Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

I have been told several times by Muslims that Islam does not allow slavery, and similar assertions can be found on websites aimed at educating infidels about the religion.It's not easy to understand the motive for such claims. The truth is that, unlike other salvationist, universalizing religions like Buddhism or Christianity, Islam depended on slavery to make conversions.In "Race and Slavery in the Middle East," Bernard Lewis, as usual, provides many documents to illustrate his point. No honest person can deny that Islam countenanced slavery. Lewis is concerned to trace the evolution of racism along with slavery.There is good evidence that the pre-Islamic Arabs did not make racial judgments. In this they were like classical, civilized people. The doctrine of Islam is clearly anti-racist. The dogma of equality (not extended, of course, to women) is unquestionable.Nevertheless, almost as soon as they became Muslims, the Arabs turned racist. Lewis traces this to a general competition in the second and third generations, when the few Arabs who conquered so many were in danger of being swamped by non-Arab Muslims, and, even more, by half-Arabs -- their own children by slave mothers of the conquered groups.The brief essay (over half the 184 pages are endnotes and translations of documents) accepts -- most of the time -- the claim of 19th century Jewish (!) scholars that slavery under Islam was less "oppressive" than in the Americas or than the official racism in South Africa (still under apartheid) when this book was published in 1990.Lewis even accepts, absurdly, that being a Muslim slave was an improvement on being a slave of a Greek or Roman. This might be so (or it might not), but it is irrelevant. The early slaves had theretofore been free men, so the kindness of the Muslims in robbing and enslaving them probably did not seem as admirable to them as it does to Professor Lewis.This is very strange.The strangeness -- aside from the lapses in judgment by the usually reliable Lewis -- is that Muslim apologists despise Lewis for misrepresenting Islam to Dar-al-Harb. Yet in almost all his many books, Lewis gives the benefit of the close calls to Islam. Never more flagrantly than here.The evidence that the humanity of Islamic slavery is a hoax is fully evidenced within this book (and elsewhere), even if Lewis ignores his own writing.To begin with, Lewis admits (as did the Ottoman sultan, under British tutelage) that conditions from capture to sale to an Muslim buyer were horrible. Somehow, this part of the system "does not count," even though for many slaves it constituted a large part of their career as slaves -- for millions, all of it.Secondly, Lewis marvels a bit that in the Middle East there are no large communities of blacks and mulattoes, as there are in the Americas. This despite the fact that the core lands of Islam imported black slaves for more than three times as long as happened in the Americas. (The Muslims took white slaves, too, until rising western military competence put a stop to it; a minor part of this book.)Although there were times and places where African slaves in the Americas were worked to death, in general they reproduced at far above replacement rates. In Muslim hands, slaves hardly reproduced at all.This could not have happened if, in fact, Muslims treated their slaves better than Europeans and Americans did.It is probably significant of Lewis's concern to lessen the obvious imputations about Muslim behavior that he gives hardly two sentences to the revolt of black slaves in southern Iraq in the 10th century, and not a word about the death toll. No one knows what it was -- Muslim sources are silent or faked -- but historians believe it was probably the biggest slave revolt in history. Nine hundred thousand slaves may have been killed. Comparable to the population at the time, this was a slaughter worse than anything 20th century Germans achieved.In his final words, Lewis says that his study assumed that the extreme claims on either side -- of the savagery of Islamic slavery or its mildness (he does not consider claims that it did not exist) -- could not be right. But even the evidence of his own book, not to mention widely available evidence elsewhere, shows that he has sugarcoated Islamic slavery.

Highly detailed, well-sourced and nuanced book on how the ancient peoples of the Middle East regarded issues considered highly sensitive today, such as race and how they helped shape and defined relations between various ethnic groups at the time, as well as how mutual perceptions of each other came to impact their world for generations to come.In essence, Lewis shows us that while many religions and belief systems may in theory call for and advocate racial equality and justice, the reality can at times be far more complex and ultimately present a much more multi-faceted picture.

