User:Bookku/AP

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Lead para three

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Last i.e. third sentence is mainly kind of a summary (and not WP:OR) of what is appearing later in the article body. WP:SYNTHNOTSUMMARY states ".. Summary is not forbidden by any Wikipedia policy. .. As long as what's in the article is an accurate, neutral summary, and each of the statements is verified by an appropriate source, then the summary is also verified by the same sources.

IMHO As policies mentioned above providing citation for a summary sentence would look bit redundant and superfluous.

Old lead
A sizable majority of the slaves traded were often women

**

According to Jane Hathaway, a sizable majority of the slaves traded in the Arab slave trade were often women; every substantial household and many less substantial households owned female slaves, including many as domestic servants. In history as well as in conventional scholarship on Ottoman historiography, non-elite slaves and women are far underrepresented.

Taledano says that while various Muslim societies had developed their own brand of enslavement, the legal essence was very much derived from Islamic law.

According to Madline Ziffi, over the centuries, Constantinople became the capital of forced captive slaves that included women. The women were captured from various African, Asian, and European territories and sold in Istanbul markets. According to Taledano, during the 15th through 18th centuries, a large pool of women captives were brought in as loot of the war from various war fronts, including Greeks and Balkans from northeast shores of Mediterranean seas and also southeastern European lands lying north of the Black Sea i.e. Georgia and Circassia. According to Taledano, Ottoman records shows that some were captured in Ottoman war campaigns in the Balkans, while many others were captured from Russia and Poland by the Crimean Khanate incursions there. Russians, Serbs-Croats Bosnians Hungary Bulgaria and Walachia. These captives became forced labor including the concubinage of elite and royal harems of Ottoman sultans. According to Taledano, the Arab slave trade usually had a higher female:male ratio instead, suggesting a general preference for female slaves. Concubinage and reproduction served as incentives for importing female slaves (often European), although many were also imported mainly for performing household tasks.

According to Robert C. Davis, The slave women market used to be filled with women captured from Corsairs, Tartars and miscellaneous slave dealers.

Davis further quotes Bon as saying that slave girls in Istanbul were bought and sold like animals – ascertaining their country of origin, plus examining their bodies all over thoroughly to confirm that their buyer did not feel swindled. Virgin and beautiful girls used to get higher prices, and traders used to be held guilty if the slave girl did not turn out to be a virgin after promising so. While Turkish free women i.e. Muslim women could not be enslaved and Muslim Turkish women had some level of legal prerogative against sexual exploitation through slavery, the same prerogative was not available to slaves against their masters buying and selling them for sexual whims, and such sexual exploitation of female slaves could not be punished legally.

Limitations of enslaved women
According to Robert C. Davis, although women slaves were mainly taken from war zones, referring to them as captives or prisoners of war was blatantly incorrect. It is significant to note that the women's religion was not the same as that of their captors, and most of them were not active combatants but were taken while going about their normal business as civilians, despite any sign of hostility. Madeline Zilfi maintains that, like male slaves, female slaves were considered the personal property of their owners. However, unlike their male counterparts, women slaves were permitted to be exploited sexually, and their sexuality was deemed to be the personal property of their owners. Although using female slaves for prostitution was technically illegal, selling a slave woman to another man for sex was permissible, and slave women had no legal protection over their sexuality. Zilfi explains that while slaves could seek recourse to Islamic Sharia courts for any other physical injury, the sexuality of women slaves was not their own to lose. As a result, they were unable to appeal to Sharia courts or Sultans. Under systemic biases introduced under the Ottoman judicial system, enslaved women, most of whom were non-Muslims, were barred from testifying as witnesses against Muslims. The loss of a slave's virginity was not a matter for herself but rather for her owner, unlike physical injuries to a woman slave by a non-owner, for example, to the arm, leg, eye, or other part of the body. For instance, in the winter of 1817 AD, a female slave owner received compensation through the courts from a man who had raped her slave because the woman's virginity had been compromised, and it would no longer be possible for her owner to sell her as a highly priced virgin.

While some intellectuals dispute whether those deemed slaves would have been considered as such under our understanding of western slavery, Ehud R. Toledano, Liat Kozma, and Suraiya Faroqhi reveal that there were cases in which enslaved women were abused and deprived of legal protection and their rights. Faroqhi explains that while some historians attempt to contest contrasting law and society, law depends on society, and Islamic law and culture include provisions for the enslaved, facilitating their societal absorption over the generations. Nevertheless, although application and practice may not be universal, those in power impose legal systems to obtain significant advantage for themselves. When viewed from the perspective of disadvantaged slaves, it is reasonable to assume that a legal system is being imposed from outside on the micro-society of the enslaved.

Finally, in the case of Ottoman Legal System in regards to slavery, individual rights to choice and consent were severely restrained. Abuse and limitations were frequent, and female slaves were reduced to the level of material possessions, to be listed in inheritance registers alongside household utensils or livestock, or given such physical descriptions in court. Nineteenth century European women visitors reported that slave women had an astonishingly large amount of leisure time and freedom of speech and action inside the harem. They saw the slaves’ lives as preferable to those of domestic servants in the West. According to Davis, by 1717, Lady Mary, wife of a British ambassador to Istanbul, reported in her later published letter that the women slave market of Istanbul was somewhat dwindling.

As Suraiya Faroqhi says, female slaves would have few possibilities, depending upon physical attributes such as beauty and natural skills of pleasure and entertaining of male counterparts with cajoling words and gestures, to be selected by elite men as slaves or concubines. Few would be selected as slaves for the imperial harem, a few of them would be gifted to other elite men, a few more physically attractive ones would get selected for royal males, then few attractive ones would be reserved for the pleasure of the Sultan himself, a few of them will be selected as concubines of the Sultan. Those who would issue a male child from the Sultan will receive some extra facilities, but if the slave lady does not convert to Islam then she will be bereft of her child and the child would be raised separately as a Muslim. A rare few of the concubines would have a chance to be selected as an official wife of the Sultan, and rarer would have a chance of being a beloved wife, then rarer among them if her child gets selected as Sultan, would have the best possible honor of being Walide (Mother) of the Sultan.

