Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (5 page)

The slave and also the liberated ex-slave played an important part in
domestic life. Eunuchs were required for the protection and maintenance of
harems, as confidential servants, as palace staff, and also as custodians of
mosques, tombs, and other sacred places. Slave women were required mainly
as concubines and as menials. A Muslim slaveowner was entitled by law to the
sexual enjoyment of his slave women. While free women might own male
slaves, they had of course no equivalent right.

The economic exploitation of slaves, apart from some construction work,
took place mainly in the countryside, away from the cities, and like almost
everything else about rural life is sparsely documented. The medieval Islamic
world was a civilization of cities. Both its law and its literature deal almost
entirely with townspeople, their lives and problems, and remarkably little
information has come down to us concerning life in the villages and the
countryside. Sometimes a dramatic event like the revolt of the Zanj in southern Iraq or an occasional passing reference in travel literature sheds a sudden
light on life in the countryside. Otherwise, we remain ignorant of what was
happening outside the cities until the sixteenth century, when for the first time
the surviving Ottoman archives make it possible to follow in some detail the
life and activities of rural populations-and the exploration of this material
has still barely begun. The common view of Islamic slavery as primarily domestic and military may therefore reflect the bias of our documentation rather
than the reality. There are occasional references, however, to large gangs of
slaves, mostly black, employed in agriculture, in the mines, and in such special tasks as the drainage of marshes. Some, less fortunate, were hired out by
their owners for piecework. These working slaves had a much harder life. The
most unfortunate of all were those engaged in agricultural and other manual
work and large-scale enterprises, such as for example the Zanj slaves used to
drain the salt flats of southern Iraq, and the blacks employed in the salt mines
of the Sahara and the gold mines of Nubia. These were herded in large
settlements and worked in gangs. Large landowners, or crown lands, often
employed thousands of such slaves. While domestic and commercial slaves
were relatively well-off, these lived and died in wretchedness. Of the Saharan
salt mines it is said that no slave lived there for more than five years. The
cultivation of cotton and sugar, which the Arabs brought from the East across
North Africa and into Spain, most probably entailed some kind of plantation
system. Certainly, the earliest relevant Ottoman records show the extensive
use of slave labor in the state-maintained rice plantations.41 Some such system, for cultivation of cotton and sugar, was taken across North Africa into
Spain and perhaps beyond. While economic slave labor was mainly male,
slave women were sometimes also exploited economically. The pre-Islamic
practice of hiring out female slaves as prostitutes is expressly forbidden by
Islamic law but appears to have survived nonetheless.
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The military slaves were in a sense the aristocrats of the slave population.
By far the most important among these were the Turks imported from the
Eurasian steppe, from Central Asia, and from what is now Chinese Turkistan.
A similar position was occupied by Slavs in medieval Muslim Spain and North
Africa and, later, by slaves of Balkan and Caucasian origin in the Ottoman
Empire. Black slaves were occasionally employed as soldiers, but this was not
common and was usually of brief duration.

Certainly the most privileged of slaves were the performers. Both slave
boys and slave girls who revealed some talent received musical, literary, and
artistic education. In medieval times most singers, dancers, and musical performers were, at least in origin, slaves. Perhaps the most famous was Ziryab, a
Persian slave at the court of Baghdad who later went to Spain, where he
became an arbiter of taste and is credited with having introduced asparagus to
Europe. Not a few slaves and freedmen have left their names in Arabic poetry
and history.

In a society where positions of military command and political power were
routinely held by men of slave origin or even status and where a significant
proportion of the free population were born to slave mothers, prejudice
against the slave as such, of the Roman or American type, could hardly
develop. Where such prejudice and hostility appear-and they are often expressed in literature and other evidence-they must be attributed to racial
more than to social distinction. The developing pattern of racial specialization
in the use of slaves must surely have contributed greatly to the growth of such
prejudice.

During the last half century or so, the word "race," in most Western languages, has undergone substantial and significant changes of meaning. Much
confusion and misunderstanding have been caused by the failure to recognize
these changes, still more by the survival of earlier meanings when new ones
have already been generally accepted. As late as the midcentury, the word
"race" was still commonly used in Europe, and occasionally in the United
States, to designate what we would nowadays call an ethnic group, that is to
say, a group defined primarily by linguistic and other cultural, historical, and
in some sense geographical criteria. In Britain the word was generally, even
officially, used to designate the four components that made up the common
British nationality.' Similarly, India was inhabited by a great variety of socalled races, speaking different but closely related languages and sharing a
common civilization. Sometimes, the term "race" was used in a broader and
looser sense, to denote a group of peoples, speaking related languages. It was
in this sense that philologists and ancient historians spoke of the Semites, the
Indo-Europeans, and other linguistically defined families of peoples.

As so often happens, social scientists took a word of common but imprecise usage and gave it a precise technical meaning. For the anthropologist, a
race was a group of people sharing certain visible and measurable characteristics, such as hair, pigmentation, skull measurements, height, and other physical features. Races thus consisted of such categories as whites, blacks, Mongols, and the like. These might be sub-divided-thus, for example, whites
could be classed as Nordic, Alpine, or Mediterranean. This kind of race,
though obviously overlapping to some extent with ethnic groupings, was independent of ethnic features. Different races could share a culture. Different
cultures could divide a race. By the strictly physical definition, even members
of the same family, with different genes, could belong to different races.

In current American usage, which has now spread to most other countries,
the word "race" is used exclusively to denote such major divisions as white,
black, Mongolian, and the like.' It is no longer applied to national, ethnic, or
cultural entities, such as the English or the Irish, the Germans or the Slavs, or
even the Japanese, who are now seen as being part of a much larger racial
grouping found in East Asia.

In this modern sense, race was of minor importance in antiquity. Where
modern scholarship has discerned racial tension and hostility, it has been in the
earlier sense of race as an ethnic or national group, such as the Egyptians, the
Assyrians, the Israelites, and others defined by language, culture, and religion.
Though the ancient civilizations of the Middle East show considerable diversity, there is no great racial difference between their peoples. In friezes and
other pictorial representations, aliens are distinguished by their garb, their
hair, their beards, and their accoutrements, rather than by physical features.
The nose alone-used rather in the manner of a modern cartoonist-seems to
have provided the ancient artist with a physical symbol of national identity.' No
doubt there were differences of predominant physical type between, say, Egyptians and Assyrians, but these were no greater than the differences between the
different peoples of Europe. In anthropological terms, the major peoples of the
Middle East who have left their mark in history-the Egyptians, the Sumerians
and Akkadians, the Israelites, the Aramaeans, the Hittites, the Medes, and the
Persians and even, later, the Greeks and the Romans-exhibited no marked
contrasts of racial type.

Like every other society known to human history, the ancient Middle
Eastern peoples harbored all kinds of prejudices and hostilities against those
whom they regarded as "other." But the "other" was primarily someone who
spoke another language (the prototypal barbarian) or professed another religion (the Gentile or heathen or-in Christian and Islamic language-the infidel). There are many hostile references to the "others"-among Jews about
Gentiles and heathens, among Greeks about barbarians, among Romans
about almost everybody. It would be easy to assemble a fine collection of
ethnic slurs from Greek and Latin literature-but they are ethnic, not racial,
slurs. When Juvenal, irked by the Syrian presence in Rome, complains that
the Orontes had overflowed into the Tiber or when Ammianus Marcellinus,
who was himself a Syrian, said of the Saracens, meaning the Bedouin, that he
did not find them desirable either as friends or as enemies, they were making
cultural, not racial, statements.' This and other similar anti-Arab remarks,
and the attitude which they express, did not prevent an Arab chieftain from
becoming the Roman Emperor Philip or a Syrian local priest from becoming
the Emperor Heliogabalus.

Other races were of course known. The ancient Egyptians were closely
acquainted with their black southern neighbors and sometimes portray them,
in words or pictures, with characteristic Negroid features. But there is no
evidence that they regarded them as inferior for that reason. The much-cited
inscription of Pharaoh Sesostris III, in the nineteenth century B.C., barring, or
rather restricting, access by blacks to Egyptian territory, is a normal security precaution on a vulnerable frontier, where many wars had been fought. It is
no more a sign of racial prejudice than are numerous similar restrictions on
numerous other frontiers.' The Persians, Greeks, and later Romans had some
occasional contacts with China, and rather more with Ethiopia, which was a
known part of the civilized world even in biblical times. But these countries
were very remote, and contacts with them were few. Ethiopia and China were
both respected, and there is no real evidence in Jewish, Greek, or Roman
sources of lower esteem for darker skins or higher esteem for lighter complexions.' Nor were there slave races. Foreigners, especially if barbarians, were
enslavable. The ancients, like the rest of humanity, believed foreigners to be
inferior. Conquest confirmed that belief and, through the universal rule of
enslaving the conquered, provided it with practical application. Classical writers, from Aristotle onward, stated the general principle that there are races
suited by nature to slavery, but although there are occasional references to
this or that people as fitting this description, these are only passing examples
of wit or spite, in no sense amounting to any kind of scientific or philosophical
statement.'