Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (26 page)

Occasionally-though infrequently-he plays a more prominent role in
the story. This may be either negative or positive. Where negative, his crimes
are usually lechery, greed, and ingratitude; where positive, he is the prototype
of simple piety and loyalty, which achieve their ultimate reward from God.
Paradoxically, this reward may take the form of his turning white.

The portrayal of blacks in Islamic art falls into much the same categories as
in narrative literature-not surprisingly, since much of the pictorial art came
into being as book illustrations. There is little sculpture, and that only in the
earliest period, before the Islamic ban on images had fully taken effect. Probably the earliest portrayals of Africans in the Islamic world are some figures in
statuary and carved plaster reliefs, in the Umayyad palace at Khirbat al-
Mafjar, in the Jordanian desert. This palace and its ornamentation, dating
probably from the early eighth century, still show marked pre-Islamic influences, notably in the use of such carved figures. Some of these have recognizable African features. They may be intended to portray domestic slaves, or
more probably some kind of entertainers. Thereafter, under Islamic influence, sculpture virtually disappeared. Painting, however, survived and flourished, at first almost entirely in the form of interior decoration in buildings,
then extending to tiles, stucco, and pottery. It achieved its main development in the art of the book, which from the late twelfth century onward became by
far the principal form of painting in Islamic lands. Among the Arabs, Per,
sians, and Turks, as well as among the remoter peoples absorbed into the
world of Islam, the art of the hook reached a high degree of perfection, and
illustrated manuscripts-later supplemented by separate miniatures-give us
a vivid and varied insight into the life of the Muslim cities.

Among the mixed population of these cities, blacks formed a significant
element; and not surprisingly they figure from time to time in book illustra,
tion and other paintings. Their portrayal falls into certain well-recognized and
easily definable categories, some of them with obvious parallels in the Chris,
tian art of medieval Europe.

One such category is sacred history-the lives of the Prophet Muhammad
and of his Companions, offering obvious analogies to Christian portrayals of
the birth and life of Jesus. The ban on the portrayal of human figures, which
long inhibited the development of Muslim pictorial art, applied with part icu.
lar force to the sacred biography, and books dealing with the lives of the
Prophet and his Companions remained bare of any illustrations. By the sixteenth century, however, Ottoman artists began to turn their attention to this
hitherto forbidden subject. The Topkapi Treasury in Istanbul contains a mag,
nificent example. Prepared by order of Sultan Murad III, and dated 1594-95,
the text consists of a fourteenth-century Turkish translation of a much earlier
Arabic work on the life of the Prophet and includes many illustrations by an
unknown artist. Among the many personalities who figure in the biography of
the Prophet, two are identified as black and depicted accordingly. One of
them is the emperor of Ethiopia, in Arabic called al-Najashi (Negus). who
gave shelter to some of Muhammad's Companions when they fled from
Mecca to escape the persecution of the reigning pagan oligarchy. This episode
was a favorite theme of the defenders of the Ethiopians against their detractors. Another figure of almost demiurgic importance is the famous Bilal, the
first muezzin and a Companion of the Prophet. Some minor black figures,
apparently slaves, also appear in these pictures.

In another common stereotype, the black appears as a kind of monster or
bogeyman. These figure prominently in Iranian mythology, and are consequently depicted from time to time in the great Persian epics. Some particularly magnificent examples may be seen in the illustrations to the Shahnama of
Firdawsi, prepared for the shah of Iran in the city of Tabriz in 1537. In one of
the two pictures reproduced here, the Persian hero Hushang is shown killing
the Great Black Devil; in another, a different hero. Isfandiyar, similarly disposes of a black sorceress. The demonology of Iran is not monochromatic.
The Great White Devil of Mazandaran is no less disagreeable than his black
colleagues.

An important group of illustrations depict the black as an exotic figure in a
strange and distant land. The best-known examples of these are the illustrations found in manuscripts of the different Arabic, Persian, and Turkish versions of the romance of Alexander. In one picture, illustrating a manuscript of
the hook of Alexander by the Persian poet Nizamt, and painted in Qazvin toward the end of the sixteenth century, Alexander (Iskandar) is seen fighting
the blacks.

Most of the traditional themes of Persian letters and art were adopted in
Muslim India, where they helped to inspire the rich art of the Mughal period.
A manuscript. Darabnama, with illustrations by various artists, made at the
Mughal court between 1580 and 1585, depicts several phases of the war
against the Zanj. In one of the three pictures reproduced here, two other
persons watch Darab fighting the blacks, while the body of another figure is
seen floating in the water. In another, Darab is seen going into battle against
the blacks; and in a third, by the same artist, he has defeated them and is
receiving their homage.

