This paper explores the ways in which the qiyan—highly trained female singers held as by the courtly elite in ‘Abbasid Baghdad and Umayyad Andalusia—were represented and depicted in medieval literary and historical narratives. More specifically, I examine how medieval authors used depictions of the qiyan as rhetorical strategies for advancing the broader political and philosophical agendas that their texts were intended to address. Because the qiyan did not write their own biographies, our understanding of these singing slave women cannot be separated from the broader literary, political, philosophical, and theological agendas of the texts in which they are discussed. In light of this reality, my paper does not attempt to reconstruct the experiences of the qiyan themselves. Rather, I attempt to return the qiyan to their original context by considering how the subject of the qiyan was mobilized for specific narrative purposes by medieval authors. This paper suggests that the subject of the qiyan was a literary motif loaded with significance and coded meanings, used in ‘Abbasid and Andalusian historiography to convey specific ideas about court culture, imperial splendor, and refinement. This motif, in turn, was imbricated with ideologies about gender dynamics, power relationships, historical memory, and the articulation of Muslim identity and imperial legitimacy.

Female Slaves in Cairo's medieval underworld: Gendered aspects of Criminality and Bondage in the Mamluk Period The presentation will consider incidents by female slaves that were depicted as criminal or transgressive in narratives written by historians of the Mamluk period in Egypt. Categories of such (alleged) activity included: theft, fornication, prostitution, homicide, espionage and religious deviance. The narratives themselves offer diverse nuances about the motives for criminal activity attributed to persons who shared the common tie of bondage to individuals who held power relationships over them. Although the narratives depicting these incidents were uniformly composed and/or transmitted by commentators rather than by the alleged offenders (actual logs registering crimes tried in courts are not available for this period), they frequently offer specific details (date/time, place, description, penalty) as well as biases and character assessments lacking in terse court records. These nuances thus suggest a variety of circumstances in which such persons could challenge, mitigate or evade these relationships. The penalties inflicted on them indicate the gravity of their actions as perceived by legal authorities--if the accused offenders were successfully apprehended.

This paper examines the position of concubines belonging to one owner, the world traveler Ibn Battuta (14th century). Two factors facilitated Ibn Battuta’s access to slave women in major structural ways. One was the expansionist wars of the period, resulting in the influx of significant numbers of slaves to the slave markets of the Dar al-Islam. The other was Ibn Battuta’s itinerant lifestyle that took him to major centers and frontier territories of Islam in Asia and Africa. There he became an observer, occasional participant, and frequent beneficiary of the Islamic warfare that increased the supply of slaves and put captive men, women, and children conveniently close for this willing customer and discerning connoisseur of female sexuality. The paper addresses three aspects of the master’s ownership of concubines. (1) Spouse substitute value. The requirement of legality of sexual intercourse creates for Ibn Battuta situations where he satisfies his appetites by either adding concubines to his (full) complement of wives or substituting concubines for absent or difficult wives who may be abandoned or divorced. (2) Emotional value. According to his own reminiscences, Ibn Battuta the owner is capable of developing fondness for a particular concubine whom he cherishes higher than any of his wives. Regardless of his attachment, he never grants the woman formal freedom when the master would have to marry his former slave in order to keep her, even though she produces a child for him, thus becoming umm al-walad. (3) Child-bearing value. We do not know how many children Ibn Battuta produced, but one daughter and possibly one son were born of slave mothers. The paper examines surviving information to assess the father’s attitude to and treatment of these children in comparison with what we know about his children by his legal wives.

The outsize households of Muslim royals and elite drove the enslavement of multitudes of women and castrated boys for over 1200 years. As late as the eighteenth century, Mouley Ismail (d. 1727) from the current ruling family of Morocco, possessed a harem numbering between 500 and 2000 concubines, including many European captives of the Barbary corsairs. Owning numerous slave concubines, however, fell out of fashion and lost its prestige value under the onslaught of modernity and competition with western values. The Young Turks invaded Istanbul and dismantled the harem of the Ottoman Sultan in 1909. Still concubinage and female slavery continued in Turkey and in Mediterranean Muslim lands under colonial power for several more decades. Islamic traditional scholars argued that Sharia law could never outlaw slavery and concubinage because Mohammed possessed his own concubines and had never forbidden the practice. This paper examines the end of royal harems and female slavery in the Muslim Mediterranean but questions whether concubinage and other forms of coerced sex work in the region ever completely disappeared, even before the resurrection of sex slavery by militant groups in the twenty-first century.