from his Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990, pp. 72-84.
From the late eighteenth century onward there are numerous accounts, by contemporary, mostly European, observers, of the processes by which African slaves were caught, transported, and sold in the markets of the Middle East and North Africa. A Tunisian traveler who visited Darfur at the beginning of the nineteenth century even speaks of farms where blacks were raised for sale:
"Certain rich people living in the town have installed these blacks [from the neighboring mountains] on their farms, to have them reproduce, and, as we sell sheep and cattle, so they, every year, sell those of their children that are ready for this. There are some of them who own five or six hundred male and female slaves, and merchants come to them at all times, to buy male and female slaves chosen to be sold."
This new evidence appears to coincide with an expansion of the trade, due to events farther north. The establishment of Russian domination in Eastern Europe and the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783 had finally ended the profitable trade of the Tatars, who for centuries had reaped an annual harvest of slaves from the villages of the Ukraine and adjoining lands and exported their crop to the slave markets of Istanbul and other Ottoman cities. The once-plentiful supply of white slaves from Central and Western Europe had long since dwindled to a mere trickle; and after the Russian annexation of the Caucasian lands circa 1801-28, the last remaining source of white slaves for the Islamic world was reduced and finally stopped. Deprived of their Georgians and Circassians, the Muslim states turned elsewhere, and a large-scale revival of slaving in black Africa took place. This was furthered by the Egyptian advance up the Nile at the time of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha.
The classical routes, developed in medieval times, lay from West Africa (Guin¢a, from the Berber word igginaw [pl. gnawa] meaning "black") across the Sahara to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; from the Sudan down the Nile or through the desert to Egypt; and from East Africa across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and beyond. Other, later routes led from Kano via Agades and Ghadames to Tripoli, and from Waday and Darfur via Borku and Tibesti to Kufra and Cyrenaica.
With the growth of European influence in Egypt and the Maghrib and the involvement of the Ottoman government in the attempt to suppress the traffic in black slaves, those routes and markets which were remote from scrutiny acquired a new importance. One was in the country which is now called Libya. Tripoli and Benghazi became major centers of the slave trade, drawing their supplies from had and sometimes as far as Nigeria, and exporting them to the Ottoman provinces in Europe as well as Asia. Often these slaves endured great hardship in the course of the journey from their homes to their destinations. A Turkish letter of November 1849, sent by the reforming Grand Vezir Mustafa Reshid Pasha to the Ottoman governor of Tripoli, refers to the death by thirst of sixteen hundred black slaves, on their way from Bornu to Fezzan in southern Libya: "While our Holy Law permits slavery, it requires that slaves be treated with fatherly care, and those who act in a contrary manner will be condemned by God." The governor was ordered to punish the guilty slavedealers and to ensure that such disasters did not recur. From British consular reports of the late nineteenth century, it is clear that this traffic, and the suffering it entailed, continued. As late as 1912, a Turkish officer serving against the Italians in Tripolitania, noted in his diary:
"A special embassy from the Grand Senussi Sidi Ahmad Sharif is on its way to bring the Grand Senussi's greetings and gifts: two ncgresses, ivory, etc. Heavens, what shall I do with the black ladies? He is also sending me his own gun, which he has blessed."
The officer was Enver Bey, later, as Enver Pasha, the Defense Minister of the last Young Turk government in Istanbul. The "Grand Senussi" was the chief of the Sanusiyya, the dominant Muslim religious order in Libya.
Another important center of the trade was the Hijaz, which was exempt from the Ottoman decrees prohibiting or restricting the traffic in African slaves and was not, therefore, subject to restraint or supervision. This gave a new role to the slave market of Mecca. Slaves were imported to the Hijaz by sea from East Africa and sent from there to the North and even to Egypt. In a dispatch dated March 17,1877, the British vice-consul in Damascus, who had been instructed to use his best efforts to prevent this traffic, reported:
"Having brought to the notice of the new Governor General, Zia
Pasha, the practice of importing African slaves from the markets of Mecca,
with the [Pilgrim] Caravan, for sale in Syria, His Excellency informed
me that he had already given very strict orders to prevent such abuses.
His Excellency's orders have not, however, met with the success which
he stated to me he expected, as slaves were brought as usual."
