Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  Russians used a whip called a knout to punish slaves and serfs. It had a long handle attached to a strip of treated leather, as hard as metal. The leather was replaced after about ten lashes, to be sure it was stiff enough to inflict terrible pain. Victims did not always survive a beating.

  Photo Credit 3.4

  CHAPTER 4

  IN THE REALM OF THE QUR’AN: SLAVERY UNDER ISLAM

  For centuries, black-skinned people, originally from East Africa and known as the Zanj, had been forced into slavery in Iraq. Under a blazing sun they did the backbreaking work of removing layers of salt from marshland, digging ditches, and planting sugar and cotton, all the while living in squalid camps of five hundred to five thousand workers.

  The slaves first revolted in the year 694, but that uprising was easily put down. Two hundred years passed before a dynamic leader came forward to lead the downtrodden slaves to revolt again. That leader was Ali ibn Muhammad.

  In 869, Ali ibn Muhammad arrived in the city of Basra. He was not a slave himself, but he promised to give slaves a better life – land, money, even slaves of their own. He attracted an army of fifteen thousand Zanj slaves, peasants, and poor city-dwellers.

  Was Ali ibn Muhammad a visionary, or power-hungry? One historian who wrote about the Zanj revolt shortly after it took place called him “an abominable one,” an enemy of Allah (God). Another chronicler reported that the Zanj massacred “children and old people, men and women, and everywhere sowed fire and destruction.”

  But Ali ibn Muhammad was also admired as a man who showed mercy to his enemies. He gathered slave owners together and told them, “I wanted to behead you all for the way you have treated these slaves, with arrogance and coercion and, indeed, in ways that Allah has forbidden, driving them beyond endurance. But my companions have spoken to me about you, and now I have decided to set you free.”

  When the masters warned him that the slaves would desert him, and offered to pay him to return them, he refused. He reassured the slaves, “Some of your number should watch me closely, and if they sense any treachery on my part, they could kill me.” He remained loyal to the Zanj.

  Eventually, however, many of his Zanj and Arab followers turned against him. Some say that he began to act a lot like the masters they were rebelling against, keeping booty for himself and his friends, and taxing his followers heavily.

  In 883, the forces of the Islamic spiritual leader, the caliph, put down the Zanj’s rebellion and Ali ibn Muhammad died in battle.

  The Zanj Revolt may have influenced landowners in the Islamic world to shy away from using large numbers of slaves – gang slavery – for fear that slaves would band together and rebel. Their farms remained relatively small, and gang slavery was not the custom. But this does not mean that slavery disappeared. It was widespread in the Muslim world into the nineteenth century, and in some places it persists today.

  These dark-skinned Zanj slaves staging a revolt against the Arabs in Iraq seem to be as well armed as their masters. This sixteenth-century manuscript is from India.

  Photo Credit 4.1

  The three great world religions based on a belief in one deity are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and slavery has been practiced by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. The Hebrew Bible never bans slavery, though the book of Exodus views the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt as a tragedy. The Christian Bible accepts slaves as a normal part of a community, although Paul, the founder of the Church, taught that all Christian believers were equal, saying, “there is neither bond nor free.” The Prophet Muhammad founded the Islamic faith in Arabia in the first quarter of the seventh century. Within a hundred years, Islam had spread through Syria, Iraq, and Persia, as far east as the Indus Valley in India, and through North Africa and Spain in the west. Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam accepted slavery as part of everyday life.

  Slavery and Islamic Law

  Although Muhammad owned slaves himself and didn’t forbid the practice, he taught that slaves and free people were equal in the eyes of God. He believed that slaves weren’t just property; they had some rights, and their owners must treat them like fellow human beings:

  A master should not act as though he despises or looks down on his slave.

  A master should share his food with his slave and dress him as he dresses himself.

  He should not overwork his slave or punish him harshly.

  He should forgive his slave if the slave has done wrong.

  If he and his slave don’t get along, he should sell his slave to another master.

  He should treat his female slaves well and not separate a slave mother from her young child.

  Muhammad urged slave owners to free their slaves, saying, “The man who frees a Muslim slave, God will free from hell, limb for limb.” And if a slave asked to be free, the master was to allow the slave to buy his freedom; “if you know some good in them … give them of the wealth of God that He has given you.” Freed slaves were supposed to respect their former masters, and their former masters had to ensure that the ex-slaves and their families did not live in poverty.

  Under the laws of Islam, not everyone could be enslaved. A slave was either someone born to slave parents or someone captured in a holy war – a jihad, a war whose purpose was to spread the religion of Islam. A Muslim was not supposed to enslave another Muslim, nor were Muslims supposed to enslave dhimmis – that is, Jews and Christians, as well as Zoroastrians (members of an ancient Eastern faith). People of these faiths were supposed to be protected from slavery because they believed in one God, like Muslims. However, the laws were not always obeyed.

  BARBARY CAPTIVITY

  Americans and Europeans who traveled by ship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries risked capture by “Barbary

  pirates” who worked for North African regimes, including Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli. If their governments did not pay a ransom, they might never return.

