Slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate



Chattel slavery was a major part of society, culture and economy in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), which during its history included most of the Middle East. While slavery was an important part also of the preceding practice of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), it was during the Abbasid Caliphate that the slave trade to the Muslim world reached a more permanent commercial industrial scale, establishing commercial slave trade routes that were to remain for centuries.

The Caliphate was a major slave trade destination, and slaves were imported from several destinations. Since Islamic law prohibited enslavement of Muslims, slaves were imported from non-Muslim lands around the Muslim world. These included Pagan Africa in the South; Christian and Pagan Europa in the North; and Pagan Central Asia and India in the East.

These slaves came from the North along the Balkan slave trade and the Volga trade route; from the East via the Bukhara slave trade; from the West via the Andalusian slave trade, the Trans-Saharan slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade; and from the South from the Indian Ocean slave trade. The slave trade to and slavery in the area continued during subsequent rulerships, and continued until the slavery in the Ottoman Empire ended in the 20th-century.

Slave trade
The slave trade had been big also during the Umayyad Caliphate, but then, it had been mainly fueled by war captives and people enslaved as tax levy; during the Abbasid Caliphate, the slave trade in war captives was largerly supplanted by people bought through commercial slave trade provided for the slave markets in Basra, Baghdad and Samarra. In parallel with the slave trade in captives and the slaves provided as tax levy and tributes, the expansion of the commercial slave trade expanded slavery during the Abbasid period.

War captives
The established custom to enslave captured warriors as well as civilians during warfare continued.

During the Sack of Amorium in 838, the city was systematically destroyed, never to recover its former prosperity. Many of its inhabitants were slaughtered, and the remainder driven off as slaves. The city was thoroughly sacked and plundered; according to the Arab accounts, the sale of the spoils went on for five days. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes Continuatus mentions 70,000 dead, while the Arab al-Mas'udi records 30,000. The surviving population were divided as slaves among the army leaders, except for the city's military and civic leaders, who were reserved for the caliph's disposal. After allowing Theophilos's envoys to return to him with the news of Amorium's fall, Mu'tasim burned the city to the ground, with only the city walls surviving relatively intact. Many of the survivors were released after a truce in 841, but prominent officials were taken to the caliph's capital of Samarra and executed years later after refusing to convert to Islam, becoming known as the 42 Martyrs of Amorium.

African slave trade
In the Abbasid Empire, African slaves were referred to as Zanj. African slaves were favored for hard labor.

Baqt
The Christian kingdom of Makuria in Dongola Reach (in today's Sudan) was obliged to provide between 360 and 400 slaves every year to Islamic Egypt (then an Abbasid province) in accordance with the terms of the Baqt treaty.

Red Sea slave trade
The slave trade from Africa to Arabia via the Red Sea had ancient roots. While in Pre-Islamic Arabia, Arab war captives were common targets of slavery, importation of slaves from Ethiopia across the Red Sea also took place. The Red Sea slave trade appears to have been established at least from the 1st-century onward, when enslaved Africans were trafficked across the Red Sea to Arabia and Yemen.

The Red Sea slave trade appear to have expanded signficiantly during the Islamic period, particularly during the Abbasid Caliphate. African slaves were transported in the 9th-century via the Red Sea slave trade from Africa across the Red Sea to the slave markets of Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and from there by caravan over the desert to the slave market of Baghdad. The Red Sea slave between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula continued for centuries until its final abolition in the 1960s, when slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in 1962.

Indian Ocean slave trade
The Indian Ocean slave trade established, in which slaves were trafficked from East Africa across the Indian Ocean by dhow through the Persian Gulf to Ras al Khymah, Dubai, Bandrar Abbas, Bushine and Basra.

European slave trade
European slaves were referred to as saqaliba. The Vikings sold both Christian and Pagan European captives to the Muslims, who referred to them as saqaliba; these slaves were likely both Pagan Slavic, Finnic and Baltic Eastern Europeans as well as Christian Western Europeans. European slaves were viewed as luxury goods and primarily served in the households of royalty and rich people. There were several routes for saqaliba slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate.

