Islam’s Black Slaves

[JesusA (imported)]

FROM: Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, by Ronald Segal. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

To secure the virtue of the supposedly fallible female and preserve the honor of her husband or master, prevalent practice in Islam went beyond the veiling o women and their seclusion in special quarters. Where resources allowed, the harem was secured not only by locks but by slave guards, and these were invariably eunuchs.

The preoccupation with honor was far from peculiar to Islamic culture. It was crucial to the code of chivalry in medieval Christendom, for instance. It was - and still is - found in societies where, in the absence of relatively developed class distinctions, the honor of the person, family, and clan was the determinant of respect. It was certainly central to pre-Islamic Arabian society, where it was accompanied by an attitude of men toward women that suggested an obsessively suspicious possessiveness. And, for all the compassionate precepts of the Koran, this attitude survived in the more sophisticated urban culture of Islam. Marshall G. S. Hodgson writes:

"Formalized sexual jealousy, even more than the simple spirit of vengeance, fills the popular stories that appear, for instance, in the 'Thousand and One nights.' One can sometimes get the impression that the most important source of an individual man's personal reassurance was his absolute control over his womenfolk. A woman's 'honour,' her shame, formed an important point in determining the honour of her man; indeed, perhaps the gravest insult to a man, which most insistently abridged his right to precedence and called for vengeance, was any impugning of the honour of his womenfolk."

In ancient Arabia, castration seems to have had no place; and when it subsequently did acquire one, the practice was roundly condemned by early Muslims. Mutilation was forbidden by Muslim law, and a specific ban on castration was invested with the authority of the Prophet by a hadith: "Whoever cuts off the nose of a slave, his nose will be cut off; and whoever castrates a slave, him also shall we castrate." But the wealth acquired by conquest and the influence of cultures encompassed in the advance of Islam - eunuchs were employed for various purposes in both the Persian and Byzantine empires - proved more potent than precept.

The letter, if not the spirit, of the law was long observed by leaving to those beyond the territorial limits of Islam the act of castration and then importing the product. In the Middle Ages, Prague and Verdun became castration centers for the supply of European eunuchs; Kharazon, near the Caspian Sea, a center for the supply of central Asian ones. Further circumventions, on Islamic territory, were pursued on the basis that the operations were conducted by non-Muslims. In tenth-century Islamic Spain, Jewish merchants reportedly performed the operation. In the nineteenth century, Christian monks ran a castration center at their monastery of Deir al-Jandala near Abu Tig, a small town in Upper Egypt.

Such circumventions, however, were not always necessary, as ready-made black eunuchs were available in Muslim areas where slaves could be bought. Having traveled in Muslim West Africa during 1353, Ibn Battuta wrote of Barnu (Bornu), a Muslim kingdom: "From this country come excellent slavegirls, eunuchs, and fabrics dyed with saffron." From the seventeenth century, eunuchs were produced in Baghirmi, a state southeast of Lake Chad that was at least nominally Muslim. One nineteenth-century traveler reported that in Morocco some masters castrated their own slaves, to use them as concubines. Moreover, across the centuries, Muslim slave traders sometimes performed the operation themselves, at the place of purchase or along the route to market centers.

The high price of slave eunuchs - up to seven times that of uncastrated male slaves in the nineteenth century - reflected both their relative scarcity, as a result of the high death rate which the operation involved, and an all-but-insatiable demand for them. While the reason for employing them as guardians of the harem is obvious, the reason for their widespread use also as administrators, tutors, secretaries, and commercial agents is less so. One can only speculate that eunuchs were regarded as likely to be more devoted and dependable in serving their masters than other males, with normal distractions, would be. Certainly, the numbers some rulers required could be huge. The Caliph in Baghdad at the beginning of the tenth century had seven thousand black eunuchs and four thousand white ones in his palace.

