The
Arab slave trade was
the practice of slavery in the Arab World, mainly West
Asia, North Africa, East Africa and certain parts of Europe (such as Sicily and
Iberia
) during
their period of domination by Arab
leaders. The trade was focused on the slave markets of the
Middle East and North Africa. People
traded were not limited to a certain color, ethnicity, or religion
and included Arabs and Berbers, especially in its early days.
Later,
during the 8th and 9th centuries of the Islamic Caliphate, most of the slaves were
Slavic Eastern Europeans (called Saqaliba), people from surrounding Mediterranean areas, Persians, Turks, peoples from the Caucasus mountain regions (such as Georgia
, Armenia
and Circassia) and parts of Central Asia and Scandinavia, Berbers from North Africa, and various other
peoples of varied origins as well as those of Black African origins.
Later, toward the 18th and 19th centuries, slaves increasingly came
from
East Africa, until slavery was
officially abolished by the end of the 19th century. It still
continues today in a smaller form in the
Arab states of the Persian
Gulf, where women and children are
trafficked from the
post-Soviet states,
Eastern Europe,
Far
East,
Africa,
South
Asia and other parts of the Middle East.
Scope of the trade
Historians
estimate that between 11 and 18 million Black Africans were
enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken across the Red Sea
, Indian Ocean
, and Sahara Desert between
650 and 1900, compared to 9.4 to 14 million Africans brought to the
Americas in the Atlantic slave
trade.
Periodic
Arab raiding expeditions were sent from Islamic Iberia
to ravage the Christian Iberian kingdoms, bringing
back booty and slaves. In a raid against Lisbon
in 1189, for
example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child
captives, while his governor of Córdoba
, in a subsequent attack upon Silves in 1191, took 3,000 Christian
slaves.
Arabs also enslaved substantial numbers of Europeans. According to
Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25
million
Europeans were captured by
Barbary pirates, who were vassals of
the
Ottoman Empire, and sold as
slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries.
These slaves were
captured mainly from seaside villages from Italy
, Spain
, Portugal
and also from more distant places like France
or England
, the
Netherlands
, Ireland
and even
Iceland
and North America. The impact of these
attacks was
devastating – France
, England
, and
Spain
each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of
the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by
their inhabitants. Pirate raids
discouraged settlement along the coast until the 19th
century.
The
Ottoman wars in Europe
and
Tatar raids brought large
numbers of European Christian slaves into the
Islamic world too.
The 'Oriental' or 'Arab' slave trade is sometimes called the
'Islamic' slave trade, but a
religious imperative was not the driver of the slavery,
Patrick Manning, a professor of World
History, states. However, if a non-Muslim population refuses to
adopt
Islam or pay the
Jizya protection/subjugation tax, that population is
considered to be at war with the Muslim "
ummah" and therefore it becomes legal under Islamic
law to take slaves from that non-Muslim population. Usage of the
terms "Islamic trade" or "Islamic world" has been disputed by some
Muslims as it treats Africa as outside of Islam, or a negligible
portion of the
Islamic world.
Propagators of
Islam in Africa often
revealed a cautious attitude towards proselytizing because of its
effect in reducing the potential reservoir of slaves.
From a Western point of view, the subject merges with the
Oriental slave trade, which followed two main
routes in the
Middle Ages:
The Arab slave trade originated before Islam and lasted more than a
millennium. It continues today in some
places.
Arab traders brought Africans across the
Indian Ocean from present-day Kenya
, Tanzania, Sudan
,Eritrea
, western
Ethiopia
and elsewhere in East Africa to present-day
Iraq
, Iran
, Kuwait
, Turkey
and other
parts of the Middle East and South Asia (mainly Pakistan
and India
).
Unlike
the trans-Atlantic slave trade
to the New World, Arabs supplied African
slaves to the Muslim world, which at
its peak stretched over three continents from the Atlantic
(Morocco
, Spain
) to India
and eastern
China
.
Sources and historiography of the slave trade
A recent and controversial topic
The history of the slave trade has given rise to numerous debates
amongst historians. For one thing, specialists are undecided on the
number of Africans taken from their homes; this is difficult to
resolve because of a lack of reliable statistics: there was no
census system in medieval Africa. Archival material for the
transatlantic trade in the 16th to 18th centuries may seem useful
as a source, yet these record books were often falsified.
