Abstract Unwelcomed freedom: What do you do when you dismantle a royal harem? The huge royal households of the Ottomans in Istanbul, the Qajars in Tehran, and the Qings in Beijing absorbed the initial onslaught of western influence in the modern era. They survived intact into the early 20th century when each of these dynasties were destroyed by the First World War, economic collapse, and revolutions. The change in power structures moved the Turkish sultan, the Persian shah, and the Chinese emperor off the global stage. Each deposed leader had huge retinues composed largely of slaves: concubines, servants, and castrated males who were dependent on stipends and royal largesse. The question of what to do with them quickly became urgent, as these enslaved communities turned from relics of a once glorious past to flotsam of a failed state. As such, they became onerous financial burdens on the emerging nation states. The solution for all three former empires was to free the slaves, yet that freedom was essentially a form of exile and erasure. Financial straits after the destruction of revolution and war motived the actions of these states rather than the idealism of manumission. This paper compares how each of these states dismantled their royal households in the early 20th century. Freeing slaves inconvenienced most societies, and the consequences to the newly freed, as in the case of the harems and emancipation in the US, were often devastating. Gender also affected the fate of the royal slaves. In the Ottoman example, women could be returned to their Circassian clans to marry well but the fate of powerful, wealthy eunuchs was execution and subsequent confiscation of their goods by the nascent government. The shuttering of royal harems created an abrupt traumatic transition to an uneasy freedom for the slaves who made up these households.

In a recent publication, Ehud Toledano challenges Patterson’s notion of the “socially dead” in the context of Islamic slavery. Furthermore, he challenges the fictiveness of kinship that defined the relationship between masters and their slaves. In this paper, I track the jurisprudential opinions of Muslim jurists from medieval Transoxiana to the 19th-century Ottoman Empire in order to ascertain the relationship between kinship formation and manumission. Legal forms of kinship could be created between masters and female slaves through matrimony, reproduction, and wet-nursing. Yet, there are other forms of kinship that would include both male and female slaves without their functions as concubines, mothers of children (umm walad), or wet nursing. Based on my preliminary research, 17th-century jurists unanimously believed that calling a slave as one’s son or daughter would result in the immediate manumission of the slave. In this paper, I will expand my research to include the opinions of jurists from different times and spaces. I will use fatwas both as legal and social sources. Legally, I am interested to find the justification for the link between manumission and kinship formation. Socially, I intend to examine the change and continuity in the practices of slavery in various Muslim societies. Some of the questions I try to answer include the following: Why were these slaves called one’s children? Why did a simple utterance of affection have such a grave legal consequence? How did the jurists and the solicitors of their opinions view the relationship between slaves and their masters? Based on my ongoing research, I argue that while the kinship formation occurred even before the formal manumission, the jurists viewed manumission as a necessary and critical step before slaves were formally recognized as independent members of the society in general and members of their masters’ households in particular.

In the social world of Iraq, some slaves did not want to be free. Take for example cases whereby a married, non-Muslim slave couple dies, leaving a prepubescent child or children without anyone to care for them. If the child or children are fostered to a Muslim family, then they adopt the religious disposition (fi?rah) of that family, resulting in their complete, immediate freedom. Some of these children, however, wanted to recover their non-Muslim religious heritage, an illegal act since it is equivalent to apostatizing. Likewise, prepubescent children who confessed Islam before puberty (7-14 years old) would be considered Muslims when they reached puberty, enslaving them for like to a childhood decision. The only exception for this was for children who converted without appropriate knowledge of Islam. In the case of a child fostered to Muslim parents, he unwillingly forfeits his right to reclaim his non-Muslim heritage, thus becoming enslaved to his newly acquired freedom. In the case of a child who converts at a pre-pubescent age, he willingly forfeits his right to reclaim his non-Muslim heritage, thus becoming enslaved to his childhood decision. There are examples of these situations in the earliest Arabic legal text—an early ?anbal? text—to exclusively categorize non-Muslims by topic entitled Non-Muslim Religious Communities. It is argued that these cases were common or frequent enough to warrant the ruling of A?mad b. ?anbal. This paper works to address the issue of unwanted freedom, conceived of in terms of parent-child relationships and dependencies. It seeks to uncover some of the different factors that contributed to shed the chains of freedom for secondary status, working to explain the parities that may have enabled the decision. For example, what were the consequences of a child converting to Islam but remaining dependent upon non-Muslim parents or a family network for basic needs, work, or food? What was social life like for parents with Muslim children and other intermixed families? What were the benefits, risks, and rewards of conversion for prepubescent children? Was life so different for non-Muslims? The answers are not always clear, but the issue of unwanted freedom is a topic that should be included in discussion on the institution of slavery and freedom in the Islamic world.

Classical Sunni law insists that all freed persons maintain a tie of clientage, or wal?', with their former masters—such clients are known as maw?l? (m.) and mawl?t (f.). While early Islamic lawyers considered wal?' to be a vestige of slavery, classical lawyers instead considered it to be a form of kinship that permanently tied the freed person to the former master's family. The patron was responsible for protecting his client and paying the fine for any crime his client might commit; in return for this protection, the patron had a right to inherit some of his client's estate. In addition, the maw?l? and mawl?t provided many forms of service not stipulated in Islamic law, including acting as business agents, messengers, water-carriers, scribes, entertainers, wet-nurses, and personal bodyguards. Previous scholars have viewed the maw?l? as severely unequal and dependent members of their patrons' households, inhabiting a position barely different from their former enslavement. This paper challenges that view by analyzing the early Islamic maw?l? (ca. 600–850 CE) on a continuum of freedom/unfreedom. Using early Islamic texts such as the treaty of Tiflis, accounts of al-Mukhtar's rebellion, al-Jahiz's al-Risala fi al-Nabita, and al-Isfahani's Kitab al-Aghani, this paper this paper shows how early Islamic maw?l?'s lives changed as a result of their manumission. It analyzes situations in which maw?l?/mawl?t exercised their agency in their own individual interests, and when they instead practiced "inter-agency"— making choices that served the greater needs of their extended households. Additionally, this paper juxtaposes the notion of individual "freedom" with competing notions such as loyalty, community, family, marriage, gender, and ethnicity. By placing the maw?l? on a continuum of freedom/unfreedom, scholars are better equipped to understand the difference between maw?l? and other subordinated groups such as slaves, serfs, and dhimm?s.