Clearly, slavery was a terrible conundrum for Egyptian Muslims. Shafïk’s articles focused primarily on the experience of African slaves, as if the sanc- tity of marriage to Circassian slaves was too private an issue to be discussed. In doing this, he relegated African slaves to the same status as Circassian slaves, gentrifying their experience in Egypt while identifying the harshness of their severance from their own families in the Sudan with the institution of Western slavery.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 680