In the early Abbasid era, Indian and Persian erotic texts were translated to Arabic and added to a growing corpus of literature dealing with sex from various angles, medical, entertaining, ethical, etc. Some of these texts are preserved in the oldest extant erotic manual, Jawami’ al-ladhdha, or Encyclopedia of pleasure, a yet unpublished work that was probably written in the late tenth century, providing a sexual ethics for elite men. In this paper, I analyze representations of slave women in Jawami’ al-ladhdha, and discuss how these can be understood as reflections on changes in the Abbasid elite families, brought in by ample access to female slaves. The author of Jawami’ al-ladhdha introduces a wide range of sexual positions and techniques but he is not fully comfortable with exposing free, noble women to the sexual excesses he makes available for his urban male readers. These should be part of sophisticated men’s repertoire, but only parts of this repertoire are suitable for free women, for whom “ordinary” sexual intercourse in itself is “a humiliation” not to speak of the advanced sexual positions. For those, men need slave women. Nevertheless, the author promotes harmony between spouses and does not want to alienate free women. He accentuates their status, asserting that “God preferred wives to slave women, and so we also give them preference”, and their refined nature. Free, noble women are (in general) delicate and bashful; men have to treat them tenderly. Slave women, on the other hand, are more robust, they need more strenuous sexual exercises. Thus, men can appeal to their free wives’ sympathy, as in an anecdote about a wife who discovers her husband having sex with her slave girl, and urges him to continue or else the slave will lose her mind. These are strategies, I suggest, for securing men’s (in this case a tenth century urban elite) access to slave concubines, without jeopardizing valuable marriage ties. The consequence is a hierarchy for the elite family in which the man is not only superior, he is omnipotent and can satisfy delicate free wives and robust slave concubines alike. Free wives are subordinated, but still favored, as they are granted divine preference. This hierarchy, however, is peculiar for the society in which this particular book is written, so finally, the paper will compare it with later works, were the roles of wives and slave concubines are more ambiguous.

This paper argues that concubinage was a major locus around which Christian religious elites in the early Abbasid Caliphate articulated new conceptions of non-Muslim community and personhood. Juxtaposing discourses on concubinage in Syriac Christian legal works with accounts of concubines and Christian men in biographical dictionaries, the paper argues that lay Christian administrators and physicians practiced concubinage – condemned unequivocally by Christian tradition – to embody their belonging to the elite, male echelons of the Abbasid court. Christian bishops responded not only by prohibiting concubinage as unacceptable polygamous sexuality, but by creating a Christian law of inheritance sharply opposed to that of Islam. Unlike Islamic law, Syriac Christian inheritance law did not allow the sons of unfree women to inherit from their free fathers, and at times it went so far as to claim that those sons should remain slaves themselves. In other words, Christian law closed off concubinage as a strategy for social reproduction: whereas many elite Muslim men received family status from their fathers while at the same time being sons of concubines, Christian inheritance law tried to preclude the potential for Christian men to pass on status to the progeny of extra-marital, servile unions. Even if Christian men might not always obey the ecclesiastics’ prohibition of extra-marital sexuality, this inheritance law would sculpt Christian communities in Abbasid society according to the monogamous, ecclesiastical ideal. In this manner, concubinage was not only a social practice contested between lay and ecclesiastical elites because of its Islamic associations, but one that allowed Christian religious elites to articulate a vision of the specific shape their non-Muslim communities should take within the Islamic Caliphate. Equally as important is the conception of unfree, gendered personhood this Christian discourse constructed. Doing away with the umm walad and her free children as a legal category, this discourse retrenched conceptually the division between the free and the unfree that was such a constitutive feature of medieval eastern Mediterranean societies.

Many transformations developed in the social status of women in medieval Iran under the Khwarazmshah (1077-1228) and the Mongols (1219-1253). The women in the Khwarazmshah Haram (the enclosed quarter of the court for women) from different classes played critical roles in the court. Some were from prominent tribes or simple Kaniz, slave women who brought in the court out of the spoils of the battles or slavery markets. The slave women particularly the beautiful strong ones had the chance to be the concubines or the wives of the Sultan that promoted their ranks from a mere Kaniz to the wife of the Sultan. The Successor of the Sultan was usually his first son who was born from a mother of a prominent tribe or family; however, if these women had strong talented sons, they could challenge the absolute power of the next designated successors. Under Sultan Muhammad (1200-1220) and Jalal al-Din (1220-1228), massive competitions developed among different women of Haram including the Kaniz. The Mongol invasion of Iran which led to the collapse of the Khwarazmshahi dynasty developed social changes in the status of women in society in general and in the court in particular. Unlike, the era of Khwarazmshah, the slave women didn’t have significant social roles in the Haram. Based on the primary sources in Persian and Arabic, this paper examines the transformations in the social status of slavery women from the Khwarazmshah under Sultan Mohammad to the Mongols. It argues that even though the Mongol invasion promoted the social and political status of women in Haram, it deteriorated the roles of slave women in the court and turned them to an inferior class in the society. Keywords: Slave Women, Social Change, Social Status, Iran, the Khwarazmshah, the Mongols,

This paper examines the women associated with the Abbasid household in medieval Cairo. It is widely recognized that in the Baghdad years of the caliphate, many of them had been slave concubines, yet went on to play significant political roles, notably as “mothers of the caliphs,” inside and outside the harem. Similarly, after the resurrection of the Abbasid line in Mamluk Cairo in 1261, the sultans often gifted the reigning caliphs with slave women (mostly Turkish concubines) to help perpetuate the line and produce sons to maintain the succession of caliphs for the future. In addition, several of the Cairo caliphs also spent considerable sums on acquiring singing girls to entertain their entourages, occasionally to the chagrin of their sultans. Evidence suggests that female children born of the unions between the Abbasid caliphs of Cairo and their concubines emerged as new generations of “Abbasid princesses” eventually forging marriage ties with members of the Mamluk military as well as representatives of the religious establishment. It is worthwhile to consider who wed these ladies and whether or not their future spouses acquired social prestige or other privileges thereby. These marriage relationships merit a deeper scrutiny starting with existing evidence from chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and chancery manuals to add definition to the lives and status of royal consorts, concubines, and other notable women associated with the Abbasid family in Mamluk Cairo, thus shedding more light on the social history of women in pre-modern Islamic societies.