Mamluk referred to Circassian slave-soldier descendants who ruled Egypt from the twelfth century

Evidence

Her comment on Kab al-Khayr's dislike of Nubians, that "she prefers one of the Mamlüks" employs a common nineteenth-century epithet for the ruling class of Ottoman Egyptians, descendants of the slave-soldiers taken, as children, from Anatolia, the Balkans, and later the Circassian region, and who rose as military leaders and ruled Egypt from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Banbah ironically contests any desire of Kab al-Khayr either to perceive herself as a marriageable peer to the white “Mamlüks” (who had real social power) or to distance herself as a black slave from the social caste of other Nubians. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 403

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the term Mamluk as used in nineteenth-century Egyptian social hierarchy.