Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

by Bernard Lewis

  Even the Caliph `Umar, said to have been the grandson of an Ethiopian woman, was attacked retrospectively on this account. An early Arab author, Muhammad ibn Habib, tells us that one day, during the lifetime of the Prophet, a man insulted `Umar and called him "Son of a black woman," whereupon God revealed the Qur'anic verse, "0 believers! People should not mock other people who may be better than they are" (XLIX: 11)." The story, which occurs in a rather brief chapter on great men who were the sons of Ethiopian women, is almost certainly a pious invention, but not the less interesting for that. It is probably a reply to Shiite propaganda against `Omar, which made some play with his Ethiopian ancestress to discredit him.''

  A second factor of importance was the wider range of experience which conquest brought to the Arabs. Before Islam, their acquaintance with Africa was substantially limited to Ethiopia, a country with a level of moral and material civilization significantly higher than their own. During the lifetime of the Prophet, the good reputation of the Ethiopians was further increased by the kindly welcome accorded to Muslim refugees from Mecca. After the conquests, however, there were changes. Advancing on the one hand into Africa and on the other into Southwest Asia and Southern Europe, the Arabs encountered fairer-skinned peoples who were more developed and darkerskinned peoples who were less so. No doubt as a result of this they began to equate the two facts.

  Coupled with this expansion was the third major development of the early Islamic centuries-slavery and the slave trade." The Arab Muslims were not the first to enslave black Africans. Even in Pharaonic times Egyptians had already begun to capture and use black African slaves, and some are indeed depicted on Egyptian monuments.14 There were black slaves in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds-but they seem to have been few and relatively unimportant, and regarded no differently from other slaves imported from remote places. `s The massive importation of black slaves and the growth of ethnic, even racial specialization in the slave population date from after the Arab expansion in Africa and were an indirect and unintended consequence of one of the most important humanitarian advances brought by the Islamic dispensation.

  Inevitably, the large-scale importation of African slaves influenced Arab (and therefore Muslim) attitudes to the peoples of darker skin whom most Arabs and Muslims encountered only in this way.

  This changing attitude affected even freemen of African ancestry-even descendants of the Companions of the Prophet. Thus `Ubaydallah, the son of Abu Bakra,16 was appointed governor of Sistan in 671 and again in 697. Already by that time blackness had become a reproach; and a poet, in a satire against him, said:

  Even the caliph, who had appointed him, remarked: "The black man is lord of the people of the East."" The descendants of Abu Bakra had acquired a prominent social position in Basra and had forged themselves an Arab pedigree. This was rejected by the Caliph al-Mahdi (reigned 775-85 A.D.), who compelled them to revert to the status of freedmen of the Prophet.

  The low status of black slaves is illustrated by a number of anecdotes. An Arab, seeking to avoid civil war among the Muslims, swears that "he would prefer to be a mutilated Ethiopian slave tending broody goats on a hilltop until death overtakes him, rather than that a single arrow should be shot between the two sides."" An early chronicler, Jahshiyari, in a history of ministers and secretaries, tells an anecdote about a certain `Abd al-Hamid (d. ca. 750), the secretary of the last Umayyad caliph. The caliph had received the gift of a black slave from a provincial governor. He was not greatly pleased with this gift and instructed his secretary to write a letter of thanks and disparagement. `Abd al-Hamid, we are told, wrote: "Had you been able to find a smaller number than one and a worse color than black you would have sent that as a gift."" Jahshiyari's purpose in telling this story is not to insult blacks but to illustrate the readiness of wit of `Abd al-Hamid-but the story vividly reflects a common attitude.

  To the Muslims-as to the people of every other civilization known to history-the civilized world meant themselves. They alone possessed enlightenment and the true faith; the outside world was inhabited by infidels and barbarians. Some of these were recognized as possessing some form of religion and a tincture of civilization. The remainder-polytheists and idolatorswere seen primarily as sources of slaves, to be imported into the Islamic world and molded in Islamic ways, and, since they possessed no religion of their own worth the mention, as natural recruits for Islam. For these peoples, enslavement was thus a benefaction and was indeed often accepted as such. This attitude is exemplified in the story of a pagan black king who is tricked and kidnapped by Muslim guests whom he has befriended and sold into slavery in Arabia. Meeting them again years later, he shows contempt but no resentment, since they had been the means of bringing him to Islam.'`" The notion that slavery is a divine boon to mankind, by means of which pagan and barbarous peoples are brought to Islam and civilization, occurs very frequently in later writers.

  The ancient Arabs, like every other people known to history, divided the world into themselves and others. For the ancient Greeks, the outsider was the barbarian, a term with a connotation of language and culture; for the Israelites, he was the Gentile, with a connotation of belief and worship. Modern societies make many distinctions, but the only one that is universally and officially accepted is between the citizen and the alien-a term that for some seems to combine the worst features of the barbarian and the unbeliever.

  In ancient Arabia, those who were not Arabs were Ajam, a term which included the Persians, the Greeks, the Ethiopians, the Nabataeans, and the various other peoples with whom the ancient Arabs had contact. Later it was specialized to mean the Persians, though it continued in occasional use in the broader sense. In modern Turkish, by a curious development of an earlier usage, ajemi (in modern Turkish orthography, acemi) has acquired the meaning of "clumsy" or "inept."'

  The ancient Arabs showed an acute awareness of ethnic, but very little consciousness of racial, differences. At first, their main concern was not with the difference between Arabs and non-Arabs but rather between the different tribes into which they themselves were divided. A conventional genealogical table of eponymous tribal ancestors divided the Arab tribes into two main groups, the Northern and the Southern. These terms related not to their current position in Arabia, where the so-called Southern tribes were often in the Syrian and Iraqi borderlands (to the north of the so-called Northern tribes), but to their presumed ancestry.

  Tribal loyalty was intense, to the larger league or confederacy of tribes of presumed common ancestry, to the individual tribe, and even to the clan or sept within the tribe to which one belonged. These tribal loyalties gave rise to severe feuding and sometimes warfare and to bitter controversies which spilled over into the political life of the caliphate and even the religious life of Islam. Much of early Arab historiography, at least until the mid-ninth century, is concerned with tribal rivalries. Ancient Arab literature, for longer than that, is dominated by inter-tribal polemics, and the invectives which tribal 2 spokesmen hurled at one another.

  The Arab expansion, and the creation of a far-flung empire in which the Arabs were a dominant but small minority among the vast non-Arab population, did not at first change, but rather intensified, this situation. The Arabs, with much larger prizes at stake, continued their feuding, in clans, in tribes, and in confederacies. These involved the growing number of half-breed Arabs; in addition, the non-Arab converts to Islam, enrolled as mawalf in one tribe or another, shared in their alliances and enmities.'

  The involvement of the half-Arabs at the higher levels of Arab society paved the way for the non-Arab converts to Islam, many of whom by now shared the language and culture as well as the religion of the conquerors. By the ninth century Arabic literature-now written by men of diverse originsreveals two significant developments: on the Arab side, a dawning awareness that they had lost their exclusive primacy and a tendency to seek compensation for that loss in a kind of social and cultural snobbery unrelated to the realities of power; among the non-Arabs, a
growing assertiveness of their own distinctive ethnic, even national traditions and accomplishments, often accompanied by the denigration of the Arabs as primitives and nomads, in all but religion inferior to the peoples they had fortuitously conquered. These sentiments are expressed in the writings of a school of thought known as the Shu`ubiyya.4 This tendency was stronger at the extremities of the Islamic world, in Persia in the East and Spain in the West,' weaker in the Fertile Crescent and North Africa, where Arabic finally replaced the previous languages and where the various peoples eventually adopted an Arab identity.'

  It was inevitable, in a society of such acute ethnic awareness, that attention should be given, by scholars and others, to ethnic relationships, characteristics, differences, and presumed aptitudes. The numerous writings dealing with these matters may be considered under three headings, which we may call literary, practical, and scientific.

  The earliest attempts at a classification of ethnic groups in Arabic Islamic literature derive from Genesis 10, dealing with Noah's three sons-Shem, Ham, and Japhet-and the lines of filiation of the various nations and peoples whom they engendered. This biblical ethnology is not in the Qur'an, and has no special place in the Islamic religious tradition. It was transmitted to the Muslims by Jews and Christians and converts from these religions, and this origin was generally recognized.7 It appears in early Arabic historical literature in a variety of forms, often with considerable differences.' An interesting feature of the Arab versions is the attempt to fit the data in Genesis 10 into a larger framework, including on the one hand the Arabian tribes and their eponymous ancestors, and on the other such other peoples as the Persians, the Turks, the Romans, and the Slavs, familiar to the Arabs but not yet visible on the Pentateuchal horizon. All agree that the Arabs are descendants of Shem, and the blacks-sometimes including the Copts and Berbers-of Ham; most agree in assigning the Turks and Slavs to Japhet. There is, however, disagreement about the Persians and the Byzantines, the two civilized peoples with whom the Arabs had the longest and most intimate acquaintance. Some assign them to Japhet, making them kinsmen of the Turks and Slavs. Others, however, assign them to Shem, thus making them kinsmen of the Arabs. Some writers of Persian background tried to incorporate such Persian mythological heroes as Feridun and Jamshid in the biblical ethnology. Centuries later, Turkish genealogists attempted the same for the Turkish tribes of inner Asia.9

  Most of these accounts are concerned only with classification and filiation and make no attempt at characterization. There are, however, exceptions, and in some versions characters and even functions are assigned to the various lines of descent. In an adaptation of the biblical story, the descendants of Ham are condemned to be slaves and menials. Some also assign specific roles to the descendants of Shem and of Japhet, the former to be prophets and nobles (sharff), the latter to be kings and tyrants. These arguments are not pursued, and neither the literary nor the religious tradition appears to attach much importance to them.10

  The discussion of ethnic characters and aptitudes seems to have begun with a ninth-century Arabic translation of a pre-Islamic Persian text, the Letter of Tansar." This includes, naturally enough, an assertion of the superior merit of the Persians. Interestingly, their superiority lies in that they combine the best features of all the different peoples who are their neighbors:

  Our people are the most noble and illustrious of beings. The horsemanship of the Turk, the intellect of India, and the craftsmanship and art of Greece, God (blessed be His realm) has endowed our people with all these, more richly than they are found in the other nations separately. He has withheld from them the ceremonies of religion and the serving of kings which He gave to us. And He made our appearance and our colouring and our hair according to a just mean, without blackness prevailing, or yellowness or ruddiness; and the hair of our beards and heads neither too curly like the negro's nor quite straight like the Turk's.I2

  An Iraqi Arab author, writing in about 902-3, presents the same idea in a more elaborate form, in relation to his own people and country:

  A man of discernment said: The people of Iraq have sound minds, commendable passions, balanced natures, and high proficiency in every art, together with well-proportioned limbs, well-compounded humors, and a pale brown color, which is the most apt and proper color. They are the ones who are done to a turn in the womb. They do not come out with something between blonde, buff, blanched, and leprous coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Ethiopians, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two."

  Such ideas appear to have been current at the time. Thus Ibn Qutayba (828-89) remarks of the blacks that

  they are ugly and misshapen, because they live in a hot country. The heat overcooks them in the womb, and curls their hair. The merit of the people of Babylon is due to their temperate climate. 14

  Earlier in the ninth century, Jahiz had observed in passing: "If the country is cold, they are undercooked in the womb."15

  The arguments of the Shu`ubiyya and the Arab response to them gave rise to an extensive literary discussion of national characteristics, differences, and aptitudes. Jahiz devoted separate essays to the Turks" and the blacks" and in a number of places developed something like a set of rules for the classification and description of ethnic groups. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, a period of Iranian cultural renaissance, these became matters of frequent discussion; and the literature of the time preserves a rich variety of anecdote and debate.' At the center of the debate are the Arabs and Persians, by now established as the two major ethnic groups within Islam, more or less on a footing of equality. Third in line are the Rum, or Romans. In classical Arabic usage this denotes the Christian Byzantine Empire and also includes the large and important communities of Orthodox Christians living in the Islamic lands. The Yunan, the ancient Greeks, are seen as a separate group, but, generally, as the predecessors of the Rum. The Romans of ancient Rome do not normally make a separate appearance in these discussions. Next in line come India and China-remoter and less familiar but recognized as areas of relatively advanced, albeit idolatrous, civilization. After them come the barbarous peoples beyond the outer perimeter-in the North, the Turks and the Slavs; in the far West, the Franks; in the South, the various peoples of black Africa. These peoples are seen as eventual converts and in the meantime as being useful as slaves.'

  Several authors, from Jahiz onward, attempt to classify various peoples by their skills and aptitudes and sometimes differentiate carefully between the two. According to Jahiz, the Chinese excel in the arts, the Greeks in philosophy and science, the Arabs in language and poetry, the Persians in government and statecraft, the Turks in warfare.'" A century later, Abu Sulayman is quoted as giving a slightly different version:

  Wisdom descended upon the heads of the Byzantines, the tongues of the Arabs, the hearts of the Persians, the hands of the Chinese.'

  In time, certain conventional descriptions emerged, which became the common stereotypes for various national groups. Arabs had generosity and courage; Persians, statecraft and civility; Greeks were philosophers and artists; Indians, magicians and conjurers; while the dexterous Chinese were makers of furniture and gadgets. Blacks were hardworking and somewhat simple but gifted with exuberance and a sense of rhythm. Turks were impetuous fighting men.22 With mostly minor changes, these become standard in the discussion of the various ethnic groups both inside and outside the world of Islam.

  In addition to the characteristics of specific groups, the discussion also dealt with some broader and more general questions. Are all ethnic groups equal in their potential, or are some more gifted than others? If one nation excels all others in a certain field, is i
t because of an inherited talent (or as some put it, a divine gift), or is it because, for historical and cultural reasons, it had chosen to specialize in that area? Some writers argue strongly that socalled national characteristics, even including such racial characteristics as blackness, are really a response to environment and that any other ethnic group finding itself in the same situation would respond in the same way.

  Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), surely the greatest historian and social thinker of the Middle Ages, devotes a whole chapter to the influence of climate on human character. Even the merriment which, in common with many other Arab writers, he attributes to blacks is, in his view, climatic and not genetic in origin. Joy and mirth, he explains, are induced by heat. Just as the heat given off by alcohol makes the drinker merry and the warm air of the bath causes the bather to sing, so too does the heat of his homeland incline the black to mirth and exuberance.23

  At the far end of the Islamic world, Said al-Andalusi (d. 1070), a qadi in the Muslim city of Toledo, attempted a general classification and characterization of civilized nations. Defining them as those nations that had cultivated science and learning, he enumerated eight nations: the Indians, Persians, Chaldees, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs, and Jews. Sa`id's "nations" are as much religious as national. His Arabs include non-Arab Muslims; his Romans include Arabic-speaking Christians. The others, apart from the Jews, are all pagan.

  For Said, only these eight peoples have contributed to civilization. Some others, such as the Chinese and the Turks, he allows to have achieved distinction in other respects; the rest of mankind he dismisses contemptuously as the Northern and the Southern barbarians, "who are more like beasts than like men." He has a few well-chosen words to say about each.