stevenoo (imported) wrote: Mon Aug 02, 2010 10:37 am I understand you can still get a neutered slave boy to work around the house in Saudi Arabia. Don't know if it's government sanctioned.

There are certainly lots of rumors that there are still eunuchs being produced for Middle Eastern harems, but there is no good hard evidence that I have been able to find of any recent case.

My first close contact with the subject of eunuchs came as a graduate student in anthropology. I took first semester Arabic in the Fall of 1965 and was assigned a young Saudi tutor to help with my pronunciation. He and I got along well and began meeting for coffee on a regular basis outside of class requirements. During the winter vacation we each traveled home to see our families. Before classes started again in January 1966 we met for coffee to talk about our vacations. He was very excited that in his absence his father had purchased a new slave to care for his mother and sisters and he could talk of little else. It was a young eunuch, whom he estimated to be about 12 years old. I dropped Arabic and joined the Anti-Slavery Society (www.antislavery.org) within the week.

Slavery had been “officially” abolished in Saudi Arabia (and in neighboring Yemen) in 1962, and this young slave was purchased three years after the supposed abolition.

According to Ahmad Nasr, a Sudanese geographer who interviewed them during his Haj in 2001, the youngest eunuch guardian of the Tomb of the Prophet in Mecca was “recruited” in 1984. He expressed doubt that there would be any more recruited for the position, though I’m not convinced.

Just last year Sheik Salah Al-Fawzan, is a member of the Council of Religious Edicts and Research, the Imam of Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh and a professor at Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University, Saudi Arabia's main center of learning for the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, publicly stated, “Slavery is a part of Islam.” He is the author of the religious curriculum taught in Saudi schools (and in many Arabic language schools around the world, including the U.S.) He clarified his position by saying, “Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.” He claims that Muslims who contend that Islam is against slavery “are ignorant, not scholars.” He has taught that Muslims who are not orthodox Sunni may also be enslaved by “true Muslims.”

Anti-Slavery International reported in the early 1990s that at least two Sudanese boys, ages 10 and 12, had been castrated to serve as house slaves during the civil war there. Prof. Stephanie Beswick, a Sudanese historian at Ball State University, has reported castration of house slaves in Sudan in the late 1990s. Slavery has long been “illegal” in Sudan, but slave raiding still occurs in the south of the country with Black (Christian and pagan) women and children being taken as slaves by Arab northerners. Some have been rescued from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, though no eunuchs have been reported among them.

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Whilst not relevant to the present day, a guy that I worked for many years ago had travelled around the near, middle east and far east back in the 1930s, he said that eunuchs were not uncommon even in the near east and some people he knew regularly visited eunuch prostitutes that had had everything removed and said that they preferred them to real woman, he said that he did puzzle about how intercourse took place.

The one thing he learnt was that most of the castrations that occurred appeared to have been voluntary although there was a practice in some areas where families had "surplus" sons castrated so that they were not a "threat" to older sons, in some cases the castrated son would stay at home to look after his parents but many of these cases (especially for poorer families) the castrated sons were sold.

Linda