The use of slave eunuchs ad concubines by some merchants in nineteenth-century Morocco points to a feature of Islamic society that affected the treatment of young male slaves, whether they were eunuchs or not. The attitude toward women, formalized in the secured seclusion of the harem, can scarcely have failed to promote a measure of heterosexual frustration among young males not yet of an age or with adequate means to acquire concubines or to marry, and this might well have promoted the alternative of homosexual relations. Pp. 39 - 41

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Unlike white eunuchs, deprived only of their testicles, black ones were subjected to the most radical form of castration, known, according to John Laffin, as "level with the abdomen...based on the assumption that the blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite." Whether out of consideration for the sacrifice they had suffered or in the belief that, freed from the distractions of carnal appetites, they were more devoted to their masters or to spiritual concerns, black eunuchs were treated with particular consideration. Indeed, many of them were appointed to offices of high responsibility, respect, and reward.

One black eunuch of probable Nubian origin, Abu'l-Misk Kafur, eventually rose to rule Egypt during the tenth century. The Ikhshidid ruler, Muhammad b. Tughi, who had bought Kafur, invested him with increasingly important political and military responsibilities, including the position of tutor to his two sons. With the death of Muhammad b. Tughi in 946, Kafur became regent to each of his sons in turn until, with the death of the second in 966, he declared himself ruler and remained such for the two years until his own death. In fifteenth-century Egypt, under Mamluk rule, one black eunuch was appointed governor of Aden, and another was sent on a special mission to his Ethiopian homeland.

At Mecca, Burckhardt found that most of the eunuchs were blacks, with a few "copper-coloured Indians;" that they were all married to black slaves; maintained several male and female slaves as servants in their homes; and had a large income through the revenues of the mosque, private donations from pilgrims, regular stipends from Constantinople, and profit from their engagement in trade. Burckhardt continues: "Their chief, or Aga, whom the elect among themselves, is a great personage, and is entitled to sit in the presence of the Pasha and the Sharif." Still greater, he found, in the respect shown to them and in their self-regard, were the "forty or fifty" eunuchs at Medina.

"There, they are more richly dressed, though in the same costume; usually wear fine Cashmere shawls and gowns of the best Indian silk stuffs, and assume airs of great importance. When they pass through the Bazar, every body hastens to kiss their hands; and they exercise considerable influence in the internal affairs of the town.... They live together in one of the best quarters of Medina, to the eastward of the mosque, and their houses are said to be furnished in a more costly manner than any others in the town. The adults are all married to black or Abyssinian slaves....

"The chief of the eunuchs is called Sheikh el Haram; he is also the chief of the mosque, and the principal person in the town; being consequently of much higher rank than the Aga, or chief of the eunuchs at Mekka.... A eunuch of the mosque would be highly affronted if he were so termed by any person. Their usual title is Aga. Their chief takes the title of Highness or Sadetkom, like a Pasha, or the Sherif of Mekka." Pp. 52 - 53

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Slaves are estimated to have composed around a fifth of the population in the major cities of al-Andalus [Muslim Spain], and they were also used as rural laborers, mainly on the large estates. White slaves, from Christian Spain, central or eastern Europe, and black ones, newly brought from beyond the Sahara or drawn from among those already in North Africa, served together both in the palaces of rulers and the establishments of the rich. There they might be menial domestics, concubines, eunuchs, musicians and dancers, stewards or agents, soldiers and guards.

Many, perhaps most, of the white slaves brought to al-Andalus apparently did not remain there. Ibn Hawqal, writing in the 970s, remarked that "among the most famous exports [from al-Andalus to other Muslim lands] are comely slaves, both male and female from Frankish and Galician regions" and that "all Slavic eunuchs on earth come from al-Andalus, because they are castrated in that region and the operation is performed by Jewish merchants." This last statement needs to be qualified by a report from Ibrahim b. al-Qasim al-Qarawi (died 1026) that in al-Andalus Muslims as well as Jews castrated slaves for export abroad. It is possible that some black slaves were among them, but few others are likely to have been brought there for export to other parts of Islam, which needed no such detour from shorter, direct routes in the black slave trade. Pp. 78 - 80.