Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (24 page)

The condemnation of racial discrimination in marriage predominates in
religious and legal discussions of the question. There are, however, other dicta,
even traditions, which state the exact opposite and thus come closer to certain
popular attitudes and practices. According to one undoubtedly spurious tradition, the Prophet said: "Be careful in choosing mates for your offspring, and
beware of marrying the Zanji, for he is a distorted creature. Another similar
tradition quotes the Prophet as forbidding intermarriage with blacks with the
words: "Do not bring black into your pedigree."' The same idea is expressed in
a verse cited by Mas`udi: "Do not intermarry with the sons of Ham, for they are
the distorted among God's creatures, apart from Ibn Akwa`."'

Ibn Habib, a ninth-century Andalusian jurist, goes even further:

A black woman may be repudiated if there is no blackness in her family;
likewise a scald-head, because such things are covered by kinship.

Ibn Habib's meaning is clear. Blackness, like skin diseases, runs in families. A
Muslim bridegroom, it will be recalled, may not see his bride unveiled until
after marriage. If he finds her black or scabby, he may repudiate her-unless
he has taken a bride from a family known to have black or scabby members, in
which case he has no grounds for complaint.

There is ample evidence that marriages of black men with white women
were frowned upon. In earlier times it seems to have been virtually impossible
for a black to marry an Arab woman. Later it became theoretically possible
but was in fact usually excluded by the rule of Kafa'a, the general principle of
which was, in the form adopted by the jurists, "Marry like with like." The
black poet Nusayb had a son who sought to marry an Arab girl of the tribe of
which he was a freedman. Nusayb's personal standing secured the acceptance
of the girl's uncle and guardian, but he himself objected. He had his son
beaten for aspiring to a marriage which he regarded as improper and advised
the girl's guardian to find her a true Arab husband. Ironically. Nusayb's own
daughters, dark-skinned like himself, remained unmarried. "My color has
rubbed off on to them," he is quoted as saying, "and they are left on my
hands. I don't want blacks for them, and whites don't want them." Their fate
became proverbial for old maids with choosy fathers.9

For a white male to mate with a black woman was in general considered
acceptable-with Nubians and other Nilotics much more than with the Zanj.
Ethiopian women were, indeed, highly esteemed. Such mating usually took
the form of concubinage-a legally and socially acceptable practice-rather
than marriage. Some authors disapprove even of this, because of the harm it
brought to a family's honor. Thus the Syrian author Abu'l-`Ala' (d. 1057)
remarked in a letter:

We often see a man of mark who has in his house women of high degree setting
above them a girl in a striped gown purchased for a few coins and so we may
see a man whose grandfather on the father's side is a fair-haired descendant of
`Ali while his maternal grandfather is a black idolator. Ii)

In early Islamic and pre-Islamic times the Arabs looked down on the sons
of slave mothers, regarding them as inferior to the sons of freeborn Arab
mothers." The stigma was attached to the status, not the race, of the mother
and affected the sons of white as well as black concubines. Before long,
however, a distinctive color prejudice appeared; and the association of blackness with slavery and whiteness with freedom and nobility became common.

Even princes were affected. `Abd al-Rahman ibn Umm Hakam, a nephew
of the Caliph Mu`awiya and his governor in Kufa, had to endure mockery
because of his dark skin and his Ethiopian ancestresses.'' An episode in the
biography of the Abbasid prince Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi (779-839) is even
more striking. His father was the caliph, his mother a high-born Persian lady
from Daylam who was enslaved after the defeat of her father and the conquest
of her country; but he was of swarthy color, so much so that some sourcesmistakenly, it would seem-say that his mother was black. Because of this
dark skin and large body, says his Arabic biographer, he was known as al-
Tinnfn-the dragon. After an unsuccessful bid for power, he was pardoned
and summoned before his nephew, the Caliph al-Ma'mun. A curious and
instructive dialogue followed, which is reported on the authority of Ibrahim
himself. The caliph greeted the dark-complexioned and unsuccessful pretender with a taunt: "Are you then the black caliph?" To this Ibrahim returned a soft answer, reminding al-Ma'mun that he had pardoned him and
quoting the verse of the black slave poet Suhaym, "Though I am black of
color my character is white." The caliph responded more kindly. Addressing
Ibrahim as uncle, he indicated that his remark was meant in jest and capped
his quotation with another, from an unnamed poet:

Ibrahim was a prince and a scholar. and his mother. though it concubine,
was born a Persian lady or princess. Others were less fortunate: and many
stories are told of people with an African mother or grandmother and with a dark complexion, who were subject to insult and humiliation on this account." A vivid example occurs in a satire ascribed, probably falsely, to
Hassan ibn Thabit:

Whiteness was seen as a mark of superior birth. Thus the eleventh-century
Tunisian poet Ibn Rashiq, in an ode in praise of the city of Qayrawan, boasts
of the nobility of its inhabitants:

In time, this perception of society was sufficiently well established to
provide a poetic metaphor for natural phenomena, as when the thirteenthcentury Andalusian poet Ibn Sahl celebrated the advent of spring.

