Mamlukica - Stephan Conermann

. .

Résumé :
Once a person starts to study the 250-some years of the Mamluk Era in Egypt and Syria (1250-1517), one characteristic of that period stands out immediately - the very unusual polarization of its society. A predominantly Arabic population was dominated by a purely Turkish-born elite of manu-mitted military slaves who sought to regenerate themselves continuously through a self-imposed fiat. The only person who could become a Mamluk was a Turk who had been born free outside the Islamic territories as a non-Muslim, then enslaved, brought to Egypt as a slave, converted to Islam, freed, and finally, trained as a warrior. Only those who met these prerequisites were members of the ruling stratum with all the concomitant political, military, and economic advantages. On this historically unique model of a society, Stephan Conermann has published a series of seminal articles. In this edited volume the reader gets an excellent introduction to some of the central issues of the ongoing research on the Mamluk history and society.

Biographie:
Stephan CONERMANN was born 1964 in Kiel/Germany. Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn/Germany since 2003, he has served as Vice Dean of Research and International Relations of the Faculty of Humanities at Bonn University (2008-2010), and Speaker of the Bonn Asia Center (since 2008), the Bonn Center for Transcultural Narratology (BZTN, since 2009), and the Bonn International Graduate School of Oriental and Asian Studies (BIGS-OAS, since 2010). He studied Ancient, Early Modern, Modern and Asian History, as well as Slavic and Oriental Philology, at the University of Kiel, and took multiple language courses and study visits in Beirut/Lebanon, Damascus/Syria, Moscow/Russia, and Poznan/Poland. He did his doctoral studies at the Department of Oriental Studies at Kiel University from 1992 till 1996, and was afterwards a Research Assistant and Assistant Professor until 2003.