Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (19 page)

When the [Abbasid] state was drowned in decadence and luxury ... and
overthrown by the heathen Tatars ... because the people of the faith had
become deficient in energy and reluctant to rally in defense ... then it was
God's benevolence that He rescued the faith by reviving its dying breath and
restoring the unity of the Muslims in the Egyptian realms.... He did this by
sending to the Muslims, from among this Turkish nation and its great and
numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers, who were
brought ... to the House of Islam under the rule of slavery, which hides in
itself a divine blessing. By means of slavery they learn glory and blessing and
are exposed to divine providence; cured by slavery, they enter the Muslim
religion with the firm resolve of true believers and yet with nomadic virtues
unsullied by debased nature, unadulterated by the filth of pleasure, undefiled
by ways of civilized living, and with their ardor unbroken by the profusion of
luxury.... Thus one intake comes after another and generation follows generation, and Islam rejoices in the benefit which it gains through them, and the
branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth."

Most of the military slaves of Islam were white-Turks and Caucasians in
the East, Slavs and other Europeans in the West. Black military slaves were,
however, not unknown and indeed at certain periods were of importance.
Individual black fighting men, both slaves and free, are mentioned as having
participated in raiding and warfare in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times.
According to the biographies and histories of the Prophet, there were several
blacks, both in his army and in the armies of his pagan enemies. One of them,
called Wahshi, an Ethiopian slave, distinguished himself in the battles against
the Prophet at Uhud and at the Ditch; and later, after the Muslim capture of
Mecca, he fought for the Muslims in the wars that followed the death of the
Prophet. Black soldiers appear occasionally in early Abbasid times,"' and
after the slave rebellion in southern Iraq, in which blacks displayed terrifying
military prowess, they were recruited into the infantry corps of the caliphs in
Baghdad. Ahmad b. Tulun (d. 884), the first independent ruler of Muslim
Egypt, relied very heavily on black slaves, probably Nubians, for his armed
forces; at his death he is said to have left, among other possessions, twentyfour thousand white mamluks and forty-five thousand blacks." These were
organized in separate corps, and accommodated in separate quarters at the
military cantonments.''` When Khumarawayh, the son and successor of Ahmad ibn Tulun, rode in procession, he was followed, according to a chronicler, by a thousand black guards

wearing black cloaks and black turbans, so that a watcher could fancy them to
be a black sea spreading over the face of the earth, because of the blackness of
their color and of their garments. With the glitter of their shields, of the
chasing on their swords, and of the helmets under their turbans, they made a
really splendid sight.13

The black troops were the most faithful supporters of the dynasty, and shared
its fate. When the Tulunids were overthrown at the beginning of 905, the
restoration of caliphal authority was followed by a massacre of the black
infantry and the burning of their quarters:

Then the cavalry turned against the cantonments of the Tulunid blacks, seized
as many of them as they could, and took them to Muhammad ibn Sulayman
the new governor sent by the caliph]. He was on horseback, amid his escort.
He gave orders to slaughter them, and they were slaughtered in his presence
like sheep.14

A similar fate befell the black infantry in Baghdad in 930, when they were
attacked and massacred by the white cavalry, with the help of other troops and
of the populace, and their quarters burned.15 Thereafter, black soldiers virtually disappear from the armies of the eastern caliphate.

In Egypt, the manpower resources of Nubia were too good to neglect, and
the traffic down the Nile continued to provide slaves for military as well as
other purposes. Black soldiers served the various rulers of medieval Egypt.
and under the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo black regiments, known as Abid al-
Shird', "the slaves by purchase," formed an important part of the military
establishment. They were particularly prominent in the mid-eleventh century,
during the reign of al-Mustansir, when for a while the real ruler of Egypt was
the caliph's mother, a Sudanese slave woman of remarkable strength of character. There were frequent clashes between black regiments and those of
other races and occasional friction with the civil population. One such incident occurred in 1021, when the Caliph al-Hakim sent his black troops against
the people of Fustat (old Cairo), and the white troops joined forces to defend
them. A contemporary chronicler of these events describes an orgy of burning, plunder, and rape.' In 1062 and again in 1067 the black troops were
defeated by their white colleagues in pitched battles and driven out of Cairo to
Upper Egypt. Later they returned, and played a role of some importance
under the last Fatimid caliphs.