Historians have to use imprecise narrative documents to make
estimates which must be treated with caution: Luiz Felipe de
Alencastro states that there were 8 million slaves taken from
Africa between the 8th and 19th centuries along the Oriental and
the Trans-Saharan routes.
Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau has put forward a figure of 17 million
African people enslaved (in the same period and from the same area)
on the basis of Ralph Austen's work.
Paul
Bairoch suggests a figure of 25 million African people
subjected to the Arab slave trade, as against 11 million that
arrived in the Americas from the
transatlantic slave trade.
Owen 'Alik Shahadah author of
African Holocaust (audio documentary), puts the figure at 10
million and argues that the trade only boomed in the 18th century,
prior to this the trade was "a trickle trade" and that exaggerated
numbers have been claimed in order to de-emphasize the
Transatlantic trade.
Another obstacle to a history of the Arab slave trade is the
limitations of extant sources. There exist documents from
non-African cultures, written by educated men in Arabic, but these
only offer an incomplete and often condescending look at the
phenomenon. For some years there has been a huge amount of effort
going into historical research on Africa. Thanks to new methods and
new perspectives, historians can interconnect contributions from
archaeology,
numismatics,
anthropology,
linguistics and
demography to compensate for the inadequacy of
the written record.
Slavery (of Africans by Africans) was endemic in Africa itself for
thousands of years before Europeans or Arabs entered the continent.
In Africa, slaves owned by African owners were often captured,
either through raids or as a result of warfare, and frequently
employed in manual labor by the captors. Slaves were commonly
traded by one African nation to another in exchange for goods or
services.
The Arab slave trade from East Africa is one of the oldest slave
trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by 700
years. Male slaves who were often made
eunuchs were employed as servants, soldiers, or
laborers by their owners, while female slaves, including those from
Africa, were long traded to the Middle Eastern countries and
kingdoms by Arab and Oriental traders, as
concubines and servants. Arab, African and
Oriental traders were involved in the capture and transport of
slaves northward across the Sahara desert and the Indian Ocean
region into the Middle East, Persia, and the Indian
subcontinent.
20th Century
From approximately 650 until around the 1960s the Arab slave trade
continued in one form or another. The Moroccan Sultan
Moulay Ismail "the Bloodthirsty" (1672-1727)
raised a corps of 150,000 black slaves, called his
Black Guard, who coerced the country into
submission.
Historical accounts and references to
slave-owning nobility in Arabia, Yemen
and
elsewhere are frequent into the early 1920s. In 1953, sheikhs from
Qatar
attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
included slaves in their retinues, and they did so again on another
visit five years later.
As
recently as the 1950s, the Saudi Arabia
’s slave population was estimated at 450,000 —
approximately 20% of the population. It is estimated that as
many as 200,000 black Sudanese children and women had been taken
into
slavery in Sudan during the
Second Sudanese Civil War.
Slavery in Mauritania was
legally abolished by laws passed in 1905, 1961, and 1981. It was
finally criminalized in August 2007.
It is estimated that
up to 600,000 black Mauritanians, or 20% of the Mauritania
’s population, are currently enslaved, many of them
used as bonded labour.
The Arab
slave trade in the Indian
Ocean
, Red
Sea
, and Mediterranean
long pre-dated the arrival of any significant
number of Europeans on the African continent.
Descendants of the African slaves brought to the Middle East during
the slave-trade still exist there today, and are aware of their
African origins.
Medieval Arabic Sources
These are given in chronological order. Scholars and
geographers from the
Arab world had been travelling to Africa since
the time of
Muhammad in the 7th
century.
- Al Masudi (died 957), Muruj
adh-dhahab or Meadows of Gold, the reference manual
for geographers and historians of the Muslim world. The author had
travelled widely across the Arab world as well as the Far
East.
- Ya'qubi (9th century), Book of
Countries
- Al-Bakri, author of Book of Roads and
Kingdoms, published in Cordoba around 1068, gives us
information about the Berbers and their
activities; he collected eye-witness accounts on Saharan caravan routes.
- Al Idrisi (died circa 1165),
Description of Africa and Spain
- Ibn Battûta (died
circa 1377), Marinid geographer who
travelled to sub-Saharan Africa, to Gao
and to
Timbuktu
. His principal work is called Gift for
those who like to reflect on the curiosities of towns and marvels
of travel.
