven to be a characteristic of Western societies and their focus on individuality, has been shown to be wrong by a number of studies. While the term autobiography has been object of numerous debates and critiques, the introduction of the term “ego-documents,” to refer to all kinds of “first-person narratives” and to “encompass all texts with an ego talking about himself,” has allowed to put some of these debates to rest. Memoirs, widely defined as non-fictional narratives based on the author’s memories, that do not necessarily span the entire life of the author but focus on specific moments, belong also to ego-documents. The focus in this chapter is not so much on the “self.” That would be impossible, because the memoirs were not written by a eunuch himself. However, looking at Hudā Shaʿrāwī’s memoirs can contribute to shedding light on how Egyptian nationalist elites understood slavery at the turn of the twentieth century.

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