Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (17 page)

Even religious groups with what some would call radical and progressive
ideals seem to have accepted the slavery of the black man as natural. Thus, in
the eleventh century we are told that the Carmathians established a kind of
republic in eastern Arabia, abolished many of the prescriptions regarding
persons and property which conventional Islam imposed-and had a force of
thirty thousand black slaves to do the rough work.19

Jurists occasionally discuss the status of black Muslim slaves. Muslim law
unequivocally forbids the enslavement of free Muslims of whatever race, and
was usually obeyed in this. There is, however, evidence that the law was not
always strictly enforced to protect Muslim captives from black Africa. A fatwa
(legal ruling) in a collection of such rulings by Spanish and North African
authorities, compiled by a fifteenth-century Moroccan jurist, Ahmad alWansharisi, is instructive. The question to be decided is whether Ethiopian
(i.e., black) slaves professing monotheism and observing religious practices
could lawfully be bought and sold. The law is clear. An unbeliever may be
enslaved, a Muslim may not; but the adoption of Islam by an unbeliever after
his enslavement does not automatically set him free. Slavery, says the fatwa, is
a condition arising from current or previous unbelief and persists after conversion, the owner of the slave retaining full property rights. If a group is known
to have been converted to Islam, then the taking of slaves from this group is
forbidden. However, the existence of a doubt as to whether conversion took
place before or after enslavement does not invalidate the ownership or sale of
the slave. It is significant that the writer of the fatwa discusses the question in
relation to black slaves, that he is at some pains to insist that Islam does not
necessarily involve freedom, and that he gives the benefit of the doubt not to
the slave but to the slaveowner.21' The problem was clearly not academic.
Other sources preserve complaints by black Muslim rulers about "holy wars"
launched against them to take captives and by jurists-usually black juristsat the enslavement of free, black Muslims contrary to law.''

The question was discussed at some length by an African jurist, Ahmad
Baba of Timbuktu (1556-1627), in an answer written for a group of Muslims
in the oasis of Tuat. This was a major center of the slave trade, and the good
men of Tuat, apparently suffering from scruples of conscience, submitted a
number of questions on the legality of the enslavement of blacks. In general,
Ahmad Baba reaffirms the classical Islamic position. Muslims, and also nonMuslims living under Muslim rule and protection, may in no circumstances be
enslaved. Idolators captured in a holy war may lawfully be enslaved, and their
slave status is not ended by any subsequent conversion to Islam. Ahmad Baba
draws his interlocutor's attention to the black tribes farther south, who are
still heathens and therefore subject to holy war and enslavement. While thus
accepting the legality of enslavement, Ahmad Baba discusses and dismisses
the story that the black races are condemned to slavery because of God's
curse on their presumptive ancestor Ham. "Even assuming," he says, "that Ham was the ancestor of the blacks, God is too merciful to punish millions of
people for the sin of a single individual." Slavery arises not from blackness but
from unbelief. All unbelievers, black or white, may be enslaved; no Muslim,
black or white, may be enslaved.

Ahmad Baba's answers, however, make it clear that many Muslim blacks
were in fact being illegally enslaved, and he frankly faces the difficulty of
distinguishing between lawful and unlawful slaves. Unlike the Moroccan alWansharisi, however, he places the burden of proof not on the slave but on
the slavedealer, who must prove his lawful right of ownership over the slave
he offers for sale. To the question, "Can one take the word of an enslaved
person?"-to which many jurists say no-Ahmad Baba replies with a firm and
documented yes."