- Ibn Khaldun (died in 1406),
historian and philosopher from North Africa. Sometimes considered
as the historian of Arab, Berber and Persian societies. He is the
author of Historical Prolegomena and History of the
Berbers.
- Ahmad al-Maqrî (died in 1442),
Egyptian historian. His main contribution is his description of
Cairo markets.
- Leo Africanus (died circa 1548),
author of a rare description of Africa.
- Rifa'a al Tahtawi (died in 1873), who translated medieval works
on geography and history. His work is mostly about Muslim
Egypt.
- Joseph Cuoq, Collection of Arabic sources concerning
Western Africa between the 8th and 16th centuries (Paris
1975)
European texts (16th - 19th centuries)
Other sources
- African Arabic and Ajami Manuscripts
- African oral tradition
- Kilwa
Chronicle
(16th century fragments)
- Numismatics: analysis of coins and of their diffusion
- Archaeology: architecture of trading posts and of towns
associated with the slave trade
- Iconography: Arab and Persian miniatures in major
libraries
- European engravings, contemporary with the slave trade, and
some more modern
- Photographs from the 19th century onward
- Ethiopian
( Ge'ez and Amharic)historical texts
Historical and geographical context of the Arab slave
trade
A brief review of the region and era in which the Oriental and
trans-Saharan slave trade took place should be useful here. It is
not a detailed study of the Arab world, nor of Africa, but an
outline of key points which will help with understanding the slave
trade in this part of the world.
The Islamic world
The religion of
Islam appeared in the 7th
century
CE, and in the next hundred years
it was quickly diffused throughout the Mediterranean area, spread
by Arabs after they
conquered
the Sassanid Persian Empire and
many territories from the Byzantine
Empire, including
the
Levant,
Armenia and
North Africa; they
invaded the Iberian
peninsula where they displaced the
Visigothic Kingdom. These regions
therefore had a diverse range of different peoples. To some extent,
these regions were unified by an Islamic culture built on both
religious and civic foundations. For example, they used the Arabic
language and the
dinar (currency) in
commercial transactions.
Mecca
in Arabia,
then as now, was the holy city of Islam and pilgrimage centre for
all Muslims, whatever their origins.
According
to Bernard Lewis, the Arab Empire was the first "truly universal civilization," which
brought together for the first time "peoples as diverse as the
Chinese
, the Indians,
the people of the Middle East and
North Africa, black Africans, and white Europeans."
The conquests of the
Arab armies and
the expansion of the Islamic state that followed have always
resulted in the capture of war prisoners who were subsequently set
free or turned into slaves or
Raqeeq (رقيق) and servants
rather than taken as prisoners as was the Islamic tradition in
wars. Once taken as slaves, they had to be dealt with in accordance
with the Islamic law which was the law of the Islamic state,
especially during the
Umayyad and
Abbasid eras. According to that law, slaves are
allowed to earn their living if they opted for that, otherwise it
is the owner’s (master) duty to provide for that. They also can’t
be forced to earn money for their masters unless with an agreement
between the slave and the master. This concept is called “مخارجة”
in the Islamic jurisprudence. If the slave agrees to that and he
would like the money s/he earns to be counted toward his/her
emancipation then this has to be written in the form of a contract
between the slave and the master. This is called “مكاتبة”
(mukatabah) in the Islamic jurisprudence. Muslims believe that
slave owners in Islam are strongly encouraged to perform
“mukatabah” with their slaves as directed by
Qur’an
- And if any of your slaves ask for a deed in writing (to enable
them to earn their freedom for a certain sum), give them such a
deed if ye know any good in them: yea, give them something
yourselves out of the means which Allah has given to you. 24:33
The framework of Islamic civilisation was a well-developed network
of towns and
oasis trading centres with the
market (
souk, bazaar) at its heart. These towns were
inter-connected by a system of roads crossing semi-arid regions or
deserts. The routes were travelled by convoys, and black slaves
formed part of this
caravan
traffic.
