Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (18 page)

The same limitation of opportunity applies to the emancipated slave. The
emancipated white slave was free from any kind of restriction; the emancipated black slave was at most times and places rarely able to rise above the
lowest levels. In Umayyad times, we still hear of black poets and singers
achieving some sort of social standing, even though they complain of discrimi nation. In later times, the black poet as a figure in Arabic literature disappears and none of any consequence are reported from the mid-eighth century
onward. A few religious figures-saints and scholars-are said to have had
black ancestry, but these again are exceptional.28 What is more important is
that the black is almost entirely missing from the positions of wealth, power,
and privilege. Medieval authors sometimes attribute this want of achievement
by black slaves and freedmen to lack of capacity. The modern observer will
recognize the effects of lack of opportunity.

The military slave, who bears arms and fights for his owner, was a known but
not common figure in antiquity. In the late fifth and early fourth centuries
B.C., the city of Athens was policed by a corps of armed Scythian slaves,
originally numbering some three hundred, who were the property of the city.'
Some Roman dignitaries had armed slave bodyguards; some owned gladiators, as men in other times might own gamecocks or racehorses, but in general
the Greeks and Romans did not approve of the use of slaves in combatant
duties.' It was not until the medieval Islamic state that we find military slaves
in significant numbers, forming a substantial and eventually predominant
component in their armies.

The professional slave soldier, so characteristic of later Islamic empires,
was not present in the earliest Islamic regimes. There were indeed slaves who
fought in the army of the Prophet, but they were there as Muslims and as loyal
followers, not as slaves or professionals. Most of them were freed for their
services, and according to an early narrative, when the Prophet appeared
before the walls of the Hijaz town of Ta'if, he sent a crier to announce that
any slave who came out and joined him would be free.' Abu Muslim, the first
military leader of the Abbasid revolution which transformed the Islamic state
and society in the mid-eighth century, appealed to slaves to come and join him
and offered freedom to those who responded. So many, we are told, answered
his call, that he gave them a separate camp and formed them into a separate
combat unit.4 During the great expansion of the Arab armies and the accompanying spread of the Islamic faith in the seventh and early eighth centuries,
many of the peoples of the conquered countries were captured, enslaved,
converted, and liberated, and great numbers of these joined the armies of
Islam. Iranians in the East, Berbers in the West, reinforced the Arab armies
and contributed significantly to the further advance of Islam, eastward into Central Asia and beyond, westward across North Africa and into Spain.
These were, however, not slaves but freedmen. Though their status was at
first inferior to that of freeborn Arabs, it was certainly not servile, and in time
the differences in rank, pay, and status between free and freed soldiers disappeared. As so often, the historiographic tradition foreshortens this development and attributes it to a decree of the Caliph `Umar, who is said to have
ordered his governors to make the privileges and duties of manumitted and
converted recruits "among the red people" the same as those of the Arabs.
"What is due to these, is due to those; what is due from these, is due from
those."' The limitation of this concession to the "red people," a term commonly applied by the Arabs to the Iranians and later extended to their Central
Asian neighbors, is surely significant. The recruitment of aliens, that is, nonArabs and often non-Muslims, was by no means restricted to liberated captives, and the distinction between freed subjects, free mercenaries, and
bought barbarian slaves is often tenuous.

In recruiting barbarians from the "martial races" beyond the frontiers into
their imperial armies, the Arabs were doing what the Romans and the Chinese had done centuries before them. In the scale of this recruitment, however, and the preponderant role acquired by these recruits in the imperial and
eventually metropolitan forces, Muslim rulers went far beyond any precedent.
As early as 766 a Christian clergyman writing in Syriac spoke of the "locust
swarm" of unconverted barbarians-Sindhis, Alans, Khazars, Turks, and
others-who served in the caliph's army.' In the course of the ninth century,
slave armies appeared all over the Islamic empire. Sometimes, as in North
Africa and later Egypt, they were recruited by ambitious governors seeking to
create autonomous and hereditary principalities and requiring troops who
would be loyal to them against their immediate subjects and their imperial
suzerains. Sometimes it was the caliphs themselves who recruited such armies.
Such, for example, were the palace guards recruited by the Umayyad Caliph
al-Hakam in Cordova and the Abbasid Caliph al-Mu`tasim in Iraq.'

