The history of slavery in the Muslim world was throughout the history of Islam with slaves serving in various social and economic roles, from powerful emirs to harshly treated manual laborers. Slaves were widely used in labour in irrigation, mining, and animal husbandry, but most commonly as soldiers, guards, and domestic workers. The use of slaves for hard physical labor early on in Muslim history led to several destructive slave revolts, the most notable being the Zanj Rebellion of 869–883. Many rulers also used slaves in the military and administration to such an extent that slaves could seize power, as did the Mamluks.
Most slaves were imported from outside the Muslim world.Slavery in Islam . 7 September 2009. BBC. Slavery in the Muslim world did not have a racial foundation in principle, although this was not always the case in practice.Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam, Harper and Yuow, 1970, quote on page 38. The brackets are displayed by Lewis. The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa (Trans-Saharan slave trade), and Southeast Africa (Red Sea slave trade and Indian Ocean slave trade), and rough estimates place the number of Africans enslaved in the twelve centuries prior to the 20th century at between six million to ten million.[Total of Black slave trade in the Muslim world from Sahara, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes through the 19th century comes to an estimated 10,500,000, "a figure not far short of the 11,863,000 estimated to have been loaded onto ships during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade." (Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformation in Slavery (CUP, 1983).Raymond Mauny estimates a total of 6 million Black slaves were traded in Islam through the 20th Century, including 300,000 for part of the 20th century. (p.57, source: "Les Siecles obscurs de l'Afrique Noire (Paris: Fayard, 1970)] The Ottoman slave trade came from raids into eastern and central Europe and the Caucasus connected to the Crimean slave trade, while slave traders from the Barbary Coast raided the Mediterranean coasts of Europe and as far afield as the British Isles and Iceland.
Historically, Muslim West Asia was more or less united for many centuries, and slavery was hence reflected in the institution of slavery in the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661), slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate (1258–1517) and slavery in the Ottoman Empire (1517–1922), before slavery was finally abolished in one Muslim country after another during the 20th century.
In the 20th century, the authorities in Muslim states gradually outlawed and suppressed slavery.Brunschvig. 'Abd; Encyclopedia of Islam Slavery in Zanzibar was abolished in 1909, when slave concubines were freed, and the open slave market in Morocco was closed in 1922. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic. Slavery in Iran and slavery in Jordan were abolished in 1929. In the Persian Gulf, slavery in Bahrain was first to be abolished in 1937, followed by slavery in Kuwait in 1949 and slavery in Qatar in 1952, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished it in 1962,Martin A. Klein (2002), Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition, p. xxii, and Oman followed in 1970. Mauritania became the last state to abolish slavery, in 1981. In 1990, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam declared that "no one has the right to enslave" another human being. As of 2001, however, instances of modern slavery persisted in areas of the Sahel,Segal, Islam's Black Slaves, 1568: p.206Segal, Islam's Black Slaves, 2001: p.222 and several 21st-century terroristic jihadist groups have attempted to use historic slavery in the Muslim world as a pretext for reviving slavery in the 21st century.
Scholars point to the various difficulties in studying this amorphous phenomenon which occurs over a large geographic region (between East Africa and West Asia), a lengthy period of history (from the seventh century to the present day), and which only received greater attention after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.Miran, J. (2022). Red Sea Slave Trade. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History.Emmer, P. (2005). Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les Traites Négrières: Essai d'Histoire Globale. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004. 468 pp. . Itinerario, 29(2), 107–108.Hogg, P. (2014). The African Slave Trade and Its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical. Routledge. The terms "Arab slave trade" and "Islamic slave trade" (and other similar terms) are invariably used to refer to this phenomenon.
Slavery in pre-Islamic Arabia Slavery was widely practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia, as well as in the rest of the antique and early medieval world. Slavery in the Muslim world began with institutions inherited from pre-Islamic Arabia.The Qur'an was promulgated in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century, and the background against which Qur'anic legislation must be seen is ancient Arabia. The Arabs practiced a form of slavery, similar to that which existed in other parts of the ancient world. Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, Slaves and SlaveryBilal b. Rabah, Encyclopedia of IslamThe Cambridge History of Islam (1977), p.36 The minority were European and Caucasus, likely brought in by caravaners or the product of Bedouin capture, a practice stretching back to biblical times. Native Arab slaves had also existed, a prime example being Zayd ibn Haritha al-Kalbi, whom Muhammad later adopted. Arab slaves, however, usually obtained as captives, were generally ransomed off among nomadic groups. The Red Sea slave trade of Africans to the Arabian Peninsula is known to have been ongoing already in antiquity.The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History. (2023). Tyskland: Springer International Publishing. 143
The slave population increased by the custom of child abandonment (see also infanticide) and by the kidnapping or sale of small children. Whether enslavement for debt or the sale of children by their families was common is disputed. (Historian Henri Brunschvig argues it was rare, but according to Jonathan E. Brockopp, debt slavery was persistent.) Free people could sell their offspring, or even themselves, into slavery. Enslavement was also possible as a consequence of committing certain offenses against the law, as in the Roman Empire.
