Yoav Alon, The Shaykh of Shaykhs, Mithqal al-Fayiz and Tribal Leadership in Modern Jordan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016). Pp. 240. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804796620

Abstract

Reviews 363 to end the importation of overseas and overland slaves and the deportation of Iranian peoples into slavery. Mirzai shows the combined efforts of European powers, not only British and Russian, to enact antislavery legislation, culminating in part with the 1889-1990 Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference. The conference adopted the 1890 Anti-Slave, Arms and Ammunition Act that declared all such were illicit and antihumanitarian. Both the Qajar Ministerial elites and some of the leading ulama , joined the rural and urban grassroots movements of peasants, workers, and literati of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11 in their final assault on Iranian slavery and the regional slave trade. With the aftermath of World War I, the Iranian parliament and new Pahlavi shah set in motion Iran's 1929 Act of Emancipation, chiefly through greater centralization of national authority and armed repression of provincial independence movements and of workers and peasant collective actions. She adds that continued 20th century struggles in improving Tehran's centralization incrementally rendered both domestic and foreign slavery and trade a thing of the past. Overall, Mirzai's seminal study will be of great interest to scholars and specialist in national, regional, and world history. She has effectively put to rest the puzzling widespread notion among many Iranians that there were neither slaves nor slave trading in Iran historically. Her use of the archival sources found in Iran, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean basin, Britain, and continental Europe opens up new research possibilities and a host of questions about accepted knowledge on the degree of Iranian intervention in the cessation of the slave trade and slaver traditions in the Middle East. Her work begins to challenge accepted beliefs of the dominance of European powers in enacting modernizing legislation, and the difficulties of engaging in progressive development in the age of empire and "new imperialism." Lastly, Mirzai's discoveries of slave narratives and case studies of slave resistance in the Iranian foreign office and general manuscript collections in Tehran were well worth her decades of research. It can only be hoped that she will publish her earlier field interviews and continue her outstanding film documentary work on the hidden lives, oral traditions, culture, and rituals of the Afro-Iranian communities in the Gulf and southern Iran regions.