The Slaves of Islam

[JesusA (imported)]

[You can tell how far behind I am. I just opened one of the books that I bought for pre-Millenium reading. The book, "Atlas of the Year 1000" by John Man (1999, Harvard University Press) steps slowly across the world with detailed maps of each region and a concise, and well-written, description of the various peoples and their interconnections. In its section on the Middle East there is a two page spread on slavery, part of which is reproduced below. Included is a very nice colored map showing the major sources of slaves, slave routes and the major castration centers of the period. --JA]

Slaves were the labourers of the Islamic world, an underclass used everywhere, in vast numbers. One 8th-century campaign in North Africa netted 300,000 captives, all destined for slavery. Umayyad princes in Spain commonly had 1,000 or more slaves. When the wave of conquest, with its backwash of captives, ceased its forward roll, trade continued the supply.

Slaves were in demand for all forms of labour, working in gangs on plantations and in mines, alongside freemen as builders in towns, in domestic service and as soldiers - particularly as soldiers, for Muslims argued that once cut from their traditional roots slaves would be more loyal to their masters than free warriors. Female slaves formed harems for sovereigns, guarded by other slaves, who had been castrated - brutal operation done without anything to deaden the pain - on their way from initial captivity to slave-market. Some harems were as large as small armies: Abd al-Rahman's harem in Cordoba in the mid 10th century numbered 6,300 women, and the Fatimid palace in Cairo had 12,000. Special schools in Baghdad, Medina and Cordoba trained musicians and dancers.

Islamic slavery had three main categories of slaves - the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Turks of Central Asia and the blacks of sub-Saharan Africa - with lesser streams of Indians and Anglo-Saxons. It was a trade in which any group with the power to do so sought the benefit of partnership, from the Christians of western Europe and Byzantium, the Jews of Europe and the Islamic world, Vikings, frontier tribes of eastern Europe, central Asia and the African interior.

Slavs captured by Christian Europe were taken south as trade goods, through France via Verdun [described by Liutprand de Cremona as the greatest castration center of Europe at the first millenium] and Lyons to Cordoba [shown on the map as another castration center, though it was in Moslem hands] and Cairo. Another route carried Slav captives to the castration centre of Prague, then on to Regensburg and Venice, the hub of the Mediterranean slave trade. The Rus of Kiev also seized captives from neighbouring tribes, trading them in Constantinople. Armenia was a noted castration centre for those Slavs who were delivered through Khazar lands to Itil at the mouth of the Volga.

Turkish slaves from Central Asia flowed into Islam through the slave markets of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Urgench, which dealt with both Slavs and Turks. All three were castration centres for those slaves destined for domestic service. Turks had been favoured as soldiers by Persian rulers, and the fashion spread westwards, with the result that slave armies became significant political forces in many major cities.

Sub-Saharan Africa was a region so vast that it made up many sources and many exit routes for the thousands captured and sold by rulers and middlemen. Western Sudanese captives - Sarakole from Takrur in today's Senegal, Soninke from ancient Ghana, Songhai from Gao and Sao from Kanem - were taken across the Sahara for sale in Morocco and Spain, or eastwards to Egypt, and beyond. Nubians of the Upper Nile were imported via Aswan, another castration centre. Ethiopians were taken down the Blue Nile or to the Red Sea ports. Somalis were exported to Aden. And east Africans - known as Zanj, whether they were Bantu or Nilotic - were taken to the island of Socotra or Aden, for shipping onwards up the Red Sea to Egypt or up the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia.

Given that slaver is now seen as an offense against humanity, it takes an effort of imagination to see it through the eyes of the past, before attitudes were coloured by the peculiar brutalities of the Atlantic slave trade. Muslims, like Christians, saw nothing wrong with it, with one proviso: that the slaves were not of their religion.

By hindsight, this implies a tacit recognition that there was something inhuman about the practice. Yet no one saw this, for many reasons. In medieval times, slavery was accepted uncritically as necessary to economic well-being. Since slaves were outsiders, not part of the 'civilized' world, they could be treated differently. The beneficiaries, Muslim and Christian alike, simply disregarded the cruelty involved in acquiring slaves. It was, after all, no more cruel than war, than plague, than the usual tribulations of life itself. (page 72)