A third route, by which slaves were exported from the Sudan, both down the Nile to Egypt and across the Red Sea to Arabia, was one of the oldest of all. It was briefly suppressed, thanks to British and Egyptian initiatives in the late seventies and early eighties in the nineteenth century, partially restored with the success of the Mahdist revolt, and suppressed again after the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest in 1896-98.
The main purpose for which blacks were imported was domestic service. A certain number of free blacks also found employment, and in Arabia they could rise to important positions. In Egypt their role was usually humble. At the end of the eighteenth century, W. G. Browne noted that in Cairo "exclusively of negro slaves in every house, there are free blacks from Nubia, who act as porters at the gates of the rich, and sometimes sell bouza and eatables.'' Black slaves for domestic use were very common during the nineteenth,century in Egypt, in Turkey, and in the other Ottoman lands; and some survivors can still be met in these countries. The Nubian porter, servant, or hawker remains a familiar figure in Egypt to this day. African women were often kept as concubines, since only the wealthy could afford Circassian or other white slaves. Abyssinians -- darker than whites, but lighter than blacks -- occupied an intermediate position, as Edward Lane, who was in Egypt between 1833 and 1835, explains:
"The hareem may consist, first, of a wife, or wives (to the number
of four); sccondly, of female slaves, some of whom, namely, whitc and (as
they are commonly called) Abyssinian (but more properly Galla) slaves,
are generally concubines and others (the black slaves) kept merely for
servile offices, as cooking, waiting upon the ladies, &c; thirdly,
of female free servants, who are, in no case, concubines, or not legitimately
so. The male dependents may consist of white and of black slaves, and free
servants; but are mostly of the last-mentioned class. Very few of the Egyptians
avail themselves of the licence, which their religion allows them, of having
four wives; and still smaller is the number of those who have two or more
wives, and concubines besides. Even most of those men who have but one
wife are content, for the sake of domestic peace, if for no other reason,
to remain without a concubine-slave: but some prefer the possession of
an Abyssinian slave to the more expensive mainte- nance of a wife; and
keep a black slave-girl, or an Egyptian female servant, to wait upon her,
to clean and keep in order the apartments of the hareem, and to cook....
The white female slaves are mostly in the possession of wealthy Turks.
The concubine-slaves in the houses of Egyptians of the higher and middle
classes are, generally, what are termed "Habasheeyehs," that
is, Abyssinians, of a deep brown or bronze complexion. In their features,
as well as their complex- ions, they appear to be an intermediate race
between the negroes and white people: but the difference between them and
either of the above-mentioned races is considerable. They themselves, however,
think that they differ so little from the white people that they cannot
be persuaded to act as servants, with due obedience, to their master's
wives; and the black (or negro) slave-girl feels exactly in the same manner
towards the Abyssinian, but is perfectly willing to serve the white ladies....
Most of them [the Abyssinians] are handsome. The average price of one of
these girls is from ten to fifteen pounds sterling, if moderately handsome;
but this is only about half the sum that used to be given for one a few
years ago. They are much esteemed by the voluptuaries of Egypt; but are
of delicate constitution: many of them die, in this country, from consumption.
The price of a white slave-girl is usually from treble to tenfold that
of an Abyssinian; and the price of a black girl, about half or two-thirds,
or considerably more if well instructed in the art of cookery. The black
slaves are generally employed as menials."
A similar distinction between true blacks and Abyssinians was noted by several travelers in Arabia. The same point is made by Arnold Kemball, lritish assistant resident in the Persian Gulf, in a report on the African slave trade dated July 8,1842. In the former group,
"the Men are employed in all hard and out door work, the women in cooking, bringing water, etc. and but very rarely as concubines except by the poorer and lower classes."
As to the Abyssinians,
"Slaves of both sexes are at all times much cared for well clothed
and well fed. The Males are early sent to school and having learnt to read
and write are employed in the performance of house duties . . . and very
frequently if intelligent in the most trustworthy situations as supercargos
of ships, stewards and superintendents.
The Females are most generally retained as concubines or employed in
the lightest duties as attendants in Harems....
Nubian and Hubshee [Abyssinian] Eunuchs are vcry high priced and only
to be seen in the Service of the King, Nobles and very rich Merchants."
Eunuchs were in fact required in considerable numbers, in many countries, for households from the palace downward. They were also employed in the service of mosques. By a custom established in the late Middle Ages which continued into the twentieth century, the custodians of the tomb of the Prophet in Medina were eunuchs, mostly black, recruited by purchase at an early age and groomed for their sacred duties, which gave them an almost priestly status.
