I will gradually post on this thread some translations from the Arabic by various scholars (although edited by me for greater clarity). I will edit and add comments as necessary, especially clarification of geographic locations with their modern names. For instance, “Saqāliba” will be noted as the Slavic areas of Eastern Europe. It also became one of the words for “eunuch” in Arabic because so many of the eunuchs were Slavic. One Arab linguist even noted that all Slavic males in the Arab world had been castrated. Not true, but they were certainly a primary source of eunuchs for much of early Muslim history, sent through trading ports from Pechina in modern Spain in the west to Kiev in the east. Venice was once a major source of Slavic eunuchs as well. (What did you think the Venetians were sending to the east in exchange for spices, silk, and gold?)

I will start with a long quotation from al-Maqdisī (c. 945–991):

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The eunuchs which one meets are of three kinds. One kind which are brought to Egypt, and this is the best of all kinds. [These would be predominantly West Africans from areas along the southern fringe of the Sahara.] Another kind are brought to Aden. These are the Berbers [North Africans before they were Arabized], and they are the worst of all kinds of eunuchs. The third kind resembles the Abyssinians. As for the white eunuchs, they are of two kinds. The first kind is those of Slavic origin. Their country is in Eastern Europe, but they are brought to al-Andalus [modern Spain], where they are castrated and then sent to Egypt. The second kind are the Greek-speaking peoples, who are brought over to Syria and Northern Mesopotamia. With the destruction of the frontier fortresses their importation to those regions stopped.

I asked a group of them how they are castrated. I learnt that the Greeks castrate their own children and assign them to service in the churches and monasteries in order that they would not be occupied with women and harmed by lust. When the Muslims attacked the land of the Greek-speakers they raided their churches and released the castrated boys from them. As for the Slavs, they are taken to a town beyond Pechina [a coastal area in southern Spain], whose people are Jews, and the Jews castrate them. There is a difference of view about how the castration is carried out. Some say that the male organ and the scrotum are completely removed with one stroke. Others say that the scrotum is cut open and the testicles are taken out of it. Then a piece of wood is put under the male organ, which is cut to its very root.

I asked ‘Urayb the Eunuch, who was a man of learning and rectitude, saying: “Tell me please about the eunuchs, and that is because the people of learning disagree about them. Abu Hanifa permits them to marry and recognizes their fatherhood of the children born by their wives. This matter can be learnt only from you eunuchs’ condition.”

He answered: “Abu Hanifa, may God have mercy upon him, was right. And I am going to inform you about their condition. You should know that during the castration the scrotum is cut and the two testicles are taken out. Sometimes the castrated young boy takes fright, and one of the testicles goes up into his abdomen. It would be looked for but would not be found at the moment. Then it would descend after the fissure had healed up. If it was the left testicle which had been spared, he will have sexual desire and ejaculate semen. If it was the right one, he would grow a beard, as was the case with this or that person. Abu Hanifa based his verdict on the saying of the Prophet, God bless him and grant him salvation, that the child belongs to the conjugal bed.”

I mentioned what ‘Urayb told me to Sa’id al-Juri in Nisapur and he said, “this is quite possible, for one of my testicles is small” and, indeed he had a thin haired beard. After the castration a rod made of lead is put in the urinary opening, which is removed only for the purpose of urinating, so that the opening would not cicatrize before being healed.

[A bit later in the text:] All that the Greeks do in their way of castration is that they take out the testicles and leave the male organs. They do this to their own boys when they give them over to the churches and monasteries. The Muslims, when they raided the Byzantines, used to capture them from the churches.

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Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Bakr al-Maqdisī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm (The Best Divisions in the Knowledge of the Regions), ed. M.J. de Goeje. Leiden 1906, p.242.

al-Maqdisī (c. 945–991) was an Arab geographer. His work was strongly influenced by that of al-Jāhiz (776–869) who is frequently quoted for his writings about eunuchs. Hans-Peter Pökel’s book Der unmännliche Mann is a study of al-Jahiz’ work on the subject. I will, in a later post, provide a quotation from his Kitāb mufākharat al-jawāri wa-al-ghilmān (Dancing girls and pretty boys: an owner’s manual).

