Instability in the environment of late antique Iraq led to the formation of the marsh regions, or baṭāʾiḥ, right before the Islamic conquests. These lands, some of the earliest to inspire debate about land ownership in new Islamic state, are important in the history of agricultural hinterlands, environmental change, and regional revolt. The baṭāʾiḥ (as per the work of anthropologist and historian James Scott) function as an environmental locus of non-state religious, cultural, and political development, as seen in the pattern of small-scale revolts and independence movements in the region. No group better represents this interplay between religious creativity, identification with the land, and the violent expression of political power than the enslaved “Zanj” people who revolted against their overlords in the Abbasid period. While they failed to establish a permanent state, they changed the course of Islamic political and economic history; and they fell when they tried to instate more stringent controls, which the Islamic state was able to undermine and counteract. However, this revolt has far too often been understudied, seen as one of simply an outpouring of violence headed by a charismatic religious opportunist. Little study has been made on the way that the people who sparked this revolt were also claiming a connection to an identity—one that was based on their knowledge of, and ability to navigate, the baṭāʾiḥ. Drawing on the theoretical work of historians of the environment and non-state societies, this paper restructures the ongoing discourse of the Zanj revolt from a rebellion of overworked plantation slaves to one of a nascent form of growing communal self-identity, not of religion or race, but of class and connection to the environment. From the early Umayyad period onward, there are at least three revolts recorded, which speaks to the intergenerational efforts of the slaves to gain their freedom. The Zanj reacted to the state’s need for control of unstable land by sabotaging the state’s means to regulate it while disrupting the agricultural and irrigation infrastructure necessary for its development. Their established state is an attempt to create a land outside of state control, which failed essentially due to the way it replicated the prevailing political and economic structures from which they tried to escape. Their history nuances our understanding of captive labor and identity in the medieval Islamicate world.