In 1842CE, the British Consul General in Morocco wrote a letter to the Sultan to ask him if he had taken any measures to stop slavery or at least, slave trade. The sultan replied that he will not do anything about it because it has been the norm since the time of the sons of Adam and no sects of Islam are against it. Hence, he will not permit anything the Qur’an forbids and will not make unlawful anything that the Qur’an has allowed. In the Sultan’s reply,
we see the simplest justification or at least, excuse, for almost 1300 years of slavery in the Islamic world. This video is part of a bigger collaboration between various YouTube History channels on the topic of Africa. Don’t forget to watch the video before this one by Stefan Milo on the Swahili Culture. First of all, I’ve chosen to call this trade the Arab Slave Trade because Arabs were a key part of this network. Arabs weren’t the only people involved in this trade but still, most of the rulers and raiders involved in the process were Arabs.
Most of the important markets were in Arab cities as well. I didn’t call it the East African Slave Trade because it wasn’t just done through East Africa. Other routes were involved as well. Slavery was already practiced in Arabia and most of the Areas that Muslims conquered in the 7th and 8th centuries. Islam did not abolish slavery but some regulations were set which were increased upon by the caliphs. There were four ways someone could end upa slave. First, a child born to slave parents was aslave. Second, a person captured in a Jihad against on-Muslims could be made a slave.
Third, a slave could be purchased or finally, a slave could be given as a tribute. The people living under Islamic rule, Muslim or non-Muslim, could not be enslaved unless they rebelled or they helped an enemy of testate. Bernard Lewis writes… In the Islamic world, various ethnicities were enslaved, not just people of African descent. In fact, they were all considered to have their own advantages. In Butane, in his handbook, tries to characterize them. He recommends Indians and Nubians as guards of persons and property.
As laborers, servants, and eunuchs, he recommendsZanj and as soldiers, Turks and Slavs. Yes, even white people were enslaved. However, there was a distinction between then. The white slaves were called “Mamluk”or “Owned” and the black slaves were called “Abd” which means, “Slave”. Where white slaves could rise up to respectable positions, the black slaves could not.
The Mukluks had their own dynasties in Egypt and India but the Abd slaves never did. In fact, even in literature or poetry, we hardly find an example of a black man, slave or otherwise, after the Umayyad's. Even free black people weren’t all treated fairly across the Muslim world but as always, there were exceptions. An early chronicler, Jahshiyari writes ananecdote about a man called Abd al-Hamid, who was apparently the secretary of the last Umayyad caliph.
The story goes that the caliph had received gift of a black slave from a provincial governor. The caliph was unhappy with him and told his secretary to write a letter of gratitude and disparagement. Abdi al-Hamid wrote, “Had you been able to find a smaller number than one and a worse color than black, you would have sent thetas a gift.”
This story, along with many others, show that the Arabs didn’t view African slaves particularly nicely and preferred other ethnicities ifthey could get them. Even in the times of Prophet Muhammad, Byzantine and Persian slaves were found in Arabia. Africans were just one of various slaves available. However, over time, the number of black slavesin Africa grew disproportionately.
Main reason for that was the stabilization of the frontiers. Turks and Indians started to embrace Islamand so, not many of them could be enslaved and as Jihad slowed down after the 8th century, so did the number of non-white slaves. Mostly against Byzantine and other European states, captured prisoners were ransomed or exchanged.
While, it’s easy to say that the distinguishing factor between slaves and non-slaves was religion and not race, that’s not all that true. The ruler of Bornu, for example, complained in a letter to the Sultan in Egypt about how the slave traders were ravaging Bornu and enslaving freemen, even members of the ruler’s family, and Muslims.
While it was forbidden to enslave Muslims, in practice, if you were a Black Muslim, you could be enslaved. Very early on, the Muslims signed a treatywith Nubia where Nubia would provide slaves in exchange for peace. This was probably the reason that Nubia wasnot taken over by the Muslim for quite a while.
However, conquests across the Sahara opened trade routes across the African continent and among the things transported across these routes were religion, ideas and unfortunately, slaves. Muslim Arabs bought slaves from these routes all across Norther Africa and brought them back into the Islamic heartland.
This started almost right after the conquests and the subsequence stabilization of the frontiers. The Coast of the Zanj, modern Kenya and Tanzania, was used by the Arabs to bring slaves to Yemen and from there, Oman and the Persian Gulfand cities like Basra and Baghdad is where, they were sold to the Muslims.
Somalis before they were Islamized were alarge number of slaves imported, and later interior peoples were exported as slaves fromthe Somali coast across into the Yemen and from there, via Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad. In Mesopotamia,
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