This was a new institution in Islam. The patriarchal caliphs, and their
successors for more than a hundred years, had no slave praetorian guards, but
were protected in their palace by a small force of free Arabs and, under the
early Abbasids, freed soldiers and their descendants from Khurasan. Within a
remarkably short time, the slave palace guard became the norm for Muslim
rulers, and rapidly developed into a slave army, serving both to maintain the
ruler in his palace and his capital and, for a sultan, to uphold his imperial
authority in the provinces. In the East, slave soldiers were recruited mainly
among the Turkish and to a lesser extent among the Iranian peoples of the
Eurasian steppe and of Central and inner Asia; in the West, from the Berbers
of North Africa and from the Slavs of Europe. Some soldiers, particularly in
Egypt and North Africa, were brought from among the black peoples farther
south. As the frontiers of Islam steadily expanded through conversion and
annexation, the periphery was pushed farther and farther away, and the enslaved barbarians came from ever-remoter regions in Asia, Africa, and, to a
very limited extent, Europe.

Some of these soldiers were captured in wars, raids, and forays. The more
usual practice, however, was for them to be purchased, for money, on the
Islamic frontiers. It was in this way that Muslims bought and imported the
Central Asian Turks who came to constitute the vast majority of eastern
Muslim armies. Captured and sold to the Muslims at a very tender age, they
were given a careful and elaborate education and training, not only in the
military arts but also in the norms of Islamic civilization. From their ranks
were drawn the soldiers, then the officers, and finally the commanders of the
armies of Islam. From this it was only a step to the ultimate paradox, the slave
kings who ruled in Cairo, in Delhi, and in other capitals. Even the Ottomans,
though themselves a freeborn imperial dynasty, relied for their infantry on the
celebrated slave corps of Janissaries, and most of the sultans were themselves
sons of slave mothers.

Various explanations have been offered for the reliance of Muslim sovereigns on slave armies. An obvious merit of the military slave, for the kings or
generals who owned him, was his habit of prompt and unquestioning obedience to orders-a quality less likely to be found among freeborn volunteers or
even among conscripts, in the relatively few times and places when conscription was known or feasible before the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most
convincing explanation of the growth of the slave armies is the eternal need of
autocratic rulers for an armed force which would support and maintain their
rule yet neither limit it with intermediate powers nor threaten it with the
challenge of opposing loyalties. An army constantly renewed by slaves imported from abroad would form no hereditary nobility; an army manned and
commanded by aliens could neither claim nor create any loyalties or bases of
support among the local population.

Such soldiers, it was assumed, would have no loyalty but to their masters, that is, to the monarchs who bought and employed them. But their
loyalty, all too often, was to the regiment and to its commanders, many of
whom ultimately themselves became kings. The mamluk sultans and emirs
who ruled Egypt, Syria, and western Arabia for two-and-a-half centuries,
until the Ottoman conquest in 1517, rigorously excluded their own freeborn
and locally born offspring from the apparatus of political and military power,
including even the sultanate itself. They nevertheless succeeded in maintaining their system for centuries. In part, the common bond of mamluk regiments was ethnic. Many regiments, and the quarters which they inhabited,
were based on ethnic and even tribal groups. But in the main, the bond was
social rather than racial. At a certain stage in his career, the mamluk was
emancipated, and, on becoming a freeman, himself bought and owned
mamluks who, rather than his physical sons, were his true successors. The
most powerful bond and loyalty, within the mamluk system, was that owed
by the slave to his master, and, after manumission, by the freedman to his
patron.

In the military sense, the slave armies were remarkably effective. In the
later Middle Ages, it was the mamluks of Egypt who finally defeated and
expelled the Crusaders and halted the Mongol advance across the Middle East, the Ottoman Janissary infantry who conquered Southeastern Europe. It
was in accordance with the logic of the system that the mamluk armies of
Egypt consisted mainly of slaves imported from the Turkish and Circassian
peoples of the Black Sea area, while the Ottoman Janissaries were recruited
mainly from the Slavic and Albanian populations of the Balkans.

Ibn Khaldun, surely the greatest of all Arab historians, writing in the
fourteenth century, saw in the coming of the Turks and in the institution of
slavery by which they came, the manifestation of God's providential concern
for the safety and survival of the Muslim state and people: