BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY The Arab slave trade was the practice of slavery in the Arab world, mainly in Western Asia, North Africa,Southeast Africa, the Horn of Africa and certain parts of Europe (such as Iberia and Sicily) during the era of the Arab conquests. The trade was focused on the slave markets of the Middle East, North Africa and theHorn of Africa. Slaves were of varied race, ethnicity, and religion.[1]
During the 8th and 9th centuries of the Fatimid Caliphate, most of the slaves were Europeans (calledSaqaliba) captured along European coasts and during wars.[2] Historians estimate that between 650 and 1900, 10 to 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken from Europe, Asia and Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert.[3] However, slaves were drawn from a wide variety of regions and included Mediterranean peoples, Persians, peoples from the Caucasus mountain regions (such as Georgia, Armenia and Circassia) and parts of Central Asia and Scandinavia, English, Dutch and Irish, Berbers from North Africa, and various other peoples of varied origins as well as those of African origins.[citation needed]
Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj (Bantu) slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of the Oman sultanate, which was based in Zanzibar in Tanzania. They came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili coast.[4] The North African Barbary states carried on piracy against European shipping and enslaved thousands of European Christians. They earned revenues from the ransoms charged; in many cases in Britain, village churches and communities would raise money for such ransoms. The British government did not ransom its citizens.
Scope of the trade
Due to the nature of the Arab slave trade, it is impossible to precisely estimate actual numbers of slaves traded.[5][6][7] European and American historians assert that between the 8th and 19th century, 10 to 18 million people were bought by Arab slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert.[3][8][9][10] The term Arab when used in historical documents often represented an ethnic term, as many of the "Arab" slave traders, such as Tippu Tip and others, were physically indistinguishable from the "Africans" whom they bought and sold.
Arabs also enslaved Europeans. According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured between the 16th and 19th centuries by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves.[11][12] 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. They were also taken from ships stopped by the pirates.[13] The effects of these attacks were devastating: France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships. Long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, because of frequent pirate attacks. Pirate raids discouraged settlement along the coast until the 19th century.[14][15]
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, Abu Yusuf 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.[16]
The Ottoman wars in Europe and Tatar raids brought large numbers of European Christian slaves into the Muslim world.[17][18][19] In 1769 a last major Tatar raid saw the capture of 20,000 Russian and Polish slaves.[20]
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 pay the jizyaprotection/subjugation tax, that population is considered to be at war with the Muslim "ummah" (nation), and it becomes legal underIslamic 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 Islam, or a negligible portion of the Islamic world.[21] According to European historians, propagators of Islam in Africa often revealed a cautious attitude towards proselytizing because of its effect in reducing the potential reservoir of slaves.[22]
From a Western point of view, the subject merges with the Oriental slave trade, which followed two main routes in the Middle Ages:
- Overland routes across the Maghreb and Mashriq deserts (Trans-Saharan route)[23]
- Sea routes to the east of Africa through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean (Oriental route)[24][25]
The Arab slave trade originated before Islam and lasted more than a millennium.[26][27][28] Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from the Swahili Coast of present-day Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania,[29] and elsewhere in Southeast Africa and fromEritrea and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa to present-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East[30] and South Asia (mainly Pakistan and India). Unlike the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the New World, Arabs supplied African slaves to the Arab world, which at its peak stretched over three continents from the Atlantic to the Far East.
Sources and historiography of the slave trade
A recent 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.[31]
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.[32] 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.[33] Ronald Segal estimates between 11.5 and 14 million were enslaved by the Arab slave trade.[34][35][36]
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.[citation needed]
The Arab trade of Zanj (Bantu) slaves in Southeast Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by 700 years.[37][38][39] Male slaves were often 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 Far East.[38][39]
The most significant Jewish involvement in the slave-trade was in Al-Andalus, as Islamic Spain was called.[40] According to historian Alan W. Fisher, there was a guild of Jewish slave traders in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The guild had about 2000 members.[20] The city was a major center of the slave trade in the 15th and later centuries. By 1475 most of the slaves were provided byTatar raids on Slavic villages.[20] Until the late 18th century, the Crimean Khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, exporting about 2 million slaves from Poland-Lithuania and Russia over the period 1500–1700.[41]
650 to 20th century
From approximately 650 until around the 1960s, the Arab slave trade continued in one form or another. Historical accounts and references to slave-owning nobility in Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere are frequent into the early 1920s.[37] In 1953, slaves companied sheikhs fromQatar attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and they did so again on another visit five years later.[9]
As recently as the 1950s, Saudi Arabia's slave population was estimated at 450,000 — approximately 20% of the population.[42] During theSecond Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery; estimates of abductions range from 14,000 to 200,000.[43] Slavery in Mauritania was legally abolished by laws passed in 1905, 1961, and 1981.[44] It was finally criminalized in August 2007.[45] It is estimated that up to 600,000 Mauritanians, or 20% of Mauritania's population, are currently in conditions which some consider to be "slavery", namely, many of them used as bonded labour due to poverty.[46]
The Arab slave trade in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Mediterranean Sea long predated the arrival of any significant number of Europeans on the African continent.[37][47]
David Livingstone wrote of the slave trade in the African Great Lakes region, which he visited in the mid-nineteenth century:[48]
We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer.[49]
Some descendants of African slaves brought to the Middle East during the slave-trade still live there today, and are aware of their African origins. Some men were castrated to beeunuchs in domestic service as were some slaves in the Middle East during its Greek, Roman and Christian periods.[30][50]
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 The 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), Kitab al-Buldan or Book of Countries
- Abraham ben Jacob (Ibrahim ibn Jakub) (10th century), Jewish merchant from Córdoba[40]
- Al-Bakri, author of Kitāb al-Masālik wa'l-Mamālik or Book of Roads and Kingdoms, published in Córdoba around 1068, gives us information about the Berbers and their activities; he collected eye-witness accounts on Saharan caravan routes.
- Muhammad al-Idrisi (died circa 1165), Description of Africa and Spain
- Ibn Battuta (died circa 1377), Moroccan geographer who travelled to sub-Saharan Africa, to Gao and to Timbuktu. His principal work is called A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.
- 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 Muqaddimah orHistorical Prolegomena and History of the Berbers.
- Al-Maqrizi (died in 1442), Egyptian historian. His main contribution is his description of Cairo markets.
- Leo Africanus (died circa 1548), author of Descrittione dell’ Africa or Description of Africa, a rare description of Africa.
- Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), 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)
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