Arabic views on black people
The
Qur'an, the
Islamic prophet Muhammad, and the overwhelming majority of
Islamic jurists and
theologians, all stated that humankind has
a single origin and rejected the idea of certain ethnic groups
being superior to others. According to the
hadiths, the prophet Muhammad declared:
Despite this, some ethnic prejudices later developed among
Arabs due to several reasons: their
extensive conquests and slave trade; the
influence of
Aristotle's idea of certain
ethnic groups being slaves by nature, echoed by
Muslim philosophers such as
Al-Farabi and
Avicenna,
particularly in regards to
Turkic and
black peoples; and the influence of
Judeo-Christian ideas regarding
divisions among mankind between the three
sons of Noah, with the Babylonian
Talmud stating that "the
descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and
[it] depicts
Ham as a sinful man
and his progeny as degenerates." However, ethnic prejudice among
some elite Arabs was not limited to darker-skinned black people,
but was also directed towards fairer-skinned "ruddy people"
(including
Persians, Turks and
Europeans), while Arabs referred to themselves as "swarthy
people".
The 9th century Muslim author
Al-Jahiz, an
Afro-Arab and the grandson of a
Zanj (
Bantu) slave, wrote
a book entitled
Risalat mufakharat al-Sudan 'ala al-bidan
("Treatise on the Superiority of Blacks over Whites"), in which he
stated that Blacks:
And that:
Al-Jahiz also stated in his
Kitab al-Bukhala ("Avarice and
the Avaricious") that:
Jahiz' criticism however, was limited to the Zanj and not blacks in
totality, likely as a result of the
Zanj
revolts in his native Iraq.
This sentiment was echoed in the following passage from
Kitab
al-Bad' wah-tarikh (vol.4) by the medieval Arab writer
Al-Muqaddasi:
Al-Dimashqi (Ibn al-Nafis), the Arab
polymath, also described the inhabitants of
Sudan and the
Zanj coast, among others, as
being of "dim" intelligence and that:
By the 14th century, an overwhelming number of slaves came from
sub-Saharan Africa, leading to
prejudice against black people in the works of several
Arabic historians and
geographers.
For example, the
Egyptian
historian Al-Abshibi (1388-1446) wrote: "It is said
that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is
hungry, he steals."
Mistranslations of Arab scholars and geographers from this time
period have lead many to attribute certain racist attitudes that
weren't prevalent until the 18th and 19th century to writings made
centuries ago. Although bias against those of very black complexion
existed in the Arab world in the 15th century it didn't have as
much stigma as it later would. Older translations of Ibn Khaldun,
for example in
The Negro land of the Arabs Examined and Explained
which was written in 1841 gives excerpts of older translations that
were not part of later colonial propaganda and show black Africans
in a generally positive light.
In 14th century
North Africa, the
Arab sociologist,
Ibn Khaldun, wrote in his
Muqaddimah:
- When the conquest of the West (by the Arabs) was completed,
and merchants began to penetrate into the interior, they saw no
nation of the Blacks so mighty as Ghanah, the dominions of which
extended westward as far as the Ocean. The King's court
was kept in the city of Ghanah, which, according to the author of
the Book of Roger (El Idrisi), and the author of the Book of Roads
and Realms (El Bekri), is divided into two parts, standing on both
banks of the Nile, and ranks among the largest and most populous
cities of the world. The people of Ghanah had for
neighbours, on the east, a nation, which, according to historians,
was called Susu; after which came another named Mali; and after
that another known by the name of Kaukau ; although some people
prefer a different orthography, and write this name Kagho.
The last-named nation was followed by a people called
Tekrur. The people of Ghanah declined in course of time,
being overwhelmed or absorbed by the Molaththemun (or muffled
people;that is, the Morabites), who, adjoining them on the north
towards the Berber country, attacked them, and, taking possession
of their territory, compelled them to embrace the Mohammedan
religion. The people of Ghanah, being invaded at a later
period by the Susu, a nation of Blacks in their neighbourhood, were
exterminated, or mixed with other Black nations.
Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the decline of Ghana and rise
of the
Almoravids. However, there
is little evidence of there actually being an Almoravid conquest of
Ghana.
Ibn Khaldun attributed the "strange practices and customs" of black
Africans to the hot climate of
sub-Saharan Africa and made it clear that
it was not due to any curse in their lineage, dismissing the
Hamitic theory as a myth.
His critical attitude towards Arabs has led the scholar Mohammad A.
Enan to suggest that Ibn Khaldun may have been a
Berber pretending to be an Arab in order to
gain social status, but Muhammad Hozien has responded to this claim
stating that Ibn Khaldun or anyone else in his family never claimed
to be Berber even when the Berbers were in power.
The
14th-century North African Arabic geographer and traveller,
Ibn Battuta, on his trip to Western
Sudan
, was impressed with occasional aspects of
life.
Battuta later visited the
Zanj-inhabited
portions of
East Africa and held more
positive views of its black people.
Ibn Battuta also appeared to be relatively impressed with some
aspects of the
Mali Empire of
West Africa, which he visited in 1352, writing
that the people there:
In addition, he wrote many other positive comments on the people of
the Mali Empire, including the following:
Ibn Battuta's remarks contrasted greatly to that of many other
comments from Arab authors concerning blacks. However, many of the
exaggerated accounts are noted to have been based on hearsay and
even perpetuated by Africans themselves in an attempt to keep their
states and economies isolated, in addition to Ibn Battuta having
been the only medieval Muslim scholar referenced here to have
actually traveled to both east and west Africa.
Africa: 8th through 19th centuries
Elikia M’bokolo, April 1998,
Le
Monde diplomatique. Quote:"The African continent was bled of
its human resources via all possible routes. Across the
Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean
ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery
for the benefit of the
Muslim countries
(from the ninth to the nineteenth)." He continues: "Four million
slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the
Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps
as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and
eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the
Atlantic Ocean"
In the 8th century AD, Africa was dominated by Arab-Berbers in the
north: Islam moved southwards along the
Nile
and along the desert trails.
- The Sahara was thinly populated. Nevertheless, since
Antiquity there had been cities living on a trade in salt, gold,
slaves, cloth, and on agriculture enabled by irrigation: Tahert
, Oualata
, Sijilmasa
, Zaouila, and others. They were ruled by
Arab, Berber, Fulani, Hausa and Tuaregs. Their
independence was relative and depended on the power of the Maghrebi
and Egyptian states.
- In the Middle Ages, sub-Saharan Africa was called bilad -ul-Sûdân in Arabic, meaning land of
the Blacks. It provided a pool of manual labour for North
Africa and Saharan Africa. This region was dominated by certain
states: the Ghana Empire, the Empire of Mali, the Kanem-Bornu Empire.
- In eastern Africa, the coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean
were controlled by native Muslims, and Arabs were important as
traders along the coasts. Nubia had been a
"supply zone" for slaves since Antiquity. The Ethiopian coast,
particularly the port of Massawa
and Dahlak Archipelago
, had long been a hub for the exportation of slaves
from the interior, even in Aksumite
times. The port and most coastal areas were largely Muslim,
and the port itself was home to a number of Arab and Indian
merchants.

Slaves in eastern Africa -
illustration from late 19th century)
The
Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia
often exported Nilotic
slaves from their western borderland provinces, or from newly
conquered or reconquered Muslim provinces. The
Somali and
Afar
Muslim sultanates, such as the
Adal
Sultanate, exported slaves as well.
Arabs also set up slave-trading posts along the
southeastern coast of the Indian Ocean, most notably in the
archipelago of Zanzibar
, along the coast of present-day Tanzania. East Africa and the Indian Ocean
continued as an important region for the Oriental slave trade up
until the 19th century.
Livingstone and
Stanley were then the first Europeans
to penetrate to the interior of the Congo basin and to discover the
scale of slavery there. The Arab
Tippu Tip
extended his influence and made many people slaves.
After Europeans had
settled in the Gulf of
Guinea
, the trans-Saharan slave trade became less
important. In Zanzibar, slavery was abolished late, in 1897,
under Sultan
Hamoud bin
Mohammed.
Africa and the Arab slave trade
People were captured, transported, bought and sold by some very
different characters. The trade passed through a series of
intermediaries and enriched some sections of the Muslim
aristocracy. Slavery fed on wars between African peoples and
states, which gave rise to an internal slave trade. Those conquered
owed tribute in the form of men and women reduced to captivity.
Sonni Ali Ber (1464–1492), emperor of
Songhai, waged many wars to extend
his territory.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, the
Caliphs had
tried to colonise the African shores of the Indian Ocean for
commercial purposes. But these establishments were ephemeral, often
founded by exiles or adventurers.
The Sultan of Cairo sent slave
traffickers on raids against the villages of Darfur
. In
the face of these attacks, the people formed militias, building
towers and outer defences to protect their villages.
Geography of the slave trade
"Supply" zones
Merchants of slaves for the Orient stocked up in Europe. Danish
merchants had bases in the
Volga region and
dealt in
Slavs with Arab merchants.
