Legal chattel slavery existed in Saudi Arabia from antiquity until its abolition in the 1960s.
Hejaz (the western region of modern day Saudi Arabia), which encompasses approximately 12% of the total land area of Saudi Arabia, was under the control of the Ottoman Empire from 1517 to 1918, and as such nominally obeyed the Ottoman laws. When the area became an independent nation first as the Kingdom of Hejaz and then as Saudi Arabia, it was a slave trade center during the interwar period. After World War II, growing international pressure eventually resulted in the formal abolition of the practice. Slavery was formally abolished in 1962. Many members of the Afro-Saudi minority are descendants of the former slaves.
In contemporary Saudi Arabia, the kafala system, in which foreign workers are tied to a single employer for the duration of their time in Saudi Arabia, and often have their passports confiscated, has been described by human rights organizations as a form of modern slavery. The labor performed by kafala workers is similar to labor previously performed by slaves, and the workers often come from similar parts of the world from which slaves were previously imported.
Background
Historically, the institution of slavery in the region of the later Saudi Arabia was 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), slavery in the Ottoman Empire (1517–1916) and of slavery in the Kingdom of Hejaz (1916–1925), realms which all included the region later to become Saudi Arabia. The chattel slavery as it looked like in Saudi Arabia was founded in Islamic law, and built upon the institution of slavery as it looked like in the prior Islamic empires in the area.
The region of the Arabian Peninsula which was renamed Saudi Arabia in 1932, was nominally under the Ottoman Empire between 1517 and 1918, and as such it nominally adhered to the same laws as the rest of the slavery in the Ottoman Empire in regard to the slavery and slave trade. Ottoman anti-slavery laws were not enforced in practice, particularly not in Hejaz; the first attempt to ban the Red Sea slave trade in the region was the Imperial Imperial Firman of 1857, with Hejaz being explicitly exempted from the ban in the wake of the 1854–56 Hejaz rebellion.Miers, S. (2003). Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem. Storbritannien: AltaMira Press. p. 17
The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1880 formally banned the Red Sea slave trade, but was not enforced in the Ottoman Provinces in the Arabian Peninsula. In 1908 the Ottoman Empire nominally abolished slavery in its territory, but again this law was not enforced in the Arabian Peninsula.
Slave trade
Enslaved Africans have been sold in the Arab World since antiquity. While in pre-Islamic Arabia, Arab war captives were common targets of slavery, it appears that slaves were also imported from Ethiopia across the Red Sea.The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History. (2023). Tyskland: Springer International Publishing. 144 The Red Sea slave trade appears to have been established by at least the 1st century AD, when enslaved Africans were trafficked across the Red Sea to destinations in Arabia and Yemen.The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History. (2023). Tyskland: Springer International Publishing. 143
After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the area formed an independent nation as the Kingdom of Hejaz (1916–1925). Hejaz did not consider itself obliged to obey the laws and treaties signed by the Ottomans regarding slavery and the slave trade. During the interwar period, the Kingdom of Hejaz was internationally known as a regional slave trade center. The Red Sea slave trade was, together with the Trans-Saharan slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade, one of the three main routes comprising what has been called in historiography the "Islamic slave trade", "Oriental slave trade", or the "Arab slave trade," which involved the trafficking of enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa to the Muslim world.Miran, J. (20 April 2022). Red Sea Slave Trade. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Retrieved 21 August 2023, from https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-868 .
By the 20th century, slaves were primarily trafficked from West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and South-Western Asia.Emancipating "The Unfortunates": The Anti-slavery Society, the United States, the United Nations, and the Decades-Long Fight to Abolish the Saudi Arabian Slave Trade. DeAntonis, Nicholas J. Fordham University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2021. 28499257. p. 1-3
A former Royal Air Force pilot, who trafficked slaves from Africa into Arabia in the 1950s, stated: "That's where all roads end[...] Arabia", since Saudi Arabia was the center and end station of modern chattel slavery at the time, and drove the expanding slave trade market after WWII.Emancipating "The Unfortunates": The Anti-slavery Society, the United States, the United Nations, and the Decades-Long Fight to Abolish the Saudi Arabian Slave Trade. DeAntonis, Nicholas J. Fordham University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2021. 28499257. p. 13
In the UN debate against slavery in 1957, Saudi Arabia was at the center of the debate since it was the hub of the slave trade network of the Arabian Peninsula, which kidnapped and enslaved people from Africa, the Aden Protectorate, the Trucial States, Baluchistan, and further away.
African slave route
The slave trade had two major routes to Hejaz. African slaves were trafficked primarily from Sudan and Ethiopia. Primarily children and young women were bought or given as tribute by their parents to Ethiopian chiefs, who sold them to slave traders. The parents were told that their children were going to be given a better life as slaves in Arabia. The slaves were delivered to Arabian slave traders by the coast and shipped across the Red Sea to Jeddah.
