Malika Dekkiche
I probably would have pursued my study in journalism or political sciences… but that was the plan before my bag and my Master thesis on the Battle of the Camel was stolen… Sometimes some dramas can lead to great things! Instead, I rewrote my thesis in a much better way than the first one, and I went to Cairo… And from there everything changed!
This was the start of a long adventure leading me from the Université de Liège, to the IFAO in Cairo, the University of Chicago, the University of Ghent and finally the University of Antwerp. Along the way, I was introduced to Mamluk Sultanate and Mamluk documents, I learned about the intricacies of the Cairene chancery. I discovered many ways to communicate, and the power of blank spaces on a sheet of paper. But even more importantly, I became fascinated by the shared culture of interaction throughout the Islamicate World, from India to Mecca, from Iraq to Maghrib, from Anatolia to Cairo.
During my Ph.D. years in Cairo, I truly developed a passion for this city. It was great to be there while working on the Mamluk Sultanate and to be able to wander through the streets of Islamic Cairo and enjoy the monumentality of Mamluk architecture…so many buildings still mentioned in our sources that may have hosted foreign envoys to the Mamluk capital.
Though at the time, I was mostly interested in the documents involved in the exchanges rather than the people. My Ph.D. thesis, Le Caire, carrefour des ambassades (defended in 2011 at the university of Liège) indeed concentrated on the chancery practice and the establishment of a manual of diplomatics aimed at a better understanding of official correspondences in the 15th century Mamluk Cairo. Through my research I was able to highlight the complexity of diplomatic communication and to reveal how chancery rules provided a reader to diplomatic relations – and hierarchies – this through the close study of internal and external features of the documents. Those rules have further helped me reevaluating the relations between the Mamluk Sultanate, the Timurids, the Qara Qoyunlu and Qaramanids; this beyond the mere message of the letters they were exchanging.
Ever since, however, I have increasingly turned my attention to the context of the exchange of letters and therefore to the field of diplomacy. A first step in this process was to get a better sense of the sultanate’s various type of exchanges. This was accomplished through the organization of a great conference hold in Liège in 2012 and that resulted in the publication of reference volume on the topic. Mamluk Cairo, a crossroad for Embassies (2019), which I edited with Frédéric Bauden, is the consecration of this effort. It gathers 28 contributions by specialists of the various powers and polities in contact with Cairo during the period of the sultanate. Two aspects surprised me greatly at the time, namely the lack of further reflection on the concept of diplomacy in the premodern Islamic context and the bias within the field imposed by the so-called Islamic conception of the world (dār al-islām/dār al-ḥarb).
All my academic efforts of the last decade have concentrated on these two aspects. As part of the first, I have increasingly addressed the question of space and Islamic basis attached to the practice of diplomacy in my research. My forthcoming volume A History of Diplomacy, Spatiality, and Islamic Ideals (Routledge, 2024) is the result of a workshop I have organized in 2021 and present six chapters on the themes of Spatiality throughout the Islamicate world – from Andalus to Baghdad – in the longue durée – from 13th to 19th century. Concerning the second aspect, my monograph A World of Realms, Kings and Men. A History of Mamluk Diplomacy in the 15th century (to be published by EUP) presents a study of intra-Muslim diplomacy in the 15th century that concentrates on the discursive registers of political elite communication and exchanges.
My research has so far concentrated on intra-Muslim contacts in the Eastern part of the Islamicate world (Egypt/Syria; Anatolia; Iraq/Iran; Hijaz and India). But to get the full picture, it became more and more clear to that I could not avoid the Mediterranean any longer, nor the contacts that took place between the Mamluk sultanate the Latin Christian mercantile powers… And from this observation is born DiplomatiCon.
My first idea of DiplomatiCon was in fact much less ambitious, and merely aimed to reevaluate the diplomatic contacts between the Mamluks and Venice and possibly Genoa against the dār al-islām/dār al-ḥarb background, and this through the study of the agents involved in the exchanges and their networks, and the working methods. I was also particularly interested in the question of diplomatic space(s) and geographies that were involved in those contacts. When the EOS call for application came out at the end of 2020, it seemed to be a good opportunity to give DiplomatiCon some concrete— collaborative —shape.
EOS research project is a Belgian program that encourages Flemish and French-speaking institutions’ collaboration. It is thus logically that I contacted Frédéric Bauden at the University of Liège, who agreed to collaborate as expert of Mamluk documents. And when it appears that EOS also allowed international partners, two names directly came out as obvious partners: Isabella Lazzarini from the University of Torino and Bologna as expert of Italian diplomacy and Roser Salicrú from the CSIC in Barcelona, as specialist of the Crown of Aragon and Western Mediterranean Diplomacy. Thanks to them, the project thus further developed as to include both the various Italian polities, such as Venice and the Northern principalities, and the Crown of Aragon. As for the specific methodological basis of the project, it is influenced by the New Diplomatic History, the Connected Histories and the Digital Humanities— a last expertise we were still lacking, until my colleague in Antwerp, Iason Jongepier, GIS specialist, accepted to join the team.
Beyond bridging my own family history, DiplomatiCon represents many opportunities for me to test various assumptions concerning Islamic and Mamluk diplomatic history but also the place of the Mamluk sultanate in Mediterranean history. The switch of focus from the state-level and the common narrative for example will allow to bring some nuances to the antagonist story of the contact between Latin Europe and the Islamic World that has prevailed especially through the study of diplomatic networks across the Mediterranean. I am particularly interested in the Mamluk networks outside Cairo and Alexandria. The mapping of those networks and their intersections may also contribute to the various discussion within Mediterranean history concerning certain monopolies there, and more importantly it may help reviewing the place of the Mamluk sultanate within the Mediterranean basin. Last but not least, I am also particularly interested in seeking and highlighting various geographies of power that were produced throughout contacts in the Mediterranean.
Within the project I am in charge of the Mamluk Diplomacy. I will concentrate on its redefinition throughout the study of its networks and geographies. But next to my own research, I am also (co)-supervising a great team in Antwerp working on the Broader Italian Diplomatic Network (Evelina Del Mercato, PhD), Mapping Italian Diplomacy (Gianluca Ratti, PhD), Mapping the Iberian Diplomacy (Giacomo Mastrogregori, PhD), Dalmatia/Ottoman borders dynamic (Davor Salihovic, PostDoc) and Mediterranean Geography (Margo Buelens-Terryn, PostDoc).