Circassian slaves were conspicuously
present in the
harems and there were many
odalisques from that region in the
paintings of
Orientalists. Non-Muslim
slaves were valued in the harems, for all roles (gate-keeper,
servant, odalisque {chambermaid}, musician, dancer, court dwarf,
concubine). In the Ottoman Empire, the last black slave sold in
Ethiopia named Hayrettin Effendi, was freed in 1918.
The slaves of Slavic
origin in Al-Andalus
came from the Varangians
who had captured them. They were put in the Caliph's guard
and gradually took up important posts in the army (they became
saqaliba), and even went to take
back
taifas after the civil war had led to an
implosion of the Western Caliphate.
Columns of slaves feeding the great
harems of Cordoba
, Seville
and Grenada
were organised by Jewish merchants
(mercaderes) from Germanic countries and parts of Northern
Europe not controlled by the Carolingian Empire. These columns crossed
the Rhône valley to reach the lands
to the south of the Pyrenees
.
There are also historical evidence of North African Muslim slave
raids all along the
Mediterranean
coasts across Christian Europe and beyond to even as far north
as the British Isles and Iceland (see book titled
White Gold). The majority of slaves traded
across the Mediterranean region were predominantly of European
origin from the 7th to 15th centuries. The
Barbary pirates continued to capture slaves
from Europe and, to an extent, North America, from the 16th to 19th
centuries.
Slaves were also brought into the Arab world via
Central Asia, mainly of
Turkic or
Tartar
origin. Many of these slaves later went on to serve in the armies
forming an elite rank.
- At sea, Barbary pirates joined
in this traffic when they could capture people by boarding ships or
by incursions into coastal areas, mainly in Southern Europe.
- Nubia and Ethiopia
were also "exporting" regions: in the 15th century,
Ethiopians sold slaves from western borderland areas (usually just
outside of the realm of the Emperor
of Ethiopia) or Ennarea, which often
ended up in India, where they worked on ships or as
soldiers. They eventually rebelled and took power (dynasty
of the Habshi Kings in Bengal
1487-1493).
- The Sûdân region and Saharan Africa formed another "export"
area, but it is impossible to estimate the scale, since there is a
lack of sources with figures.
- Finally, the slave traffic affected eastern Africa, but the
distance and local hostility slowed down this section of the
Oriental trade.
Routes
Caravan trails, set up in the 9th century, went past the oases of
the Sahara; travel was difficult and uncomfortable for reasons of
climate and distance. Since Roman times, long convoys had
transported slaves as well as all sorts of products to be used for
barter. To protect against attacks from
desert nomads, slaves were used as an escort. Any who slowed down
the progress of the caravan were killed.
Historians know less about the sea routes. From the evidence of
illustrated documents, and travellers' tales, it seems that people
travelled on
dhows or
jalbas, Arab ships which were used as transport
in the Red Sea. Crossing the Indian Ocean required better
organisation and more resources than overland transport.
Ships
coming from Zanzibar made stops on Socotra
or at Aden
before
heading to the Persian
Gulf
or to India. Slaves were sold as far away as India, or
even China: there was a colony of Arab merchants in Canton
. Serge Bilé cites a 12th century text which
tells us that most well-to-do families in Canton had black slaves
whom they regarded as savages and demons because of their physical
appearance.
Although Chinese slave traders bought slaves
(Seng Chi i.e. the Zanj) from
Arab intermediaries and "stocked up" directly in coastal areas of
present-day Somalia
, the local Somalis --
referred to as Baribah and Barbaroi (Berbers) by medieval Arab and ancient Greek geographers, respectively (see Periplus of the Erythraean
Sea), and no strangers to capturing, owning and trading
slaves themselves -- were not among them:
One important commodity being transported by the Arab
dhows to Somalia was slaves from other parts of East
Africa.
During the nineteenth century, the East African slave
trade grew enormously due to demands by Arabs, Portuguese, and
French.
Slave traders and raiders moved throughout eastern and
central Africa to meet the rising demand for enslaved men, women,
and children.
Somalia did not supply slaves -- as part of the Islamic
world Somalis were at least nominally protected by the religious
tenet that free Muslims cannot be enslaved -- but Arab dhows loaded
with human cargo continually visited Somali ports.

