Slavery in The Islamic World: Its Characteristics and Commonality Mary Ann Fay Digital Version 2025
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ITS CHARACTERISTICS & COMMONALITY
Slavery in the Islamic World
Mary Ann Fay
Editor
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
America, Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
Acknowledgements
This collection of scholarly articles on slavery and Islam was made pos-
sible by the authors who committed themselves to this project in spite
of some bumps and setbacks along the way. Various authors of the vol-
ume, in addition to working on their own chapters, brought with them
images that have now been incorporated into the texts. I would also like
to acknowledge the reviewer who gave the anthology a valuable assess-
ment that encouraged me as the editor to move forward. I am also grate-
ful for the translation of Professor Helen Harrison of the text in French
of Professor Sarga Moussa’s chapter that added so much to the volume.
Thanks also to Katelyn Zingg and Mary Fata, whose capable editing
brought this project to completion. Finally, this collection of chapters
would not have been possible without the constant encouragement and
assistance of my husband, John Willoughby and our son Zack.
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index 203
Notes on Contributors
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Fig. 4.1 The White Slave, 1888 (oil on canvas), Lecomte du Nouÿ,
Jean-Jules-Antoine (1842–1923)/Musée des Beaux-Arts,
Nantes, France/Bridgeman Images 58
Fig. 4.2 Sir William Allan, The Slave Market, Constantinople, National
Galleries of Scotland 60
Fig. 4.3 Jean-Leon Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1866 (Image courtesy of
the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) 61
Fig. 4.4 Harem: After the Bath, c.1894 (color litho), Bouchard, Paul
Louis (1853–1937)/Private Collection/Photo © Fototeca
Gilardi/Bridgeman Images 62
Fig. 4.5 Adrien Tanoux, Après le Bain, 1912 © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY 63
Fig. 4.6 Sketch by Arthur Munby, 1828–1910 (Poem Credit: Poem by
Mohja Kahf. Reprinted with permission of the University Press
of Florida) 64
Fig. 7.1 Taj al-Saltana as a young woman, apparently taken from a
newspaper clipping. (Source: Crowning Anguish, 311) 105
Fig. 7.2 Painting of Taj al-Saltana. (Source: Crowning Anguish,
frontispiece)106
Fig. 7.3 The young E’temad al-Dowleh (later, Muzaffar al-Din Shah),
the son of Nasir al-Din Shah, surrounded by aristocratic
relatives and enslaved African women. (Source: Middle East
Eye. http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/features/
they-are-iranian-discovering-african-history-and-slavery-
iran-970665328)110
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Scholars of slavery in the Islamic world of the Middle East and North
Africa arrived as late-comers to the field of slavery studies and have, there-
fore, inherited a large body of research with various approaches to the
subject that have informed the study of slavery in the Islamic world. One
of the goals for this collection is to determine where slavery in the Islamic
world fits within the global history of slavery and the various models that
have been developed to analyze it. To that end, the proposed volume will
also focus on a question about Islamic slavery that has frequently been
asked but not answered satisfactorily, namely, what is Islamic about slavery
in the Islamic world. Another goal is to contribute to the scholarly research
on slavery in the Islamic lands, which continues to be understudied and
under-represented in global slavery studies.
The nine authors in this proposed volume come from various fields
including history, sociology, literature, women’s studies, African studies
and comparative slavery studies. The authors use various methodologies
for analytical purposes including gender, race and sexuality that are
grounded in the specificities of the historical context. The geography of
M. A. Fay (*)
Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, USA
slavery in the proposed volume encompasses the Middle East and North
Africa as well as East and West Africa, the Indian Ocean and Cape Town,
South Africa. Before discussing the content of the proposed volume, I
want to comment briefly on the various approaches to the study of slavery
and critique their usefulness for studies of Islamic slavery.
Until fairly recently, the paradigm for global slavery—the acquisition of
slaves, their treatment in captivity, the relationship between the slaves and
their master and the slaves and the law—was based on Atlantic or New
World slavery. In his exhaustive 1982 study of slavery from the ancient world
to the nineteenth century, Orlando Patterson created a model for slavery
based on what he described as the “social death” of the slave. According to
Patterson, slavery was based on the most extreme form of domination exer-
cised by the master and the total powerlessness of the slave. The result was
the “total alienation and deracination” of the slave. A slave “ceased to belong
to any legitimate social order.” Thus, “slaves were isolated from the social
heritage of their ancestors,” and “not allowed freely to integrate the experi-
ence of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of
social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to
anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.”
Patterson’s study was challenged by scholars who rejected the concept
of a universal model of slavery as practiced in the West and also of the
alleged “social death” of slaves. The scholars contributing to this volume,
while refraining from describing any form of slavery as “benign,” note that
the humanity of slaves could be preserved in various ways including the
regulation of slavery by the law, the community consensus on how slaves
should be treated, and the particular way that household slavery endowed
the enslaved—in particular eunuchs and concubines—with agency and
even authority.