The sexual theme occurs far less frequently in Islamic art than in Islamic
letters, and the literary portrayal of both the black male and the black female
as creatures of immense sexual appetites and powers is rarely paralleled in the
pictorial arts. A few examples do, however, occur in the Mughal art of India.
In one of them, also an illustration to the same manuscript of the Darabnama,
Homay, the mother of Darab, is murdered by a black groom. According to
the story, he had a secret passion for her and murdered her one night when he
came to her and she refused to submit to him. A later Mughal manuscript,
completed in India in 1629, illustrates a story by the Persian poet Sa`di, and
depicts an old man who upbraids a black and a girl for flirting. Much more
dramatic than either of these is a Persian manuscript of the famous Masnavi of
Rumi, completed in Tabriz in about 1530. illustrating an episode in the poem
in which a woman discovers her maidservant copulating with an ass and tries,
with disastrous results, to do the same.

The overwhelming majority of blacks who appear in Islamic paintings are,
however, none of these things-neither sacred figures not monsters, neither
exotic nor erotic. They are quite simply slaves and servants. They appear in
countless pictures of court life, domestic life, and various outdoor scenes: in
illustrations of narrative literature and other forms of belles-lettres; and-in
Ottoman times-in the sumptuous albums portraying celebrations of special
occasions at the Ottoman court. In these pictures the black appears with fair
frequency. When he does so, he is almost invariably carrying a tray, pushing a
broom, leading a horse, wielding a spade, pulling an oar or a rope, or discharging some other subordinate or menial task. Blacks appear as servants and
attendants, as masons and gardeners, as grooms and huntsmen, or as boatmen. Mostly they are male, though female figures occasionally appear. Some
of the finest examples of thirteenth-century descriptive art occur in illustrations of the Arabic literary works known as magamat, a kind of poetic prose
narrative. In one of them, dated 1237 and probably completed in Mesopotamia, the artist vividly portrays a slave market in the Yemen, in which black
slaves imported from Africa are bought and sold. In another similar manuscript, completed a few years earlier in Syria, a black slave is shown bringing
food. In numerous Persian, Indian, and Turkish miniatures of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, blacks variously appear as grooms, huntsmen, and
servants of various kinds.

In Ottoman times the chief black eunuch of the court, sometimes known
as the Aga of the Gate of Felicity, or more informally as the Aga of the Girls,
was a major personage at the Ottoman court. His dignity and position are
vividly portrayed by court artists. From the late sixteenth century we have a
number of magnificent albums depicting various aspects of the life of the
Ottoman court, and several of these portray the black eunuchs and other
functionaries. A manuscript dated 1597 shows an Ottoman prince and grand
vizier with black attendants, the heir apparent with black eunuchs. and, in a
particularly interesting picture, the funeral of the sultan's mother. Nurbanu
(born Cecilia Venier-Baffo, of Venice), with black eunuchs in attendance. A
much later volume, illustrated by the great painter Levni in about 1720-32,
depicts in great detail the ceremonies and celebrations at the circumcision of a
young prince. In one picture, we see princes, pages, and black eunuchs at an
evening party by the Golden Horn; in another, the chief black eunuch conducts the young prince to the circumcision ceremony.''

One of the greatest of Persian painters, the famous Behzad, who flourished in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, seems to have used a
black figure as a kind of signature. In many of his paintings such a figure
appears, usually in a very minor capacity. This mannerism was picked up by
some of his disciples and successors, and became characteristic of the school
of Herat, which he founded. Clearly, the primary role of the black as menial
was by this time so well understood that he could acquire a secondary role as a
symbol.

In reviewing the evidence of prejudice and discrimination in the Middle Eastern past, I have tried to correct the false picture drawn by the myth makers, a
picture of idyllic freedom from such evils. But in correcting an error, one
should not fall into the opposing error. At no time did the peoples of the
Middle East ever practice the kind of racial oppression which exists in South
Africa at the present time or which existed until recently in the United States.
My purpose is not to set up a moral competition-to compare castration and
apartheid as offenses against humanity or to argue the relative wickedness of
Eastern and Western practices; it is rather to refute the claims of both exclusive virtue and exclusive vice and to point to certain common failings of our
common humanity. The correction of error-even of emotionally satisfying
and politically useful error-is a legitimate, indeed a necessary task of the
historian.

This raises another, and an important, question. If, as the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates, the conventional picture of a society totally free
from racial prejudice and discrimination is false, how then did it come to be?
The sources of this Western-made myth may he found in European and American, rather than Middle Eastern, history. The American Civil War brought
the issue of slavery sharply before European opinion, the more so since it
coincided with a renewed and determined British effort, by both diplomatic
and naval action, to induce Muslim rulers in Turkey, Arabia, and elsewhere to
ban, and indeed suppress, the slave trade. Comparisons were inevitable, and
the obvious contrasts led some European observers to defend Muslim slavery,
or at least to praise Muslim racial attitudes.