Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

by Bernard Lewis

  The colour of the Mekkawy and Djiddawy is a yellowish sickly brown, lighter or darker according to the origin of the mother, who is very often an Abyssinian slave.... There are few families at Mekka. in moderate circumstances, that do not keep slaves.... The male and female servants are Negroes, or rtoahos, usually brought from Sowakin: the concubines are always Abyssinian slaves. No wealthy Mekkawy prefers domestic peace to the gratification of his passion: they all keep mistresses in common with their lawful wives: but if a slave gives birth to a child, the master generally marries her, or if he fails to do so. is censored by the community. The keeping of Abyssinian concubines is still more prevalent at Djidda. Many Mekkawys have no other than Abvssinian wives, finding the Arabians more expensive, and less disposed to yield to the will of the husband. The same practice is adopted by many foreigners, who reside in the Hedjaz for a short time. Upon their arrival, they buy a female companion, with the design of selling her at their departure; but sometimes their stay is protracted; the slave bears a child; they marry her, and become stationary in the town. This, indeed, is general in the East, and nowhere more so than at Mekka. The mixture of Abyssinian blood has, no doubt, given to the Mekkawys that yellow tinge of the skin which distinguishes them from the natives of the desert.

  The Mekkawys make no distinction whatever between sons born of Abyssinian slaves and those of free Arabian women.19

  The absence of social barriers against persons of part-African origin, and even against freed slaves of pure African descent, is confirmed by most other travelers.20

  Among the Bedouin, marriages with blacks were considered shameful, and even the use of black concubines, according to some accounts, was disapproved .2' Even where miscegenation was socially tolerated, it seems to have been a one-way street. In the words of a leading authority on the topic:

  Whereas for example, the Qaramanli sultans of Tripoli married off their daughters to European slaves to avoid dynastic rivalries, it would have been unthinkable for an Arab or a Berber, a Turk or a Persian, to consent to his daughter marrying a black African, slave or freed. Marriages the other way around, between a black slavegirl and an Arab man, could and did take place.'

  In Arabia even a pariah tribe like Hutaym disdains miscegenation. "Arabs of noble race," according to an observer, ". . . do not intermarry with Hutaym. . . . Hutaym in turn are not supposed to intermarry with negroes.""

  Marriage was one thing, concubinage another. Like many North American slaveowners and still more South American ones, Muslim men who owned women slaves were accustomed to mate with them. But the two situations were very different. In the West, concubinage was condemned by law, religion, and society. It was usually furtive, and its offspring, without recognition or legitimacy, merged into the general slave population. In Islam, concubinage was sanctioned by the law and indeed by the Qur'an itself. A man could, if he chose, recognize his offspring by his slave woman as legitimate, thereby conferring a formal legal status on both mother and child. In theory, this recognition was optional, and in the early period was often withheld. By the high Middle Ages it became normal and was unremarkable in a society where the sovereigns themselves were almost invariably the children of slave concubines. White-skinned women were usually preferred for the bed, and the occasional assertion, by an author, of the sexual attractions of the dark-skinned usually presents an appearance of bravado or paradox. A major change occurred in the nineteenth century, when, because of the consolidation of the power of both Eastern and Western Europe, white slaves, both female and male, became rare and expensive, and blacks of both sexes were able to rise from their previous subordination to higher status and functions.'

  The literature and folklore of the Middle East reveal a sadly normal range of traditional and stereotypical accusations against people seen as alien and, more especially, inferior. The most frequent are those commonly directed against slaves and hence against the races from which slaves are drawn-that they are stupid; that they are vicious, untruthful, and dishonest; that they are dirty in their personal habits and emit an evil smell. The black's physical appearance is described as ugly, distorted, or monstrous.' The point is made in an anecdote about an Arab poet known as al-Sayyid al-Himyari-the South Arabian Himyarite Sayyid (723-89):

  The Sayyid was my neighbor, and he was very dark. He used to carouse with the young men of the camp, one of whom was as dark as he was, with a thick nose and lips, and a Negroid [muzannajj appearance. The Sayyid had the foulest smelling armpits of anybody. They were jesting together one day, and the Sayyid said to him: "You are a Zanji in your nose and your lips!" whereat the youth replied to the Sayyid: "And you are a Zanji in your color and armpits!"

