The Early Modern Seminar: Malika Dekkiche (Universiteit Antwerpen)
"Power Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate. Mamluk Egypt and the Islamicate World in the 15th Century".
Ambassadors of the Egyptian Sultan al-Nasir Faraj ibn Barquq Present their Gifts of Tribute, Including a Giraffe, to Timur, illustration from Zafarnama of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdishiraz, 1436. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.
Bio
Malika Dekkiche is associate professor of Premodern Islamicate world in the History Department at the University of Antwerp. Specialized in the history of the Mamluk Sultanate and Post-Mongols dynasties, she is focusing on the history of Islamic Diplomacy, Muslim pilgrimage and religious patronage. She is the (co)editor of Mamluk Cairo, A Crossroads for Embassies (Brill, 2019) and the editor of A History of Diplomacy, Spatiality and Islamic ideals (Routledge, 2024). She is currently one of the PI of the EOS funded project "DiplomatiCon, A Connected History of Medieval Mediterranean Diplomacy".
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Malika Dekkiche. Photo: private.
Abstract
Power Diplomacy research goes beyond established concepts of Islamicate diplomacy. Central in the study is the concept of soft power, which sets the focus on cultural and ideological influence and diffusion, by opposition to coercion and military domination.
Taking the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria (r. 1250-1517) as case study, the research analyzes how, in the fifteenth century, Islamicate courts have created an environment favorable to inter-Muslim contacts, that was based on mutual understanding. They did so through a common conception and culture of power, which was cultivated among scholar-bureaucrats. The accumulation, ordering and diffusion of that knowledge created a sort of archive of power.
The project aims first to understand this archive, and the various texts that constitute it in order to highlight the various strategies of scholars for recording the power they represented. Secondly, the project investigates the way this archive has determined a specific ordering of the world and the mode of interactions, through the establishment of a hierarchy and particular themes of power. Thirdly, it focuses on the theater of power by bringing together the various genres involved in the archive of power and analyze its performance through the account of the interactions between the Mamluk sultanate and its Muslim foreign counterparts.
The lecture will concentrate on the first part of the project devoted to the archive of power.
About the seminar
Convernors: Birgit Tremml-Werner, Mats Hallenberg, and Magnus Linnarsson.
Contact: birgit.tremml@historia.su.se
You can participate in the seminar via Zoom:
https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/my/tidigmodernt
Last updated: 2026-01-27
Source: Department of History