Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (23 page)

Similar views were expressed by an Austrian, Ludwig Stross, who visited
Arabia in 1886. Stross begins by agreeing that slavery "as such" is indefensible:

That whole Negro villages are burned, all the men killed, and their women and
children are taken on months-long terrible marches finally to he offered as
merchandise in markets and distant lands, must appear to us as an injustice
that cries to heaven.

Nevertheless, he continues "it is at the very least dubious" whether it is a good
work to insist on freeing the black slave when he has already been taken from
his home. In Stross's view, slavery is so deep-rooted, and the slave trade so
extensive in Africa and the Arab lands, that to uproot it is impossible and
merely to free those blacks who are already enslaved and on their way to their
destination does more harm than good.

The liberated Negroes will not work even for money. For them freedom means
their native idleness. They form a proletariat, than which nothing worse can be
found.

The theory of human rights and self-determination certainly sounds very
fine, but in such cases can hardly find its proper application.

I would rather compare the Negroes with children, who must be made to do
their stint.

As long as the Negroes stay in their homelands, no one can object if they idle
away their lives in their own way. But in fact they have been brought, by force
of circumstances, into other lands and other conditions. Since one cannot
prevent their coming, however unwillingly, one should also not prevent their
being made to work.13

Like almost all the other European travelers, Stross condemns the horrors
of the abduction and transportation of the slaves, which he describes in some
detail; but he insists that once a slave

has arrived and is in firm hands, he is usually well cared for. The conditions of
slavery in the Orient have nothing in common with those which arose earlier in
North America and Brazil. The slave is, for the Mohammedan, a member of
the family and is almost without exception well treated. Mistreatments are rare
and are usually richly deserved. . . . As regards work, as a rule only very
reasonable demands are made of the slaves; and one may safely assume that a
Negro would have to work very much harder in order to earn his living as a free
man. . . . Often liberated slaves are the heirs of their masters and continue
their businesses. In Jedda and Mecca I know many liberated slaves who are
respected merchants.

It will thus be seen that slavery in the Orient, though it has many shadowy
sides, has nothing to do with the sort of conditions described for lovers of
sentimental reading in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Most observers, however, were less willing to be convinced by the apologetics of slavery; and in time virtually all civilized governments, including that
of the Ottoman Empire, joined in the effort to suppress the slave trade.

An obvious question, since so many blacks entered the central lands over
so long a period, is why they have left so little trace.14 There is nothing in the
Arab, Persian, and Turkish lands that resembles the great black and mulatto
populations of North and South America. One reason is obviously the high
proportion of eunuchs among black males entering the Islamic lands. Another
is the high death rate and low birth rate among black slaves in North Africa
and the Middle East. In about 1810, Louis Frank observed in Tunisia that
most black children died in infancy, and that infinitesimally few reached the
age of manhood." A British observer in Egypt, some thirty years later, found
conditions even worse:

The mortality among the slaves in Egypt is frightful,-when the epidemical
plague visits the country, they are swept away in immense multitudes, and they
are the earliest victims of almost every other domineering disease. I have heard
it estimated that five or six years are sufficient to carry off a generation of
slaves, at the end of which time the whole has to he replenished. This is one of
the causes of their low market-value. When they marry, their descendants
seldom live; in fact, the laws of nature seem to repel the establishment of
hereditary slavery. "'

Concubinage at higher, and intermarriage at lower, social levels seem to
have taken place but must have been on a rather limited scale and, probably
for social more than biological reasons, produced little effect. Even now,
members of the comparatively small number of recognizably black families in
the Middle East tend on the whole to marry among their own kind."

The voice of Islamic piety on miscegenation is clear and unequivocal-there
are no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage.
In practice, however, this pious doctrine is frequently disregarded or even
overruled. Marriage is regulated by the holy law of Islam and is indeed the
only important issue on which questions of race and color become the concern
of the law. This concern arises under the legal doctrine of Kafa a, which might
be roughly translated as equality of birth and social status in marriage. The
purpose of Kafa a was to ensure that a man should be at least the social equal
of the woman he marries. It does not forbid unequal marriages and is thus in
no sense a Muslim equivalent of the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany or the
apartheid laws of South Africa. Its aim is to protect the honor of respectable
families, by enabling them, if they wish, to stop unsuitable marriages. The
principle of Kafa a may be invoked by the father or other legal guardian of a
woman in order to prevent her from contracting a marriage without his permission or to annul it if contracted without permission or with permission fraudulently obtained, provided there is no child or pregnancy. The rule operates to
restrain a woman from marrying a man who is below her and thus disgracing
her family. For a man to marry a woman below him does not matter-the
woman is, in the view of the jurists, in the inferior situation anyway, and no
immediate social injury can therefore result.

The notion of Kafa a has its antecedents in pre-Islamic Arabia, where
tribal custom required a measure of social compatibility between husband
and wife. Though not sanctioned by the Qur'an and indeed in a sense contrary to the spirit of the Qur'an, it survived into Islamic times and became
part of the holy law of Islam. There were, however, from the beginning,
differences between the juristic schools, more specifically between what
might be called the more lax and more rigorous approaches. For one group, with its origins among the jurists of Medina, the notion of Kafa a was basically religious and was intended to save a devout woman from being forcibly
married to a dissolute man. This remained the dominant view in the Maliki
school of jurisprudence; their founder, Malik ibn Anas, is quoted as strongly
denouncing the idea that a mawla woman is inferior to an Arab woman and
proclaiming that "all the people of Islam are equal [akfa ] to one another, in
accordance with God's revelations." But for another group, deriving from
the school of Kufa and perhaps influenced by the social hierarchies of preIslamic Iran, Kafa a was determined by a number of matters-not only piety
and character but also wealth and profession and three other factors which
have direct bearing on the question of race and status: freedom, Islam, and
descent.

