The historiography of the Zanj Rebellion in southern al-ʿIrāq and al-Ahwāz, which established a de facto state with its capital outside Basra and held off the forces of the ʿAbbasid caliphate for fourteen years, has either labeled it a ‘slave revolt’, drawing analogies with Spartacus and Toussaint without ever pursuing them; or adduced the limited evidence for an extensive slave trade between the Persian Gulf and the Bilād al-Zanj (East Africa) in the 3rd/9th century to argue most rebels could not have been enslaved. Kurt Franz’s recent interventions, attending carefully to the rebellion and the norms of ‘Islamic slavery’, argue both that the Zanj did come to the region through the slave trade, and that ‘slavery’ is not the most helpful vocabulary for analyzing the revolt. While Franz correctly emphasizes the divergence of Zanj slavery from Islamic legal norms, the sui generis character in the Islamic world of this example of agricultural slavery, and the continuity of Zanj labor with other forms of agrarian exploitation, these three observations do not necessitate an alternative terminology; nor must describing the uprising as a ‘slave revolt’ imply romanticism. A double comparison is valuable here. Firstly, Orlando Patterson’s theorization of slavery as social death remains highly relevant to the Zanj case, given the circumstances of enslaved laborers’ arrival in the region. Recalling that the natal alienation of many of the rebels continued beyond what Franz terms their ‘original enslavement’, we cannot simply observe that their labor formed a continuum with other exploited labor and conclude with Franz that the rebellion more closely resembled ‘peasant revolts.’ Secondly, comparison with ancient Mediterranean and early modern American slave revolts suggests common features including: alliances of different oppressed groups; a variety of statuses within formerly enslaved rebels; participation of disgruntled elite figures; a charismatic visionary leader; and objectives like permanent freedom for participants, wealth, dignity, and revenge, but not fully-fledged revolution. The historiography of the Americas helps us delimit the concept of the ‘slave revolt’, avoiding both romanticization and denial. Comparison enables us to insert the Zanj Rebellion on a spectrum of resistance, from individual flight to marronage, from small-scale conspiracy to extensive insurrection, transcending the rebellion’s unique character within the framework of ‘Islamic’ slavery, requiring greater attention to enslaved people’s forms of resistance throughout Islamic history.