Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (20 page)

In 1757 a new sultan, Sidi Muhammad III, came to the throne. He decided
to disband the black troops and rely instead on Arabs. With a promise of royal
favor, he induced the blacks to come to Larache with their families and
worldly possessions. There he had them surrounded by Arab tribesmen, to
whom he gave their possessions as booty and the black soldiers, their wives,
and their children as slaves. "I make you a gift," he said, "of these abid, of
their children, their horses, their weapons, and all they possess. Share them
among you."29

Blacks were occasionally recruited into the mamluk forces in Egypt at the
end of the eighteenth century. "When the supply [of white slaves] proves
insufficient," says a contemporary observer, W. G. Browne, "or many have
been expended, black slaves from the interior of Africa are substituted, and if
found docile, are armed and accoutred like the rest." This is confirmed by
Louis Frank, a medical officer with Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, who
wrote an important memoir on the Negro slave trade in Cairo.'

In the nineteenth century, black military slaves reappeared in Egypt in
considerable numbers; their recruitment was indeed one of the main purposes
of the Egyptian advance up the Nile under Muhammad `Ali Pasha (reigned
1805-49) and his successors. Collected by annual razzias (raids) from Darfur
and Kordofan, they constituted an important part of the Khedivial armies and
incidentally furnished the bulk of the Egyptian expeditionary force which Said
Pasha sent to Mexico in 1863, in support of the French.3' An English traveler
writing in 1825 had this to say about black soldiers in the Egyptian army:

When the negro troops were first brought down to Alexandria, nothing could
exceed their insubordination and wild demeanour; but they learned the military evolutions in half the time of the Arabs; and I always observed they went
through the manoeuvres with ten times the adroitness of the others. It is the
fashion here, as well as in our colonies, to consider the negroes as the last link
in the chain of humanity, between the monkey tribe and man in intellect; and I
do not suffer the eloquence of the slave driver to convince me that the negro is
so stultified as to be unfit for freedom.31

Even in Turkey, liberated black slaves were sometimes recruited into the
armed forces, often as a means to prevent their reenslavement. Some of these
reached officer rank. A British naval report, dated January 25, 1858, speaks of
black marines serving with the Turkish navy:

They are from the class of freed slaves or slaves abandoned by merchants unable
to sell them. There are always many such at Tripoli. I believe the government
acquainted the Porte with the embarrassment caused by their numbers and
irregularities, and this mode of relief was adopted. Those brought by the Faizi
Bari, about 70 in number, were on their arrival enrolled as a Black company in
the marine corps. They are in exactly the same position with respect to pay,
quarters, rations, and clothing as the Turkish marines, and will equally receive
their discharge at the expiration of the allotted term of service. They are in short
on the books of the navy. They have received very kind treatment here, lodged
in warm rooms with charcoal burning in them day and night. A negro Mulazim
[lieutenant] and some negro tchiaoushes [sergeants], already in the service have
been appointed to look after and instruct them. They have drilled in the manual
exercise in their warm quarters, and have not been set to do any duty on account
of the weather. They should not have been sent here in winter. Those among
them unwell on their arrival were sent at once to the naval hospital. Two only
have died of the whole number. The men in the barracks are healthy and appear
contented. No amount of ingenuity can conjure up any connexion between their
condition and the condition of slavery.32

While the slave in arms was, with few exceptions, an Islamic innovation,
the slave in authority dates hack to remote antiquity. Already in Sumerian
times, kings appointed slaves to positions of prestige and even power-or,
perhaps more accurately, treated certain of their court functionaries as royal
slaves. Different words were used to denote such privileged slaves, distinct
from those applied to the menial and laboring generality. Under the Abbasid
caliphs and under later Muslim dynasties, men of slave origin, usually but not
always manumitted, figured prominently in the royal entourage. The system
of court slavery reached its final and fullest development in the Ottoman
Empire, where virtually all the servants of the state, both civil and military,
had the status of kul, 33 "slave," of the Gate, that is, of the sultan. The only
exceptions were the members of the religious establishment. The Ottoman
kul was not a slave in terms of Islamic law, and was free from most of the
restraints imposed on slaves in such matters as marriage, property, and legal
responsibility. He was, however, subject to the arbitrary power of the sultan,
who was free to dispose of his assets, his person, and his life in ways not
permitted by the law in relation to free- or freedmen. This perception of the
status of political officeholders and their relationship to the supreme sovereign power was of course by no means limited to the Ottoman Empire, or
indeed to the Islamic world.

From the late eighteenth century onward there are numerous accounts, by
contemporary, mostly European, observers, of the processes by which African slaves were caught, transported, and sold in the markets of the Middle
East and North Africa.' A Tunisian traveler who visited Darfur at the beginning of the nineteenth century even offers an otherwise unconcerned story
of farms where blacks were raised for sale:

Certain rich people living in the town have installed these blacks [from the
neighboring mountains] on their farms, to have them reproduce, and, as we
sell sheep and cattle, so they, every year, sell those of their children that are
ready for this. There are some of them who own five or six hundred male and
female slaves, and merchants come to them at all times, to buy male and
female slaves chosen to be sold.'

This new account probably reflects an expansion of the trade, due to
events farther north. The establishment of Russian domination in Eastern
Europe and the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783 had finally ended
the profitable trade of the Tatars, who for centuries had reaped an annual
harvest of slaves from the villages of the Ukraine and adjoining lands and
exported their crop to the slave markets of Istanbul and other Ottoman cities.
The once-plentiful supply of white slaves from Central and Western Europe
had long since dwindled to a mere trickle; and after the Russian annexation of
the Caucasian lands circa 1801-28, the last remaining source of white slaves
for the Islamic world was reduced and finally stopped.' Deprived of their
Georgians and Circassians, the Muslim states turned elsewhere, and a large scale revival of slaving in black Africa took place. This was furthered by the
Egyptian advance up the Nile at the time of Muhammad `Ali Pasha.

The classical routes, developed in medieval times, lay from West Africa
(Guinea, from the Berber word igginaw [pl. gnawa] meaning "black") across
the Sahara to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; from the Sudan down the Nile
or through the desert to Egypt; and from East Africa across the Red Sea and
Indian Ocean to Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and beyond. Other, later routes led from
Kano via Agades and Ghadames to Tripoli, and from Waday and Darfur via
Borku and Tibesti to Kufra and Cyrenaica.

With the growth of European influence in Egypt and the Maghrib and the
involvement of the Ottoman government in the attempt to suppress the traffic
in black slaves, those routes and markets which were remote from scrutiny
acquired a new importance. One was in the country which is now called
Libya. Tripoli and Benghazi became major centers of the slave trade, drawing
their supplies from Chad and sometimes as far as Nigeria, and exporting them
to the Ottoman provinces in Europe as well as Asia.' Often these slaves
endured great hardship in the course of the journey from their homes to their
destinations. A Turkish letter of November 1849, sent by the reforming Grand
Vezir Mustafa Reshid Pasha to the Ottoman governor of Tripoli, refers to the
death by thirst of sixteen hundred black slaves, on their way from Bornu to
Fezzan in southern Libya: "While our Holy Law permits slavery, it requires
that slaves be treated with fatherly care, and those who act in a contrary
manner will be condemned by God." The governor was ordered to punish the
guilty slavedealers and to ensure that such disasters did not recur. From
British consular reports of the late nineteenth century, it is clear that this
traffic, and the suffering it entailed, continued.' As late as 1912, a Turkish
officer serving against the Italians in Tripolitania, noted in his diary:

A special embassy from the Grand Senussi Sidi Ahmad Sharif is on its way, to
bring the Grand Senussi's greetings and gifts: two negresses, ivory, etc. Heavens, what shall I do with the black ladies? He is also sending me his own gun,
which he has blessed .6

The officer was Enver Bey, later, as Enver Pasha, the Defense Minister of the
last Young Turk government in Istanbul. The "Grand Senussi" was the chief
of the Sanusiyya, the dominant Muslim religious order in Libya.

Another important center of the trade was the Hijaz, which was exempt
from the Ottoman decrees prohibiting or restricting the traffic in African
slaves' and was not, therefore, subject to restraint or supervision. This gave a
new role to the slave market of Mecca. Slaves were imported to the Hijaz by
sea from East Africa and sent from there to the North and even to Egypt." In a
dispatch dated March 17, 1877, the British vice-consul in Damascus, who had
been instructed to use his best efforts to prevent this traffic, reported:

Having brought to the notice of the new Governor General, Zia Pasha, the
practice of importing African slaves from the markets of Mecca, with the [Pilgrim] Caravan, for sale in Syria, His Excellency informed me that he had
already given very strict orders to prevent such abuses.

His Excellency's orders have not, however, met with the success which he
stated to me he expected, as slaves were brought as usual.9

A third route, by which slaves were exported from the Sudan, both down
the Nile to Egypt and across the Red Sea to Arabia, was one of the oldest of
all. It was briefly suppressed, thanks to British and Egyptian initiatives in the
late seventies and early eighties in the nineteenth century, partially restored
with the success of the Mahdist revolt, and suppressed again after the AngloEgyptian reconquest in 1896-98.10

The main purpose for which blacks were imported was domestic service. A
certain number of free blacks also found employment, and in Arabia they
could rise to important positions. In Egypt their role was usually humble. At
the end of the eighteenth century, W. G. Browne noted that in Cairo "exclusively of negro slaves in every house, there are free blacks from Nubia, who
act as porters at the gates of the rich, and sometimes sell bouza and eatables."" Black slaves for domestic use were very common during the nineteenth century in Egypt, in Turkey, and in the other Ottoman lands; and some
survivors can still be met in these countries. The Nubian porter, servant, or
hawker remains a familiar figure in Egypt to this day. African women were
often kept as concubines, since only the wealthy could afford Circassian or
other white slaves. Abyssinians--darker than whites, but lighter than blacksoccupied an intermediate position, as Edward Lane, who was in Egypt between 1833 and 1835, explains: