Modern scholarship has often made much of how Islamic societies of the central middle ages (and later) featured large numbers of many types of slaves, including eunuchs, qiyan, mamluks, and concubines, and of the vast extent of slave-raiding and trading in those cultures. It is, perhaps, easy to imagine that slavery was somehow inherent to Islamicate society and many discussions have tended to begin with that as an assumption. In the decades after Muhammad’s death, the Muslims had rapidly conquered much of the Middle East and far beyond. Many of them became wealthy beyond anything they might have earlier imagined. Suddenly, the new elite found themselves owning enormous numbers of slaves. Yet, the world depicted in the Quran and in the oldest layers of Islamic tradition is quite different. While slavery is known, it was far from an essential part of the society of western Arabia. Slaves themselves were rare; only the very wealthiest people in Mecca owned more than two or three slaves. Attitudes towards children born to slave mothers were quite different from those of even a century later while what constituted the work of slaves and the work of the free was also rapidly transformed. Nearly all slaves worked alongside their owners or did basic domestic tasks. By re-reading some of these earliest sources, it is hoped that attitudes towards slavery as well as the lives of slaves in the world into which Islam was born can be understood. Separating the attitudes towards slavery that the first Muslims carried with them from pre-Islamic Arabia along with the teachings and practices of Muhammad from those of the hybrid culture that grew up in the wake of the conquests will help to better understand both.

A trend of mostly Islamist feminist scholars argues that the presence of slave women as licit sexual commodities through legal concubinage contributed to a conception of women as sexually submitted beings with detrimental consequences on the legal status of free women. This approach does not focus on the conditions imposed on slave women but rather emphasizes the dialectical aspect of the relationship linking slave women to free women. Moreover, the ‘freedom’ of Abbasid slave women tends to be apprehended in modern terms with no explicit reference to the meaning of ‘freedom’ in the Abbasid period and the ways in which it relates to slavery. Other scholars have engaged in investigating legal discourse for a better understanding of the roles and positions attributed to slave women as well as the possibilities and limitations thus created. They have analyzed a variety of legal texts and shown that, despite its popular and scholarly depiction as an uninhibited sexual relationship free of any legal, social or moral constraints, concubinage has followed, in legal discourse, a set of clearly delineated rules. Building a clearer understanding of the ethical principles underlying the legal regulations of the bodies and sexuality of slave women is a necessary step in evaluating their impact on the perception of womanhood and the status of free women. This paper investigates the regularization of the bodies and sexuality of slave women by analyzing a representative selection of anaf legal texts from the third/ ninth, fourth/tenth, and fifth/eleventh centuries (al-Shaybān’s (d.189/805) Kitāb al-al and al-Jāmi al-kabr; al-Sarakhs’s (d.1090) al-Mabs) with the purpose of providing substantiated answers to the following questions: Under which categories and through which vocabulary did legal discourse regulate the bodies and the sexuality of slave women? What were the rights (if any) and duties attributed to slave women regarding their sexuality through the legalization of concubinage and mixed marriages? How do gender, status, and pleasure intervene in regulating the sexuality of slave women? What ethical principles, concerns, and anxieties informed the conceptual framework of the classical jurists and consequently legal discourse? How does the regulation of the sexuality of slave women inform us about the images or the representations of slave women and more generally of ‘womanhood’ in the conceptual framework of the classical jurists? How do the status and the ‘image(s)’ of slave women in legal discourse contribute to a better appreciation of the Abbasid understanding of slavery and freedom?

This paper studies family letters, legal records, and responsa from the Cairo Geniza between the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and analyzes how female domestic slavery impacted the honor and social prestige of free women in Jewish Egyptian households. Bills of sale and letters concerning slave transactions reflect that women often initiated the acquisition of new household slaves, or deputized others to do so on their behalf. Women’s motivations for acquiring slaves were varied. While some interests centered on practical concerns, others were more interested in using slaves to project their own social positions and legacies. Family letters and deathbed inheritance declarations describe the diverse roles performed by slaves. These roles including serving as caretakers for both children and for their ill mistresses in the stead of absent kin. The domestic labor that slaves performed did more than simply alleviate the burden of household chores that were routinely expected of free women. Slaves protected the appearance of their owners’ modesty and honor by venturing forth into mixed, public spaces to run errands on their mistresses’ behalf. Yet the presence of slave women in the domestic sphere could also compromise the dignity and security of free women. Petitions to local authorities and legal queries sent to Egyptian Jewish jurists reveal a persistent social practice that defied communal norms. Jewish men bought slaves and used them as concubines despite the fact that Jewish law expressly prohibited slave concubinage. In some instances, wives and children were abandoned by husbands who absconded with their wives’ possessions and took up residence with their slave women. In others, slaves became pawns in protracted marital disputes between estranged spouses. While it has long been acknowledged that male desire for concubines played a substantive role in the demand for slaves in the Islamic world, less attention has been paid to the role played by free women’s demands for slaves. This paper aims to illustrate how free women played an active role in shaping the meaning of medieval domestic slavery in the Middle East as well as how this system of slavery could undermine their own interests.

The position of domestic slaves in the markets of the medieval Middle East has received relatively little scholarly attention compared to the roles of those slaves in the household after purchase. Studies by Donald Little and Yusuf Ragib on medieval slave markets have laid the essential groundwork on the basis of legal texts, especially documents of sale and the shurūṭ manuals which governed their structure, but they have not extended to the social or economic context of these sales. My paper will analyze the ways in which domestic slaves were marketed and sold in fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt and Syria on the basis of a late fifteenth-century guide to buying slaves, al-Qawl al-Sadīd fī Ikhtiyār al-Imā’ wa-al-‘Abīd by Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmad al-‘Ayntābī. Although al-‘Ayntābī’s treatise gives advice concerning the purchase of many different types of slaves, I will focus on the medical and ethnographic advice pertaining to non-elite slaves. My analysis will include gender, origin, and skin color as factors in the purchase of slaves, as well as the ways in which these factors may have operated differently in the markets for elite and non-elite slaves. If time allows, I will also compare al-‘Ayntābī’s advice on slave-buying with the rules for slave inspection enjoined on the muḥtasib of the Mamluk slave market through the genre of the ḥisba manual. I will supplement these sources with the observations of European travelers who visited Mamluk slave markets during the fifteenth century and with the few surviving examples, some Mamluk and some Venetian, of contracts for the sale of domestic slaves in Mamluk territory during this period.