Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

by Bernard Lewis

  Later, castration was forbidden on Egyptian soil, and eunuchs were bought ready-made from the Sudan.

  Kemball's indication that African slaves were used for "hard and out door work" as well as the more commonly cited domestic tasks is confirmed in other sources and dates back to early times. Travel accounts-and more particularly consular reports-sent at the time of the British anti-slavery campaign, suggest the wide use of slave labor in agriculture and construction.'9 In nineteenth-century Egypt, African slaves were imported for economic use, chiefly agricultural. Slave gangs were employed in sugar plantations and on irrigation works; the boom in Egyptian cotton during the American Civil War enabled newly prosperous Egyptian farmers to spend "some of their profits in the purchase of slaves to help them in the cultivation of their lands.""

  Most of the known black slaves were domestic and lived as part of a household. On the evidence of European travelers, they suffered terribly at the hands and under the lash of slavers and slavedealers from capture until final sale but were well treated by their urban masters.

  The drying up of the sources of white slaves, while greatly increasing the depredations of the slaveraiders in Africa, also brought some benefit to those black slaves who survived their capture and transportation and reached their destinations. In the absence of white slaves, black slaves were increasingly given tasks and positions which were previously the preserve of whites, and acquitted themselves to the satisfaction of their masters. In the course of the nineteenth century, black slaves-and more frequently black freedmen-are found occupying important positions and often exercising great power. This occurs quite frequently in Arabia, much less frequently in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

  In the course of the nineteenth century the revulsion against slavery, which gave rise to a strong abolitionist movement in England, and later in other Western countries, began to affect the Islamic lands. What was involved was not, initially, the abolition of the institution of slavery but its alleviation and in particular the restriction and ultimately the elimination of the slave trade. Islamic law, in contrast to the ancient and colonial systems, accords the slave a certain legal status and assigns obligations as well as rights to the slaveowner. The manumission of slaves, though recommended as a meritorious act, is not required, and the institution of slavery not only is recognized but is elaborately regulated by Shari`a law. Perhaps for this very reason the position of the domestic slave in Muslim society was in most respects better than in either classical antiquity or the nineteenth-century Americas.

  While, however, the life of the slave in Muslim society was no worse, and in some ways was better, than that of the free poor, the processes of acquisition and transportation often imposed appalling hardships. It was these which drew the main attention of European opponents of slavery, and it was to the elimination of this traffic, particularly in Africa, that their main efforts were directed.

  The abolition of slavery itself would hardly have been possible. From a Muslim point of view, to forbid what God permits is almost as great an offense as to permit what God forbids'-and slavery was authorized and regulated by the holy law. More specifically, it formed part of the law of personal status, the central core of social usage, which remained intact and effective even when other sections of the holy law, dealing with civil, criminal, and similar matters, were tacitly or even openly modified and replaced by modern codes. It was from conservative religious quarters and notably from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina that the strongest resistance to the proposed reforms came. The emergence of the holy men and the holy places as the last-ditch defenders of slavery against reform is only an apparent paradox. They were upholding an institution sanctified by scripture, law, and tradition and one which in their eyes was necessary to the maintenance of the social structure of Muslim life.

  The gradual reduction and eventual elimination of slavery were accomplished in most Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with some difference for whites and blacks. Chattel slavery was abolished by law in most of the independent Muslim states of the Middle East at various dates between the two World Wars; in 1962 it was abolished by the newly established republican regime in Yemen, and a few weeks later by royal decree in Saudi Arabia. In Iran, it had formally been outlawed by the constitution of 1906, though some subsequent legislation was needed to give this effect. The last to enact legal abolition appears to have been Mauritania, which took this step in 1980. There are persistent reports that despite these legal measures, slavery, sometimes voluntary, continues in several countries.'

  The initial impetus for abolition had come from Europe, and for some time progress in this matter was due almost entirely to European urging and action. In the British, French, Dutch, and Russian Empires-in that ordergeneral abolition had been imposed by the imperial authorities. Britain also undertook, by diplomatic pressure supported by naval power, to suppress the slave trade from East Africa to the Middle East and exacted decrees to this end from the sultan of Turkey, the shah of Persia, and the khedive of Egypt, as well as from a number of local rulers in Africa and Arabia.

  The first Muslim ruler to order the emancipation of black slaves was the bey of Tunis, who in January 1846 decreed that a deed of enfranchisement should be given to every slave who desired it. Among the reasons for this action, he notes the uncertainty among Muslim jurists concerning the legal basis for "the state of slavery into which the black races have fallen" and, significantly, the need to prevent the black slaves "from seeking the protection of foreign authorities."3 The abolition of black slavery was completed after the French occupation.

  In Turkey, the most important surviving independent Muslim state, the process of emancipation seems to have begun in 1830.' In that year a firman was issued, ordering the emancipation of slaves of Christian origin, who had kept to their religion. This was a kind of amnesty for Greek and other Christian subjects of the Porte who had been reduced to slavery as a punishment for participating in the recent rebellions. Those who had become Muslims were excluded from this emancipation and remained the property of their owners.'

  The overwhelming majority of white slaves, both Christian and Muslim, came from the Caucasian lands. Though the supply was much reduced after the Russian conquest, slaves from these lands continued to arrive in the Ottoman Empire either overland or by ship to the Turkish Black Sea ports. Their movement and subsequent fate were beyond the range of influence or of interference of the Western powers and were an exclusively Ottoman concern. It was thus almost entirely on Ottoman initiative, determined by inter nal circumstances and pressures, that the Ottoman state undertook, by due process of law, a very substantial improvement in their condition, amounting ultimately to the effective-even if not the legal-abolition of their servile status. Orders against the traffic in white slaves from Georgia and Circassia were issued in 1854 and 1855 and were in general put into effect.'

  In 1847 the British were able to win some concessions from the Ottoman government about black slaves; and in 1857 they obtained a major Ottoman firman, prohibiting the traffic in black slaves throughout the empire, with the exception of the Hijaz.7

  The reasons for this exception are of some interest. By early 1855, reports were reaching the Hijaz of current and impending Ottoman measures against the slave trade. The alarm caused by the limitation of the supply of white slaves from the Caucasus and the increasingly severe restriction of the importation of black slaves from Africa was heightened by news of an order from the governor of Suez, acting on instruction from the capital, that slaves brought from the Hijaz to Egypt should be sent back. On April 1, 1855, a group of prominent merchants in Jedda addressed a letter to the leading members of the ulema as well as to the sharif of Mecca expressing their concern. They referred with disapproval to the steps which had already been taken and quoted a report that a general ban on the slave trade would soon be imposed throughout the empire, together with other pernicious and Christian-inspired changes such as the emancipa
tion of women and the toleration of religiously mixed marriages. This ban, with the whole program of reform of which it was alleged to be a part, was condemned by the writers of the letter as antiIslamic, the more so since all the black slaves imported from Africa embraced the Muslim religion.

  The letter caused some excitement in Mecca and may indeed have been instigated by its ruler, the Sharif `Abd al-Muttalib. It provided an occasion for him to consult with the chief of the ulema of Mecca, Shaykh Jamal. According to an Ottoman source, the sharif told the shaykh that the Crimean War, then in progress, would mean the doom of the Ottoman Empire whichever way it ended. In any case, the Turks had become apostates from Islam, and this was an opportunity to rid the holy cities of their domination. The suppression of the slave trade, he is quoted as saying, would be a good pretext.

  The crisis came a few months later when the governor of the Hijaz sent an order to the district governor of Mecca prohibiting the trade in slaves. The district governor was instructed to read the order aloud at the Shari a court of Mecca in the presence of the ulema and the sharifs. This took place on October 30, 1855, and the audience declared their readiness to obey.

  This was the moment for which the sharif had been waiting. On his instructions, Shaykh Jamal issued a fatwa denouncing the ban on the slave trade as contrary to the holy law of Islam. Because of this anti-Islamic act, he said, together with such other anti-Islamic actions as allowing women to initiate divorce proceedings and to move around unveiled, the Turks had become apostates and heathens. It was lawful to kill them without incurring criminal penalties or bloodwit, and to enslave their children.

  The Turks have become renegades. It is obligatory to make war against them and against those who follow them. Those who are with us are for heaven and those who are with them are for hell. Their blood is lawful and their goods are licit."

  The fatwa produced the desired effect. The Ottoman authorities in the holy cities were attacked by local leaders and populace, and the qadi-an Ottoman appointee-was also compelled to sign a declaration condemning the ban on the slave trade. Ottoman soldiers were set upon all over Mecca as were also some foreign protected persons. A holy war was proclaimed against the Ottomans, and the revolt began.

  By June of the following year, the revolt had been completely crushed. The sultan's government had, however, noted the warning, and took steps to forestall a secession of the Ottoman south. In the ban on the trade in black slaves promulgated in 1857, the province of the Hijaz was exempted. The Sharif `Abd al-Muttalib was in due course reappointed, and his continued presence in the Hijaz encouraged the slavetraders to ignore the anti-slaving laws and to shift their trade to that area.

  The actual enforcement of the ban of 1857 was no easy matter, and despite the efforts of both the Ottoman authorities and the British navy, the traffic continued. It now tended to concentrate in two main areas. One of these was the Red Sea, where the exemption of the Hijaz from the Ottoman ban on the slave trade gave the slavetraders a secure base which they lacked elsewhere; the other was Libya, which, after the establishment of British rule in Egypt and French rule in Tunisia and Algeria, was the only part of Ottoman Africa not subject to foreign control. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a substantial proportion of the export of slaves from black Africa to the Ottoman lands passed through the ports of Tripoli and later Benghazi. Here, too, great efforts were made to stop the trade in blacks, and when slaves were detected they were promptly freed. This created another problem, since the freed slaves were in urgent need of food and shelter and also of protection against their former owners, seeking to reenslave them. The care of freed slaves was a continuing concern of the Ottoman authorities, who took measures of various kinds to meet these needs. On several occasions, the government of Istanbul sent orders to Benghazi instructing Turkish officials there to transfer freed black slaves to Istanbul or Izmir, where the men were to be drafted into the army or navy and the women placed as domestic servants.

