Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (27 page)

The defenses took a variety of forms. One of the first to make the comparison was the Austrian scholar-diplomat Alfred von Kremer, in a book published in 1863. Kremer abhors slavery and describes the abduction and trans portation of the African slaves in blood-chilling terms. He notes, however, as
did many previous travelers, that the slave, once he reached his destination,
was relatively well treated. More significantly, he acquits the Muslims of race
prejudice:

The color prejudice that is maintained in so crude a form by the free sons of
America, not only against genuine Africans but even against their descendants
in the fourth and fifth degrees, is not known in the Orient. Here a person is not
considered inferior because he is of a darker complexion. This can easily be
explained from the nature of slavery in the Orient, where the slave is not
separated by an insurmountable barrier from the family of his master, where
the slave does not belong to a caste that is despised and barely considered
human, but where in contrast, between master and slave, there is the most
intimate and manifold relationship. In the Orient there can hardly be a Muhammedan family that is without slave blood.'

Snouck Hurgronje draws a similar distinction between Muslim and American attitudes, and complains that the Americans have given slavery a bad
name. European public opinion, he says, has been misled by a confusion
between the two types of black slavery and warns his reader that if he goes
into an Arabian slave market with European ideas, "perhaps even with recollections of a reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin in his head," he will get a very
negative impression. But, he goes on, the first impression is false, and unfortunately most travelers to the Orient bring hack "little but their false first
impressions. "2

Kremer's assertion of the total absence of race prejudice or discrimination
in Islamic society was surely exaggerated, and even Snouck Hurgronje, in his
defense of black slavery in Arabia, written twenty years later and with the
advantage of a visit to the holy cities, uses a more cautious formulation. But
the contrast between Islamic and American conditions was real, and the
exaggeration a natural consequence of European revulsion from American
attitudes and practices. In the horrors of the abduction of Africans from their
homes, for delivery to Islamic and American purchasers, there was little to
choose, and indeed the same intermediaries may have served in both cases.
Nor was there much difference in the dangers and hardships of the journey,
until the human merchandise reached its ultimate destination, across ocean or
desert. It was in the treatment accorded to the slaves by their new masters,
and the place assigned to them in the societies to which they had come, that
the main contrast was to be seen. Some European observers, particularly
from the conservative and monarchical societies, derived ironic amusement
from the spectacle of slavery in free America; others were shocked and horrified. Even the European colonial empires had long since outlawed slavery,
first at home and then in their overseas possessions, where it had in any case
never reached the American level of racial discrimination and oppression.

Travelers who compared Islamic with American slavery mostly overlooked the fact that they were comparing two different types of slave employ ment, domestic and economic. The slaves whom Western travelers in the East
encountered and described were those employed in households, and their lot
and degree of acceptance were certainly far better than those of domestic
slaves in the Americas. But there were also slave workers in the Middle East,
for example, in southern Iraq, where, according to British consular reports,
agricultural labor in the pestilential climate was largely assigned to black
slaves imported by sea.' Later in the century, the sudden wealth accruing to
Egypt from the export of cotton during the American Civil War enabled
Egyptian farmers to grow rich and also to import black slaves to cultivate their
fields.' These were rarely seen or described by Western travelers. There were
also some black laborers in the cities. Thus even Snouck Hurgronje noted that
"shining pitchblack negro slaves" were used in Mecca for "the hardest work of
building, quarrying, etc." and believed that "their allotted work ... is generally not too heavy for them, though most natives of Arabia would be incapable of such bodily efforts in the open air."`

In fact, the limits of toleration accorded to persons of African or partAfrican origin varied considerably from time to time and from place to place.
In Arabia, where Islamic sentiments were strongest, African slaves and freedmen could occupy positions of power and authority, though they were far less
likely to reach such positions than their white colleagues. It was only after the
virtual disappearance of the white slave that the black slave was commonly
able to attain such heights. Children of Arab fathers and black-usually
Ethiopian-concubines suffered no significant disability in the holy cities,
where they were able to rise to the social level of their free Arab fathers. If
their fathers were sharifs, they, too, were, or could be, sharifs. The swarthy
son of a free Arab father and an African mother, by virtue of his father's
status, could marry a white woman. But few, if any, Arab families were willing
to give their daughters in marriage to a genuine African man.

The myth of Islamic racial innocence was a Western creation and served a
Western purpose. Not for the first time, a mythologized and idealized Islam
provided a stick with which to chastise Western failings. In the eighteenth
century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment had praised Islam for its lack
of dogmas and mysteries, its freedom from priests and Inquisitors and other
persecutors-recognizing real qualities but exaggerating them as a polemical
weapon against the Christian churches and clergy. In the early nineteenth
century, West European Jews, newly and still imperfectly emancipated, appealed to a legendary golden age in Muslim Spain, of complete tolerance and
acceptance in symbiotic harmony.' This, too, had some foundation in reality
but was greatly overstated to serve at once as a reproach and an encouragement to their somewhat dilatory Christian emancipators.

