Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (13 page)

This kind of discrimination is well attested in Arabic literature: so too is
the resentment of its victims. As this class of victims-the sons of Arab fathers
and non-Arab mothers-became more numerous and more important, their
resentments became more dangerous. At one time it was argued-principally
by nineteenth-century European scholars reflecting the preoccupation of their
time and place with struggles for national freedom-that the great upheavals
of the mid-eighth century were due to a rising tide of Persian revolt against
Arab domination and that the Abbasid revolution marked their victory. This
theory, and the accompanying idea of a new Persian ascendancy, is not supported by the evidence. On the contrary, all the indications are that the Arab
ascendancy continued for some time after the advent of the Abbasid caliphs.
The caliphs themselves and all their senior officials and commanders were still
Arabs, Arabic was the sole language of government, and Arabs still continued
to enjoy important social and economic privileges in the empire.'

Nevertheless, major changes had been taking place. According to a saying
attributed to the Prophet, "the ruin of the Arabs will come when the sons of the
daughters of Persia grow to manhood." The tradition is certainly spurious, but
like many such spurious traditions it reflects, very accurately, the issues and
concerns of the time. Those who challenged and in time unseated the Arab
conquistador aristocracy were not the subject peoples, still traumatized by
conquest and politically inert. The challengers were their own sons, half-Arab
and therefore only half-privileged, increasing in numbers and in power, and
ever less willing to accept the disabilities and humiliations imposed upon them
by their full-blooded half-brothers. As with most major revolutionary changes,
the equalization of the half-Arabs began before the revolution and was not
accomplished until some time after its political completion. The last two
Umayyad caliphs were the sons of slave mothers; the first Abbasid, the son of a
free Arab woman.' But the second Abbasid caliph, and those who came after
him, were the sons of foreign concubines. The army of Khorasan. to which the
Abbasids owed their victory and for a while their survival, was an Arab, not a
Persian, army-but an Arab army half-Persianized by generations of residence
and intermarriage.'

The term commonly used by the ancient Arabs for the offspring of mixed
unions was hajin, a word which, like the English "mongrel" and "half-breed,"
was used both of animals and of human beings. For example, hajin would
indicate a horse whose sire was a purebred Arab and whose dam was not. It
had much the same meaning when applied to human beings, denoting a
person whose father was Arab and free and whose mother was a foreign slave.
The term hajin in itself is social rather than racial in content, expressing the contempt of the highborn for the baseborn, without attributing any specific
racial identity to the latter. Non-Arabs, of whatever racial origin, were of
course baseborn but so too were many Arabs who, for one reason or another,
were not full and free members of a tribe. Full Arabs-those born of two free
Arab parents-ranked above half-Arabs, the children of Arab fathers and
non-Arab mothers (the opposite case was inadmissible). Half-Arabs, in turn,
ranked above non-Arabs, who were, so to speak, outside the system.

Among the ancient Arabs there was an elaborate system of social gradations. A man's status was determined by his parentage, family, clan, sept, and
tribe and the rank assigned to them in the Arab social order. All this is richly
documented in poetry, tradition, and a vast genealogical literature. A more
difficult question is how far the ancient Arabs recognized and observed social
distinctions among the various non-Arab peoples and races who supplied
much, though not all, of the slave population of Arabia. According to `Abduh
Badawi, "there was a consensus that the most unfortunate of the hajins and
the lowest in social status were those to whom blackness had passed from their
mothers."'

At his discretion, the free father of a slave child could recognize and
liberate him and thus confer membership in the tribe. Under the Islamic
dispensation such recognition became mandatory. In pre-Islamic custom, however, the father retained the option; according to Badawi and the sources
cited by him, Arab fathers at that time were reluctant to recognize the sons of
black mothers.

This is probably an accurate description of the social attitudes of the
Bedouin aristocracy of conquest that emerged after the great expansion of the
Arabs in the seventh century and for a while dominated the new Islamic
Empire, which they created in the lands of the Middle East and North Africa.

Among these two groups, the non-Arab converts and the half-breed Arabs, color as such does not seem to have been a significant issue. The literature preserves the memory of a bitter struggle in which the three parties are
Arabs, half-Arabs, and non-Arabs. The identity of the non-Arab component
seems to have been of secondary importance, at least to the Arabs, though it
may have meant more among the non-Arabs themselves. The significance of
an African origin as distinct from other possible non-Arab origins lay in its
visibility. The son of an Arab father and a Persian or Syrian mother would not
look very different from the son of two Arab parents. The difference was in
effect social and depended on social knowledge. The son of an African
mother, however, was usually recognizable at sight and therefore more exposed to abuse and discrimination. "Son of a black woman" was a not infrequent insult addressed to such persons, and "son of a white woman" was
accordingly used in praise or boasting.10