  The other major center was Arabia. Thanks to the exemption from the ban on the slave trade, the flow of slaves from Africa into Arabia and through the Gulf into Iran continued for a long time. Apart from commercial channels, the supply was augmented through the practice by which a wealthy pilgrim brought a retinue of slaves from his own country and sold them one by one-as a kind of traveler's checks-to pay the expenses of the pilgrimage. In time the Red Sea trade dwindled as a result of the wars in the Sudan and in Ethiopia. The extension of British, French, and Italian control around the coasts of the Horn of Africa deprived the slavetriders of their main ports of embarkation. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and later the AngloEgyptian control of the Sudan and the consequent suppression of the slaveraiders further hampered the traffic by cutting off one of the main sources of supply. In spite of the reconquest of the Sudan and all the efforts by Turkish, Egyptian, British, French, and Italian authorities, the traffic continued into modern times. From the 1890s onward, however, the slave trade, though it remained active, was of necessity clandestine.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, white slavery had, apart from the Arabian peninsula, virtually disappeared, and black slavery had been reduced to a mere fraction of its former dimensions. The capture, sale, and transportation of blacks from Africa to Arabia and Iran continued, however, albeit on a much reduced scale, at least until the mid-twentieth century.`

  British efforts to end the slave trade in Arabia and elsewhere were by no means universally approved. They were, of course, resented and resisted by those immediately affected, the slaveraiders and slavedealers. They were also criticized by other, less-interested parties. The famous Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje, who visited Mecca in 1885, complained of the "undeserved applause" given to British measures against the slave trade, and to the "fantasies" which inspired them. In their place, he offered what he called a "sober reality." According to Snouck,

  public opinion in Europe has been misled concerning Muslim slavery by a confusion between American and Oriental conditions.... As things are now, for most of the slaves their abduction was a blessing.... They themselves are convinced, that it was slavery that first made human beings of them. Concubines, specifically Abyssinians, are for various reasons more highly esteemed by the Meccans than their free wives; the practice is, by both religion and custom, recognized as fully legal.... Their bond with their owner is firmer than the easily dissolvable Muslim marriage. All in all, since I know the situation, the anti-slavery campaign is, for me, in the highest degree repugnant. u

  Snouck quotes with approval from some earlier travelers who defend the enslavement of blacks in Arabia and condemn British efforts to free them, sometimes on frankly racist grounds. One such was the Englishman J. F. Keane, who visited Arabia in 1881. Using arguments familiar from other places and times, he observes that

  the Negro is to be found here [in Arabial in his proper place, an easily-managed, useful worker. The Negroes are the porters. water-carriers, and performers of most of the real labour in Meccah. Happy, healthy, well-fed, well-clothed (as such things go in Meccah), they are slaves, proud of their masters, in a country where a slave is "honoured only after his master." Slavery in the East has an elevating influence over thousands of human beings, and but for it hundreds of thousands of souls must pass their existence in this world as wild savages, little better than animals; it, at least, makes men of them, useful men too, sometimes even superior men. Could the Arab slave-trade be carried on with safety, it might be executed more humanely; and it would, philanthropically speaking, do good to many of the human race. . . . While every settled town under Turkish or native rule in all wide Arabia has a slave market to be stocked, our greatest efforts can but increase the demand and raise the markets. Witness: a strong male adult might be bought for $40.00 four years ago in Meccah, and the same will now fetch $60.00. Were our cruisers doubled, the weekly landing of slaves among the creeks and reefs along the coast of the Hejaz could not be prevented. . . . That there are evils in
Arab slavery I do not pretend to deny, though not affecting the Negro, once a slave. The exacting slave-driver is a character wholly unknown in the East, and the slave is protected from the caprice of any cruel master in that he is transferable and of money value. The man who would abuse or injure his slave would maim and willfully deteriorate the value of his horse. Whatever the Arab may not know, he most assuredly knows what is to his own immediate interest better than that. And the Negro himself . . . may through this medium be raised from a savage, existing only for the moment .. . to a profitable member of society, a strong tractable worker, the position Nature seems to have made him to occupy.12

  Similar views were expressed by an Austrian, Ludwig Stross, who visited Arabia in 1886. Stross begins by agreeing that slavery "as such" is indefensible:

  That whole Negro villages are burned, all the men killed, and their women and children are taken on months-long terrible marches finally to he offered as merchandise in markets and distant lands, must appear to us as an injustice that cries to heaven.

  Nevertheless, he continues "it is at the very least dubious" whether it is a good work to insist on freeing the black slave when he has already been taken from his home. In Stross's view, slavery is so deep-rooted, and the slave trade so extensive in Africa and the Arab lands, that to uproot it is impossible and merely to free those blacks who are already enslaved and on their way to their destination does more harm than good.