In earlier times eunuchs had been recruited from both white and black slaves, and the Ottoman palace establishment, for example, had included separate corps of black and white eunuchs, each with its own chief. From the sixteenth century onward, the white eunuchs in the palace declined both in numbers and in influence. The black eunuchs increased correspondingly, and their chief, known as the Kizlar Agasi, the "Aga of the Girls," was one of the most powerful figures at the Ottoman court. The corps of eunuchs was virtu- ally the only route by which a black could attain to high office.
Most eunuchs, of course, remained in humble employment. By the nineteenth century they were recruited overwhelmingly from Africa. According to Louis Frank, writing in 1802, between one and two hundred African boys were castrated every year at Abu Tig in Upper Egypt, on the slave caravan route from the Sudan to Cairo. The victims were usually boys between eight and ten years old never older. A eunuch, he notes, could be sold at double the price of an ordinary Negro, "and it is this increase in price which determines the owners, or rather usurpers, to have some of these wretches mutilated.''
Rather more detail is given by the Swiss Arabist J. L. Burckhardt, who traveled extensively in Upper Egypt and the Sudan in 1813 and 1814. He found two places where slaves were mutilated in this way. The less important of the two was at a place west of Darfur, from which a few eunuchs went to Egypt and the remainder were "sent as presents by the Negro sovereigns to the great mosques at Mekka and Medina, by the way of Souakin."-The main center was at Zawiyat al-Dayr, a predominantly Coptic villagc near Asyut (Siout) in Upper Egypt. Here, says Burckhardt, was
"the great manufactory which supplies all Europeans, and the greater
part of Asiatic Turkey with these guardians of female virtue.... The operators,
during my stay in that part of the country, were two Coptic monks, who
were said to excel all their predecessors in dexterity, and who had a house
in which the victims were received. Their profession is held in contempt
even by the vilest Egyptians; but they are protected by the government,
to which they pay an annual tax; and the great profits which accrue to
the owners of the slaves in consequence of their undergoing this cruel
operation, tempts them to consent to an act which many of them in their
hearts abhor. The operation itself, however extraordinary it may appear,
very seldom proves fatal. I know certainly, that of sixty boys upon whom
it was performed in the autumn of 1813, only two died; and every person
whom I questioned on the subject in Siout, assured me that even this was
above the usual proportion, the deaths being seldom more than two in a
hundred. As the greater number undergo the operation immediately after
the arrival of the Darfour and Sennaar caravans from Siout, I had no opportunity
of witnessing it but it has been described to me by several persons who
have often seen it performed. The boys chosen are between the age of eight
and twelve years, for at a more advanced age, there is a great risk of
its proving fatal.
. . . A youth on whom this operation has been successfully performed
is worth one thousand piastres at Siout; he had probably cost his master,
a few weeks before, about three hundred; and the Copt is paid from forty-five
to sixty for his operation. This enormous profit stifles every sentiment
of mercy which the traders might otherwise entertain. About one hundred
and fifty eunuchs are made annually. Two years ago, Mohammed Aly Pasha
caused two hundred young Darfour slaves to be mutilated, whom he sent as
a present to the Grand Signor. The custom of keeping eunuchs has greatly
diminished in Egypt, as well as in Syria. In the former country, except
in the harems of the Pasha and his sons, I do not think that more than
three hundred could be found; and they are still more uncommon in Syria.
In these countries there is great danger in the display of wealth; and
the individual who keeps so many female slaves as to require an eunuch
for their guardian, becomes a tempting object to the rapacity of the government.
White eunuchs are extremely rare in the Turkish dominions."
Later, castration was forbidden on Egyptian soil, and eunuchs were bought ready-made from the Sudan.
Kemball's indication that African slaves were used for "hard and out door work" as well as the more commonly cited domestic tasks is confirmed in other sources and dates back to early times. Travel accounts -- and more particularly consular reports -- sent at the time of the British anti-slavery campaign, suggest the wide use of slave labor in agriculture and construction. In nineteenth-century Egypt, African slaves were imported for economic use, chiefly agricultural. Slave gangs were employed in sugar plantations and on irrigation works; the boom in Egyptian cotton during the American Civil War enabled newly prosperous Egyptian farmers to spend "some of their profits in the purchase of slaves to help them in the cultivation of their lands."
Most of the known black slaves were domestic and lived as part of a household. On the evidence of European travelers, they suffered terribly at the hands and under the lash of slavers and slavedealers from capture until final sale but were well treated by their urban masters.
The drying up of the sources of white slaves, while greatly increasing the dcpredations of the slaveraiders in Africa, also brought some benefit to those black slaves who survived their capture and transportation and reached their destinations. In the absence of white slaves, black slavcs were increasingly given tasks and positions which were previously the preserve of whites, and acquitted themselves to the satisfaction of their masters. In the course of the nineteenth century, black slaves -- and more frequently black freedmen -- are found occupying important positions and often exercising great power. This occurs quite frequently in Arabia, much less frequently in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.
In the course of the nineteenth century the revulsion against slavery, which gave rise to a strong abolitionist movement in England, and later in other Western countries, began to affect the Islamic lands. What was involved was not, initially, the abolition of the institution of slavery but its alleviation and in particular the restriction and ultimately the elimination of the slave trade. Islamic law, in contrast to the ancient and colonial systcms, accords the slave a certain legal status and assigns obligations as well as rights to the slaveowner. The manumission of slaves, though recomrncndcd as a meritorious act, is not required, and the institution of slavery not only is recognized but is elaborately regulated by Shari'a law. Perhaps for this very reason the position of the domestic slave in Muslim society was in most respects better than in either classical antiquity or the nineteenth-century Americas.
While, however, the life of the slave in Muslim society was no worse, and in some ways was better, than that of thc free poor, the processes of acquisition and transportation often imposed appalling hardships. It was these which drew the main attention of European opponents of slavery, and it was to the elimination of this traffic, particularly in Africa, that their main efforts were directed.
The abolition of slavery itself would hardly have been possible. From a Muslim point of view, to forbid what God permits is almost as great an offense as to permit what God forbids -- slavery was authorized and regulated by the holy law. More specifically, it formed part of the law of personal status, the central core of social usage, which remained intact and effective even when other sections of the holy law, dealing with civil, criminal, and similar matters, were tacitly or even openly modified and replaced by modern codes. It was from conservative religious quarters and notably from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina that the strongest resistance to the proposed reforms came. The emergence of the holy men and the holy places as the last-ditch defenders of slavery against reform is only an apparent paradox. They were upholding an institution sanctified by scripture, law, and tradition and one which in their eyes was necessary to the maintenance of the social structure of Muslim life.
The gradual reduction and eventual elimination of slavery were accomplished in most Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with some difference for whites and blacks. Chattel slavery was abolished by law in most of the independent Muslim states of the Middle East at various dates between the two World Wars; in 1962 it was abolished by the newly established republican regime in Yemen, and a few weeks later by royal decree in Saudi Arabia. In Iran, it had formally been outlawed by the constitution of 1906, though some subsequent legislation was needed to give this effect. The last to enact legal abolition appears to have been Mauritania, which took this step in 1980. There are persistent reports that despite these legal measures, slavery, sometimes voluntary, continues in several countries.
The initial impetus for abolition had come from Europe, and for some time progress in this matter was due almost entirely to European urging and action. In the British, French, Dutch, and Russian Empires -- in that order -- general abolition had been imposed by the imperial authorities. Britain also undertook, by diplomatic pressure supported by naval power, to suppress the slave trade from East Africa to the Middle East and exacted decrees to this end from the sultan of Turkey, the shah of Persia, and the khedive of Egypt, as well as from a number of local rulers in Africa and Arabia.
The first Muslim ruler to order the emancipation of black slaves was the bey of Tunis, who in January 1846 decreed that a deed of enfranchisement should be given to every slave who desired it. Among the reasons for this action, he notes the uncertainty among Muslim jurists concerning the legal basis for "the state of slavery into which the black races have fallen" and, significantly, the need to prevent the black slaves "from seeking the protection of foreign authorities." The abolition of black slavery was completed after the French occupation.
In Turkey, the most important surviving independent Muslim state, the process of emancipation seems to have begun in 1830.4 In that year a firman was issued, ordering the emancipation of slaves of Christian origin, who had kept to their religion. This was a kind of amnesty for Greek and other Christian subjects of the Porte who had been reduced to slavery as a punishment for participating in the recent rebellions. Those who had become Muslims were excluded from this emancipation and remained the property of their owners.