Freedom refers to the question of whether the prospective bridegroom is
free, freed, or slave and involves not only his personal status but that of his
immediate forbears. A freedman is not as good as the son of a freedman, and
he in turn not as good as the grandson of a freedman. This principle is pursued
up to three generations, after which all Muslims are deemed equally free. The
same is true of Islam. Non-Muslims are of course excluded. But that is not all.
A convert is not as good as the son of a convert; the son of a convert is not as
good as the grandson of a convert. Here too the rule is limited to three
generations, after which all are equal in their Islam.

Descent is another matter. Partly this is a social issue-the distinction
between "good" (i.e., well-connected or well-descended) families and others;
partly, however, it may also be concerned with ethnic origins. Most jurists
make a distinction between Arab and non-Arab. Some maintain that a nonArab man is not the equal of an Arab woman in any circumstances and that
even the manumitted slave of a non-Arab owner is not the equal of the
manumitted slave girl of an Arab owner. Generally speaking, the jurists do
not bother to distinguish between the various kinds of non-Arabs, though
some make the general observation that the non-Arabs are ranked among
themselves just as are the Arabs.

The restriction of intermarriage is a grievance frequently mentioned by
Muslim critics, especially by Shiite opponents of the Sunni order. A limitation
on marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims was accepted without question. Muslim men might marry Christian or Jewish women; Christian or Jewish men were forbidden to marry Muslim women under pain of death. The
logic of this distinction is that in any religiously mixed marriage Islam must
prevail, and the male is the dominant partner (the jurists were often unworldly). The rules regarding Kafa a introduced distinctions even between
Muslims-and these were challenged as contrary to the true spirit of Islam. A
Shiite tract enumerating the misdeeds of the first three caliphs, seen by the
Shia as usurpers, illustrates the point vividly. Among other crimes, the Caliph
`Umar is accused of having introduced ethnic impediments to marriage, and of
discriminating not only between Arabs and non-Arabs but also between the
noble Arab tribe of Quraysh and the other Arabs.

When this man seized power over the people he said that the Arabs may not
marry women of Quraysh but Quraysh may marry women from the rest of the
Arabs and the non-Arabs. The Persians and other mawali' may not marry
women of the Arabs, but the Arabs may marry any of them. In this way he put
the rest of the Arabs in the same relationship to Quravsh as are the Jews and
Christians in relation to the Muslims, since the Muslims may marry Christian
and Jewish women, but they may not marry Muslim women.'

In this, as in some other respects, the Shiite polemicist is attributing to
`Umar the results of a long process of development. But the doctrine of Kafn a
was still invoked among Muslims. and the distinction on the one hand between
Arab and non-Arab Muslims and on the other between the tribe and family of
the Prophet and the rest of the Arabs remained a factor of importance.

Occasionally writers on the subject make reference to the question of
color. Sometimes they express the pious view and assert that a man of true
piety, "even a black," is acceptable. In this connection they quote a story
about Bilal, the Ethiopian muezzin of the Prophet, who wished to marry an
Arab girl. Her family refused, and the Prophet (according to tradition) then
sent a personal message to the family asking them to give their daughter to
Bilal. The story is probably not authentic, since it deals with a prejudice which
does not seem to have existed in the Prophet's lifetime. It is one of many such
tales invented for the purpose of proving the egalitarian point. The same point
is made in a story included in a tenth-century compilation.4 According to this
tale, a man came to the Prophet and asked: "Do my blackness and the
ugliness of my face bar me from entering paradise?" To which the Prophet
answered no. The man then complained that although he had become a
believing and loyal Muslim, "I have already asked everyone, present and
absent, for the hand of one of their daughters in marriage, and they have all
rejected me because of my black complexion and ugly face. Now in my tribe I
am noble, but in my case the dark complexion of my mother's family has
predominated." The Prophet then sent him to see a certain man of the tribe of
Thagif, a recent adherent to Islam, and the father of "a freeborn daughter
who was very beautiful and very wise." "Go then," said the Prophet, "knock
gently on his door, give him greeting, and when you are inside say 'the
Prophet has given me your daughter as wife.' " When the man of black
complexion reached the door, knocked, and gave his greeting, they heard the
voice of a stranger and opened the door; but when they saw how black and
ugly he was, they shrank back. "The Prophet has given me your daughter as
my wife." he said, but they drove him away in a nasty way. The girl's father
went to see the Prophet and, when confronted with this rejection of the
Prophet's will, excused himself: "I thought that this man must he lying in what
he said. If he was telling the truth, my daughter is his, and I seek refuge in
Allah from the wrath of Allah." The marriage was agreed, and the bride price
was set at four hundred pieces of silver. When the suitor was about to go to his
family to raise the money, the Prophet offered to raise it from three prominent Muslims. But as the suitor with his money was on his way to complete the
transaction, he heard the call of the muezzin and, looking heavenward, decided to spend the money "in the service of God." that is, in the jihad. With
the bride-money he bought a horse and weapons and rode out to do battle for
the faith. In due course, he was killed and, dying, was tended by the Prophet
himself, who saw him go to paradise, to be greeted by the houris. His body
was brought to his prospective bride, and the bearers told her: "Allah has
already married him to a better maid than any of yours." The story is obviously a moral tale, designed to make a point against racist prejudice-though,
it may be noted, the man is Arab and noble on his father's side, and, since he
dies a hero's death, the marriage does not in fact take place. Similar evasions
are familiar in Western popular entertainment.