With the fall of the Fatimids, the black troops again paid the price of their
loyalty. Among the most faithful supporters of the Fatimid Caliphate, they
were also among the last to resist its overthrow by Saladin, ostensibly the
caliph's vizier but in fact the new master of Egypt. By the time of the last
Fatimid caliph, al-'Adid, the blacks had achieved a position of power. The black eunuchs wielded great influence in the palace; the black troops formed a
major element in the Fatimid army. It was natural that they should resist the
vizier's encroachments. In 1169 Saladin learned of a plot by the caliph's chief
black eunuch to remove him, allegedly in collusion with the Crusaders in
Palestine. Saladin acted swiftly; the offender was seized and decapitated and
replaced in his office by a white eunuch. The other black eunuchs of the
caliph's palace were also dismissed. The black troops in Cairo were infuriated
by this summary execution of one whom they regarded as their spokesman
and defender. Moved, according to a chronicler, by "racial solidarity"
(jinsiyya)," they prepared for battle. In two hot August days, an estimated
fifty thousand blacks fought against Saladin's army in the area between the
two palaces, of the caliph and the vizier.

Two reasons are given for their defeat. One was their betrayal by the
Fatimid Caliph al-`Adid, whose cause they believed they were defending
against the usurping vizier:

Al-'Adid had gone up to his belvedere tower, to watch the battle between the
palaces. It is said that he ordered the men in the palace to shoot arrows and
throw stones at [Saladin's] troops, and they did so. Others say that this was not
done by his choice. Shams al-Dawla [Saladin's brother] sent naphtha-throwers
to burn down al-'Adid's belvedere. One of them was about to do this when the
door of the belvedere tower opened and out came a caliphal aide, who said:
"The Commander of the Faithful greets Shams al-Dawla, and says: `Beware of
the [black] slave dogs! Drive them out of the country!' " The blacks were
sustained by the belief that al-'Adid was pleased with what they did. When they
heard this, their strength was sapped, their courage waned, and they fled.'8

The other reason, it is said, was an attack on their homes. During the
battle between the palaces, Saladin sent a detachment to the black quarters,
with instructions "to burn them down on their possessions and their children."
Learning of this, the blacks tried to break off the battle and return to their
families but were caught in the streets and destroyed. This encounter is variously known in Arabic annals as "the Battle of the Blacks" and "the Battle of
the Slaves."" Though the conflict was not primarily racial, it acquired a racial
aspect, which is reflected in some of the verses composed in honor of Saladin's
victory. Maqrizi, in a comment on this episode, complains of the power and
arrogance of the blacks:

If they had a grievance against a vizier, they killed him; and they caused much
damage by stretching out their hands against the property and families of the
people. When their outrages were many and their misdeeds increased. God
destroyed them for their sins.20

Sporadic resistance by groups of black soldiers continued, but was finally
crushed after a few years. While the white units of the Fatimid army were
incorporated by Saladin in his own forces, the blacks were not. The black
regiments were disbanded, and black fighting men did not reappear in the armies of Egypt for centuries. Under the mamluk sultans, blacks were employed in the army in a menial role, as servants of the knights.2' There was a
clear distinction between these servants, who were black and slaves, and the
knights' orderlies and grooms, who were white and free.

Though black slaves no longer served as soldiers in Egypt, they still fought
occasionally-as rebels or rioters. In 1260, during the transition from the
Ayyubid to the mamluk sultanate, black stableboys and some others seized
horses and weapons, and staged a minor insurrection in Cairo. They proclaimed their allegiance to the Fatimids and followed a religious leader who
"incited them to rise against the people of the state; he granted them fiefs and
wrote them deeds of assignment."

The end was swift: "When they rebelled during the night, the troops rode
in, surrounded them, and shackled them; by morning they were crucified
outside the Zuwayla gate.""