This book is nothing less than an intellectual disaster. It is an insult both to Africans and Islam. The book simply attempts to equate slavery in the Middle East from since the preIslamic era up to the 19th century with the form of slavery practised by the West in the New World. In short, Lewis attempts to attack Islam by using blacks and their station in Islam as the means or weapon of doing so.In order to achieve his purpose, he has to come up with a very narrow and restricted definitions of these two things. I mean Africa/blacks and Islam. Islam after all is a religion, history and culture which spans over a vast expanse of geography and peoples and an equally vast expanse of time, several centuries in a matter of fact.Africa and the word black also means various things in Islam. Lewis actually makes mention of the fact that Arabs frequently referred to themselves as black, in the exact same way that they would refer to Bantu speaking East Africans, designated as Zanj, as black. Lewis actually makes it clear that the word black was no indication of ethnicity in the early Arabic period. And goes on to make the claim that somehow,after thedeath of the Prophety, the Arabs stopped using the word black as a personal description and begun using it as an ethnic appellation for Africans. He gives the story of the Black Arab, Ubada who conquered Egypt, as one of the last episodes of Arabs showing respect for people with black skin color. As far as he is concerned, from here everything goes downhill:"The episode of the noble but swarthy `Ubada occurred at the very beginning of Arab expansion. Under the patriarchal caliphs and still more under the Umayyad caliphs in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, we find ample evidence of a radical change of attitudes.Bernard Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Kindle Locations 466-467). Kindle Edition. "Lewis also refuses to spend anytime to describe the nature of Islam in any of the African regions of the Middle East. Parts of Africa, which were part of the umma, global Islamic world include: Egypt, the Maghrib, West Africa, under Medieval Islamic kingdoms such as Mali and Songhay, Central Afrian Kingdom of Kanem, Somalia, parts of Ethiopia and the Swahili maritime communities of South East Africa. This omission is glaring, especially in a book which purports to give an account of black slavery in the Middle East.And the book is definitely about Black slavery in the Middle east despite the title. Lewis makes mention of white slavery, but somehow constructs his argument in such a way as to portray white slavery as something minor, insignificant, temporary, less vicious and somehow eventually and inevitably being replaced by black slavery. This is ahistorical nonsense ofcourse. According to Robert Davis "From 1500 to 1650 when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy more Europeans were taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas. See, Robert Davis Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, MacMillan Publishers, published 2003".Lets look at Lewis' geographic definition of Africa and Black. Black Africa in Lewis' book does not include Egypt, North Africa and the Maghreb. Naturally because the enslavement of blacks or the recruiting of black slave soldiers by governments of these regions would mean in Lewis' world view the enslavement or opression of blacks by suppossedly white powers, no different from the enslavement of blacks by white Western powers. This ofcourse contradicts the rich corps of Arabic litereature which specifically includes North Africa and the Magreb as part of the black races. In chapter 4, he references Jahiz (beginning from kindle location 515) and mentions the fact that the Egyptians or Copts were among the races of the Blacks, but dismisses this classification as not common or typical and refuses to expain how. He even goes as far as claiming that Jahiz, who was himself of probable African descent, was somehow not being sincere in his praise or defense of blacks. Here is the original quote by Al Jahiz, in his Defense of the Blacks:"The blacks are more numerous than the whites. The whites at most consist of the people of Persia, Jibal,and Khurasan, the Greeks, Slavs, Franks, and Avars, and some few others, not very numerous; the blacks include the Zanj, Ethiopians, the people of Fazzan, the Berbers, the Copts, and Nubians, the people of Zaghawa..."The people of Fazzan, the Berbers and Copts all include North Africa. The Fazzan, in Southern Libya especially which was a source of black slaves for many parts of North Africa. This would suggest that Black slave soldiers in North African polities was a case of black governments enslaving other blacks as oppossed to some evidence of growing antiblack prejudice against darkskinned Africans after the islamic expansion following the death of the prophet.Al Jahiz also makes mention of Abraham's marriage to an Egyptian wife, to make the claim that blacks were as spiritually worthy as any other group, which Louis does not quote:" The Copts too are blacks. Abraham the friend of God married one of them and so was born a big prophet the ancestor of the Arabs; Ismael. The Prophet (p.b.u.h.) also married one of them and Ibrahim was born..."Al Jahiz does nothing less here than claim Arabs as part of the wide and varied family of the black races, through their desecent through Ishmael. Lewis himself in his notes quotes otherArabic authors who make the same or similar claims, in relation to the curse of Ham:"Wahb ibn Munabbih said: Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and a fine figure, and Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father's curse. He went away, followed by his sons, and they settled by the shore, where God increased and multiplied them. They are the blacks. Their food was fish, and they sharpened their teeth like needles, as the fish stuck to them. Some of his children went to the West [Maghrib]. Ham begat Kush ibn Ham, Kan'an ibn Ham, and Fut ibn Ham. Fut settled in India and Sind and their inhabitants are his descendants. Kush and Kan'an's descendants are the various races of blacks: Nubians, Zanj, Qaran, Zaghawa, Ethiopians, Copts, and Berbers.Bernard Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Kindle Locations 2049-2053). Kindle Edition. "This has a bearing and certain implications in his chapter "Slaves in Arms", where slave armies are portrayed as a priviledged position which Berbers and Turks mostly benefit from (in the case of Egypt), with blacks always being at the losing end. Blacks in slave armies are portrayed universally as being betrayed, tricked or marginalised by white powers. He goes at length to describe the situation in Fatimid Egypt, which he portrays as a rivalry between Blacks, Berbers and Turks, with