Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

by Bernard Lewis

  The overwhelming majority of blacks who appear in Islamic paintings are, however, none of these things-neither sacred figures not monsters, neither exotic nor erotic. They are quite simply slaves and servants. They appear in countless pictures of court life, domestic life, and various outdoor scenes: in illustrations of narrative literature and other forms of belles-lettres; and-in Ottoman times-in the sumptuous albums portraying celebrations of special occasions at the Ottoman court. In these pictures the black appears with fair frequency. When he does so, he is almost invariably carrying a tray, pushing a broom, leading a horse, wielding a spade, pulling an oar or a rope, or discharging some other subordinate or menial task. Blacks appear as servants and attendants, as masons and gardeners, as grooms and huntsmen, or as boatmen. Mostly they are male, though female figures occasionally appear. Some of the finest examples of thirteenth-century descriptive art occur in illustrations of the Arabic literary works known as magamat, a kind of poetic prose narrative. In one of them, dated 1237 and probably completed in Mesopotamia, the artist vividly portrays a slave market in the Yemen, in which black slaves imported from Africa are bought and sold. In another similar manuscript, completed a few years earlier in Syria, a black slave is shown bringing food. In numerous Persian, Indian, and Turkish miniatures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, blacks variously appear as grooms, huntsmen, and servants of various kinds.

  In Ottoman times the chief black eunuch of the court, sometimes known as the Aga of the Gate of Felicity, or more informally as the Aga of the Girls, was a major personage at the Ottoman court. His dignity and position are vividly portrayed by court artists. From the late sixteenth century we have a number of magnificent albums depicting various aspects of the life of the Ottoman court, and several of these portray the black eunuchs and other functionaries. A manuscript dated 1597 shows an Ottoman prince and grand vizier with black attendants, the heir apparent with black eunuchs. and, in a particularly interesting picture, the funeral of the sultan's mother. Nurbanu (born Cecilia Venier-Baffo, of Venice), with black eunuchs in attendance. A much later volume, illustrated by the great painter Levni in about 1720-32, depicts in great detail the ceremonies and celebrations at the circumcision of a young prince. In one picture, we see princes, pages, and black eunuchs at an evening party by the Golden Horn; in another, the chief black eunuch conducts the young prince to the circumcision ceremony.''

  One of the greatest of Persian painters, the famous Behzad, who flourished in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, seems to have used a black figure as a kind of signature. In many of his paintings such a figure appears, usually in a very minor capacity. This mannerism was picked up by some of his disciples and successors, and became characteristic of the school of Herat, which he founded. Clearly, the primary role of the black as menial was by this time so well understood that he could acquire a secondary role as a symbol.

  In reviewing the evidence of prejudice and discrimination in the Middle Eastern past, I have tried to correct the false picture drawn by the myth makers, a picture of idyllic freedom from such evils. But in correcting an error, one should not fall into the opposing error. At no time did the peoples of the Middle East ever practice the kind of racial oppression which exists in South Africa at the present time or which existed until recently in the United States. My purpose is not to set up a moral competition-to compare castration and apartheid as offenses against humanity or to argue the relative wickedness of Eastern and Western practices; it is rather to refute the claims of both exclusive virtue and exclusive vice and to point to certain common failings of our common humanity. The correction of error-even of emotionally satisfying and politically useful error-is a legitimate, indeed a necessary task of the historian.

  This raises another, and an important, question. If, as the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates, the conventional picture of a society totally free from racial prejudice and discrimination is false, how then did it come to be? The sources of this Western-made myth may he found in European and American, rather than Middle Eastern, history. The American Civil War brought the issue of slavery sharply before European opinion, the more so since it coincided with a renewed and determined British effort, by both diplomatic and naval action, to induce Muslim rulers in Turkey, Arabia, and elsewhere to ban, and indeed suppress, the slave trade. Comparisons were inevitable, and the obvious contrasts led some European observers to defend Muslim slavery, or at least to praise Muslim racial attitudes.

  The defenses took a variety of forms. One of the first to make the comparison was the Austrian scholar-diplomat Alfred von Kremer, in a book published in 1863. Kremer abhors slavery and describes the abduction and trans portation of the African slaves in blood-chilling terms. He notes, however, as did many previous travelers, that the slave, once he reached his destination, was relatively well treated. More significantly, he acquits the Muslims of race prejudice:

  The color prejudice that is maintained in so crude a form by the free sons of America, not only against genuine Africans but even against their descendants in the fourth and fifth degrees, is not known in the Orient. Here a person is not considered inferior because he is of a darker complexion. This can easily be explained from the nature of slavery in the Orient, where the slave is not separated by an insurmountable barrier from the family of his master, where the slave does not belong to a caste that is despised and barely considered human, but where in contrast, between master and slave, there is the most intimate and manifold relationship. In the Orient there can hardly be a Muhammedan family that is without slave blood.'

  Snouck Hurgronje draws a similar distinction between Muslim and American attitudes, and complains that the Americans have given slavery a bad name. European public opinion, he says, has been misled by a confusion between the two types of black slavery and warns his reader that if he goes into an Arabian slave market with European ideas, "perhaps even with recollections of a reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin in his head," he will get a very negative impression. But, he goes on, the first impression is false, and unfortunately most travelers to the Orient bring hack "little but their false first impressions. "2

  Kremer's assertion of the total absence of race prejudice or discrimination in Islamic society was surely exaggerated, and even Snouck Hurgronje, in his defense of black slavery in Arabia, written twenty years later and with the advantage of a visit to the holy cities, uses a more cautious formulation. But the contrast between Islamic and American conditions was real, and the exaggeration a natural consequence of European revulsion from American attitudes and practices. In the horrors of the abduction of Africans from their homes, for delivery to Islamic and American purchasers, there was little to choose, and indeed the same intermediaries may have served in both cases. Nor was there much difference in the dangers and hardships of the journey, until the human merchandise reached its ultimate destination, across ocean or desert. It was in the treatment accorded to the slaves by their new masters, and the place assigned to them in the societies to which they had come, that the main contrast was to be seen. Some European observers, particularly from the conservative and monarchical societies, derived ironic amusement from the spectacle of slavery in free America; others were shocked and horrified. Even the European colonial empires had long since outlawed slavery, first at home and then in their overseas possessions, where it had in any case never reached the American level of racial discrimination and oppression.

  Travelers who compared Islamic with American slavery mostly overlooked the fact that they were comparing two different types of slave employ ment, domestic and economic. The slaves whom Western travelers in the East encountered and described were those employed in households, and their lot and degree of acceptance were certainly far better than those of domestic slaves in the Americas. But there were also slave workers in the Middle East, for example, in southern Iraq, where, according to British consular reports, agricultural labor in the pestilential climate was largely assigned to black slaves imported by sea.' L
ater in the century, the sudden wealth accruing to Egypt from the export of cotton during the American Civil War enabled Egyptian farmers to grow rich and also to import black slaves to cultivate their fields.' These were rarely seen or described by Western travelers. There were also some black laborers in the cities. Thus even Snouck Hurgronje noted that "shining pitchblack negro slaves" were used in Mecca for "the hardest work of building, quarrying, etc." and believed that "their allotted work ... is generally not too heavy for them, though most natives of Arabia would be incapable of such bodily efforts in the open air."`

  In fact, the limits of toleration accorded to persons of African or partAfrican origin varied considerably from time to time and from place to place. In Arabia, where Islamic sentiments were strongest, African slaves and freedmen could occupy positions of power and authority, though they were far less likely to reach such positions than their white colleagues. It was only after the virtual disappearance of the white slave that the black slave was commonly able to attain such heights. Children of Arab fathers and black-usually Ethiopian-concubines suffered no significant disability in the holy cities, where they were able to rise to the social level of their free Arab fathers. If their fathers were sharifs, they, too, were, or could be, sharifs. The swarthy son of a free Arab father and an African mother, by virtue of his father's status, could marry a white woman. But few, if any, Arab families were willing to give their daughters in marriage to a genuine African man.

  The myth of Islamic racial innocence was a Western creation and served a Western purpose. Not for the first time, a mythologized and idealized Islam provided a stick with which to chastise Western failings. In the eighteenth century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment had praised Islam for its lack of dogmas and mysteries, its freedom from priests and Inquisitors and other persecutors-recognizing real qualities but exaggerating them as a polemical weapon against the Christian churches and clergy. In the early nineteenth century, West European Jews, newly and still imperfectly emancipated, appealed to a legendary golden age in Muslim Spain, of complete tolerance and acceptance in symbiotic harmony.' This, too, had some foundation in reality but was greatly overstated to serve at once as a reproach and an encouragement to their somewhat dilatory Christian emancipators.

  In the same way, the myth of total racial harmony in the Islamic world appears to have arisen as a reproach to the practices of white men in the Americas and in Southern Africa, beside which indeed even Islamic realities shone in contrast. This idea won particular favor in the nineteenth century among Christian missionaries in Africa, who sought some explanation of the failure of their missions as contrasted with the success of Islam, despite every advantage of power, wealth, and (as they saw it) truth. The explanation which some missionaries found was in the difference between the second-class status accorded to black Christians by white rulers and the immediate equality received by black converts to Islam. There may indeed be a great deal of truth in this, but it overlooks two important points-first, that the Muslim preachers were themselves black and represented the far limit of Islamic expansion into Africa, and second, that even so, there were shades of difference, perhaps invisible to the outsider but vitally important to the people themselves.

  It is significant that one of the most influential proponents of the myth was Edward W. Blyden, a black West Indian who was educated in Liberia under missionary auspices but was convinced by his African experiences that Islam was better suited than Christianity to black African needs. His writings, with their stress on Christian guilt and on a somewhat romanticized Muslim tolerance, were widely read.' Writers of this school usually make the illogical assumption that the reprobation of prejudice in a society proves its absence. In fact, of course, it reveals its presence. Anti-Semitism is a criminal offense in Germany and Russia, but not in England or America.

  That the myth has survived and been taken up enthusiastically in our time is due, I think, to another factor, to what might be called nostalgia for the white man's burden. The white man's burden in Kipling's sense-the Westerner's responsibility for the peoples over whom he ruled-has long since been cast off and seized by others. But there are those who still insist on maintaining it-this time as a burden not of power but of guilt, an insistence on responsibility for the world and its ills that is as arrogant and as unjustified as the claims of our imperial predecessors.

  Preface

  1. For a rare example of a fair and honest approach to a delicate and sensitive topic, see Samir M. Zoghby, "Blacks and Arabs: Past and present." Current Bibliography on African Affairs 3, no. 5 (May 1970), pp. 5-22.

  Chapter 1

  1. See below, p. 151.

  2. On pre-classical antiquity, see Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (New York. 1949): G. R. Driver and John C. Miles, The Babylonian Laws, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1952), pp. 478-90; Muhammad A. Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia, from Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626-331 B.C.), trans. Victoria A. Powell (De Kalb, IL, 1984). There is a vast literature on slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds. For some modern studies, citing earlier work, see William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia, 1955) ; Keith Hopkins. Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1978); K. R. Bradley. Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New York and Oxford, 1987); M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge and New York, 1968); idem, ed., Classical Slavery (London, 1987); idem, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York, 1980): Zvi Yavetz, Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome (New Brunswick, NJ, and Oxford, 1988). The question whether Greek and Roman societies were based on a slave system of production has given rise to vigorous, often heated, and still continuing controversy. It need not detain us here. On slavery in general, including a thoughtful comparative study of ancient and Middle Eastern slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Cultures (Ithaca, NY, 1966); idem, Slavery and Human Progress (New York and Oxford, 1984).

  3. On slavery in Roman law, see W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law on Slavery (Cambridge, 1908): Ohs Robleda, II diritto degli schiavi nell'antica Roma (Rome, 1976).

  4. E.g., Deut 15:15. The Passover prayers and rituals, celebrating the Exodus, are an annual reminder to Jews that they are the descendants of slaves who won freedom. On slavery among Jews, in law and practice, see E. E. Urbach. The laws regarding slavery as a source for the social history of the period of the second Temple, the Mishnah and Talmud," in Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, ed. J. G. Weiss, vol. 1 (Jerusalem and London, 1964), pp. 1-94; Simha Assaf, Be-ohale Ya'ag6v (Jerusalem, 1943), pp. 223-56; Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (New York, 1957), pp. 187-96. For the Talmudic laws regarding slavery, see Gittin 8a-9a, l lb-I5a, 37b-45a, 46b-47a (The Babylonian Talmud, Seder Nashim, ed. 1. Epstein, Gitlin, trans. Maurice Simon, vol. 4 [London, 1936], pp. 27-31, 39-55, 155-98, 206-7) and Yehamot, passim. See, further. Westermann, Slave Systems, pp. 124-26.

  5. As, for example, in Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkh6t Avadim 9:8.

  6. It is interpreted in this sense by Maimonides, who quotes this verse, along with other texts, in an eloquent plea for the humane treatment of the Canaanite, i.e., the non-Jewish slave (ibid). Recommendations for the good treatment of Jewish slaves sometimes appear extreme: "[The slave] must be [equal to] thee in food and drink, that thou shouldst not eat white bread and he black bread, thou drink old wine and he new wine, thou sleep on a feather bed and he on straw. Hence it was said. Whoever buys a Hebrew slave is like buying a master for himself" (Qiddushin, 20a [Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin, trans. H. Freedman, vol. 4, p. 92]).

  7. Gal 3:28; cf. similar statements in 1 Cor 12:13 and Col 3:11, "Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all, and in all."

  8. E.g., Luke 12:37-38, 17:7-9, 19:13-22, 20:10-12; Mark 12:2-5, etc. By using "servant" to render the Greek doulos, "slave," the Engl
ish (and other European) translators of the Bible sub-edited slavery out of Christianity. For the Hebrew 'ehhed in the Old Testament, the English translators use "slave," "bondsman," and sometimes "servant." The Vulgate, correctly, translates both doulos and 'ebhed as servus.

  9. For other acceptances of slavery, see 1 Cor 7:21-23 and Col 3:21; G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, "Early Christian attitudes to property and slavery," in Church, Society, and Politics, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1975), pp. 15-16; Westermann. Slave Systems, pp. 128-29,149-62.

  10. Piero A. Milani, La schiavitu net pensiero politico dai Greci al basso medio evo (Milan, 1972), pp. 147ff., 161ff., and, on the Roman Stoics, pp. 204ff.; Westermann, Slave Systems, pp. 109-17.

  11. Philo Judaeus, Quod omnis prohus, 79; cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18, 21: "Essenes ... do not own slaves.... They believe it contributes to injustice"; Davis, Problem of Slavery, pp. 81-82; Westermann, Slave Systems, p. 117. For other examples, see Robert Schlaifer, "Greek theories of slavery from Homer to Aristotle," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 10, no. 7 (1936), pp. 127-29 (reprinted in Finley, Slavery, pp. 199-201); Milani, La schiavitu, pp. 145ff.