  Ibn Butlan notes of the Zanj women that

  their bad qualities are many, and the blacker they are the uglier their faces and the more pointed their teeth. They are of little use and may cause harm and are dominated by their evil disposition and destructiveness. . . . Dancing and rhythm are instinctive and ingrained in them. Since their utterance is uncouth, they are compensated with song and dance. . . . They have the cleanest teeth of all people because they have much saliva, and they have much saliva because they have bad digestions. They can endure hard work ... but there is no pleasure to be got from them, because of the smell of their armpits and the coarseness of their bodies.3

  The Egyptian writer al-Abshihi (1388-1446), in a chapter on slaves, tells a bloodcurdling story of the wickedness of a black slave, and concludes:

  Is there anything more vile than black slaves, of less good and more evil than they'? As for the mulatto, if you show kindness to one of them all your life and in every way, he will not be grateful; and it will be as if you had done nothing for him. The better you treat him, the more insolent he will he; the worse you treat him, the more humble and submissive. I have tried this many times, and how well the poet says:

  It is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals. My grandfather on my mother's side used to say: The worst use of money is bringing up slaves, and mulattoes are even worse and wickeder than Zanj, for the mulatto does not know his father, while the Zanji often knows both parents. It is said of the mulatto that he is like a mule, because he is a mongrel. . . . Do not trust a mulatto, for there is rarely any good in him.4

  At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman erotic poet Fazil Bey (ca. 1757-1810) wrote a "Book of Women," describing the attractions and other qualities of girls of about forty different races and regions, and a similar book on beautiful boys. Fazil was a Palestinian Arab, the grandson of the famous Shaykh Dahir Al-`Umar. Born in Safad, he was brought up in Istanbul and wrote in Turkish. He speaks well of the Ethiopians of both sexes but has little good to say of those whom he calls "the blacks." Though they may have good qualities inside, their darkness makes them unattractive, and their faculties are correspondingly dull. The black boy, says Fazil "is not meet to kiss and embrace, unless the lover's eye is blind," while the black girl "is not worthy of the bed but is right for the kitchen." It is foolish, thinks Fazil, to make love to blacks when whites are available, and it is unwise to raise up those whose proper place is as servants.5

  Despite this and many other similar descriptions, physical rejection, of the type professed by some Western racists, seems to have been rare. Mas`udi notes a few examples, as oddities:

  Tawus the Yemenite, the disciple of 'Abdallah ibn 'Abbas, would never eat meat butchered by a Zanji because, he said, the Zanji was a distorted creature. I have heard that the Caliph al-Radi would accept nothing from the hand of a black man, because he was a distorted slave. I do not know whether he was adopting the principles of Tawus in this or following any particular opinion or doctrine."

  Another accusation, which also sometimes appears as praise, is that the black is frivolous and lighthearted-that is, in other terms, cheerful and of happy disposition. Other positive stereotypes show the black as brave, generous, musical, and with a strong feeling of rhythm. Thus lbn Butlan remark
s that "if a Zanji were to fall from heaven to earth he would heat time as he goes down."'

  One of the commonest positive stereotypes of the black is that of simple piety. There are many anecdotes of a well-known religious type in which the black appears as the simple pious man contrasted with the clever but wicked." And here again one cannot help feeling that this is an example of the trajectio ad absurdum. The point that the narrator seeks to make is the superiority of simple piety over clever wickedness, and the black is chosen as the ultimate example of simplicity.