The overwhelming majority of white slaves, both Christian and Muslim, came from the Caucasian lands. Though the supply was much reduced after the Russian conquest, slaves from these lands continued to arrive in the Ottoman Empire either overland or by ship to the Turkish Black Sea ports. Their movement and subsequent fate were beyond the range of influence or of interference of the Western powers and were an exclusively Ottoman concern. It was thus almost entirely on Ottoman initiative, determined by internal circumstances and pressures, that the Ottoman state undertook, by due process of law, a very substantial improvement in their condition, amounting ultimately to the effective -- even if not the legal -- abolition of their servile status. Orders against the traffic in white slaves from Georgia and Circassia were issued in 1854 and 1855 and were in general put into effect.
In 1847 the British were able to win some concessions from the Ottoman government about black slaves; and in 1857 they obtained a major Ottoman firman, prohibiting the traffic in black slaves throughout the empire, with the exception of the Hijaz.
The reasons for this exception are of some interest. By early 1855, reports were reaching the Hijaz of current and impending Ottoman measures against the slave trade. The alarm caused by the limitation of the supply of white slaves from the Caucasus and the increasingly severe restriction of the importation of black slaves from Africa was heightened by news of an order from the governor of Suez, acting on instruction from the capital, that slaves brought from the Hijaz to Egypt should be sent back. On April 1, 1855, a group of prominent merchants in Jedda addressed a letter to the leading members of the ulema as well as to the sharif of Mecca expressing their concern. They referred with disapproval to the steps which had already been taken and quoted a report that a general ban on the slave trade would soon be imposed throughout the empire, together with other pernicious and Christian-inspired changes such as the emancipation of women and the toleration of religiously mixed marriages. This ban, with the whole program of reform of which it was alleged to be a part, was condemned by the writers of the letter as anti-Islamic, the more so since all the black slaves imported from Africa embraced the Muslim religion.
The letter caused some excitement in Mecca and may indeed have been instigated by its ruler, the Sharlf 'Abd al-Muttalib. It provided an occasion for him to consult with the chief of the ulema of Mecca, Shaykh Jamal. According to an Ottoman source, the sharlf told the shaykh that the Crimean War, then in progress, would mean the doom of the Ottoman Empire whichever way it ended. In any case, the Turks had become apostates from Islam, and this was an opportunity to rid the holy cities of their domination. The suppression of the slave trade, he is quoted as saying, would be a good pretext.
The crisis came a few months later when the governor of the Hijaz sent an order to the district governor of Mecca prohibiting the trade in slaves. The district governor was instructed to read the order aloud at the Shari'a court of Mecca in the presence of the ulema and the sharifs. This took place on October 30,1855, and the audience declared their readiness to obey.
This was the moment for which the sharif had been waiting. On his instructions, Shaykh Jamal issued a fatwa denouncing the ban on the slave trade as contrary to the holy law of Islam. Because of this anti-Islamic act, he said, together with such other anti-Islamic actions as allowing women to initiate divorce proceedings and to move around unveiled, the Turks had become apostates and heathens. It was lawful to kill them without incurring criminal penalties or bloodwit, and to enslave their children.
"The Turks have become renegades. It is obligatory to make war against them and against those who follow them. Those who are with us are for heaven and those who are with them are for hell. Their blood is lawful and their goods are licit."
The fatwa produced the desired effect. The Ottoman authorities in the holy cities were attacked by local leaders and populace, and the qadi -- an Ottoman appointee -- was also compelled to sign a declaration condemning the ban on the slave trade. Ottoman soldiers were set upon all over Mecca as were also some foreign protected persons. A holy war was proclaimed against the Ottomans, and the revolt began.
By June of the following year, the revolt had been completely crushed. The sultan's government had, however, noted the warning, and took steps to forestall a secession of the Ottoman south. In the ban on the trade in black slaves promulgated in 1857, the province of the Hijaz was exempted. The Sharif 'Abd al-Muttalib was in due course reappointed, and his continued presence in the Hijaz encouraged the slavetraders to ignore the anti-slaving laws and to shift their trade to that area.
