CCCW-DivFac World Christianities Seminar: “When World Christianity Meets Global Microhistory: Two Lives between Egypt, India, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States” by Prof Heather J. Sharkey

11 February, 16:00-17:30 GMT

Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge

Followed by refreshments

Title: When World Christianity Meets Global Microhistory: Two Lives between Egypt, India, China, the United Kingdom, and the United State

Two people often cited as “success stories” in the history of the American Presbyterian mission to Egypt in the late nineteenth century are Bamba Müller (1848-1877) and Ahmed Fahmy (1861 wirwww1933). Bamba was the daughter of a German merchant father and enslaved Ethiopian mother whom the missionaries introduced to Duleep Singh, exiled maharaja of the Sikh Empire in India. Married at sixteen, she settled with her husband in England and entered the social circle of Queen Victoria. Ahmed Fahmy was the scion of an educated Muslim Arabic-speaking family who fled to the United Kingdom after embracing Christianity. He earned a medical degree in Edinburgh and then joined the London Missionary Society in China, where he founded a hospital in Changchow (Zhangzhou) and spent the next thirty years training the healthcare workers who succeeded him. In this talk, I will discuss Bamba and Ahmed Fahmy as they feature in a book that I am writing about global microhistory in the Nile Valley. Global microhistory uses local, small-scale, or “micro” sources and topics to see bigger or “macro” connections and trends in world history. While we can look to Bamba and Ahmed Fahmy as products and exemplars of World Christianity in the mid-to-late nineteenth century era, we can also follow them to trace global networks of exchange that linked the countries they were connected with. Their life stories can help us to understand changing patterns of migration and mobility; ideas and practices about marriage, family, and gender roles; and relations between Christians on the one hand and Muslims and Sikhs on the other.

Speaker: Prof Heather J. Sharkey

Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2024-25 year, she is the Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College of Oxford University in the UK and a senior fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Her books include Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press 2003); American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press 2008); and A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2017). With Jeffrey Edward Green, she edited The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press 2021).

She is currently writing a book about global microhistory in the Nile Valley.