The same desire among the slaves to emulate the forms and trappings of
the mamluk state is expressed in a more striking form in an incident in 1446,
when some five hundred slaves, tending their masters' horses in the pasturages outside Cairo, took arms and set up a miniature state and court of their
own. One of them was called sultan and was installed on a throne in a carpeted pavilion; others were dignified with the titles of the chief officers of the
mamluk court, including the vizier, the commander in chief, and even the
governors of Damascus and Aleppo. They raided grain caravans and other
traffic and were even willing to buy the freedom of a colleague. They succumbed to internal dissensions. Their "sultan" was challenged by another
claimant, and in the ensuing struggles the revolt was suppressed. Many of the
slaves were recaptured and the rest fled.23

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, black slaves were admitted to
units using firearms-a socially despised weapon in the mamluk knightly society. When a sultan tried to show some favor to his black arquebusiers, he
provoked violent antagonism from the mamluk knights, which he was not able
to resist. In 1498 "a great disturbance occurred in Cairo." The sultan (according to the chronicler) had outraged the mamluks by conferring two boons on a
black slave called Farajallah, chief of the firearms personnel in the citadelfirst, giving him a white Circassian slave girl from the palace as wife, and
second, granting him a short-sleeved tunic, a characteristic garment of the
mamluks:

On beholding this spectacle [says the chronicler] the Royal mamluks expressed
their disapproval to the sultan, and they put on their ... armour . . . and
armed themselves with their full equipment. A battle broke out between them
and the black slaves, who numbered about five hundred. The black slaves ran
away and gathered again in the towers of the citadel and fired at the Royal
mamluks. The Royal mamluks marched on them, killing Farajallah and about
fifty of the black slaves; the rest fled; two Royal mamluks were killed. Then the
emirs and the sultan's maternal uncle, the Great Dawadar, met the sultan and
told him: "We disapprove of these acts of yours [and if you persist in them, it would be better for you to] ride by night in the narrow by-streets and go away
together with those black slaves to far-off places!" The sultan answered: "I
shall desist from this, and these black slaves will be sold to the Turkmans."24

In the Islamic West black slave troops were more frequent, and sometimes
even included cavalry-something virtually unknown in the East. The first
emir of Cordova, `Abd al-Rahman I, is said to have kept a large personal
guard of black troops; and black military slaves were used, especially to
maintain order, by his successors. Black units, probably recruited by purchase
via Zawila in Fezzan (now southern Libya), figure in the armies of the rulers
of Tunisia between the ninth and eleventh centuries.25 Black troops became
important from the seventeenth century, after the Moroccan military expansion into the Western Sudan. The Moroccan Sultan Mawlay Ismail (16721727) had an army of black slaves, said to number 250,000. The nucleus of this
army was provided by the conscription or compulsory purchase of all male
blacks in Morocco; it was supplemented by levies on the slaves and serfs of the
Saharan tribes and slave raids into southern Mauritania. These soldiers were
mated with black slave girls, to produce the next generation of male soldiers
and female servants. The youngsters began training at ten and were mated at
fifteen.26 After the sultan's death in 1727, a period of anarchic internal struggles followed, which some contemporaries describe as a conflict between
blacks and whites. The philosopher David Hume, writing at about the same
time, saw such a conflict as absurd and comic, and used it to throw ridicule on
all sectarian and factional strife:

The civil wars which arose some few years ago in Morocco between the Blacks
and Whites, merely on account of their complexion, are founded on a pleasant
difference. We laugh at them; but, I believe, were things rightly examined, we
afford much more occasion of ridicule to the Moors. For, what are all the wars
of religion, which have prevailed in this polite and knowing part of the world?
They are certainly more absurd than the Moorish civil wars. The difference of
complexion is a sensible and a real difference; but the controversy about an
article of faith, which is utterly absurd and unintelligible, is not a difference in
sentiment, but in a few phrases and expressions, which one party accepts of
without understanding them, and the other refuses in the same manner... .
Besides, I do not find that the Whites in Morocco ever imposed on the Blacks
any necessity of altering their complexion . . . nor have the Blacks been more
unreasonable in this particular.27