  A close parallel with the more familiar type of prejudice current in our society may be found in the sexual stereotype attributed to the black. A common theme is his immense potency and unbridled sexuality. A fairly restrained example of this, in the framework story of The Thousand and One Nights, has already been quoted. Others, sometimes in more extreme forms, occur in folklore, in the literature of light entertainment, in tales of the strange and marvelous, and in books on the art of love. The superbly endowed and sexually inexhaustible black slave appears in some of these writings, sometimes as the seducer or ravisher of his owner's wives and daughters, sometimes as the victim, willing or unwilling, of sexual aggression by voracious and frustrated white ladies.9

  The stereotypes of sexuality refer not only to the black male. In his defense of the blacks, Jahiz quotes some verses which he ascribes to the Arab poet Farazdaq (d. ca. 730), "the greatest connoisseur of women"-

  There is a good deal of Arabic poetry which shows the same kind of prurient interest in the Negress as one finds in European anti-Semitic writings about the Jewess. The interrelated European themes of la belle juive and l'affreuse juive have close parallels in the simultaneous interest shown by Arab poets in the repulsive ugliness and incandescent sexuality which they ascribe to the black woman." That there are resemblances between these stereotypes of blacks and those common in our own society will be obvious.

  There is, however, one aspect of this which deserves deeper exploration: the emotional content attached to the concepts of blackness and whitenessthe idea that black is somehow connected with sin, evil, deviltry and damnation, while white has the opposite associations. Thus in the Qur'an itself (III: 102), we find reference to

  the day when some faces will become white and some faces will become black. As for those whose faces have become black-will you disbelieve after having believed? Then taste the punishment for the unbelief which you have been showing. But as for those whose faces have become white-in the mercy of Allah will they be, therein to abide.

  It is obvious that no reference to black and white races is intended in this passage,'` which makes use of the common Arabic idiom-shared with many other languages, even including those of black Africa-associating whiteness with joy and goodness, blackness with suffering and evil. Similar associations underlie a good deal of Muslim legend, folklore, literature, proverb, and even language.

  The portrayal of blacks in Islamic literature begins at an early date, and soon falls into a few stereotyped categories. They appear-usually though not always as slaves-in the stories of the Prophet and his Companions; as demons and monsters in Persian mythology; as the remote and exotic inhabitants of the land of the Zanj and other places, as for example the cannibal islands of South and Southeast Asia. They figure in the mythical adventures of Alexander, in Arabic called Iskandar. The romance of Alexander was a popular theme of Muslim writers, in both verse and prose. In the Persian legend, Alexander is the son of the mythical Darab, and the half-brother of King Darius, from whom he claimed his heritage. In one episode of the romance, the hero Iskandar goes to Egypt, which he delivers from the menace of the Zanj. In the course of his struggle against them, Iskandar invades the land of Zanj, engages and defeats their army, and takes a number of captives. The adventures in Africa are attributed to both Iskandar and his father, Darab.13 Similar adventures are ascribed, in medieval popular romances in Arabic, to such figures as the legendary Yemenite hero Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, who conquers and converts a variety of pagan Africans.''

  Most commonly, however, the black portrayed in literature is none of these but is a familiar household figure, as slave or servant or attendant. The black slave or attendant is often part of the background depicted in narrative or belles-lettres.

  Occasionally-though infrequently-he plays a more prominent role in the story. This may be either negative or positive. Where negative, his crimes are usually lechery, greed, and ingratitude; where positive, he is the prototype of simple piety and loyalty, which achieve their ultimate reward from God. Paradoxically, this reward may take the form of his turning white.

  The portrayal of blacks in Islamic art falls into much the same categories as in narrative literature-not surprisingly, since much of the pictorial art came into being as book illustrations. There is little sculpture, and that only in the earliest period, before the Islamic ban on images had fully taken effect. Probably the earliest portrayals of Africans in the Islamic world are some figures in statuary and carved plaster reliefs, in the Umayyad palace at Khirbat al- Mafjar, in the Jordanian desert. This palace and its ornamentation, dating probably from the early eighth century, still show marked pre-Islamic influences, notably in the use of such carved figures. Some of these have recognizable African features. They may be intended to portray domestic slaves, or more probably some kind of entertainers. Thereafter, under Islamic influence, sculpture virtually disappeared. Painting, however, survived and flourished, at first almost entirely in the form of interior decoration in buildings, then extending to tiles, stucco, and pottery. It achieved its main development in the art of the book, which from the late twelfth century onward became by far the principal form of painting in Islamic lands. Among the Arabs, Per, sians, and Turks, as well as among the remoter peoples absorbed into the world of Islam, the art of the hook reached a high degree of perfection, and illustrated manuscripts-later supplemented by separate miniatures-give us a vivid and varied insight into the life of the Muslim cities.

