The liberated Negroes will not work even for money. For them freedom means their native idleness. They form a proletariat, than which nothing worse can be found.
The theory of human rights and self-determination certainly sounds very fine, but in such cases can hardly find its proper application.
I would rather compare the Negroes with children, who must be made to do their stint.
As long as the Negroes stay in their homelands, no one can object if they idle away their lives in their own way. But in fact they have been brought, by force of circumstances, into other lands and other conditions. Since one cannot prevent their coming, however unwillingly, one should also not prevent their being made to work.13
Like almost all the other European travelers, Stross condemns the horrors of the abduction and transportation of the slaves, which he describes in some detail; but he insists that once a slave
has arrived and is in firm hands, he is usually well cared for. The conditions of slavery in the Orient have nothing in common with those which arose earlier in North America and Brazil. The slave is, for the Mohammedan, a member of the family and is almost without exception well treated. Mistreatments are rare and are usually richly deserved. . . . As regards work, as a rule only very reasonable demands are made of the slaves; and one may safely assume that a Negro would have to work very much harder in order to earn his living as a free man. . . . Often liberated slaves are the heirs of their masters and continue their businesses. In Jedda and Mecca I know many liberated slaves who are respected merchants.
It will thus be seen that slavery in the Orient, though it has many shadowy sides, has nothing to do with the sort of conditions described for lovers of sentimental reading in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Most observers, however, were less willing to be convinced by the apologetics of slavery; and in time virtually all civilized governments, including that of the Ottoman Empire, joined in the effort to suppress the slave trade.
An obvious question, since so many blacks entered the central lands over so long a period, is why they have left so little trace.14 There is nothing in the Arab, Persian, and Turkish lands that resembles the great black and mulatto populations of North and South America. One reason is obviously the high proportion of eunuchs among black males entering the Islamic lands. Another is the high death rate and low birth rate among black slaves in North Africa and the Middle East. In about 1810, Louis Frank observed in Tunisia that most black children died in infancy, and that infinitesimally few reached the age of manhood." A British observer in Egypt, some thirty years later, found conditions even worse:
The mortality among the slaves in Egypt is frightful,-when the epidemical plague visits the country, they are swept away in immense multitudes, and they are the earliest victims of almost every other domineering disease. I have heard it estimated that five or six years are sufficient to carry off a generation of slaves, at the end of which time the whole has to he replenished. This is one of the causes of their low market-value. When they marry, their descendants seldom live; in fact, the laws of nature seem to repel the establishment of hereditary slavery. "'
Concubinage at higher, and intermarriage at lower, social levels seem to have taken place but must have been on a rather limited scale and, probably for social more than biological reasons, produced little effect. Even now, members of the comparatively small number of recognizably black families in the Middle East tend on the whole to marry among their own kind."
The voice of Islamic piety on miscegenation is clear and unequivocal-there are no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage. In practice, however, this pious doctrine is frequently disregarded or even overruled. Marriage is regulated by the holy law of Islam and is indeed the only important issue on which questions of race and color become the concern of the law. This concern arises under the legal doctrine of Kafa a, which might be roughly translated as equality of birth and social status in marriage. The purpose of Kafa a was to ensure that a man should be at least the social equal of the woman he marries. It does not forbid unequal marriages and is thus in no sense a Muslim equivalent of the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany or the apartheid laws of South Africa. Its aim is to protect the honor of respectable families, by enabling them, if they wish, to stop unsuitable marriages. The principle of Kafa a may be invoked by the father or other legal guardian of a woman in order to prevent her from contracting a marriage without his permission or to annul it if contracted without permission or with permission fraudulently obtained, provided there is no child or pregnancy. The rule operates to restrain a woman from marrying a man who is below her and thus disgracing her family. For a man to marry a woman below him does not matter-the woman is, in the view of the jurists, in the inferior situation anyway, and no immediate social injury can therefore result.
The notion of Kafa a has its antecedents in pre-Islamic Arabia, where tribal custom required a measure of social compatibility between husband and wife. Though not sanctioned by the Qur'an and indeed in a sense contrary to the spirit of the Qur'an, it survived into Islamic times and became part of the holy law of Islam. There were, however, from the beginning, differences between the juristic schools, more specifically between what might be called the more lax and more rigorous approaches. For one group, with its origins among the jurists of Medina, the notion of Kafa a was basically religious and was intended to save a devout woman from being forcibly married to a dissolute man. This remained the dominant view in the Maliki school of jurisprudence; their founder, Malik ibn Anas, is quoted as strongly denouncing the idea that a mawla woman is inferior to an Arab woman and proclaiming that "all the people of Islam are equal [akfa ] to one another, in accordance with God's revelations." But for another group, deriving from the school of Kufa and perhaps influenced by the social hierarchies of preIslamic Iran, Kafa a was determined by a number of matters-not only piety and character but also wealth and profession and three other factors which have direct bearing on the question of race and status: freedom, Islam, and descent.
Freedom refers to the question of whether the prospective bridegroom is free, freed, or slave and involves not only his personal status but that of his immediate forbears. A freedman is not as good as the son of a freedman, and he in turn not as good as the grandson of a freedman. This principle is pursued up to three generations, after which all Muslims are deemed equally free. The same is true of Islam. Non-Muslims are of course excluded. But that is not all. A convert is not as good as the son of a convert; the son of a convert is not as good as the grandson of a convert. Here too the rule is limited to three generations, after which all are equal in their Islam.
Descent is another matter. Partly this is a social issue-the distinction between "good" (i.e., well-connected or well-descended) families and others; partly, however, it may also be concerned with ethnic origins. Most jurists make a distinction between Arab and non-Arab. Some maintain that a nonArab man is not the equal of an Arab woman in any circumstances and that even the manumitted slave of a non-Arab owner is not the equal of the manumitted slave girl of an Arab owner. Generally speaking, the jurists do not bother to distinguish between the various kinds of non-Arabs, though some make the general observation that the non-Arabs are ranked among themselves just as are the Arabs.
The restriction of intermarriage is a grievance frequently mentioned by Muslim critics, especially by Shiite opponents of the Sunni order. A limitation on marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims was accepted without question. Muslim men might marry Christian or Jewish women; Christian or Jewish men were forbidden to marry Muslim women under pain of death. The logic of this distinction is that in any religiously mixed marriage Islam must prevail, and the male is the dominant partner (the jurists were often unworldly). The rules regarding Kafa a introduced distinctions even between Muslims-and these were challenged as contrary to the true spirit of Islam. A Shiite tract enumerating the misdeeds of the first three caliphs, seen by the Shia as usurpers, illustrates the point vi
vidly. Among other crimes, the Caliph `Umar is accused of having introduced ethnic impediments to marriage, and of discriminating not only between Arabs and non-Arabs but also between the noble Arab tribe of Quraysh and the other Arabs.
When this man seized power over the people he said that the Arabs may not marry women of Quraysh but Quraysh may marry women from the rest of the Arabs and the non-Arabs. The Persians and other mawali' may not marry women of the Arabs, but the Arabs may marry any of them. In this way he put the rest of the Arabs in the same relationship to Quravsh as are the Jews and Christians in relation to the Muslims, since the Muslims may marry Christian and Jewish women, but they may not marry Muslim women.'
In this, as in some other respects, the Shiite polemicist is attributing to `Umar the results of a long process of development. But the doctrine of Kafn a was still invoked among Muslims. and the distinction on the one hand between Arab and non-Arab Muslims and on the other between the tribe and family of the Prophet and the rest of the Arabs remained a factor of importance.
Occasionally writers on the subject make reference to the question of color. Sometimes they express the pious view and assert that a man of true piety, "even a black," is acceptable. In this connection they quote a story about Bilal, the Ethiopian muezzin of the Prophet, who wished to marry an Arab girl. Her family refused, and the Prophet (according to tradition) then sent a personal message to the family asking them to give their daughter to Bilal. The story is probably not authentic, since it deals with a prejudice which does not seem to have existed in the Prophet's lifetime. It is one of many such tales invented for the purpose of proving the egalitarian point. The same point is made in a story included in a tenth-century compilation.4 According to this tale, a man came to the Prophet and asked: "Do my blackness and the ugliness of my face bar me from entering paradise?" To which the Prophet answered no. The man then complained that although he had become a believing and loyal Muslim, "I have already asked everyone, present and absent, for the hand of one of their daughters in marriage, and they have all rejected me because of my black complexion and ugly face. Now in my tribe I am noble, but in my case the dark complexion of my mother's family has predominated." The Prophet then sent him to see a certain man of the tribe of Thagif, a recent adherent to Islam, and the father of "a freeborn daughter who was very beautiful and very wise." "Go then," said the Prophet, "knock gently on his door, give him greeting, and when you are inside say 'the Prophet has given me your daughter as wife.' " When the man of black complexion reached the door, knocked, and gave his greeting, they heard the voice of a stranger and opened the door; but when they saw how black and ugly he was, they shrank back. "The Prophet has given me your daughter as my wife." he said, but they drove him away in a nasty way. The girl's father went to see the Prophet and, when confronted with this rejection of the Prophet's will, excused himself: "I thought that this man must he lying in what he said. If he was telling the truth, my daughter is his, and I seek refuge in Allah from the wrath of Allah." The marriage was agreed, and the bride price was set at four hundred pieces of silver. When the suitor was about to go to his family to raise the money, the Prophet offered to raise it from three prominent Muslims. But as the suitor with his money was on his way to complete the transaction, he heard the call of the muezzin and, looking heavenward, decided to spend the money "in the service of God." that is, in the jihad. With the bride-money he bought a horse and weapons and rode out to do battle for the faith. In due course, he was killed and, dying, was tended by the Prophet himself, who saw him go to paradise, to be greeted by the houris. His body was brought to his prospective bride, and the bearers told her: "Allah has already married him to a better maid than any of yours." The story is obviously a moral tale, designed to make a point against racist prejudice-though, it may be noted, the man is Arab and noble on his father's side, and, since he dies a hero's death, the marriage does not in fact take place. Similar evasions are familiar in Western popular entertainment.
The condemnation of racial discrimination in marriage predominates in religious and legal discussions of the question. There are, however, other dicta, even traditions, which state the exact opposite and thus come closer to certain popular attitudes and practices. According to one undoubtedly spurious tradition, the Prophet said: "Be careful in choosing mates for your offspring, and beware of marrying the Zanji, for he is a distorted creature. Another similar tradition quotes the Prophet as forbidding intermarriage with blacks with the words: "Do not bring black into your pedigree."' The same idea is expressed in a verse cited by Mas`udi: "Do not intermarry with the sons of Ham, for they are the distorted among God's creatures, apart from Ibn Akwa`."'
Ibn Habib, a ninth-century Andalusian jurist, goes even further:
A black woman may be repudiated if there is no blackness in her family; likewise a scald-head, because such things are covered by kinship.
Ibn Habib's meaning is clear. Blackness, like skin diseases, runs in families. A Muslim bridegroom, it will be recalled, may not see his bride unveiled until after marriage. If he finds her black or scabby, he may repudiate her-unless he has taken a bride from a family known to have black or scabby members, in which case he has no grounds for complaint.
There is ample evidence that marriages of black men with white women were frowned upon. In earlier times it seems to have been virtually impossible for a black to marry an Arab woman. Later it became theoretically possible but was in fact usually excluded by the rule of Kafa'a, the general principle of which was, in the form adopted by the jurists, "Marry like with like." The black poet Nusayb had a son who sought to marry an Arab girl of the tribe of which he was a freedman. Nusayb's personal standing secured the acceptance of the girl's uncle and guardian, but he himself objected. He had his son beaten for aspiring to a marriage which he regarded as improper and advised the girl's guardian to find her a true Arab husband. Ironically. Nusayb's own daughters, dark-skinned like himself, remained unmarried. "My color has rubbed off on to them," he is quoted as saying, "and they are left on my hands. I don't want blacks for them, and whites don't want them." Their fate became proverbial for old maids with choosy fathers.9
For a white male to mate with a black woman was in general considered acceptable-with Nubians and other Nilotics much more than with the Zanj. Ethiopian women were, indeed, highly esteemed. Such mating usually took the form of concubinage-a legally and socially acceptable practice-rather than marriage. Some authors disapprove even of this, because of the harm it brought to a family's honor. Thus the Syrian author Abu'l-`Ala' (d. 1057) remarked in a letter:
We often see a man of mark who has in his house women of high degree setting above them a girl in a striped gown purchased for a few coins and so we may see a man whose grandfather on the father's side is a fair-haired descendant of `Ali while his maternal grandfather is a black idolator. Ii)
In early Islamic and pre-Islamic times the Arabs looked down on the sons of slave mothers, regarding them as inferior to the sons of freeborn Arab mothers." The stigma was attached to the status, not the race, of the mother and affected the sons of white as well as black concubines. Before long, however, a distinctive color prejudice appeared; and the association of blackness with slavery and whiteness with freedom and nobility became common.
Even princes were affected. `Abd al-Rahman ibn Umm Hakam, a nephew of the Caliph Mu`awiya and his governor in Kufa, had to endure mockery because of his dark skin and his Ethiopian ancestresses.'' An episode in the biography of the Abbasid prince Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi (779-839) is even more striking. His father was the caliph, his mother a high-born Persian lady from Daylam who was enslaved after the defeat of her father and the conquest of her country; but he was of swarthy color, so much so that some sourcesmistakenly, it would seem-say that his mother was black. Because of this dark skin and large body, says his Arabic biographer, he was known as al- Tinnfn-the dragon. After an unsuccessful bid for power, he was pardoned and summoned before his nephew, the Caliph al-Ma'mun. A curious
and instructive dialogue followed, which is reported on the authority of Ibrahim himself. The caliph greeted the dark-complexioned and unsuccessful pretender with a taunt: "Are you then the black caliph?" To this Ibrahim returned a soft answer, reminding al-Ma'mun that he had pardoned him and quoting the verse of the black slave poet Suhaym, "Though I am black of color my character is white." The caliph responded more kindly. Addressing Ibrahim as uncle, he indicated that his remark was meant in jest and capped his quotation with another, from an unnamed poet:
Ibrahim was a prince and a scholar. and his mother. though it concubine, was born a Persian lady or princess. Others were less fortunate: and many stories are told of people with an African mother or grandmother and with a dark complexion, who were subject to insult and humiliation on this account." A vivid example occurs in a satire ascribed, probably falsely, to Hassan ibn Thabit:
Whiteness was seen as a mark of superior birth. Thus the eleventh-century Tunisian poet Ibn Rashiq, in an ode in praise of the city of Qayrawan, boasts of the nobility of its inhabitants:
In time, this perception of society was sufficiently well established to provide a poetic metaphor for natural phenomena, as when the thirteenthcentury Andalusian poet Ibn Sahl celebrated the advent of spring.
To the present day, in North Africa, a man with Negroid features, even of the highest social status, is sometimes described as ould khadem, "the son of a "s slave woman.
Similar attitudes seem to have persisted among the Bedouin, though much less among the townspeople, in the Middle East. The local literary and documentary sources rarely discuss such matters: but Western visitors-at first travelers, later ethnologists and anthropologists-agree on the general picture. In the cities, notably in Arabia, cohabitation with black concubines was common and acceptable, and even marriage not unusual. As elsewhere, Ethiopians and Nubians were preferred for the bed. John Lewis Burckhardt, who visited Arabia in 1814, noted the frequency of African racial traits among the people of the Hijaz:
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry Page 13