Slave Commerce in the Medieval Islamic Middle East
Panel 287, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 20 at 12:00 pm
Panel Description
The panel considers commerce in enslaved persons in different medieval Middle Eastern settings. Scholars are paying renewed attention to the many forms of slavery that were integral to medieval Islamic and Middle Eastern states and households, as well as to the diverse populations that were "eligible" for enslavement by, and within, the pre-modern Islamic World. The spectrum of these regions is striking, encompassing nearly all the territories bordering the Islamic world. Yet, for the period 600-1250, comparatively little is known about the history of the patterns, institutions and social sectors involved in slave commerce and which supported diverse forms of slavery in the Middle East and beyond. Our four papers seek to contribute to a clearer understanding of this history.
The one paper, "Origins of slaves in early Islamic society," reexamines the considerable evidence for slaves and slave commerce in Mecca in the first Islamic period. It argues for situating that trade, and the enslaved persons, more clearly in the political history of the first Islamic state. A second paper, "Abbasid cities and their slave markets," treats the physical infrastructure and slave traders of the principal Abbasid cities (Baghdad, Samarra and al-Fustat), with an eye to filling in a wide lacuna in our knowledge of slave commerce in the early medieval period. The third paper, "Desperately Seeking the Medieval Near Eastern Slave Trade," considers documentary sources from the Cairo Geniza alongside traditional literary sources to demonstrate how individual merchants and middlemen organized the long-distance transport of individual domestic slaves. The final paper, "The Practice of Slave-Prostitution in Early Islamic Urban Centers," considers a long-neglected topic, the practice and spread of prostitution in Middle Eastern urban society. These were slave women recruited by handlers and purveyors of the medieval Middle East sex industry. The paper brings together evidence on slave prostitution from a spectrum of Arabic sources.
The panel seeks to reach to reach an audience of specialists in the history of medieval Islamic/Middle Eastern social organization; slavery in the medieval Middle East as well as scholars of slavery more generally; marginal, subaltern subjects; and the dynamics of pre-modern Islamic/Middle Eastern commerce and economic life.
Disciplines
History
Participants
Dr. Matthew S. Gordon
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
Michael McCormick argues for the “voracious” appetite of early Abbasid urban society for (European) slaves and slave labor (Origins, 759, 761, 776). He accounts, in other words, for a significant facet of early medieval Near Eastern slave history. His discussion, well founded, turns on the impact of that traffic on the early medieval European economy. This paper turns the lens from Europe to the Abbasid urban landscape itself. It takes up one poorly considered element of this complex history: the physical and human infrastructure in which the interaction of slave merchant, client and slave/freedperson played out. It brings together a range of evidence from the Arabic and Islamic canon, material that McCormick treats wholly from translations and, thus, very much in partial fashion. A further body of literary and documentary references concerns, on one level, the setting for this one sector of the Abbasid economy, and, more broadly, the physical traces of the medieval trans-Mediterranean slave commerce.
The paper will consider the fragmentary evidence regarding physical slave markets and other material evidence (cited or actual), including the extensive surviving corpus of papyri documents, most of which originate from Egypt. It will also consider the slave merchants of the Abbasid period. At issue is less the reputation of the slave merchants – they are one of the stock characters of Abbasid literary works – than the extent to which we can grasp the range and nature of their activity; the membership of the slave merchant ‘class’; their networks of connections with other sectors of the Abbasid-era economic, social and political sphere; and so on. The paper, again, underscores the fragmentary yet highly suggestive and, in some areas, wholly convincing character of the evidence, and thus aims to complement and refine McCormick’s invaluable discussion.
This paper studies eleventh- and twelfth-century merchant letters alongside contemporary Arabic chronicles and hisba (market-inspector) manuals in order to demonstrate how a variety of actors managed the logistics of the slave trade to Cairo from sub-Saharan Africa and regions of the western Indian Ocean. Merchants’ correspondence shows how individual buyers turned to their business and personal networks in order to secure domestic slaves and organize the slaves’ transport over long distances. Such documentary evidence suggests that it was far more common for most domestic slaves to be shipped individually as one commodity, or in small numbers, among a mix of goods.