Even the Caliph `Umar, said to have been the grandson of an Ethiopian
woman, was attacked retrospectively on this account. An early Arab author,
Muhammad ibn Habib, tells us that one day, during the lifetime of the
Prophet, a man insulted `Umar and called him "Son of a black woman,"
whereupon God revealed the Qur'anic verse, "0 believers! People should not mock other people who may be better than they are" (XLIX: 11)." The story,
which occurs in a rather brief chapter on great men who were the sons of
Ethiopian women, is almost certainly a pious invention, but not the less
interesting for that. It is probably a reply to Shiite propaganda against `Omar,
which made some play with his Ethiopian ancestress to discredit him.''

A second factor of importance was the wider range of experience which
conquest brought to the Arabs. Before Islam, their acquaintance with Africa
was substantially limited to Ethiopia, a country with a level of moral and
material civilization significantly higher than their own. During the lifetime of
the Prophet, the good reputation of the Ethiopians was further increased by
the kindly welcome accorded to Muslim refugees from Mecca. After the
conquests, however, there were changes. Advancing on the one hand into
Africa and on the other into Southwest Asia and Southern Europe, the Arabs
encountered fairer-skinned peoples who were more developed and darkerskinned peoples who were less so. No doubt as a result of this they began to
equate the two facts.

Coupled with this expansion was the third major development of the
early Islamic centuries-slavery and the slave trade." The Arab Muslims
were not the first to enslave black Africans. Even in Pharaonic times Egyptians had already begun to capture and use black African slaves, and some
are indeed depicted on Egyptian monuments.14 There were black slaves in
the Hellenistic and Roman worlds-but they seem to have been few and
relatively unimportant, and regarded no differently from other slaves imported from remote places. `s The massive importation of black slaves and
the growth of ethnic, even racial specialization in the slave population date
from after the Arab expansion in Africa and were an indirect and unintended consequence of one of the most important humanitarian advances
brought by the Islamic dispensation.

Inevitably, the large-scale importation of African slaves influenced Arab
(and therefore Muslim) attitudes to the peoples of darker skin whom most
Arabs and Muslims encountered only in this way.

This changing attitude affected even freemen of African ancestry-even
descendants of the Companions of the Prophet. Thus `Ubaydallah, the son of
Abu Bakra,16 was appointed governor of Sistan in 671 and again in 697.
Already by that time blackness had become a reproach; and a poet, in a satire
against him, said:

Even the caliph, who had appointed him, remarked: "The black man is lord of
the people of the East."" The descendants of Abu Bakra had acquired a
prominent social position in Basra and had forged themselves an Arab pedigree. This was rejected by the Caliph al-Mahdi (reigned 775-85 A.D.), who
compelled them to revert to the status of freedmen of the Prophet.

The low status of black slaves is illustrated by a number of anecdotes. An
Arab, seeking to avoid civil war among the Muslims, swears that "he would
prefer to be a mutilated Ethiopian slave tending broody goats on a hilltop
until death overtakes him, rather than that a single arrow should be shot
between the two sides."" An early chronicler, Jahshiyari, in a history of
ministers and secretaries, tells an anecdote about a certain `Abd al-Hamid (d.
ca. 750), the secretary of the last Umayyad caliph. The caliph had received the
gift of a black slave from a provincial governor. He was not greatly pleased
with this gift and instructed his secretary to write a letter of thanks and
disparagement. `Abd al-Hamid, we are told, wrote: "Had you been able to
find a smaller number than one and a worse color than black you would have
sent that as a gift."" Jahshiyari's purpose in telling this story is not to insult
blacks but to illustrate the readiness of wit of `Abd al-Hamid-but the story
vividly reflects a common attitude.

To the Muslims-as to the people of every other civilization known to
history-the civilized world meant themselves. They alone possessed enlightenment and the true faith; the outside world was inhabited by infidels and
barbarians. Some of these were recognized as possessing some form of religion and a tincture of civilization. The remainder-polytheists and idolatorswere seen primarily as sources of slaves, to be imported into the Islamic world
and molded in Islamic ways, and, since they possessed no religion of their own
worth the mention, as natural recruits for Islam. For these peoples, enslavement was thus a benefaction and was indeed often accepted as such. This
attitude is exemplified in the story of a pagan black king who is tricked and
kidnapped by Muslim guests whom he has befriended and sold into slavery in
Arabia. Meeting them again years later, he shows contempt but no resentment, since they had been the means of bringing him to Islam.'`" The notion
that slavery is a divine boon to mankind, by means of which pagan and
barbarous peoples are brought to Islam and civilization, occurs very frequently in later writers.