According to Lidia Zhigunova, during the Ottoman period, women in the Caucasus had to face a multiplicity of colonizing agents, the westerners' and Russians' narratives focused on stereotypes of beauty and sexuality of elite Circassian slave women and their perceived emancipation and attempted to ignore their agency and other facets like their voices, resistance and diversity. Zhigunova quotes Tlostanova to describe possibilities of agencies for Ottoman women slaves. They (Zhigunova, Tlostanova) say that (unlike western slavery) slave status of Ottomans did not rob rights and humanity of the slaves, absorbed and integrated into the society better, there was a chance of change of status from non-elite to elite, for women slaves it was easier through possibilities of marriage. An enslaved woman impregnated by her owner could not be easily resold, her children were considered free, and if the owner accepted they were his children, the same inheritance rights applied as if children were from a legitimate marriage. So over next several generations of slaves were easily absorbed and integrated into the society like other earlier similarly integrated members. Moreover, female slaves would become free after the death of their owners through mechanism known as tedbir, a declaration wherein a slave owner would promise to manumit slave prior to his death to avail religious points of good behavior. At times in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state encouraged Mukatebe contracts wherein slaves could save to buy their own manumission. However, Zhigunova notes that there used to be repeated instances of women slave abuse, too. According to one example cited by Ehud Toledano, on 30 June 1854 a Circassian slave woman of poor background, named Shemsigul, recorded her testimony with Cairo police. According to her testimony, she was first trafficked from her native village in Circassia to Istanbul where she was purchased by a slave trader named Deli Mehmet, who on the way to Cairo sexually forced himself on her and subsequently, despite her getting pregnant from him, the trader sold her to a son of Egypt's then-Governor Mehmet Ali Pasha and subsequently was resold many times during her pregnancy itself, and even attempted to abort her. But eventually she gave birth to a child and the child was adopted by the wife of Deli Mehmet and she was resold to another dealer—even while the reselling of a slave mother was illegal even by Islamic standards—so the persecuting dealer Deli Mehmet was duly convicted. '''Toledano's study further says that the trafficking of Circassian women was well established by the nineteenth century, getting an additional dimension when, from the 1850s onwards, Russians expelled Circassians en masse from their own territories. The Circasians sought refuge with the Ottomans at the cost of being slaves. When rates of white slave women went down, black slave women were dumped. Sudden dumping or sudden manumission without any other recourse could lead to slave women's further destitution.'''

Suraiya Faroqhi compares agency to slaves of Ottoman in comparison to contemporary slaves of Mughal empire in South Asia. According to Faroqhi, no doubt, slave women of the Ottoman Empire had better chances of agency if they chanced upon elite masters, whereas in an attempt to ensure better life for own daughters, elites of Mughal empire used to precondition marriage contracts so that legally wedded wives had rights to dispose of husband's slave women and concubine as and when they wanted and add that amount to own kitty. Thus, they could get rid of any eventual competition from any concubine. '''Whereas Ottoman women did not take as much recourse to this strategy, they used to end up in familial jealousy wars and risked being dumped by husbands if any slave woman or concubine found better favor. So in Ottoman times, agency, if any, of any slave woman used to be achieved at the cost of other women's agency.''' Faroqhi says that, whether any other law or Sharia, in slave holding society, for slaves, capacity to show initiative and gain any agency remains limited by law or otherwise. For example, the mechanism of tedbir could prove riskier in achieving meaningful liberation on death of the owner, since the owner could not dispose of his two-thirds property which would get divided among decedent's inheritors, who could claim that (property) value of the slave was too high which owner could not dispose of in full so inheritors continue to have ownership rights over the slave.

Rather than imposing a binary whether Ottoman slaves were slaves or not, Faroqhi prefers to categorize them in a larger spectrum, wherein few of the elite male slaves growing through their military or administrative careers, enjoying most of practical life full of freedoms, wealth and power may not necessarily be called as slaves at all in the western sense but just next to them '''elite harem women slaves might have shared wealth and even power in some cases but considerable freedoms were alluding from them, too. But non-elite, i.e. menial slaves suffered the most from legal disabilities and reduced life chances that we associate with slavery'''. Faroqhi further points out that Farhat Yasa's study of 16th-18th Centuries fatwas claims under certain circumstances that slave owners could kill their slaves without worrying about being punishment while alive in living world, meaning thereby when one focuses on agency availed by few privileged ones, one ought to acknowledge most female slaves could show their agency only in very narrow limits, if at all. Some female slaves could turn out to be mere facade and slave users using them to face court punishments against their own crimes, too. So under the same spectrum talking of any agency of mere helpless victim female slaves would not remain relevant at all.

According to Kate Fleet, female slaves had more likelihood of access to public spaces as compared to non-slave Ottoman Muslim women. In fact, elite women usually had to take their female slaves along with them if a close male relative was not there to accompany them in public spaces. At times female slaves used to get some amount of agency as informant or spies. More often than not, access to public spaces for female slaves was not dignified.

Fleet says the visibility of female slaves was always meant to be fluid, since she would quickly move from one level of visibility to another, from being a protected possession to an exposed commodity without any choice over the levels to which they could be displayed to public gaze, could be handled naked by customers in the slave market, or from household servant to prostitute at the whim of their owners.

The slave market was under the supervision of the Ottoman state, which taxed every transaction of slaves.