ISLAMIC AREA STUDIES

SERIES EDITOR Salo Tsugitaka

Published

SLAVE ELITES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA:A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Edited by Miura Torn and John Edward Philips

Forthcoming

THE MANAR JOURNAL AND THE MANAR SCHOOL Edited by Kosugi Yasushi

THE CONCEPT OF TERRITORY IN ISLAMIC LAW AND THOUGHT Edited by Yanagihashi Hiroyuki

ISLAM AND POLITICS IN RUSSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA Edited by Stephane Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao

THE OTTOMAN STATE AND LOCAL SOCIETIES IN CHANGE Edited by Hayashi Kayoko and Mahir Aydin

THE INFLUENCE OF HUMAN MOBILITY Edited by Kuroki Hidemitsu

Islamic Area Studies

The Islamic Area Studies Project plans 10 do multidisciplinary research on Muslim societies in both the Islamic and non-lslamic worlds, by reflecting the fact that areas with close ties to Islam now encompass the world. This series presents the important new knowledge and debate achieved through international joint research about Islam as a religion and civilization, particularly emphasizing comparative and historical analysis. The series will hopefully provide multifaceted, useful information to deepen the reader’s understanding of the Islamic world.

Project Leader: Sato Tsugitaka The University of Tokyo

SLAVE ELITES

IN THE MIDDLE EAST A N D AFRICA

A Comparative Study

Edited by

Miura Toru and John Edward Philips

KEGAN PAUL INTERNATIONAL

London and New York

jyfy Slave, My Son, My Lord: Slavery, Family and State in the Islamic Middle East

Dr or Ze ’evi

This is a|' in terpretative essay, based on a re-examination o f material most of us are aware o f in one form or another. It is not intended to present a whole new model, but rather to direct attention to one com er o f our studies. The conclusions are not restricted to the institution o f slavery but pertain also, perhaps more so, to the history o f the family and kinship in Islamicate

societies.The course o f an elite slave’s career from purchase or imprisonment

to lofty position may be described as “The Butterfly Syndrome.” It seems that just as the butterfly requires an interim phase— the cocoon— in order to go through its metamorphosis, so the future vizier, present slave, required a social slumber period as a full member o fthe master’s family or household. In what follows I shall try to describe and examine this assumption.

That a slave, often o f lowly social origins, may rise to the most powerful positions in a kingdom , commanding vast armies and powerful ministries, is difficult to imagine. Even more perplexing, in Islamdom such modes o f government were ubiquitous, and dom inant for many centuries. In the Mamluk and O ttom an cases the slaves themselves perpetuated the system, and there were relatively few serious attempts to replace it with a more “natural” system, such as bequeathing rule and power to progeny

Previous Explanations of Elite Slavery

Many attem pts w ere made to explain this phenomenon and its resilience. In one com prehensive survey Daniel Pipes showed convincingly that military slavery is, by and large, an Islamicate phenomenon. Having eliminated several other possibilities such as the importance o f Turkic horsemen in the lands o f Islam, the influence o f hot and arid climes on equestrian arts, and >he invention o f the stirrup, Pipes finds a remarkable congruence between •i'e extent o f m ilitary slavery and the boundaries o f Islam. There was no

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equivalent institution in Venice, for example, even though it maintained very close relations with the Mamluk Kingdom and with other Islamic states for centuries. From the Umayyad to the Ottoman period, from Spain in the West to Indonesia in the Far F.ast, slaves were part o f the political elite in different phases.

Pipes' attempt to explain this phenomenon, however, is somewhat less convincing. At the risk o f simplifying a long and complex story, the essence of his explanation is that the rise o f elite slavery is an outcome of the withdrawal o f devout Muslims from army and politics. Since the establishment of Islam, he suggests, the gap between the M uslim ideal— one God, one king (khalifa), one people (umma) — and political reality, kept growing wider. Religious strife, political splintering and rebellious leaders forced Muslims to fight their brethren, while jihad against the unbelievers was neglected. The Muslim inhabitants o f daral-islam found it more and more difficult to reconcile the ideal with reality. As a consequence they were alienated from politics and military service. Rulers, deprived o f their main sources of manpower, had to contend with recruited mercenaries. Military slaves, cheaper to maintain and more dependable than mercenaries, were an almost Inevitable next step.

Pipes differentiates in theory between military and “government” slaves, the main difference being that military slaves are products o f an organized system of training and disciplining. Government slaves, kept by rulers and notables, are a separate phenomenon, and existed even outside Islamdom, in places such as China and Ethiopia. This differentiation is not developed, however, and in his subsequent discussion , the two sub- institutions merge. I believe this is an important distinction, and in my argument I will refer mainly to the “government” type o f slaves.

