Sudanese slave women performed zär healing ceremonies in Egyptian Muslim households.

Evidence

At the most powerful point of the ceremony, the oldest of the slave women is visited by the spirit of a shaykh and, in this persona, speaks to the surrounding Egyptian women, trying to treat their different complaints. One woman says that her little boy is very ill and that her husband demands that a medical doctor be brought to the house to cure him. The “shaykh”-slave woman insists that this is the wrong treatment and that the wife should kill a “black hen and a black rooster, with no other marks on them,” and then bring this to the “shaykh” along with a little piece of the boy’s clothing. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s comparative coloniality interest: Egyptian master narrative vs. Sudanese subaltern practice, and the civilizational hierarchy the domestic scene dramatizes.