The Africa Institute (GSU) invites you to a lecture by Professor Behnaz Mirzai, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, Canada, presenting her research titled “The Middle Passage across Africa to the Middle East: From Slavery to Freedom,” on Thursday, 6 November 2025, from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM at Auditorium, The Africa Institute (location map).
This seminar will examine the experiences of Africans from enslavement to freedom and the efforts of reformers to end the institution of slavery through the lens of a freed slave, Mahboob Qirvanian. It traces the horrors of enslavement in Africa, the dreadful journey, life transformation, and eventual freedom in the Middle East. The seminar offers insight into the political upheavals that affected the Middle East in the early decades of the twentieth century. It helps understand the post-emancipation and slave liberation transition period in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, the challenges enslaved people encountered, and the opportunities that emerged. It also demonstrates how racial, national, and religious identity transformed in different contexts. After the mid-nineteenth century, the enslavement of Iranians increased because of political instability, insecurity, the suppression of enslaved African trading infrastructures in the Indian Ocean and Gulf regions, and the Russian annexation of much of the Caucasus. With the growth of internal slave markets, it fell to secular and religious social reformers to spearhead initiatives to terminate the trafficking of enslaved people in Iran. These reformers and the political leaders of the Constitutional Revolution helped write Iran’s first constitution and established its parliament, the Majlis, ensuring the full emancipation of enslaved people in Iran in 1929.
Behnaz Mirzai, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, Canada. From 2005 to 2006, she held a teaching position at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, USA. She is currently a Senior Guest Researcher at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. In 2024, she was a Visiting Professor at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, and in 2023, at Unité de recherches Migrations et société (URMIS), Université Côte d’Azur, Nice. She is the author of A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929, a finalist for the 2018 Canadian Historical Association Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. The book has been translated into Persian twice, by Andishe-yi Ihsan in 2024 and Nashr-i Tarikh-i Iran in 2017. It remains the first comprehensive study dedicated to slavery in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran. Her most recent book, The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: Autobiography of Mahboob Qirvanian (University of Toronto Press). Read more.
Majid Hannoum, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, USA. He earned a Ph.D. in Arabic and Comparative Literature from Sorbonne University, France, and a second Ph.D. in History and Anthropology from Princeton University, USA. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa (2016) and the author of several books, including Secular Narrations and Transdisciplinary Knowledge (2023), The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East (2021), Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City (2020), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (2010), and Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (2001). Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a teaching and research center for the study of Africa and its diaspora and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.
The Africa Institute (GSU) invites you to a lecture by Professor Behnaz Mirzai, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, Canada, presenting her research titled “The Middle Passage across Africa to the Middle East: From Slavery to Freedom,” on Thursday, 6 November 2025, from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM at Auditorium, The Africa Institute (location map).
The Africa Institute (GSU) invites you to a lecture by Professor Behnaz Mirzai, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, Canada, presenting her research titled “The Middle Passage across Africa to the Middle East: From Slavery to Freedom,” on Thursday, 6 November 2025, from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM at Auditorium, The Africa Institute (location map).
This seminar will examine the experiences of Africans from enslavement to freedom and the efforts of reformers to end the institution of slavery through the lens of a freed slave, Mahboob Qirvanian. It traces the horrors of enslavement in Africa, the dreadful journey, life transformation, and eventual freedom in the Middle East. The seminar offers insight into the political upheavals that affected the Middle East in the early decades of the twentieth century. It helps understand the post-emancipation and slave liberation transition period in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, the challenges enslaved people encountered, and the opportunities that emerged. It also demonstrates how racial, national, and religious identity transformed in different contexts. After the mid-nineteenth century, the enslavement of Iranians increased because of political instability, insecurity, the suppression of enslaved African trading infrastructures in the Indian Ocean and Gulf regions, and the Russian annexation of much of the Caucasus. With the growth of internal slave markets, it fell to secular and religious social reformers to spearhead initiatives to terminate the trafficking of enslaved people in Iran. These reformers and the political leaders of the Constitutional Revolution helped write Iran’s first constitution and established its parliament, the Majlis, ensuring the full emancipation of enslaved people in Iran in 1929.
Behnaz Mirzai, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University and Professor of Middle Eastern History at Brock University, Canada. From 2005 to 2006, she held a teaching position at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, USA. She is currently a Senior Guest Researcher at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. In 2024, she was a Visiting Professor at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, and in 2023, at Unité de recherches Migrations et société (URMIS), Université Côte d’Azur, Nice. She is the author of A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929, a finalist for the 2018 Canadian Historical Association Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. The book has been translated into Persian twice, by Andishe-yi Ihsan in 2024 and Nashr-i Tarikh-i Iran in 2017. It remains the first comprehensive study dedicated to slavery in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran. Her most recent book, The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: Autobiography of Mahboob Qirvanian (University of Toronto Press). Read more.
Majid Hannoum, Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, USA. He earned a Ph.D. in Arabic and Comparative Literature from Sorbonne University, France, and a second Ph.D. in History and Anthropology from Princeton University, USA. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa (2016) and the author of several books, including Secular Narrations and Transdisciplinary Knowledge (2023), The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East (2021), Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City (2020), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (2010), and Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (2001). Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a teaching and research center for the study of Africa and its diaspora and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.
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