  On October 25, 1793, the American brig Polly, two days away from her destination on the Spanish coast, encountered a ship flying an English flag. A sailor, dressed like an Englishman, hailed the Polly, and the Polly’s captain identified his ship. At that point alarmed Americans saw other sailors dressed in Algerian clothes. As crewman John Foss explains in an account he wrote five years after his adventure:

  About one hundred of the Pirates, jumped on board, all armed; some, with Scimitars and Pistols, others with pikes, spears, lances, knives, &c.… As soon as they came on board our vessel, they made signs for us all to go forward, assuring us in several languages that if we did not obey their commands, they would immediately massacre us all.

  After looting the ship of bedding, books, charts, and navigation tools, they stripped the clothes off the crew, leaving them in their underwear. They then ferried them to their own ship, whose captain made it clear that the captives would “experience the most abject slavery, on … arrival at Algiers, which we soon found to be true.” They were presented to the governor of Algiers, who announced, “Now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.”

  For the next three years, Foss and his companions endured wretched conditions in the Algerian prison where hundreds of Western captives were kept. Surviving on less than a pound (half a kilo) a day of grainy, sour bread and vinegar to dip it in, they spent long days blasting rocks and hauling them two miles (3 km) to build a breakwater in the harbor. To keep them working, the slave drivers were “continually beating the slaves with their sticks and goading them,” says Foss. For minor misdeeds, men were bastinadoed – beaten with a stick hundreds of times on the back and the soles of the feet. Foss saw men tortured to death.

  Almost two years after their capture, the American government bought freedom for the captives – too late for many who had already died of plague and other causes.

  The Route to Slavery

  Muslims’ slaves came from many places and were captured in many ways. White slaves came from northern Spain, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia, and black slav
es came from Africa. Some had been captured in pirate raids at sea, some in jihads. Yet others were bought from raiders or traders.

  All travel was dangerous, but it would be hard to imagine anything worse than the plight of slaves from Africa who were forced to cross the vast desert of the Sahara on foot. From the earliest times, only nomadic desert tribes had the skill to find their way across the shifting sands, and the camels to carry them. What relief these miserable travelers must have felt when they reached a rare oasis and could drink fresh water!

  The desert route was harsh, but transport by sea was not much better. Some slaves were brought by boat across the Mediterranean Sea and along the coast to the Middle East; others were shipped from East Africa across the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, or the Indian Ocean to be sold in Arabia, Iraq, Persia, Turkey or India. Conditions on Arab traders’ ships were terrible, and slaves arrived in poor condition. Many died along the way.

  The pirates who ravaged the Mediterranean coast were far from being swashbuckling characters in bright clothing and hoop earrings. They were cruel and dangerous thugs who preyed on innocent travelers. In the Middle Ages, Muslim raiders from Spain, Sicily, and North Africa carried off people from the Christian kingdoms along the Mediterranean. In turn, Christian pirates raided Muslim coastal areas. Like their enemies, they took prisoners and held them in slavery or for ransom.

  Islam and Race

  In the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad teaches that God intentionally created people of many languages and colors, and says, “Among God’s signs are the creation of the heavens and of the earth and the diversity of your languages and of your colors.” Allah judges people not by their ethnic group or tribe but by their righteousness, he says. In fact, when Islam was a young religion, some of Muhammad’s followers – including Umar, the second caliph – were of Ethiopian descent, and dark-skinned.

  In his last sermon, Muhammad said, “No Arab has any priority over a non-Arab and no white over a black except in righteousness.” But why did he find it necessary to say this? It seems likely that he had begun to notice signs of racial or ethnic prejudice. We can find such signs in Arabic poetry, even as early as 660. For example, an African slave poet wrote, “If my color were pink, women would love me / But the Lord has marred me with blackness.”

  A NOTORIOUS SLAVE TRADER

  South of the Sahara, the slave traders were not necessarily outsiders. Tippu Tip, named after the sound of his firearms, was an African-Arab trader from Zanzibar. His real name was Hamed bin Muhammad el Murjebi, and he established his own kingdom west of Lake Tanganyika in the 1860s. When a Christian missionary spotted one of Tip’s caravans, the slaves had already come 1,000 miles (1,600 km) on foot from the Upper Congo, and had 250 more miles to go to reach the coast. Filthy, and scarred by the traders’ whips, the captives were chained by the neck. Many of them were women with babies on their backs.

  Tragically, when people have different skin color, features, and hair than the majority, they are often treated differently. And when they are the only people who do jobs nobody likes, such as cleaning streets or carrying garbage, it’s a short step to believing that they are inferior.

  At first, most slaves in the Middle East and the Mediterranean were white (from Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia), but as black slaves were imported into Islamic lands from more southerly parts of Africa, chilling comments started to appear in Arabic literature. “Is there anything more vile than black slaves, of less good and more evil than they?” wrote one medieval Egyptian poet.

  After a grueling march across the Sahara desert, or a wretched voyage in a crowded ship, slaves were sold in markets like this one in Cairo in the 1840s.

