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, therefore, 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 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 exercised 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 experience 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 cotton 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 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 slavery 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 demonstrate 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 conceptualization 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 concluded that the study of slavery has been underdeveloped because of its extreme sensitivity as a topic. Erdem has described the inattention to slavery 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 constructing 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 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 example, 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 articles 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 constraining institution of law was largely absent in the New World. Nevertheless, historical context clearly matters. The contributions to this volume include studies of North
Africa (MacDougall, Dunn, Sears and Ghabrial), Iran and/or Persia (Moussa and Lee), Egypt (Fay), the Arabian Peninsula (Sabban) and South Africa (Baderoon
). The authors investigate the ways in which households, polities and geopolitical relations were affected by the practices of slavery. In this sense, What Is Islamic About Slavery in the Islamic World provides models and methodologies which we hope will inspire more interdisciplinary and comparative studies of the important issues raised in this volume.