This explanation leaves a few questions unansw ered. First, the alienation pattern described by Pipes may explain, to a certain degree, the origins of the system, but its explanatory value weakens as we move along to later periods. In the first or second century A .H ./7-8 centuries A.D., a Muslim may have still felt exasperation at the fragmentation o f the umma and the faith. But in later centuries this fragmented Islamic world was the state of affairs a person was bom into, and must have been accepted by most people as a fact of life. It is only natural that people bom and socialized

Daniel Pipes, Slaw Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis ofa Military System (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1 -53 .

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inlo a given political reality identify theirs as the right faith or the true king, while others are decreed impostors and unbelievers. Furthermore, from reading chronicles and other source material ofdiflerent periods, one does not get a sense o f total alienation from the state or even from the ruler There were cruel and greedy sultans, to be sure, but many were loved and cherished by the people. Even when a certain ruler was hated or despised, the populace often kept its allegiance to the state and the dynasty.

For almost a thousand years, then, elite slave systems kept emerging and reproducing, in different times and sometimes in very remote places, with Islamicate surroundings as a unique and active common factor. Pipes’ suggestion provides an important insight, but falls short o f full explanation, especially when we move beyond a quest for origins to the perpetuation of the system. I believe we have to look for a more comprehensive, perhaps more articulated explanation. It is not my intention ta provide such a full and rounded-up alternative in this paper. In what fallows I uould like to offer a few suggestions, and to dwell mainly on one o f the options.

There are at least three Islamicate concepts that provided a cultural basis for elite slavery. One o f them is an ideal akin to that o f the Western literary "noble savage." This concept has its roots in the founding myths of Islam. The stories o f the Jahiliyya, and the famous Ayyam al-'Arab which were incorporated into the canon o f Islamicate culture, all stress the ethos o f murumva, a cluster o f qualities that constitute manhood and nobility. The most noteworthy paragons o f munmwa were the valiant Bedouin of Arabia. This became a standard topos in early literature. Islamic authors, from al-Jahiz in the ninth century to Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth, all stress the importance o f growing up under harsh conditions as a major constituent element o f manhood, courage and leader qualities. Ibn Khaldun presents this concept in refined form, when he shows how dynasties nse and fall. A dynasty fresh from the wild conquers and rules a territory, but in due course, pampered by the conditions o fcity culture, loses its grip and is replaced by another dynasty, fresh from the wild. In this case the seminal thinker was only giving voice and literary structure to what he thought was a basic truism. Although this concept o f the noble savage was known in various other cultures, including pre-modem European culture, nowhere did it attain such prevalence as ultimate proof o f military prowess and political shrewdness.

Other important factors are not structural but rather an outcome o f historical contingency. Among them we can mention the frustration of

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conquered people who csme to sssume the collective name o f nuxwoli in the first century A.H. As the religion of Islam spread and Islamic states proliferated, most of the subjugated people embraced Islam. For several certuries. however, they were considered subservient to the Arab rulers. It was only natural for them to expect a share in government, and, more directly relevant to our discourse, to prefer their folk to others. As they became part of the state machinery in the ‘Abbasid period, the former ideal—a noble savage of the Arabian Desert—gave way to the Persian, Turkish or Mongolian warrior of the steppes. Slaves, brought in from the wild, as it were, were believed to possess those qualities required for leadership.

There were also "push” factors in play. Many social formations in and around the world of Islam recognized the possibilities inherent in the situation. In many cases young men chose to be recruited, and even to assume the yoke of slavery, in order to extract themselves from poverty and to move upwards and become members o f the ruling elite. For many a dispossessed Mongol or Circassian youth this was a great job opportunity, not to be missed.

All these are important constituent elements, and most o f them have been suggested before. Butas I said, I would like to dwell on another factor: the family as an agent of socialization and as a career springboard. This, it seems to me, is a singular Islainicate feature that enabled the slaves to be accepted as equals and even as seniors. In other words, only meaningful integration into the household, as a special son of the master, enabled the slave to complete the metamorphosis from slave to lord.

Revival of the Socially Dead

In his now classic book Slavery and Social Death,1 Orlando Patterson stresses two pertinent characteristics common to almost all slavery systems. The first is social death. Whether in intrusive systems, where the source for slaves is beyond the borders, or in extrusive ones, where society’s outcasts are reduced to slavery, slaves are always cut off from their roots. A slave is deprived of any connection to ancestry, and in many cases denied the right to posterity as well, either by castration or by restriction o f marriage and procreation. In this respect a slave is socially dead, and exists only as a social extension of his owner.