To the present day, in North Africa, a man with Negroid features, even of
the highest social status, is sometimes described as ould khadem, "the son of a
"s
slave woman.

Similar attitudes seem to have persisted among the Bedouin, though much
less among the townspeople, in the Middle East. The local literary and documentary sources rarely discuss such matters: but Western visitors-at first
travelers, later ethnologists and anthropologists-agree on the general picture. In the cities, notably in Arabia, cohabitation with black concubines was
common and acceptable, and even marriage not unusual. As elsewhere, Ethiopians and Nubians were preferred for the bed. John Lewis Burckhardt, who
visited Arabia in 1814, noted the frequency of African racial traits among the
people of the Hijaz:

The colour of the Mekkawy and Djiddawy is a yellowish sickly brown, lighter
or darker according to the origin of the mother, who is very often an Abyssinian slave.... There are few families at Mekka. in moderate circumstances,
that do not keep slaves.... The male and female servants are Negroes, or
rtoahos, usually brought from Sowakin: the concubines are always Abyssinian
slaves. No wealthy Mekkawy prefers domestic peace to the gratification of his
passion: they all keep mistresses in common with their lawful wives: but if a
slave gives birth to a child, the master generally marries her, or if he fails to do
so. is censored by the community. The keeping of Abyssinian concubines is still
more prevalent at Djidda. Many Mekkawys have no other than Abvssinian
wives, finding the Arabians more expensive, and less disposed to yield to the
will of the husband. The same practice is adopted by many foreigners, who reside in the Hedjaz for a short time. Upon their arrival, they buy a female
companion, with the design of selling her at their departure; but sometimes
their stay is protracted; the slave bears a child; they marry her, and become
stationary in the town. This, indeed, is general in the East, and nowhere more
so than at Mekka. The mixture of Abyssinian blood has, no doubt, given to the
Mekkawys that yellow tinge of the skin which distinguishes them from the
natives of the desert.

The Mekkawys make no distinction whatever between sons born of Abyssinian slaves and those of free Arabian women.19

The absence of social barriers against persons of part-African origin, and
even against freed slaves of pure African descent, is confirmed by most other
travelers.20

Among the Bedouin, marriages with blacks were considered shameful,
and even the use of black concubines, according to some accounts, was disapproved .2' Even where miscegenation was socially tolerated, it seems to have
been a one-way street. In the words of a leading authority on the topic:

Whereas for example, the Qaramanli sultans of Tripoli married off their daughters to European slaves to avoid dynastic rivalries, it would have been unthinkable for an Arab or a Berber, a Turk or a Persian, to consent to his daughter
marrying a black African, slave or freed. Marriages the other way around,
between a black slavegirl and an Arab man, could and did take place.'

In Arabia even a pariah tribe like Hutaym disdains miscegenation. "Arabs of
noble race," according to an observer, ". . . do not intermarry with Hutaym. . . . Hutaym in turn are not supposed to intermarry with negroes.""

Marriage was one thing, concubinage another. Like many North American slaveowners and still more South American ones, Muslim men who
owned women slaves were accustomed to mate with them. But the two
situations were very different. In the West, concubinage was condemned by
law, religion, and society. It was usually furtive, and its offspring, without
recognition or legitimacy, merged into the general slave population. In Islam,
concubinage was sanctioned by the law and indeed by the Qur'an itself. A
man could, if he chose, recognize his offspring by his slave woman as legitimate, thereby conferring a formal legal status on both mother and child. In
theory, this recognition was optional, and in the early period was often
withheld. By the high Middle Ages it became normal and was unremarkable
in a society where the sovereigns themselves were almost invariably the
children of slave concubines. White-skinned women were usually preferred
for the bed, and the occasional assertion, by an author, of the sexual attractions of the dark-skinned usually presents an appearance of bravado or paradox. A major change occurred in the nineteenth century, when, because of
the consolidation of the power of both Eastern and Western Europe, white
slaves, both female and male, became rare and expensive, and blacks of both
sexes were able to rise from their previous subordination to higher status and
functions.'