This panel considers the roles and experiences of slave concubines across the greater medieval Mediterranean using Islamic, Christian, and Jewish sources. Our first paper analyses Ibn Kathir's treatise to demonstrate the wide ranging legal debates regarding the rights of the umm al-walad. This "mother of a child" designates a concubine who has borne her master a child and by conventions of Islamic law should become free upon her master's death. This Mamluk era text is situated within the longer historic context of Islamic legal discourse on the position of the concubine-mother. Yet, the debate over concubines was not limited to Muslim jurisprudence. Our second paper analyzes sources from the Cairo geniza documents and rabbinic responsa that reveal how illegal concubinage impacted the politics of Jewish domestic and communal life. Because medieval Jewish law forbade concubinage while the ruler's Muslim courts allowed it, Jewish communal authorities were unable to regulate the practice effectively with unintended consequences for both the concubines themselves and the families of Jewish men who took concubines. A third paper then broadens our focus to compare concubinage in Latin and Byzantine Europe in the era when Islam was emerging. For example, Balthild , a slave woman, rose to be Queen of the Franks and eventually a saint, defying the maxim that social mobility was only available in Islamic slavery. During this period, rules emerged to govern women that bear a striking resemblance to Islamic practices. Our fourth paper takes a wider view of the inter-regional slave trade and analyses how Europe served as a source of female slaves for markets in the Islamicate world and beyond. Starting with Ibn Khurradadhbih's ninth century description of Jewish traders who transported Spanish, French, Italian and Byzantine women through the Abbassid empire, it then examines how Europeans were enslaved and traded as a luxury commodity. Archaeology, coinage, and texts from Europe and the Abbasid Empire show the effect of the slave trade on both societies.
Islamic slavery initially appears unique in its religious/ legal provisions for relations with slave women which allowed concubines social mobility, wealth, eventual freedom through motherhood and sometimes even political power as queen mothers. This panel, however, looks not just at the place of concubines in Islamic society but also compares it with concubinage across Christian Europe and in Jewish Cairo as well as the overarching slave trade that made commodities out of concubines.
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Dr. Kathryn Hain
In the 9th century, Ibn Khurdadhbih, a Persian intelligence official serving the Abbasid caliph, took a textual photograph of the Jewish Radhanite traders passing by his post on the Silk Route. In his work on geography, Kit?b al Mas?lik wa’l Mam?lik (The Book of Roads and Kingdoms) he described their cargo and routes;
'Through the Sea of the Maghrib (Mediterranean Sea) are exported Slavic, Roman, Frankish, and Lombard slaves; Roman and Spanish girls; beaver skins and other furs…they load their merchandise on the back of camels and proceed by land…..On their return from China they load musk, aloe wood, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the eastern countries….'
This paper crosses the frontier between the Islamic world and Europe to analyze the European supply side of this slave trade. In this era, Byzantine/Roman women were still captured by war, either along the long Anatolian Byzantine-Abbasid frontier or through the slow Aghlabid-North African conquest of Byzantine Sicily, which proved to be a rich source for slaves. The Slavic women were victims of raids by the Rus-Norsemen. The Spanish, French, and Lombard women however, had to be acquired either by Muslim raids which pushed as far as Paris and Rome or they were purchased from the European slave markets. Three questions need answered to understand how these women ended up on camels 3,000 miles from home. How did these women enter slavery? Who cooperated in their enslavement, transport, and sale? And how did women becoming a desired inter-regional commodity impact Europe? Michael McCormick in Origins of the European Economy used archaeology, artifacts, coinage, and textual references to show that Europe experienced an 8th century surge in the circulation of Islamic coins, silks, spices, …and shackles in the century preceding Ibn Khurdadhbih. Both European and Arabic texts indicate that the Muslim slave trade was lucrative, wide spread, and resulted from the cooperation of Jews, Muslims, Pagan Norsemen and Christians, both Eastern and Western. Jewish slave dealers particularly had networks that enabled them to cross communal and political lines. The sheer abundance of European slave women in Muslim households, palaces, and literary salons can be better understood by examining the European supply side of the early medieval slave trade taking women to sell in the Muslim world and beyond to T’ang China.