Orlando Panerson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Princeton:Princeton U n iv e rs ity Press, 1982).

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The second characteristic relevant to our discussion is the idea of fictive kinship. In certain systems, where the near-absolute power of the master is attenuated or softened to fit cultural norms, the relationship between slave and owner sometimes assumes the guise o f family relations. The master thus becomes a pseudo-parent, and the slave is expected to pose as a quasi- son or daughter. This, says Patterson, should never be confused with real kinship. When put to the test the master will always revert to brute force and resume total control.

I believe these two concepts are in need of serious qualification as regards Islamicate elite slavery. Describing the conditions o f elite slaves as social death, even in terms o f ancestry and posterity alone, is an evident exaggeration. In most cases they were allowed to create and maintain their own family (or posterity), and, perhaps more striking, in quite a few cases relations were re-established with the original family, and the “slave” elevated his/her family to higher status.’ Furthermore, even if slaves were temporarily detached from their families, they were often swept into die master’s household. These relations usually evolved not as fictive kinship, but as real kinship o f a specific sort, in which other elements substituted for blood ties as the basis o f family.

In Islands o f History Marshall Sahlins describes Hawaiian society in the eighteenth century. In Hawaiian thought, he says:

... kinsmen are made as well as bom. ‘Feeding’ (hanai), the so-called adoption, may as effectively institute parenthood as would birth. The logic is highly productive and meaningfully consistent. Kama'aina or ‘child o f the land’ refers to someone “native" to a place. Yet one may equally be a kama'aina by action or by prescription: by long term residence or by birthright. The consistency is that all these relationships of childhood and nativity have a common denominator They all invoke the common human substance o f the people so related. Parents and children are people o f the same kind: they are composed o f the same thing, whether by the reproduction o f substance or its common consumption.*

1 Metin Kunt, “Ethnic-Regional (cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth Century Ottoman Establ ishment," International Journal o f Middle East Studies 5 (1974): 233-39.

* Marshall Sahlins, Islands o f History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1985), 28.

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What Sahlins says, in effect, is that in eighteenth-century Hawaiian culture the notion of kin was not based exclusively on blood relations. By eating the same food, by living in the same surroundings, by breathing the same air, people become united in substance, and therefore related as kin. It seems tome that these words may apply, (0 a certain extent, to Islamicate societies as well, and that this may bring us a little closer to an explanation o f the

metamorphosis.At first thought it seems unusual to connect such notions to the cultures

of Islam. After all many of these cultures, perhaps more than others, lay emphasis on lineage and blood relations. So much so that even adoption [tabanni) is frowned upon in Islamic law, and is usually prohibited, because in order to be fully incorporated into a new family an adopted child must relinquish his or her own lineage and assume that o f the new family.5 This tendency 10 uphold lineage is evident in the patrilineal pattern so prevalent in many Islamic cultures. It is also attested to in the fact that women, even after their marriage, are in most cases not accepted into the husband’s family, but rather remain suspended between their original family and that o f the husband. In any case of divorce the divorcee returns to her kin.

Yet there are indications, both in the religion and in several Islamicate cultures, of a different underlying system. This system, which Islamic law left in fetal form, suggests another way o f looking at Islamic and Islamicate kinship. It was first pointed to in an article by Paul Forand, entitled "The Relation of the Slave and the Client to the M aster or Patron in Medieval Islam.”‘ In his concise argument, based on many examples, Forand suggests that relationships between a freedman and master were sometimes similar to father-son relations. I would like to carry this argument a bit further, to say that (I) in the case o f elite slavery integration into the family was a necessary phase, and (2) it was carried out not as a result o f manumission, but while the son” was still a slave, at least formally.

We may begin with one obvious legal facet— the set o f laws concerning breast-feeding. The Qur’an and the shari'a stipulate that milk siblings,

Amira Sonbol, “Adoption in Islamic Society: A Historical Survey,” in Children in ihe Muslim Middle East, ed. Elizabeth W. Femea (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1996), 48-51.

Pj\!r!^ran^ ^ al'on Slave ar,d the Client to the Master or Patron m Medieval Islam," International Journal o f Middle East Studies 2 (1977):

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children who were breast-fed by the same wet nurse, are relatives in mahram relations. They are not allowed to marry each other, and all other laws pertaining to incest apply to them. In the words of the prophet: yuhramu min al-rada? ma yuhramu min al-nasab (What is forbidden for reasons of blood relationship, is also forbidden for breast-feeding relations).’ Not all societies respected these laws, but all knew them, and understood them to mean that kinship may be based on something other than blood.