  Among the mixed population of these cities, blacks formed a significant element; and not surprisingly they figure from time to time in book illustra, tion and other paintings. Their portrayal falls into certain well-recognized and easily definable categories, some of them with obvious parallels in the Chris, tian art of medieval Europe.

  One such category is sacred history-the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and of his Companions, offering obvious analogies to Christian portrayals of the birth and life of Jesus. The ban on the portrayal of human figures, which long inhibited the development of Muslim pictorial art, applied with part icu. lar force to the sacred biography, and books dealing with the lives of the Prophet and his Companions remained bare of any illustrations. By the sixteenth century, however, Ottoman artists began to turn their attention to this hitherto forbidden subject. The Topkapi Treasury in Istanbul contains a mag, nificent example. Prepared by order of Sultan Murad III, and dated 1594-95, the text consists of a fourteenth-century Turkish translation of a much earlier Arabic work on the life of the Prophet and includes many illustrations by an unknown artist. Among the many personalities who figure in the biography of the Prophet, two are identified as black and depicted accordingly. One of them is the emperor of Ethiopia, in Arabic called al-Najashi (Negus). who gave shelter to some of Muhammad's Companions when they fled from Mecca to escape the persecution of the reigning pagan oligarchy. This episode was a favorite theme of the defenders of the Ethiopians against their detractors. Another figure of almost demiurgic importance is the famous Bilal, the first muezzin and a Companion of the Prophet. Some minor black figures, apparently slaves, also appear in these pictures.

  In another common stereotype, the black appears as a kind of monster or bogeyman. These figure prominently in Iranian mythology, and are consequently depicted from time to time in the great Persian epics. Some particularly magnificent examples may be seen in the illustrations to the Shahnama of Firdawsi, prepared for the shah of Iran in the city of Tabriz in 1537. In one of the two p
ictures reproduced here, the Persian hero Hushang is shown killing the Great Black Devil; in another, a different hero. Isfandiyar, similarly disposes of a black sorceress. The demonology of Iran is not monochromatic. The Great White Devil of Mazandaran is no less disagreeable than his black colleagues.

  An important group of illustrations depict the black as an exotic figure in a strange and distant land. The best-known examples of these are the illustrations found in manuscripts of the different Arabic, Persian, and Turkish versions of the romance of Alexander. In one picture, illustrating a manuscript of the hook of Alexander by the Persian poet Nizamt, and painted in Qazvin toward the end of the sixteenth century, Alexander (Iskandar) is seen fighting the blacks.

  Most of the traditional themes of Persian letters and art were adopted in Muslim India, where they helped to inspire the rich art of the Mughal period. A manuscript. Darabnama, with illustrations by various artists, made at the Mughal court between 1580 and 1585, depicts several phases of the war against the Zanj. In one of the three pictures reproduced here, two other persons watch Darab fighting the blacks, while the body of another figure is seen floating in the water. In another, Darab is seen going into battle against the blacks; and in a third, by the same artist, he has defeated them and is receiving their homage.

  The sexual theme occurs far less frequently in Islamic art than in Islamic letters, and the literary portrayal of both the black male and the black female as creatures of immense sexual appetites and powers is rarely paralleled in the pictorial arts. A few examples do, however, occur in the Mughal art of India. In one of them, also an illustration to the same manuscript of the Darabnama, Homay, the mother of Darab, is murdered by a black groom. According to the story, he had a secret passion for her and murdered her one night when he came to her and she refused to submit to him. A later Mughal manuscript, completed in India in 1629, illustrates a story by the Persian poet Sa`di, and depicts an old man who upbraids a black and a girl for flirting. Much more dramatic than either of these is a Persian manuscript of the famous Masnavi of Rumi, completed in Tabriz in about 1530. illustrating an episode in the poem in which a woman discovers her maidservant copulating with an ass and tries, with disastrous results, to do the same.