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Mr. Younus Mirza
The paper will analyze the treatise Juz’ f? bay‘ ummah?t al-awl?d by the famous jurist, historian and Qur’anic exegete, Ibn Kath?r (d. 1373 CE). Ibn Kath?r discusses eight positions regarding the status of the umm al-walad (the female slave who gives birth to a child of her master): 1. That she is free on her master’s death; 2. She may be sold without restriction; 3. The master may sell her at any time during his lifetime but, when he dies, she becomes automatically free; 4. She may be sold to pay a debt; 5. She may be sold, but if her child is alive at the death of his father and her master, she is manumitted as part of the child’s inheritance; 6. She can only be sold on the condition she is set free; 7. If she is righteous then it is not permissible to sell her, but if she becomes immoral or an unbeliever, then it becomes permissible to do so; 8. Suspension of judgement on the issue. Ibn Kath?r also discusses miscellaneous issues regarding the umm al-walad such as her waiting period (before she can get married) after her master dies. Some say that it is one menstrual cycle, which is the waiting period for a slave girl, while others argue that it is four months and ten days, the waiting period for a free wife. The treatise demonstrates the tremendous range of legal debate that occurred throughout the Mamluk period (c. 1250-1517 CE) regarding the standing of the umm al-walad. The paper treats Ibn Kath?r’s invaluable text against the long historic backdrop of Islamic legal discourse surrounding the position and privileges of the concubine-mother.
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Dr. Craig Perry
Medieval Jewish law forbade the practice of concubinage. Yet documentary sources from Fatimid and Ayyubid Cairo (969-1250 CE) suggest that concubinage was common in the Egyptian Jewish community. The Cairo Geniza, the worn manuscript depository of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, has preserved documents including family letters, rabbinic responsa, and legal sources that attest to the practice of concubinage. These records raise a range of questions about the purpose and role of illicit Jewish concubinage in its Islamicate setting and about the experiences of the concubines themselves.
Why did Jewish men take concubines in defiance of communal norms and legal rulings and, sometimes, to the clear detriment of their wives and children? Historians have long presumed that instances of Jewish concubinage can be explained by Islamic influence, positing that the Muslim majority’s legal and social practices shaped Jewish practice. This paper advances another explanation for illicit concubinage among Jews: such concubinage must be understood as part and parcel of the politics of the household. Concubinage, and ownership of female domestic slaves in general, provided men with a means to assert their mastery vis-á-vis their wives and families, a means conveniently located in a legal gray area. Because concubinage lacked legal recognition, communal authorities had fewer tools at their disposal to regulate its practice. Furthermore, some medieval rabbis treated master-slave concubinage more leniently than others in their rulings. The failure of communal authorities to regulate concubinage consistently and effectively had unintended consequences. For free women married to men who took concubines, illicit concubinage could lead to increased marginalization. For the concubines themselves, the extra-legal status of concubinage arrangements both created opportunities and increased their vulnerability to their masters’ caprice.
This paper analyzes documentary sources and rabbinic responsa from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in order to recover and describe the experiences of the masters, slave women, and free wives who were impacted by illicit concubinage arrangements.
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Thomas J. MacMaster
When westerners discuss slavery and related institutions in
the Islamicate world, the discussion often seems to suggest that there was both something peculiarly Muslim and ineffably alien about it. However, when early Islamic systems of slavery and concubinage are looked at in the context of the period and cross-culturally, other possibilities might emerge.
Whether these parallels emerged from a common heritage in the Late Antique Roman world or were the result of similar social situations, other states and social systems that had emerged from what had been the Roman Empire had many similarities to Islamicate patterns on female slavery and concubinage in the years immediately before the emergence of Islam and in its early centuries. One need only, for
instance, recall the life of Balthild, an English slave and concubine who rose to become Queen of the Franks as consort and then regent, even achieving sainthood, to see parallels with near contemporary Islamic women. At the same time, similar rules and regulations emerged restricting the freedom of women, whether as slaves or as slave-owners, that bear a striking resemblance to Islamicate practices.
This paper will examine female slavery and the trade in women slaves in the first centuries of Islam in the broader context of the post-Roman world. By comparing Islamicate practices with those of their contemporaries and immediate predecessors in the Late Roman and Byzantine Empires as well as in the Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, Lombardic, and Visigothic kingdoms, it is hoped that the institution of slavery and specific aspects of female servitude in the Islamic world will be contextualized. At the same time, such a comparison will enable an attempt to determine whether there were any distinctively Islamic aspects to slavery in this period.