For most of world history, the chattel slavery of the sugar, rice and cot-
ton plantations of the Americas, the Caribbean and Brazil was regarded as
the paradigm for global slavery. However, scholars of non-Western slavery
argued that slavery as practiced in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-
continent and East and South Asia was in fact the norm and New World
slavery, the deviation. As early as 1977, Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff
proposed, based on their research, that slavery in Africa was more benign
because it did not follow the Western model.
Claire C. Klein and Martin H. Robertson’s research on sub-Saharan
African slavery showed that slaves were predominantly female although
accounts of African slavery were written as though slaves were exclusively
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS ISLAMIC ABOUT SLAVERY IN THE ISLAMIC… 3
male. Other scholars of African slavery have noted that slavery was unlikely
to be lifelong or hereditary and have noted the importance of the
assimilation of slaves into kin groups. Anthropologists introduced to slav-
ery studies the concept of rights in persons that conceptualize slavery on a
continuum from free person to slave.
An appropriate model or approach to slavery in Muslim societies appears
to be one that was first articulated by Moses I. Finley in 1980 in which he
made the distinction between “societies with slaves and slave societies.” Ira
Berlin in his 1998 history of slavery, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two
Centuries of Slavery in North America, elaborated on Finley’s insight by
distinguishing between a slave society and a society with slaves. According
to Berlin, the distinction was that in slave societies, slavery stood at the
center of economic production and the master-slave relationship, which
provided the model for all social relations. In a society with slaves, the
slaves were marginal to the central productive process and slavery was just
one form of labor among many. The articles in this collection will demon-
strate that slavery in the Middle East adheres closely to the Finley-Berlin
model, that is, a society with slaves. One of the tasks of the authors in this
volume is to elucidate where and how in the Middle East, a society with
slaves had certain characteristics that defined it as Islamic.
Scholars of the Middle East and Islam were slow to develop slavery in
the Islamic lands as a field of research and to contribute to the conceptu-
alization of slavery as practiced among Muslims. Various reasons have
been given for the reluctance of Middle East scholars to engage in research
on slavery. Y. Hakan Erdem, Bernard Lewis and Murray Gordon con-
cluded that the study of slavery has been underdeveloped because of its
extreme sensitivity as a topic. Erdem has described the inattention to slav-
ery during the Ottoman period as “near-total collective amnesia” and
Gordon has charged “a conspiracy of silence” concerning Arab slavery.
This is no longer the case, and a robust corpus of scholarly literature on
slavery in the Islamic world has emerged. One of our goals for this volume
is to build on the present scholarship and continue the task of construct-
ing the field of slavery studies and Islam. The volume makes a significant
and timely contribution to Middle East and Islamic Studies, to the global
history of slavery and to the methodologies used for research. The authors
in this volume explore new ways of researching slavery that go beyond the
law and statistics to questions regarding gender and sexuality, retrieving
the voices of individual slaves and making the enslaved the subjects rather
than the objects of history. To name but a few, the approach of this volume
4 M. A. FAY
builds on the pioneering work of Terence Walz and Kenneth Cuno (eds.),
Race and Slavery in the Middle East; Madeline Zilfi, Women and Slavery in
the Late Ottoman Empire; Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the
Ottoman Middle East; Eve M. Trout Powell, Tell This in My Memory:
Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire; and
Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam.
The nine chapters in this volume also demonstrate that slavery in the
Islamic lands was not race-based as was New World slavery where the
slaves were Black and when being Black in the American South, for exam-
ple, meant to be a slave. The enslaved males and females in the Islamic
lands came from different parts of the globe making slavery more diverse.
Europeans and Americans were captured and enslaved in North Africa and
White slaves were brought to the region from the Georgia and Circassia.
The Middle East was linked to the Indian Ocean trade by various trade
routes, which provided African slaves to Arabia, Oman, Persia and the
sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf as well as to Egypt and North Africa.
In addition to contributing to the research on slaves and masters, the
individual authors confront and respond to a question that has been on
the fringes of scholarly inquiry concerning slavery in Middle East and
Islamic studies but that has not been answered satisfactorily: What is
Islamic about slavery in the Islamic world? Considered together, the arti-
cles problematize the existence of Islamic slavery as a distinct and coherent
system regulating and constructing the practice of slavery around the
world. Individually, the authors consider the way(s) in which Islam is a
factor in enslaving or being enslaved.
The authors engage with issues and questions such as: Is slavery in the
Islamic world a variation of slavery in Africa because it shares some of its
characteristics, such as the incorporation of slaves into households and the
fact that slavery was usually not lifelong or hereditary? Is it because it is
regulated by the law, which applies not only to free-born Muslims but also
to slaves? Is it because of the verses in the Qur’an that enjoin Muslims to
treat slaves with kindness, preserve their humanity and manumit them? Is
it Islamic because of a community consensus on how slaves should be
treated or perhaps because of the importance of slave concubines to the
reproduction of the family? These questions are addressed in various ways
by the authors in their individual chapters.
These articles demonstrate that Islam provides a universal template
which structures the slave-master relationship. The Qur’an and Islamic
law provide a framework governing treatment and manumission. The con-
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