Two classes of slaves existed: a purchased slave and one born in the master's home. Over the latter, the master had complete rights of ownership, though these slaves were unlikely to be sold or disposed of by the master. Female slaves were at times forced into prostitution for the benefit of their masters, following Near Eastern customs.Mendelsohn (1949) pp. 54–58John L Esposito (1998) p. 79
Slavery in Islamic Arabia
Early Islamic history
W. Montgomery Watt points out that Muhammad's expansion of Pax Islamica to the Arabian peninsula reduced warfare and raiding, and therefore cut off the basis for enslaving freemen.Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 1956, p. 296 According to Patrick Manning, Islamic legislations against abuse of slaves limited the extent of enslavement in the Arabian peninsula and, to a lesser degree, for the area of the entire Umayyad Caliphate, where slavery had existed since the most ancient times.Manning (1990) p. 28
Constant Umayyad raids into Byzantine territory flooded the slave market with Greek captives. When Caliph Sulayman was in Medina on his way back from pilgrimage, he gifted 400 Greek slaves to his local favorites, "who could think of nothing better to do with them than slaughter them", boasted Jarir ibn Atiyah, a poet who took part in this.
According to Bernard Lewis, the growth of internal slave populations through natural increase was insufficient to maintain slave numbers through to modern times, which contrasts markedly with rapidly rising slave populations in the New World. This was due to a number of factor including liberation of the children born by slave mothers, liberation of slaves as an act of piety, liberation of military slaves who rose through the ranks, and restrictions on procreation, since casual sex and marriage was discouraged among the menial, domestic, and manual worker slaves.
A fair proportion of male slaves were also imported as eunuchs. The custom of using eunuchs as servants for women inside the Islamic harems had a preceding example in the life of Muhammad, who used the eunuch Mabur as a servant in the house of his own slave concubine Maria al-Qibtiyya; both of them slaves from Egypt.Taef El-Azhari, E. (2019). Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History, 661-1257. Storbritannien: Edinburgh University Press. Levy states that according to the Quran and Islamic traditions, such emasculation was objectionable. Some jurists such as al-Baydawi considered castration to be mutilation, stipulating laws to prevent it. However, in practice, emasculation was frequent. In eighteenth-century Mecca, the majority of eunuchs were in the service of the mosques (aghawat).Brunschvig. 'Abd; Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 16.
There were also high death tolls among all classes of slaves. Slaves usually came from remote places and, lacking immunities, died in large numbers. Segal notes that the recently enslaved, weakened by their initial captivity and debilitating journey, would have been easy victims of an unfamiliar climate and infection.Segal, Islam's Black Slaves, 2001: p.62
Children were especially at risk, and the Islamic market demand for children was much greater than the American one. Many Black slaves lived in conditions conducive to malnutrition and disease, with effects on their own life expectancy, the fertility of women, and the infant mortality rate. As late as the 19th century, Western travellers in North Africa and Egypt noted the high death rate among imported Black slaves. – See under 'What about eunuchs?'
Another factor was the Zanj Rebellion against the plantation economy of ninth-century southern Iraq. Due to fears of a similar uprising among slave gangs occurring elsewhere, Muslims came to realize that large concentrations of slaves were not a suitable organization of labour and that slaves were best employed in smaller concentrations. As such, large-scale employment of slaves for manual labour became the exception rather than the norm, and the medieval Islamic world did not need to import vast numbers of slaves.
Slave trade
Bernard Lewis writes: "In one of the sad paradoxes of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside, the Islamic empire." He notes that the Islamic injunctions against the enslavement of Muslims led to the massive importation of slaves from the outside. According to Patrick Manning, Islam by recognizing and codifying slavery seems to have done more to protect and expand slavery than the reverse.
The 'Arab' slave trade was part of the broader 'Islamic' slave trade. Bernard Lewis writes that "polytheists and idolaters were 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." Patrick Manning states that religion was hardly the point of this slavery.Manning (1990) p.10 Also, this term suggests comparison between Islamic slave trade and Christian slave trade. Propagators of Islam in Africa often revealed a cautious attitude towards proselytizing because of its effect in reducing the potential reservoir of slaves.Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World. New Amsterdam Press, New York, 1989. Originally published in French by Editions Robert Laffont, S.A. Paris, 1987, p. 28.