That this ruling was of little practical effect is shown by a later discussion
of the illegal enslavement of black Muslims by the nineteenth-century Moroccan historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri (1834-97).23 Writing within the
context of traditional society, he is nevertheless clearly affected by the new
anti-slavery ideas current at the time. Al-Nasiri recognizes the legality of the
institution of slavery in Muslim law but is appalled by its application. He
complains in particular of "a manifest and shocking calamity widespread and
established since of old in the lands of the Maghrib-the unlimited enslavement of the blacks, and the importation of many droves of them every year,
for sale in the town and country markets of the Maghrib, where men traffic in
them like beasts, or worse." This abuse is so old and so deep-rooted, says alNasiri, that "many of the common people believe that the cause of their
enslavement in Holy Law is that they are black of color and imported from
those parts." This is, of course, untrue, and al-Nasiri swears that "by God's
life, this is one of the worst and greatest abominations against religion, because the black people are Muslim people, with the same rights and duties as
ourselves." While conceding that heathens may be enslaved, al-Nasiri argues
that by now a majority or at least a substantial minority of the blacks are
Muslims and that since the natural condition of man is freedom, they should
be given the benefit of the doubt. The evidence of slavetraders is dismissed as
interested and unreliable, and the traders themselves are condemned as "men
without morals, virtue, or religion."

Al-Nasiri then makes a further point against the legality of the slave trade
in blacks:

Some men of integrity and some others have argued that the blacks today, as in
the past. raid each other and kidnap each other's children, stealing them in
places remote from their homes and dwellings, in the same way that the Bedouin of the Maghrib raid each other and seize and steal each other's mounts
and cattle. They are all Muslims but arc led to this by lack of religion and the
absence of any restraint. How can any man who is scrupulous about his religion
allow himself to buy anything of this kind'? How can he permit himself to take
their women as concubines and thus risk entering on a legally dubious sexual
relationship'?

Despite such arguments and despite the decrees in favor of emancipation
by Ahmad Bey of Tunis, the enslavement of blacks and their export to the
Mediterranean lands and the Middle East continued and was defended by the
increasingly flimsy argument that blacks were idolators and therefore that
warfare against them was jihad, or holy war, and the captives were legally
liable to enslavement. Since, for a conscientious Muslim, only a jihad could
supply legally valid slaves, it was necessary to call every slave raid a jihad.
One can understand the anger and anguish of a good Muslim like al-Nasiri.

White slaves were rarely used for rough labor and filled higher positions in
domestic and administrative employment. Both blacks and whites were used
as eunuchs, but the blacks soon predominated. The Caliph al-Amin (reigned
809-13), it is said, collected them in large numbers and formed separate corps
of white and black eunuchs, which he called "the locusts" (jaradiyya) and the
"ravens" (ghurabiyya). An Arabic description of the court of the caliph in
Baghdad at the beginning of the tenth century speaks of seven thousand black
and four thousand white eunuchs.z' Later, white eunuchs became rare and
costly.

The importation of black slaves into the central Islamic lands, which began
at the time of the conquest, continued without interruption until the nineteenth century and in some areas into the twentieth. From time to time,
Western travelers give us a glimpse of this traffic. Thus Jeremy Bentham, who
sailed from Izmir to Istanbul on a Turkish caique in November 1785, noted in
his diary: "Our crew consists of 15 men besides the Captain: we have 24
passengers on the deck, all Turks; besides 18 young Negresses (slaves) under
the hatches. ,15

Between white and black slaves-even where the latter were numerous
and powerful-there was for a long time one crucial distinction. Whereas
white slaves could become generals, provincial governors, sovereigns, and
founders of dynasties, this hardly ever happened with black slaves in the
central Islamic lands. In Muslim India, a number of soldiers of African slave
origin rose to high office, some even becoming rulers.26 Elsewhere, their
opportunities for advancement were very limited. Only one of them ever
became the ruler of a Muslim country outside the black zone-the famous
Nubian eunuch Abu'l-Misk Kaffir, "Musky Camphor," who in the tenth century became regent of Egypt (and a very capable one). Historians clearly
regarded this as remarkable, and the great Arab poet al-Mutanabbi found in
Kaffir's blackness a worthy object of satirical abuse. In one of his most famous
poems, he bitterly attacks the master of Egypt:

In another poem he remarks: