History Of Arab Slave Trade
In 1842 CE, 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.
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 up a slave. First, a child born to slave parents was a slave. Second, a person captured in a Jihad against non-Muslims could be made a slave. Third, a slave could be purchased or finally, a slave could be given as a tribute.
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| History Of Arab Slave Trade |
The people living under Islamic rule, Muslim or non-Muslim, could not be enslaved unless they rebelled or they helped an enemy of the state. 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. Ibn Butlan, in his handbook, tries to characterize them. He recommends Indians and Nubians as guards of persons and property. As laborers, servants, and eunuchs, he recommends Zanj 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 Mamluks 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 Umayyads. Even free black people weren’t all treated fairly across the Muslim world but as always, there were exceptions.
An early chronicler, Jahshiyari writes an anecdote 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 a 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. Abd al-Hamid wrote, “Had you been able to find a smaller number than one and a worse color than black, you would have sent thatas a gift.” This story, along with many others, show that the Arabs didn’t view African slaves particularly nicely and preferred other ethnicities if they could get them. Even in the times of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), Byzantine and Persian slaves were found in Arabia. Africans were just one of various slaves available. However, over time, the number of black slaves in Africa grew disproportionately. Main reason for that was the stabilization of the frontiers. Turks and Indians started to embrace Islam and 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.
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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 treaty with Nubia where Nubia would provide slaves in exchange for peace. This was probably the reason that Nubia was not 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 sub sequence 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 Gulf and cities like Basra and Baghdad is where, they were sold to the Muslims. Somalis before they were Islamized were a large number of slaves imported, and later interior peoples were exported as slaves from the Somali coast across into the Yemen and from there, via Mecca, Damascus and Baghdad. In Mesopotamia, a large number of Zanj slaves were used in thousands of plantations and saltpeter mines. Apparently, the working conditions were so terrible that they revolted numerous times between 868 CE and 883 CE and became a serious threat to the Abbasid Caliphate. This went on for centuries and became a system but it wasn’t as severe as it later grew into.
At the time, various African tribes raided each other and enslaved the prisoners, selling them on the frontiers of the Islamic Empire. From here, Arabs took over and took these slaves inland, not only to be sold in their borders but also, in India and across the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, the holiest site in the Islamic world, Mecca became a bustling market for slave trading. People bought slaves in this market when they visited for Hajj, the Islamic Pilgrimage. Slaves were brought there as a commodity which could be sold to get some cash. They were easier to protect than any other precious commodity in a huge caravan so, people brought them along. People also bought them in Mecca since people from all over the world would gather there. All the way up to 1962 CE, slaves were being sold in Mecca. In “The Legacy of Arab-Islam In Africa”,John Alembillah Azumah writes the following The main areas from which slaves were drawn and exported to Egypt and other North African Muslim locations and then to the wider Islamic world were the central and western Sudan. The traffic started mainly from Nubia, from where people living to the south and east of Dongola were taken to Egypt. Slaves were exported also from Kanem-Bornovia Fezzan to Cairo, Tripoli and Qayrawan.
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| History Of Arab Slave Trade |
People groups living around the Lake Chadarea were later exported along this route while in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Bagirmi slaves (especially eunuchs) formed an important part of the slave traffic along this route. Some were sent later from Tripoli to ports in modern Turkey, Greece, Albania and southern Yugoslavia which were all at the time under the Ottoman empire. Slaves from the Middle Niger and the Atlantic coast were also drawn from Gao via Warghla to Tahert (in modern Algeria) and Qayrawan and later from Timbuktu through Tuwat to Tlemcen, Sijilmasa, Fez and other centres of the western Maghrib from where some passed into Muslim Spain and Sicily when it was under Muslim domination between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Ibn Khaldun testifies to the presence of a large black slave population in fourteenth-century North Africa when he wrote that blacks constituted‘the ordinary mass of slaves’.
Muslim Berber groups of North Africa like the Tuareg and Moors became the chief agents in the raiding, and in the traffic of black slaves to North Africa, Spain, Turkey and the Mediterranean world, some of whom were taken as far as India. As early as the eighth century, the Berber Ibadi community of North Africa virtually controlled the trade routes, and thus the traffic in black slaves. Considering the terrible conditions on the sea routes and the increasingly predatory nature of the slave raids, one historian estimates that for every slave that was sold in a market, 10 had died on the way there. These raids were often labeled Jihad by the raiders to legitimize them. Neither the Muslim raiders nor the buyers of slaves really cared about who the slaves were and where they came from. The Swahili coast became a bustling hub of slave trading. A network was established across the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. In the 18th and 19th century, when Ivory trade was on the rise, these slaves were also forced to carry Ivory and other precious commodities on their way to the markets by raiders. It was during those centuries that the slave trade reached its peak.
From around 1800 CE to 1850 CE, most European countries abolished slavery and the slave trade started to die on the western side. However, on the east, it was picking up further. The British did try to have countries abolish it but it didn’t work. Not only did it not work, it probably had the opposite effect. As colonization was taking place, a lot of these countries exported slaves. Muslim Bornu , for example, entered into a trade deal with the Ottoman Empire to provide them slaves. Muslim Africa ravaged the continent and raided deep into it. The stories of those raids are disturbing,to say the least. Most Muslim rulers of the region were interested in slavery because it was profitable. There weren’t many advocating for abolition,even though, in Europe, slavery had mostly died out. The British could not force the rulers to do away with slavery. However, by the end of the 19th century, Africa was almost entirely colonized by the British and slave trade was put to an end. Muslim states of the middle east were breaking into chaos, the Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe. The Europeans were isolating countries that still practiced slavery. All these factors combined put a slow end to slave trading by 1950. It was outlawed in Saudi Arabia in 1962 CE. However, slavery, in some forms, is still practiced in various Muslim and African countries. From 1450 CE to 1850 CE, an estimated 12 million African slaves were taken from Africa to the Americas. In around the same period, 5 million African slaves were traded by the Muslims. However, the Islamic trade existed for a much larger period than the European one and the total number of slaves traded from 600 CE to 1900 CE is around 17 million.
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