  Photo Credit 4.2

  Race didn’t hold everyone back. A successful ruler of Egypt in the tenth century was a black man, and in Muslim India in the fourteenth century some Ethiopian slaves became rulers. But in slave markets, white slaves fetched a higher price than darker-skinned ones.

  From the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, thousands of captives from Europe, and later from America, spent long years at harsh labor in North Africa. Accounts written by ransomed captives were popular reading. In this 1859 engraving, a Western artist imagines the despair of the captives in an exotic desert setting complete with camels.

  Photo Credit 4.3

  Slaves’ Jobs

  In the vast Islamic world, most slaves worked in cities or villages rather than on the land. As happened in Rome centuries earlier, the more work slaves did, the less their owners were willing to do, until the owners came to believe that working with their hands was beneath them. Almost all cleaning, cooking, laundry, child care, and sewing was done by female slaves. Most gardeners, grooms for the horses, watchmen, or – if they appeared capable and trustworthy – clerks or agents in the master’s business affairs were male slaves.

  Entertainers

  If you were a slave and had a gift for music, poetry, dance, or art, you might be sent to school in Baghdad, Córdoba (in Spain), or Medina (in Arabia). If you were a female slave and were a talented musician, you might find yourself in a chamber orchestra. In fact, in the Middle Ages most singers, dancers, and musicians in Muslim lands had originally been slaves. Ziryab, an Iraqi-born black singer, musician, and poet – his name means “blackbird” – was a freed Persian slave who started his career in the court in Baghdad. When he eventually moved to Spain, this amazing man introduced the Spanish to the five-string lute, as well as asparagus, sugar cane, cotton, and toothpaste and deodorant!

  Harems and Eunuchs

  Probably the largest single category of slaves in the Islamic world was made up of women in harems. A man was allowed to have four wives if he could treat them all equally. He was also permitted to keep other women as concubines to give him pleasure. Rich rulers sometimes had harems of thousands of women, while tradesmen might have one or two. White-skinned women were preferred, but when white slaves became rare and expensive in the nineteenth century, Africans were recruited.

  Harems were guarded by eunuchs – men who had been castrated, just as we “fix” dogs and cats, so they were not capable of sexual acts. Eunuchs were considered more reliable in general, so they often had very responsible jobs in the palace, as assistants to the ruler.

  A missionary took this photograph of a young slave in Zanzibar around 1890. His master chained the boy to a thirty-two-pound (14.5–kg) timber as a punishment. The only way the child could move was by carrying the timber on his head.

  Photo Credit 4.4

  Doing the Heavy Work

  For centuries the memory of the Zanj Revolt may have made landowners wary of slave gangs, but where there were farms or plantations, the owners wanted slaves – a great many slaves – for the backbreaking work. Black slaves worked the date plantations of northeastern Arabia, and cultivated dates, grain, and vegetables in the oases of the Sahara. They toiled on Moroccan plantations. They did the perilous work of mining gold in Egyptian Nubia and salt in the Western Sahara, where it is said that no slave survived for more than five years. Over the course of about a hundred years, right into the nineteenth century, Arabs from Oman, on the northern and eastern coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, imported a total of 769,000 black slaves to work on immense grain, sugar, and clove plantations in East Africa and on the island of Zanzibar.

  Soldiers

  Over the last thousand years, Muslims have had whole armies made up of slaves. As Islam spread, the caliphs bought or captured boys and young men – Turks, Slavs, Berbers, and Africans – from bordering non-Islamic regions. Christian boys, for example, were bought, converted to Islam, and educated in military arts to become soldiers and officers.

  One of the most remarkable groups of slave soldiers was the Turkish Mamluks of Egypt. In 1260, their forces stopped the westward march of the Mongol invaders from Central Asia, who had already swept through Iran and sacked the city of Baghdad. The Mamluks became the ruling class of Egypt and Syria and
remained in power for 250 years.

  COTTON FOR THE WORLD

  During the American Civil War (1860 – 1865), not enough cotton was being harvested in the United States, so there was a worldwide boom in Egyptian cotton. The family of Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali, put hundreds of slaves to work on its cotton plantation. Egyptian peasants, enriched by rising cotton prices, bought African slaves from Sudan so they could work more of their land and produce more cotton.

  Slavery in the Ottoman Empire

  Slaves in Islamic lands did not leave behind diaries or other accounts of what they thought or felt, but by the nineteenth century, court records can tell us much about what happened to them. This was a time of huge change in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, centered in Turkey. Western ideas and technology, such as the telegraph and railroads, were influencing Ottoman society, and Britain had the greatest impact. The British had abolished slavery in their own empire by 1838 and had begun to campaign against it elsewhere.

  Slavery was still legal in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, around five out of every hundred people were slaves. But slaves could go to court if they believed they were ill-treated, and the Ottoman courts were becoming more willing to listen to their complaints. Slaves even knew which British consuls or British ships would shelter runaways, and which judges would be more sympathetic to their stories of abuse.