Eunuchs, female concubines and male labourers were the occupations of slaves sent from Ethiopia to Jidda and other parts of Hejaz. The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia. Female and male slaves from Ethiopia made up the main supply of slaves to India and the Middle East.
Chinese slave route
There was a long history of Chinese slave girls being sold to the Muslim harems in Aceh on Sumatra, where they were used as concubines (sex slaves); from Aceh, the Mui Tsai girls could be exported further for sale to Arabia.Clarence-Smith, W. G. (2007). Eunuchs and Concubines in the History of Islamic Southeast Asia. Manusya: Journal of Humanities, 10(4), 8–19. https://doi.org/10.1163/26659077-01004001 Under this form of the slave trade, the acquisition of slaves was officially called adoptions to avoid scrutiny from the authorities, since the colonial powers in the Dutch East Indies had banned slavery, and it was known to have continued during the Interwar period.
Indian slave route Egypt and Hejaz were also the recipients of Indian women trafficked via Aden and Goa. Since Britain banned the slave trade in its colonies, 19th century British-ruled Aden was no longer a recipient of slaves and the slaves sent from Ethiopia to Arabia were shipped to Hejaz instead.
Hajj slave route One slave route was connected to the Hajj pilgrimage. Already in the Middle Ages, the Hajj played a role in the slave trade; in 1416, al-Maqrizi described pilgrims coming from Takrur (near the Senegal River) brought 1,700 slaves with them to Mecca. Meillassoux, C. (1991). The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. Storbritannien: University of Chicago Press. p45
The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, was the biggest vehicle for enslavement. When the open trans-Saharan slave trade died out, Muslim-African Hajj pilgrims across the Sahara were duped or given low-cost travel expenses by tribal leaders. When they arrived at the East Coast, they were trafficked over the Red Sea in the dhows of the Red Sea slave trade or on small passenger planes, and discovered upon arrival in Saudi Arabia that they were to be sold on the slave market rather than to perform the Hajj.
Slave traders trafficked primarily women and children in the guise of wives, servants and pilgrims to Hejaz, where they were sold after arrival. The victims of this trafficking route were sometimes tricked, and taken on Hajj under false pretenses. Slave traders trafficked women to Hejaz by marrying them and then taking them on the Hajj, where they were sold, with their families later told that the women had died during the journey.
In a similar fashion, parents entrusted their children to slave traders under the impression that the slave traders were taking their children on Hajj, as servants, or as students. This category of trafficking victims came from all over the Muslim world, as far away as the East Indies and China. Some travelers sold their servants or poor travel companions in the Hajj, to pay for their travel costs.
The English traveler Charles M. Doughty, who visited Central Arabia in the 1880s, noted that African slaves were brought up to Arabia every year during the Hajj, and that "there are bondsmen and bondwomen and free negro families in every tribe and town".Zdanowski J. Slavery in the Gulf in the First Half of the 20th Century: A Study Based on Records from the British Archives. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Askon; 2008
To combat the Red Sea slave trade, which was strongly connected to the Hajj pilgrimage, the Inter-Sanitary Conference in Alexandria of 1927 declared that pilgrims were to travel only by steamers or motorboats to avoid the dhow slave boats. This regulation proved to be difficult to enforce in practice, and pilgrims continued to cross the Red Sea by dhow to land at places difficult to control.Miers, S. (2003). Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem. Storbritannien: AltaMira Press. 262 In 1933, Nigeria introduced a new passport system that required Hajj pilgrims to deposit funds to cover the expenses and return fares to prevent their enslavement during the Hajj.
In the 1950s, in connection to the Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, Barnett Janner described Saudi Arabia and Yemen as the only remaining states where slavery was still a legal institution:
Similar to the defenders of slavery in the American South, slavery in Islamic societies has been described as a benevolent institution, and King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud remarked to the British legation officer Munshi Ihsanullah that West Africans:Emancipating "The Unfortunates": The Anti-slavery Society, the United States, the United Nations, and the Decades-Long Fight to Abolish the Saudi Arabian Slave Trade. DeAntonis, Nicholas J. Fordham University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2021. 28499257. p. 10
Balochistan slave route In the 1930s and 1940s, it was reported that slaves in Balochistan in modern-day Iran and Pakistan were shipped to Saudi Arabia via Oman and the Gulf states. It was reported that some people in Balochistan sold themselves or their children to slave traders to escape poverty. In 1943, it was reported that girls in Balochistan were shipped via Oman to Mecca, where they were popular as concubines since Caucasian girls were no longer available, and were sold for $350–450.
Buraimi slave route
The Buraimi Oasis was a staging post in a neutral border zone, mutually administered by Britain and Saudi Arabia and manned by Trucial Scouts, an Arab force with British officers. Sawyer, R. (n.d.). Slavery in the Twentieth Century. Storbritannien: Taylor & Francis.