Khazar and Bukhara slave trade
The main route of European slaves to the Caliphate was the Eastern Volga trade route via Russia and Central Asia down to Baghdad via Persia. Initially via the Khazar slave trade, and later via the Samanid slave trade.

The Khazar slave trade and the Samanid slave trade in Bukhara constituted the two great furnishers of slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate. People taken captive during the viking raids in Western Europe could be sold to Moorish Spain via the Dublin slave trade or transported to Hedeby or Brännö and from there via the Volga trade route to Russia, where slaves and furs were sold to Muslim merchants in exchange for Arab silver dirham and silk, which have been found in Birka, Wollin and Dublin; initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate, but from the early 10th-century onward it went via Volga Bulgaria and from there by caravan to Khwarazm, to the Samanid slave market in Central Asia and finally via Iran to the Abbasid Caliphate.

This slave trade is known to have functioned from at least between 786 and 1009, as big quantities of silver coins from the Samanid Empire has been found in Scandinavia from these years, and people taken captive by the Vikings during their raids in Western Europe were likely sold in Islamic Central Asia, a slave trade which was so lucrative that it may have contributed to the Viking raids in Western Europe, used by the Vikings as a slave supply source for their slave trade with Islamic world.

Al-Andalus slave trade
Other routes for saqaliba slaves to the Caliphate was via the al-Andalus slave trade in Western Europe. From the Prague slave trade of Pagan Slavs via France to slavery in al-Andalus in Spain, and via the al-Andalus slave trade to the Abbasid Caliphate. The al-Andalus slave trade was significantly reduced with the end of the Prague slave trade in the 11th-century, but continued in a smaller scale until the end of the reconquista.

Andalusian Saracen pirates established a base in Camargue, Fraxinetum or La Garde-Freinet-Les Mautes (888-972), from which they made slave raids in to France and the Fraxinetum slave trade exported the Frankisk prisoners they captured as slaves to the Muslim world.

Slaves captured by the vikings in the British islands were also sold via the Dublin slave trade to the al-Andalus slave market.

Saracen piracy
Saracens from Aghlabids of Ifriqiya managed an extensive slave trade of Italians captured in Southern Italy to Abbasid Maghreb from the early the mid 9th-century.

While the Saracen bases in France was eliminated in 972 and Italy in 1091, this did not prevent the Saracen piracy slave trade of the Mediterranean; both Almoravid dynasty (1040-1147) and the Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269) approved of the slave raiding of Saracen pirates toward non-Muslim ships in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean for the purpose of slave raiding.

Turkic people
Turkic peoples belonged to the most common categories of slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate after Africans. They were foremost favored for military slavery.

Turkic people from the Central Asian Steppe, were a major supply source for slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate during the entire Middle Ages. They were Pagans, adherents of Tengrism, and thereby viewed as legitimate targets of slavery. In the Middle East, they were referred to as "white" and used for military slavery for centuries during the Middle Ages. Turkic slaves were trafficked to the Abbasid Caliphate via the Bukhara slave trade.

al-Baladhuri described how Caliph al-Mamun used to write to his governors in Khurasan to raid those peoples of Transoxiana who had not submitted to Islam:
 * "when al-Mutasim became Caliph he did the same to the point that most of his military leaders came from Transoxiana: Soghdians, Farhanians, Ushrusanians, peoples of Shash, and others [even] their kings came to him. Islam spread among those who lived there, so they begun raiding the Turks who lived there".

Turkic slaves were the main slave supply of the Samanid slave trade, and regularly formed a part of the land tax sent to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad; the geographer Al-Maqdisi (ca. 375/985) noted that in his time the annual levy (ḵarāj) included 1,020 slaves.

From the early 9th-century, military slavery played a major military role in the Abbasid Caliphate, and Turkic male slaves were particularly favored for the role of slave soldiers.

Slave market
The slave market and use of slaves in the Abbasid Caliphate divided slaves into male, female and eunuchs. The slaves were also divided in skin color. Eunuchs were used for domestic and administrative purpuse; male slaves were used for labor and military slavery; and females were used for domestic service and sexual slavery (concubinage).