Berbers and Turks being lightskin troops outsmarting the blacks. However in the specific case of Fatimid Egypt we know well enough that Masmuda Berbers made up a large proportion of the black army, according to Yaacov Lev, "Army, Regime and Society in Fatimid Egypt, 358-487/968-1094″, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 19.3 (1987) p. 342.Lewis' flawed argument is based on omission and cherry picking. Here is what Edward Said had to say about Lewis: "The fact is that the present political moment allows him to deliver ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism." The present political moment ofcourse means in the wake of the attacks of the WTC in the 1980. [...] This political moment ofcourse has only intensified with the 911 attacks.Lewis seems to take issue with the claim that Islam as a culture and a religion is much more tolerant than Western Christian societies at the height of the colonial era. In the last pages of the last chapter, he makes an allussion to Edward Blyden, a famous pan Africanist, who frequently made that point:"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."One cant help but notice the nonsensical suggestion that Blyden who was educated under "missionary auspices" was somehow ungrateful for such an education by making the assertion. Lewis' wider point ofcourse is nonsense. Islam in Africa, including North Africa (as oppossed to the far limit of Islamic expansion into Africa) has shown a great deal of respect for the contribution of blacks to Islamic civilization. Ghana and the rest of Western Sudan was respected as a land ruled by competent African Rulers who organised a fablous trade in Gold. The early Ibadite and kharijite communities in North Africa, who were so essential in expanding the Gold trade in the Western Sudan included a number of Sudanese as their leaders and members. From: Fadge J.D (2002) The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 2, pg 643-645--Cambridge Histories online, 2008.After the Moroccan invasion of Songhay in the late 16th century by a Moroccan army made up largely of White Christian slave soldiers, Ahmed Bahba, a Timbuktu scholar was kidnapped and bought to Morocco, where he immediately became the leading Islamic Scholar of the whole Maghreb, even lamenting the shabby sholarly and intellectual standards which the Almoravids and Almohads bequeathed to North Africa. Before that, the reputation of Timbuktu as a center of unrivalled Islamic scholarship was already well respected and the stuff of legend. There is also the Amoravid invasion of Spain, which begun in the Senegambia region, which Lewis designates as the "limit of Islamic expansion in Africa." One doubts that a historic episode as momentous as the Almoravid conquest of Spain could be dismissed as "the far limit of Islamic expansion in Africa'. Anyone familiar with the Amoravids and their descriptions by their European contemporaries (who refererred to them as Moors) would be fully aware of the Almoravids as blacks ruling over a largely white society. This recognition of Moors or North Africans as being synonymous with blacks would go back even earlier before the islamic conquest of Visigothic Spain. From a book easily found here at Amazon:" Indeed, by the time Isidore of Seville came to write his Etymologies, the word Maurus or `Moor' had become an adjective in Latin, `for the Greeks call black, mauron'. In Isidore's day, Moors were black by definition..." (Staying Roman: Conquest and identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700. Jonathan Conant, 2012 Cambridge University Press.)"These things all go against the oversimplified narrative that Islam in its early period, before the prophet Mohammed's death was relatively free of negrophobic prejudice, only later to be overwhelmed and characterised by an antiblack racism no different from what was practised by 19th century Western societies. His interpretation of the use of slave soldiers in Islam is equally problematic. In the chapter labelled "Slaves in Arms",he gives a peculiar narrative of black slave armies, where the black slave troops always end up being betrayed or losing to either white rulers or their lighter skin rivals.Lewis constructs his argument by making use of various quotes by Islamic poets and scholars from different regions and different periods to make his point. It reminds one of the use often made of the Bible by religious ideologues. The Bible is large enough to find quotes that can prove just about anything believed by the person quoting it: A catholic priest could quote parts of the Bible to justify his stance against the death penalty, whereas an Evangelist priest could do the same to justify his stance in favor of the death penalty. What matters in either case is not the Bible but rather the ideology of the person wielding it.Likewise we ought to make a distinction between the large and varied corps of Islamic texts and literature and the ideology of people such as Lewis who pose themselves as fair and balanced interpreters of these texts. Lewis simply abuses his knowledge of Arabic and Islamic sources to heap abuse on Islam using blacks as a weapon. The conclusion of Lewis in the last chapter reveals more of his ideology, where he continues to reference Blyden:"His (Edward Blyden's) 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."There are so many things wrong with this paragraph. Edward Blyden lived and wrote in a time when slavery was well and alive in the US. His lifetime also saw the Berlin conference where Africa was divided between the expanding European colonial powers. Dismissing Blyden's writings as stressing on Christian guilt and romanticising Muslim tolerance seems quite incredible. The White Man's burden was most definitely the inspiration of colonialism and even a justification for Western slavery.And the white guilt is not something attributable to people like Blyden or the whites who agreed with his work but rather to people like Lewis himself. His book after all is nothing more but an intellectually disastrous attempt to convince us or maybe even himself that anti-black racism in the Islamic world was the same as antiblack racism in the US or British colonies at the height of empire. Accusing Arabs or the Islamic world of being guilty ofexactly what the West was guilty of. However it ought to be clear that the scientific racism upon which Western slavery and prejudice was based is something unique to the West, and no other society. This scientific racism led eventually to things such as the Jewish Holoacaust, which Lewis suggests in his point about antisemitism in Germany(I dont know why Russia). Trying to imagine or define some ancient black racism that Arabs or Islam were guilty of and equating such a racism with Western racism is making a mockery of history.

Professor Lewis in top form as usual. Professor Lewis identifies the reality of the Middle East vs Edward Said's delusions and victimology. Professor Lewis, RIP.

An excellent tour of historical race relations and subjugation in medieval times.

good

Informative work. Helps me understand some of the complexities I see today

I think the writer is falsely biased against Christianity, the only relegion that said Man and Women are both created on the image of God is the Judeo Christian world view with implicitly is againist ensalving mankindAnother example is NT full of qoutes againist slavery for example ""There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Gal 3:28. What really enslaved freemen is Islam through raceful conquests and enslavment I have tons of evidence for that. I am getting an impression that Bernard might be Christophobic

I was amazed going through this book. It gave me so much perspective on the history of interactions among the Arabian, Egyptian, North African and Saharan states. It was fascinating to read about that period without the 'weight' of European point of view weighing as heavily as it normally does.

There is plenty of exagerated and distorted perceptions in the west about slavery in early Islam and middle east.Although this may be a short introduction, it goes in depth of the rights and social status of slaves and concubines in early Islamic history and the development of the concept of slavery. Slavery in the middle eastern societies was defined differently in status, ranks and ethics in comparison to what it was like in the west. A book worth reading

Bernard Lewis ist ein Kenner des Mittleren Ostens, auch in diesem Buch ist dies deutlich spürbar.Das brisante Thema der Sklaverei und der Rassen im Mittleren Osten wird aufgrund des profunden Wissens Lewis hervorragend in diesem Buch aufbereitet und dargestellt. Vorurteile und Mythen werden aufgedeckt und berichtigt. Dabei wird von den Grundlagen des Islams her das Wissen zur Sklaverei und Rassen herausgearbeitet. Zwar kennt der Islam nur Gläubige, die ohne Rassenvorurteile alle gleich sein sollen, Lewis kann jedoch zeigen, dass die Realität anders aussah. Trotzdem standen Sklaven erstaunliche Aufstiegschancen zur Verfügung.Das Buch ist für historisches Verständnis, Religion und interkulturelle Studien hervorragend geeignet, aber auch für den interessierten Leser gut verständlich.

Very interesting. I should have liked more on the activities of Arab slavers on the westward trade, towards the Americas