Thank you for posting this. So interesting.

Very Interesting. Will be looking for followup posts.

I have read that, unlike the Americas, there are no descendants of African slaves in Arabia. It is said that all male slave brought from Africa were immediately castrated. History can be inexact and yet given the proliferation of slavery in Muslim countries throughout the ages this appears to be legitimate. Slavery was only abolished in Mauritania in 1978 and made illegal in the 1980s and yet there are very few slaves of African origin. So the practice of castrating male African slave may have survived well into the 20th century.

seanthomas (imported) wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2020 2:22 pm I have read that, unlike the Americas, there are no descendants of African slaves in Arabia. It is said that all male slave brought from Africa were immediately castrated. History can be inexact and yet given the proliferation of slavery in Muslim countries throughout the ages this appears to be legitimate. Slavery was only abolished in Mauritania in 1978 and made illegal in the 1980s and yet there are very few slaves of African origin. So the practice of castrating male African slave may have survived well into the 20th century.

It is estimated that more African slaves were sent to the Muslim countries than to all of the Americas, both North and South. Some parts of Africa sent slaves in both directions. For example, the Sultanate of Bagirmi, southeast of Lake Chad in central Africa, which ruled a large area from 1480 until the French conquered it in 1897, was a state heavily involved in slave raiding from surrounding states. Healthy adult men and women were sent south to the coast for shipment to the New World. Young boys, who were castrated before sale, and young girls were sent across the Sahara to the Muslim world.

While African male slaves were commonly used as eunuchs, many intact male slaves were also converted to Islam and they made up a large part of the armies, and even ruled as the Mamluks in Egypt, although a minority of the Mamluks were of European or Central Asian origin. (For example, Saladin’s army that threw the Crusaders out of Jerusalem was largely made up of African converts to Islam, both intact and eunuch. Over half of his army was eunuchs, about evenly divided between African and European eunuchs.) The eunuchs, of course, left no descendants and few of the military men did either, as they were generally forbidden to marry.

The girls/women did produce children, although abortion and infanticide were common. Most of the children of African slaves gradually blended into the local population. The current king of Saudi Arabia has an African ancestor on his mother’s side. Arab men could simply decide to declare any child of one of their African slave women to be their legitimate child, and many did so. Al-Jāhiz, whom I will be quoting later in this thread, was the child of freed African slaves.

As Seanthomas notes, slavery was only made illegal (for the first time) in Mauritania in 1978. No penalty was attached to keeping or trading slaves. Slavery was “officially” abolished a couple more times in the country, but the first legal action against a slave owner wasn’t taken until 2018! It’s estimated that there are still between 300,000 and 500,000 slaves in the country.

Slavery wasn’t abolished in most of the Arabian Peninsula until 1961, although the supposedly last eunuch purchased to guard the tomb of Mohammed in Medina wasn’t officially purchased until 1964 (and there are rumors of more purchased since then and of the existence of eunuchs in wealthy households in the country today). I began study of Arabic in 1962 and my young Saudi conversation partner returned to Saudi Arabia for winter break, 1962-63. When we met again for coffee in January, 1963, he could hardly contain his excitement as he told me about the 12-year-old eunuch slave that his father had bought to serve his mother and sisters. There are quite believable stories of 10- and 12-year-old eunuchs being sent to Saudi Arabia from the war in Sudan in the late 1990s.

I had thought that someone would ask about the role of the Venetians in castrating boys for sale to the east. The standard high school history texts, which provide most of the information that Americans have about historical Venice, generally state that Venetian and (to a lesser extent) Genoese traders were responsible for importing eastern goods and ideas to Western Europe. Their activities are taught as largely responsible for kick-starting the Renaissance. Nothing is usually said about what they were exporting to the east in exchange for these treasures. Largely, it was Europeans, which I have never seen mentioned in a high school history book.

The castration houses in Venice were busy castrating boys from what is today modern England, Ireland, France, and Germany, although primarily from the western part of the Slavic world (Poland, Czechia, Macedonia, Croatia, Bulgaria, etc.). The Genoese, through their trading colonies in the Black Sea, were primarily selling Slavs from the eastern part of the Slavic world.

The earliest surviving treaty between Venice and the Carolingian empire of Lothar I in 840 included a provision that the Venetians would no longer castrate Carolingian (primarily German and Frankish) boys for sale to the Muslim world. Sale of castrated boys to the Christian Byzantine Empire, another Venetian market, was not mentioned, only sale to Muslims. The treaty was apparently not enforced and when it was renegotiated by Charles III in 880, it was altered to state that the Venetians would no longer castrate Carolingian boys for sale to Muslims UNLESS they were already slaves when they entered Venetian territory. By that time greatest number of the eunuchs that the Venetians sold were Slavic, from the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea or transported by land from further east. The Venetians were also important middlemen for the Viking slave trade, castrating boys transported from as far west as the Irish Sea. Dublin was a major slave-trading port, with many slaves from the British Isles shipped east.

Mary Valante, in her work about the Viking slave trade, writes:

Certain types of slaves, including educated males young enough to be castrated, were worth far more when traded along these [southern] routes than when brought home to Scandinavian farms. Viking raiders provided this valuable commodity in part through their attacks on monasteries, feeding the growing desire (rather than need) for educated and castrated slaves. The castration houses in Venice were the main source for eunuchs for the caliphate, though Verdun and the Andalusian region of Spain may also have produced large numbers of eunuchs. The majority of boys and young men who were castrated in Venice were clearly Slavs – Paul the Deacon in the eighth century describes ‘innumerable troops of captives’, from Germanic and Slavic lands being sold southwards.

St. Naum (c. 830–910) of Bulgaria wrote of a single group of 200 Slavic boys being sent to Venice for castration and sale to the Muslim world.

Slavic slaves were also shipped to the Caliphate along an eastern route by Rus traders. The slaves were transported across the Black Sea from the Crimean Peninsula by Genoese traders. In addition to Slavs, the Rus also raided Finnish and Karelian peoples for slaves to ship south. Purchasers in the Caliphate paid high prices for exotic girls and castrated boys from the far north.

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Korpela, Jukka. 2019. Slaves from the North: Finns and Karelians in the East European Slave Trade, 900–1600. Leiden: Brill.

McCormick, Michael. 2001. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900. Cambridge: University Press.

Valente, Mary A. 2013. Castrating Monks: Vikings, Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs. IN: Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, Larissa Tracy (ed.). Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

This gets more interesting as we go.

Abū ʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Kinānī al Baṣrī, commonly known as al-Jāḥiẓ (Bug Eyes, 776– 869) was an Arab writer and author of works of literature, natural history, and theology. One early source lists 140 books which he wrote, of which 75 exist today and are still in print. Far too little has been translated into English, although there are some translations in other western languages available.

He was born in Basra, the grandson of African slaves. He died at age 93, sitting at his desk writing another book, when an earthquake toppled a pile of books on him, killing him.

He is best known for his 7-volume Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (The book of Animals), which includes a major section on the impact of castration on humans, as well as other animals. In it, he also describes evolution by natural selection a millennium before Charles Darwin.

Two brief quotations from al-Jahiz:

On castration among the Byzantines: There are among people of certain creeds those who castrate their own sons and dedicate them to the house of worship and make them sacristans as the Byzantines so. But they, in carrying out that operation, do not harm the penis, and they only remove the testicles. It is as if they only hate that their children would impregnate their women and their nuns and nothing else! As for sexual pleasure and lust satisfaction, they claim that the eunuchs reach heights, never reached by the uncastrated virile man. It is as if they claim that the eunuch draws out of the woman everything she has, because of his excessive ability to prolong the sexual act.