Thousands and possibly millions of Africans, Berbers, Turks, and European saqaliba are estimated to have been enslaved in this time period.

Female slaves
Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic servants, or as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of tasks. The sex slave-concubines of rich Urban men who had given birth to the son of their enslaver were counted as the most privileged, since they became an Umm Walad and became free upon the death of their enslaver; the concubine of a Beduoin mainly lived the same life as the rest of the tribal members and the women of the family. Female domestic slaves lived a hard life and reproduction among slaves was low; it was noted that the infant mortality was high among slaves, and that female slaves were often raped in their childhood and rarely lived in their forties, and that poorer slave owners often prostituted them.

The slave trade in the Muslim world focused on women for used of domestic servants and sex slaves. Women were trafficked to the royal Abbasid harem from Europe via the Volga trade route, as well as from Africa and Asia. The royal harem was used as a role model for the harems of other wealthy men. Women from Europe, Central Asia, Asia and Africa was used as sex slaves and domestic servants within the royal harem and the lesser harems of private men, as well as the harems of local principalities within the Abbasid Caliphate.

Male slaves
The use of male slaves were far more varied. Since eunuchs lacked family of their own and was unable to have children, they were considered highly thrustworthy, and used as harem guards, as guards at mosques and holy sites, as administrators and family stewards.

Slave labourers were used in cash-crop production, in the silk textile industry, in salt production and land reclamation, in cotton and sugar production especially in the area of the big slave market center of Basra. Slave labourers were kept in big work camps, and often had to be replaced by new slaves through the slave trade, since the marshlands in Mesopotamia caused slaves to die in large numbers from malaria, and slaves were not allowed to marry or have children. Around 15,000 slaves were estimated to be kept in the Basra area at any given time, and that a quarter of the labor force consisted of slave labor. Contemporary writers in the late 9th-century estimated that there were around 300,000 slaves in Iraq. The harsh condition resulted in a big slave rebellion known as the Zanj Rebellion, which lasted between 869 and 883.

From the early 9th-century, slaves, specifically Turkic slaves, were also employed as slave soldiers.

Racial dimension of slavery
There was a dimension of racism in the slavery of the Abbasid Caliphate. Since all non-Muslims not living under Islamic rule were considered a legitimate target of enslavement by Islamic law, the slaves in the Caliphate could be of many different races. However, this did not prevent a racist component of slavery. Slaves were valued differently on the market depending on their race, and were considered to have different abilities because of their racial identity, and a racial hierarchy existed among slaves of different races in the Caliphate.

Racism against Black Africans in the Arab world grew after Islam. While there had been a trade in slaves from Africa to both the Hellenistic world, the Roman Empire and Pre-Islamic Arabia, this was in a relatively small scale; but the massive expansion of slave trade from Africa after the Islamic conquests made Africans the most common ethnicity for slaves, and most Africans that Arabs interacted with were slaves, which increased racism against Africans. By the 8th-century, Blackness was associated with ugliness and inferior status, and this was mentioned by black Arab poets in their writings. Black skin was associated with evil, devilry and damnation, while white skin carried the opposite associations, a racist stereotype described also in the Quran (III: 102).

During the first century of Islam, Black slaves and freedmen could achieve fame and recognition, but from the Umayyad Caliphate onward, Black freedmen (unlike white), are with rare exceptions no longer noted to have achieved any higher positions of wealth, power, privilege or success, and contemporary Arab Muslim writers contributed this factor to a lack of capacity.

Arab racist stereotypes against Black Africans portrayed Black people as people with a simple piety, but also with an unbridled sexuality with immense potency, a stereotype described in "The Thousand and One Nights". The stereotypical Black man was described both as a seducer or rapist of white women, but also himself a victim of frustrated white wives and daughters, while the Black woman was ascribed both repulsive ugliness as well as incandescent sexuality by Arab poets.

Asian slaves had a higher status than African slaves. Turkic men were widely regarded to be brave and suitable for military slavery. Caliph Mutasim had 70.000 Turkic slave soldiers, and one of his governors noted that there were "none like the Turk for service". While Turkic men were considered brave soldiers, Turkic women were seen as ideal for giving birth to brave sons.