When we juxtapose the trade described in documentary sources with the accounts of slave shipments found in chronicles, it becomes clear that the slave trade in the medieval Islamic World was multi-stranded. Chronicles tend to focus on a strand of the slave trade comprised of prestige gifts—that is, diplomatic exchanges between heads-of-state that included slaves. Such prestige gifts reflect highly specific historical contexts and diplomatic practices. Yet most scholarship on the slave trade in the medieval Near East generally, and in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Middle East specifically, has understood such high profile slave exchanges as representative of larger patterns and trends.
By focusing on little used documentary sources, we gain a ground-up view of the slave trade that suggests a very different picture of how merchants managed this activity on a daily basis. The smaller scale and more diffused organization of this more quotidian trade encourages scholars to question our own assumptions about what kind of slave trade we have gone looking for in our various sources. This paper will suggest that our understanding of the medieval slave trade in the Islamic World has been unduly shaped by a preoccupation with forms of slave trading that resemble practices more common to the early modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades. While Jewish merchant letters from the Cairo Geniza will form the primary basis of this study, letters of Muslim merchants in the Red Sea port of Quseir suggest a similar pattern of slave trading.
Although several authors have investigated the lives of female slaves in Islamic societies, there remains a dearth of scholarship on slave-prostitution in medieval Islamic history. This silence on slave-prostitutes is perhaps due to the erroneous idea that the Quran forbids slave-prostitution in 24:33, "...But do not force your female slaves into prostitution when they desire chastity...." However, the conditional phrasing of this verse allows people to continue using their slaves as prostitutes, and it puts the burden of chastity on the slave women themselves. Slave-prostitution was probably curtailed both by the widespread practice of concubinage and by concerns over the paternity of prostitutes' children, but the institution persisted alongside concubinage. Prostitutes provided a sexual outlet for travellers and men who could not afford a wife or concubine.
This paper investigates the scattered descriptions of slaves and freedwomen who worked as prostitutes in early Islamic urban centers in Arabia and Syria. These descriptions can be found in a range of early Islamic works, from lexicons and travelogues to biographical dictionaries and Quranic exegeses; the searchable databases al-Jami al-Kabir and al-Maktaba al-Shamila make plumbing this material more fruitful than ever before. These collected accounts provide glimpses into many aspects of slave-prostitution: what kinds of wages prostitutes earned, how they indicated they were prostitutes, where their masters bought them, the economic status of their masters, the appearance of their bodies, the clients who visited them, and the physical spaces where they worked. Not only does this analysis recover the lived experiences of slave women in early Islamic society, but it also provides a basis for potential cross-cultural analyses with other premodern Near Eastern societies that employed slaves and freedwomen as prostitutes.
This paper will study the origins of slaves in the Hijaz during the lifetime of the prophet Muhammad, the various ways they were enslaved and acquired as reflected in historical chronicles, biographical, and geographical works of the medieval Islamic period. Even though the vast majority of slaves in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times were victims of inter tribal warfare of the ayyam al-’arab, large numbers of non-Arab slaves are also documented in the sources (esp. Tabari, Ibn Sa’d, Ibn Hisham, and Azraqi). Examining lists such as those of slaves and freed slaves that belonged to Muhammad or those that participated in the battle of Badr (2/624) offers a diverse range of slaves of various African origins, Persians, and Byzantines. The constellation of slaves was deeply rooted in the socio-political and economic life of the Hijaz. The question is how did these slaves get to Arabia, what role did the slave trade play, and how important was the role of Mecca as a major commercial center in providing slaves in the international slave trade during the lifetime of Muhammad. Was Mecca, "un des plus important marchés d´esclaves"? (Lammens, Arabie, p. 12) The sources would indicate, rather, that the arrival of most of the non-Arab slaves into the Hijaz was due to its geo-political role in the conflict between the Sasanid and Byzantine Empires as well as the latter’s vassal state in Abyssinia. This paper argues for a reconsideration of long-standing scholarly views of the slave trade and the role of Mecca in this trade during the first Islamic period.