13th century slave market in the
Yemen
Slave
labor in East Africa was drawn exclusively from the Zanj, who were Negroid
Bantu-speaking peoples that lived
along the East African coast in an area roughly comprising
modern-day Tanzania, Mozambique
and Malawi
.The Zanj were for centuries shipped as
slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean
. The Umayyad and
Abbasid caliphs
recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as AD 696, we
learn of slave revolts of the Zanj against their Arab enslavers in
Iraq
(see Zanj
Rebellion). Ancient Chinese texts also mention
ambassadors from Java presenting the Chinese emperor with two
Seng Chi (Zanj) slaves as gifts, and Seng Chi slaves
reaching China from the Hindu kingdom of
Sri Vijaya in Java
.
Barter
Slaves were often bartered for objects of various different kinds:
in the Sûdân, they were exchanged for cloth,
trinkets and so on. In the Maghreb, they were
swapped for horses. In the desert cities, lengths of cloth,
pottery, Venetian glass beads, dyestuffs and jewels were used as
payment. The trade in black slaves was part of a diverse commercial
network.
Alongside gold coins, cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean or the
Atlantic (Canaries
, Luanda
) were used
as money throughout black Africa (merchandise was paid for with
sacks of cowries).
Slave markets and fairs
Enslaved Africans were sold in the towns of the Muslim world. In
1416, al-Makrisi told how pilgrims coming from Takrur (near the
Senegal river) had brought 1700 slaves
with them to Mecca.
In North Africa, the main slave markets were
in Morocco, Algiers
, Tripoli
and Cairo. Sales were held in public places
or in souks. Potential buyers made a careful examination of the
"merchandise": they checked the state of health of a person who was
often standing naked with wrists bound together. In Cairo,
transactions involving eunuchs and
concubines happened in private houses. Prices
varied according to the slave's quality.
Towns and ports involved in the slave trade
See also
References
- This article was initially translated from the featured
French wiki article "Traite musulmane" on 19 May
2006.
- Historical survey > The international slave
trade
- Arabs and Slave Trade
- Should The Islamic World Apologize For
Slavery?
- United Arab Emirates, US Department of
State
- Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons
Report 2007, US Department of State
- Country Narratives: Near East, US Department of
State
- Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black
History
- Focus on the slave trade
- The Unknown Slavery: In the Muslim world, that is —
and it's not over
- BBC NEWS | Africa | Quick guide: The slave trade
- Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced
on the Christian-Islamic Frontier
- When europeans were slaves: Research suggests
white slavery was much more common than previously
believed
- Davis, Robert. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White
Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy,
1500-1800.Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to
obtain slaves for the Americas". Stephen Behrendt, "Transatlantic
Slave Trade", Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and
African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books,
1999), ISBN 0-465-00071-1.
- BBC - History - British Slaves on the Barbary
Coast
- Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates by Christopher
Hitchens, City Journal Spring 2007
- Supply of Slaves
- Soldier Khan
- The living legacy of jihad slavery
- Manning (1990) p.10
- Murray Gordon, “Slavery in the Arab World.” New Amsterdam
Press, New York, 1989. Originally published in French by Editions
Robert Laffont, S.A. Paris, 1987, page 28.
- Battuta's Trip: Journey to West Africa (1351 -
1353)
- The blood of a nation of Slaves in Stone
Town
- BBC Remembering East African slave raids
- "Know about Islamic Slavery in Africa"
- Irfan Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century,
Dumbarton Oaks, 2002, p. 364 documents Ghassanid Arabs seizing and
selling 20,000 Jewish Samaritans as slaves in the year 529, before
the rise of Islam.
- A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight
- Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, Traite, in Encyclopædia
Universalis (2002), corpus 22, page 902.
- Ralph Austen, African Economic History (1987)
- Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l'histoire
économique, (1994). See also: Economics and World History:
Myths and Paradoxes (1993)
- Mintz, S. Digital History Slavery, Facts &
Myths
- Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East. Oxford
Univ Press 1994.
- http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-85410331.html 'The Unknown
Slavery: In the Muslim world, that is -- and it's not over. (From:
National
Review | Date: 5/20/2002 | Author: Miller, John J.)