–––‘Amr b. Bahr al-Jāhiz. Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of the Animals). Cairo 1938, vol. 1 (of 7), p. 124.

<<<oooOOOooo>>>

A eunuch combines everything a woman could want. She detests all those who are quick to ejaculate but slow to recover...but the eunuch is quick to recover after having been slow to ejaculate, as well as being sure not to impregnate her.

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JesusA (imported) wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2020 12:20 pm Kitāb mufākharat al-jawāri wa-al-ghilmān (

Courtesans and Catamites: an owner’s manual). hiz in a lecture, but lost my source in a fire and have not yet been able to find another copy to give a proper citation.]

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Part of Kitāb al-Hayawān [/FONT](including much of the section on eunuchs) is available in French translation. The best source for his various existing writing about eunuchs, though, is an analysis in German:

Pökel, Hans-Peter. (2014). Der unmännliche Mann: Zur Figuration des Eunuchen im Werk von al- Ğāḥiz (gest. 869). Würzburg: Ergon. 388 pp.

My best friend was in Mauritania last year and said slavery is alive and well and not hidden at all.

From all I can gather, as Jessica indicates, slavery is obvious in Mauritania where it i

JesusA (imported) wrote: Sun Sep 13, 2020 5:59 pm s estimated that there are still between 300,000 and

600,000 slaves in the country. While slavery has been made illegal several times (beginning when Mauritania was still a French colony), penalties have only recently been attached to slave ownership or slave trading. As of yesterday, there have been only TWO successful prosecutions for slavery in the country, although there are a few more cases wending their way through the courts.

Immediately after my Arabic conversation partner told me about his father’s purchase of a 12-year-old eunuch in 1963, I dropped Arabic and took up Japanese instead. I also joined the Anti-Slavery Society (currently named Anti-Slavery International and the successor to the original British anti-slavery society founded in 1839). I support their activities around the world.

There is still illegal but barely hidden slavery in many countries. One current campaign of ASI is Koran schools in Senegal. Muslim imams seek young boys in rural areas distant from the capital and offer their parents the opportunity to send their boys to Koran school. They will be cared for and educated entirely for free. Once the boys arrive, they are set to begging in the streets of the city, with the imam taking all of what they garner. There is at least one report of a truckload of Koran school boys being sent to an “advanced school” in the north of the country, and being driven off and never reported again.

In the Nigerian news in 2018 was a court case in Kaduna. A Ghanaian man purchased three children (2 boys and a girl) from a Kaduna orphanage for about U.S.$3000. He was stopped when he tried to take them out of the country. He successfully argued his court case and took the children to ??? They disappeared from the records once they left Nigeria.

In 2015, a Saudi Arabian posted an ad in on-line marketplace offering for sale a 26-year-old African eunuch whom he had purchased somewhere in West Africa and imported himself. The ad disappeared quickly, but my Arabic sources are confident that the offer was real.

ASI has long been concerned with child trafficking and slavery in South Asia. Sale of children has been documented in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, with shipment of children between countries (as well as to the Persian Gulf countries). Urban children are more often kidnapped off the streets or rural children lured into accompanying someone to the city.

In 2018, the Japan International Cooperation Agency published a survey of child prostitutes in Bangladesh, some of them from Nepal, as well as local children. They identified 5,239 and analyzed their data for a random set of 1,418 who were interviewed by social workers. The age range was 8 to 17, with an average age of 15. Of the set of 1,418 child prostitutes, 183 (13%) were castrated boys, 141 (10%) were intact boys, and 1094 (77%) were girls.

A 2020 article in a Bangladeshi academic journal, Jurnal Iqra’: Kajian Ilmu Pendidikan, about the reasons why slum children dropped out of school, described one individual who entered elementary school already castrated at age 8. He dropped out at age 13 and became a prostitute because of bullying.