In the same way, the myth of total racial harmony in the Islamic world
appears to have arisen as a reproach to the practices of white men in the
Americas and in Southern Africa, beside which indeed even Islamic realities
shone in contrast. This idea won particular favor in the nineteenth century
among Christian missionaries in Africa, who sought some explanation of the
failure of their missions as contrasted with the success of Islam, despite every advantage of power, wealth, and (as they saw it) truth. The explanation which
some missionaries found was in the difference between the second-class status
accorded to black Christians by white rulers and the immediate equality received by black converts to Islam. There may indeed be a great deal of truth in
this, but it overlooks two important points-first, that the Muslim preachers
were themselves black and represented the far limit of Islamic expansion into
Africa, and second, that even so, there were shades of difference, perhaps
invisible to the outsider but vitally important to the people themselves.

It is significant that one of the most influential proponents of the myth was
Edward W. Blyden, a black West Indian who was educated in Liberia under
missionary auspices but was convinced by his African experiences that Islam
was better suited than Christianity to black African needs. His writings, with
their stress on Christian guilt and on a somewhat romanticized Muslim tolerance, were widely read.' Writers of this school usually make the illogical
assumption that the reprobation of prejudice in a society proves its absence.
In fact, of course, it reveals its presence. Anti-Semitism is a criminal offense
in Germany and Russia, but not in England or America.

That the myth has survived and been taken up enthusiastically in our time
is due, I think, to another factor, to what might be called nostalgia for the
white man's burden. The white man's burden in Kipling's sense-the Westerner's responsibility for the peoples over whom he ruled-has long since
been cast off and seized by others. But there are those who still insist on
maintaining it-this time as a burden not of power but of guilt, an insistence
on responsibility for the world and its ills that is as arrogant and as unjustified
as the claims of our imperial predecessors.

Preface

1. For a rare example of a fair and honest approach to a delicate and sensitive
topic, see Samir M. Zoghby, "Blacks and Arabs: Past and present." Current Bibliography on African Affairs 3, no. 5 (May 1970), pp. 5-22.

Chapter 1

1. See below, p. 151.

2. On pre-classical antiquity, see Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near
East (New York. 1949): G. R. Driver and John C. Miles, The Babylonian Laws, vol. 1
(Oxford, 1952), pp. 478-90; Muhammad A. Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia, from
Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626-331 B.C.), trans. Victoria A. Powell (De
Kalb, IL, 1984). There is a vast literature on slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds.
For some modern studies, citing earlier work, see William L. Westermann, The Slave
Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia, 1955) ; Keith Hopkins. Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1978); K. R.
Bradley. Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New
York and Oxford, 1987); M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge
and New York, 1968); idem, ed., Classical Slavery (London, 1987); idem, Ancient
Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York, 1980): Zvi Yavetz, Slaves and Slavery in
Ancient Rome (New Brunswick, NJ, and Oxford, 1988). The question whether Greek
and Roman societies were based on a slave system of production has given rise to
vigorous, often heated, and still continuing controversy. It need not detain us here. On
slavery in general, including a thoughtful comparative study of ancient and Middle
Eastern slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Cultures
(Ithaca, NY, 1966); idem, Slavery and Human Progress (New York and Oxford, 1984).

3. On slavery in Roman law, see W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law on Slavery
(Cambridge, 1908): Ohs Robleda, II diritto degli schiavi nell'antica Roma (Rome,
1976).

4. E.g., Deut 15:15. The Passover prayers and rituals, celebrating the Exodus,
are an annual reminder to Jews that they are the descendants of slaves who won
freedom. On slavery among Jews, in law and practice, see E. E. Urbach. The laws
regarding slavery as a source for the social history of the period of the second Temple,
the Mishnah and Talmud," in Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, ed. J. G. Weiss,
vol. 1 (Jerusalem and London, 1964), pp. 1-94; Simha Assaf, Be-ohale Ya'ag6v (Jerusalem, 1943), pp. 223-56; Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd
ed., vol. 4 (New York, 1957), pp. 187-96. For the Talmudic laws regarding slavery, see
Gittin 8a-9a, l lb-I5a, 37b-45a, 46b-47a (The Babylonian Talmud, Seder Nashim, ed.
1. Epstein, Gitlin, trans. Maurice Simon, vol. 4 [London, 1936], pp. 27-31, 39-55,
155-98, 206-7) and Yehamot, passim. See, further. Westermann, Slave Systems, pp.
124-26.

5. As, for example, in Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkh6t Avadim 9:8.

6. It is interpreted in this sense by Maimonides, who quotes this verse, along with
other texts, in an eloquent plea for the humane treatment of the Canaanite, i.e., the
non-Jewish slave (ibid). Recommendations for the good treatment of Jewish slaves
sometimes appear extreme: "[The slave] must be [equal to] thee in food and drink,
that thou shouldst not eat white bread and he black bread, thou drink old wine and he
new wine, thou sleep on a feather bed and he on straw. Hence it was said. Whoever
buys a Hebrew slave is like buying a master for himself" (Qiddushin, 20a [Babylonian
Talmud, Kiddushin, trans. H. Freedman, vol. 4, p. 92]).