The actual enforcement of the ban of 1857 was no easy matter, and despite the efforts of both the Ottoman authorities and the British navy, the traffic continued. It now tended to concentrate in two main areas. One of these was the Red Sea, where the exemption of the Hijaz from the Ottoman ban on the slave trade gave the slavetraders a secure base which they lacked elsewhere; the other was Libya, which, after the establishment of British rule in Egypt and French rule in Tunisia and Algeria, was the only part of Ottoman Africa not subject to foreign control. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a substantial proportion of the export of slaves from black Africa to the Ottoman lands passed through the ports of Tripoli and later Benghazi. Here, too, great efforts were made to stop the trade in blacks, and when slaves were detected they were promptly freed. This created another problem, since the freed slaves were in urgent need of food and shelter and also of protection against their former owners, seeking to reenslave them. The care of freed slaves was a continuing concern of the Ottoman authorities, who took measures of various kinds to meet these needs. On several occasions, the government of Istanbul sent orders to Benghazi instructing Turkish officials there to transfer freed black slaves to Istanbul or Izmir, where the men were to be drafted into the army or navy and the women placed as domestic servants.
The other major center was Arabia. Thanks to the exemption from the ban on the slave trade, the flow of slaves from Africa into Arabia and through the Gulf into Iran continued for a long time. Apart from commercial channels, the supply was augmented through the practice by which a wealthy pilgrim brought a retinue of slaves from his own country and sold them one by one -- as a kind of traveler's check -- to pay the expenses of the pilgrimage. In time the Red Sea trade dwindled as a result of the wars in the Sudan and in Ethiopia. The extension of British, French, and Italian control around the coasts of the Horn of Africa deprived the slavetraders of their main ports of embarkation. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and later the Anglo-Egyptian control of the Sudan and the consequent suppression of the slaveraiders further hampered the traffic by cutting off one of the main sources of supply. In spite of the reconquest of the Sudan and all the efforts by Turkish, Egyptian, British, French, and Italian authorities, the traffic continued into modern times. From the 1890s onward, however, the slave trade, though it remained active, was of necessity clandestine.
By the end of the nineteenth century, white slavery had, apart from the Arabian peninsula, virtually disappeared, and black slavery had been reduced to a mere fraction of its former dimensions. The capture, sale, and transportation of blacks from Africa to Arabia and Iran continued, however, albeit on a much reduced scale, at least until the mid-twentieth century.
British efforts to end the slave trade in Arabia and elsewhere were by no means universally approved. They were, of course, resented and resisted by those immediately affected, the slaveraiders and slavedealers. They were also criticized by other, less-interested parties. The famous Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje, who visited Mecca in 1885, complained of the "undeserved applause" given to British measures against the slave trade, and to the "fantasies" which inspired them. In their place, he offered what he called a "sober reality." According to Snouck,
"public opinion in Europe has been misled concerning Muslim slavery by a confusion between American and Oriental conditions.... As things are now, for most of the slaves their abduction was a blessing.... They themselves are convinced, that it was slavery that first made human beings of them. Concubines, specifically Abyssinians, are for various reasons more highly esteemed by the Meccans than their free wives; the practice is, by both religion and custom, recognized as fully legal.... Their bond with their owner is firmer than the easily dissolvable Muslim marriage. All in all, since I know the situation, the anti-slavery campaign is, for me, in the highest degree repugnant."
Snouck quotes with approval from some earlier travelers who defend the enslavement of blacks in Arabia and condemn British efforts to free them, sometimes on frankly racist grounds. One such was the Englishman J. F. Keane, who visited Arabia in 1881. Using arguments familiar from other places and times, he observes that
"the Negro is to be found here [in Arabia] in his proper place, an easily-managed, useful worker. The Negroes are the porters, water-carriers, and performers of most of the real labour in Meccah. Happy, healthy, well-fed, well-clothed (as such things go in Meccah), they are slaves, proud of their masters, in a country where a slave is honoured only after his master." Slavery in the East has an elevating influence over thousands of human beings, and but for it hundreds of thousands of souls must pass their existence in this world as wild savages, little better than animals; it, at least, makes men of them, useful men too, sometimes even superior men. Could the Arab slave-trade be carried on with safety, it might be executed more humanely; and it would, philanthropically speaking, do good to many of the human race.... While every settled town under Turkish or native rule in all wide Arabia has a slave market to be stocked, our greatest efforts can but increase the demand and raise the markets. Witness: a strong male adult might be bought for $40.00 four years ago in Meccah, and the same will now fetch $60.00. Were our cruisers doubled, the weekly landing of slaves among the creeks and reefs along the coast of the Hejaz could not be pre- vented.... That there are evils in Arab slavery I do not pretend to deny, though not affecting the Negro, once a slave. The exacting slave-driver is a character wholly unknown in the East, and the slave is protected from the caprice of any cruel master in that he is transferable and of money value. The man who would abuse or injure his slave would maim and willfully deteriorate the value of his horse. Whatever the Arab may not know, he most assuredly knows what is to his own immediate interest better than that. And the Negro himself. . . may through this medium be raised from a savage, existing only for the moment . . . to a profitable member of society, a strong tractable worker, the position Nature seems to have made him to occupy."
Similar views were expressed by an Austrian, Ludwig Stross, who visited Arabia in 1886. Stross begins by agreeing that slavery "as such" is indefensible:
"That whole Negro villages are burned, all the men killed, and their women and children are taken on months-long terrible marches finally to be offered as merchandise in markets and distant lands, must appear to us as an injustice that cries to heaven."
Nevertheless, he continues "it is at the very least dubious" whether it is a good work to insist on freeing the black slave when he has already been taken from his home. In Stross's view, slavery is so deep-rooted, and the slave trade so extensive in Africa and the Arab lands, that to uproot it is impossible and merely to free those blacks who are already enslaved and on their way to their destination does more harm than good.
"The liberated Negroes will not work even for money. For them freedom
means their native idleness. They form a proletariat, than which nothing
worse can be found.
The theory of human rights and self-determination certainly sounds
very fine, but in such cases can hardly find its proper application.
I would rather compare the Negroes with children, who must be made
to do their stint.
As long as the Negroes stay in their homelands, no one can object if
they idle away their lives in their own way. But in fact they have been
brought, by force of circumstances, into other lands and other conditions.
Since one cannot prevent their coming, however unwillingly, one should
also not prevent their being made to work."
Like almost all the other European travelers, Stross condemns the horrors of the abduction and transportation of the slaves, which he describes in some detail; but he insists that once a slave
"has arrived and is in firm hands, he is usually well cared for.
The conditions of slavery in the Orient have nothing in common with those
which arose earlier in North America and Brazil. The slave is, for the
Mohammedan, a member of the family and is almost without exception well
treated. Mistreatments are rare and are usually richly deserved.... As
regards work, as a rule only very reasonable demands are made of the slaves;
and one may safely assume that a Negro would have to work very much harder
in order to earn his living as a free man.... Often liberated slaves are
the heirs of their masters and continue their businesses. In Jedda and
Mecca I know many liberated slaves who are respected merchants.
It will thus be seen that slavery in the Orient, though it has many
shadowy sides, has nothing to do with the sort of conditions described
for lovers of sentimental reading in Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Most observers, however, were less willing to be convinced by the apologetics of slavery; and in time virtually all civilized governments, including that of the Ottoman Empire, joined in the effort to suppress the slave trade.
An obvious question, since so many blacks entered the central lands over so long a period, is why they have left so little trace. There is nothing in the Arab, Persian, and Turkish lands that resembles the great black and mulatto populations of North and South America. One reason is obviously the high proportion of eunuchs among black males entering the Islamic lands. Another is the high death rate and low birth rate among black slaves in North Africa and the Middle East. In about 1810, Louis Frank observed in Tunisia that most black children died in infancy, and that intinitesimally few reached the age of manhood. A British observer in Egypt, some thirty years later, found conditions even worse:
"The mortality among the slaves in Egypt is frightful, -- when the epidemical plague visits the country, they are swept away in immense multitudes, and they are the earliest victims of almost every other domineering disease. I have heard it estimated that five or six years are sufficient to carry off a generation of slaves, at the end of which time the whole has to be replenished. This is one of the causes of their low market-value. When they marry, their descendants seldom live; in fact, the laws of nature seem to repel the establishment of hereditary slavery."
Concubinage at higher, and intermarriage at lower, social levels seem to have taken place but must have been on a rather limited scale and, probably for social more than biological reasons, produced little effect. Even now, members of the comparatively small number of recognizably black families in the Middle East tend on the whole to marry among their own kind.