- Slavery in Islam
- £400 for a Slave
- War and Genocide in Sudan
- The Lost Children of Sudan
- Slavery still exists in Mauritania
- Mauritanian MPs pass slavery law
- The Abolition season on BBC World Service
- Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, in Les Collections de
l'Histoire (April 2001) says:"la traite vers l'Océan
indien et la Méditerranée est bien antérieure à l'irruption des
Européens sur le continent"
- A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight
(washingtonpost.com)
- Dr Susan
- Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi, Culture and Customs of
Somalia, (Greenwood Press: 2001), p.13
- Bethwell A. Ogot, Zamani: A Survey of East African
History, (East African Publishing House: 1974), p.104
- http://www.jstor.org/pss/3590803 Translation and the Colonial
Imaginary: Ibn Khaldun Orientalist, by Abdelmajid Hannoum © 2003
Wesleyan University.
- The Negro land of the Arabs Examined and
Explained
- Not Quite Venus from the Waves: The Almoravid
Conquest of Ghana in the Modern Historiography of Western Africa by
Pekka Masonen; Humphrey J. Fisher 1996
- http://www.jstor.org/pss/3171598 The Conquest That Never Was:
Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076. I. The External Arabic Sources, by
David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher © 1982 African Studies
Association
- IBN KHALDUN: His Life and Work by Muhammad
Hozien
- Please note : The numbers occurring in the source, and repeated
here on Wikipedia
include both Arab and European trade. The impact
of the slave trade on Africa
- Pankhurst, Richard. The Ethiopian Borderlands: Essays in
Regional History from Ancient Times to the End of the 18th
Century (Asmara, Eritrea: Red Sea Press, 1997), pp.416
- Pankhurst. Ethiopian Borderlands, pp.432
- Pankhurst. Ethiopian Borderlands, pp.59
- Emery Van Donzel, "Primary and Secondary Sources for Ethiopian
Historiography. The Case of Slavery and Slave-Trade in Ethiopia,"
in Claude Lepage, ed., Études éthiopiennes, vol I. France:
Société française pour les études éthiopiennes, 1994,
pp.187-88.
- Roland Oliver, Africa in the Iron Age: c.500 BC-1400
AD, (Cambridge University Press: 1975), p.192
- F.R.C. Bagley et al., The Last Great Muslim Empires,
(Brill: 1997), p.174
- James Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Part
12: V. 12, (Kessinger Publishing, LLC: 2003), p.490
- Henry Louis Gates, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the
African and African American Experience, (Oxford University
Press: 1999), p.1746
- David D. Laitin, Politics, Language, and Thought: The
Somali Experience, (University Of Chicago Press: 1977),
p.52
- Catherine Lowe Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class,
and the Legacy of Slavery, (University of Pennsylvania Press:
1999), p. 51
- [278293] Mintz, S., Digital History/Slavery
Facts & Myths
Bibliography
Books in English
- The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam
(Princeton Series on the Middle East) by Eve Troutt Powell
(Editor), John O. Hunwick (Editor)
- Edward A. Alpers, The East African Slave Trade
(Berkeley 1967)
- Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White
Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy,
1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) ISBN 978-1403945518
- Allan G. B. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in
Africa, ed. C. Hurst (London 1970, 2nd edition 2001)
- Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab world (New York
1989)
- Bernard Lewis, Race and
slavery in the Middle East (OUP 1990)
- Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah
trans. F.Rosenthal ed. N.J.Dawood (Princeton 1967)]
- Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of
Slavery in Africa (Cambridge 2000)
- Ronald Segal, Islam's Black Slaves (Atlantic Books,
London 2002)
Audio Material
Books and articles in French
- Serge Daget, De la traite à l'esclavage, du Ve au XVIIIe
siècle, actes du Colloque international sur la traite des
noirs (Nantes, Société française d'histoire d'Outre-Mer,
1985)
- Jacques Heers, Les Négriers en terre d'islam (Perrin,
Pour l'histoire collection, Paris, 2003) (ISBN
2-262-01850-2)
- Murray Gordon, L'esclavage dans le monde arabe, du VIIe au
XXe siècle (Robert Laffont, Paris, 1987)
- Bernard Lewis, Race et esclavage au Proche-Orient,
(Gallimard, Bibliothèque des histoires collection, Paris,
1993) (ISBN 2-07-072740-8)
- Olivier Petré-Grenouilleau, Les Traites oubliée des
négrières (la Documentation française, Paris, 2003)
- Jean-Claude Deveau, Esclaves noirs en Méditerranée in
Cahiers de la Méditerranée, vol. 65, Sophia-Antipolis
- Olivier Petré-Grenouilleau, La traite oubliée des négriers
musulmans in L'Histoire, special number 280 S
(October 2003), pages 48–55.
External links