The story of Joseph, as told in the Qur’an, allows us to catch another glimpse of the way elite slavery was conceived of in the early years of the Medinan society. Joseph’s master tells his wife: “Receive him honorably. Perchance he may prove useful to us or we may adopt him as a son.“* Forand also mentions the fact that in the Qur’an the word ghuldm, later on used almost exclusively as a term for different types o f slaves, often means simply “boy” or “son.”9

From Mawali to KulUnderlying these utterances there may have been a remnant of a more developed “Hawaiian type” system in the so-calledjahiliyya period, when adoption into the clan was a much-favored way of augmenting one's power and prestige. This was apparently a widespread phenomenon, which Islam, in its formative years put a stop to by the prohibition o f adoption. In fact the shari'a's insistence on banning all forms of adoption may have been one reason for the integration o f outsiders as adopted kin. In the First centuries, as a direct extension o f these practices the mawali system developed. We tend to forget that before being the common name for Muslims of non-Arab origins, the term mawali, (mawla in the singular) designated a common occurrence in the conquered lands. In this early phase the way to join the conquerors was not outright conversion, but ratherjoining the family o f a Muslim, in what may be seen as a continuation o f Roman familia practices.10 Mawali were people who became the proteges o f an Arab Muslim, were gradually absorbed into the clan as family members.

’ See for example: Ibrahim al-Halabi, Afu/raqd al-abhur (Beirut, IW L 1:207-8. 1 Qur’an, 12:22, as quoted in Forand, "The Relation of Slave and the Client," 6b. .Ibid., 60-61 י10 Marleen B. Flory, “Family and Familia: A Study of Social Relations in Slavery■'

(Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978). 28-47.

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and thus came to be identified as M uslim s.11 L ater on, as the gap between their status as fully-fledged family m em bers and the ir restric ted political status widened, the term became a common designation for frustrated non-

Arab Muslims.As the years wore on, and supply o f mawali w aned, it was only a

small leap to the purchase o f slaves and their adoption in their stead. Elite slavery thus combined the pre-lslamic institution o f adoption for military

purposes, the ideal of converting the heathen to Islam, as dem onstrated in

the minvali tradition, and the acute need to overcom e the shar'i ban on

adoption. This trend was reinforced by the great M ongol m igrations that began at about the same time. The M ongols brought w ith them a set of

adoption practices for military purposes. A m ong them w as a cerem ony of adaption conducted by mixing blood with m ilk (and the reference to milk

could not have escaped the Muslims). Since M ongol socie ty w as warlike,

and the family often functioned as a miniature scale arm y, they also brought along a blurring of terms between the family and the m ilitary .13

At about the same time another institution— kivrelik— appears to have been carried over by Turkmen tribes. Practiced even today in and around Turkey, kivrelik is a sort o f godfather-godson re la tionship established at

the circumcision ceremony between the boy being circum cised and a friend

or a relative o f the father. The kivre becomes a sort o f surrogate father, and assumes responsibility for the child’s upbringing.11

All these institutions indicate a tendency to “ create kin” alongside blood relations, while evading the need to adopt legally. They were embraced by Islamicate societies in the Central Lands, and clustered together to enable

the leap from slavery to adoption and to help transform young elite slaves into kin. We should also bear in mind that in many instances the masters were ex-slaves themselves, and their adopted kin may have been closer to them culturally than their own flesh and blood. To quote Sahlins again:

" Forand rightly differentiates here between wala\ which is the relation of a freedman to the master after manumission, and ntuwaldt, the non-binding mutual agreement between mawali (Forand, op.cit., 59).5ubhi Wahida, Fi usdl al-mas'ala al-Misriyya (al-Qahira, 1950), 6 1.P. J. Magnarella and Orhan Turkdogan, “Descent, Affinity and Ritual Relations in Eastern Turkey," American Anthropologist 75/5 (1972): 1626-33.

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י

Human conceptions of kinship may be so far from biology as to exclude all but a small fraction of a person's genealogical connections from the category of'close kin', while at the same time including in that category, as sharing common blood, very distantly related people or even complete strangers. Among these strangers (genetically) may be one’s own children (culturally),״

Arabic, Turkish and Persian literature from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries is replete with examples of father-son relations between masters and those o f their slaves destined for leadership. Here one should re- emphasize the clear distinction between military slaves and what we may call “ruling slaves to be”— governors, ministers and other high-ranking officers and officials. While servile soldiers were trained and treated as chattel slaves or at least as draftees, a select group among them—the ruling slaves to be— were actually adopted.

Examples o f this can be drawn from ‘Abbassid Iraq and Fatimid Egypt, through the Mamluk kingdom, to the Ottoman Empire.15 In the 'Abbasid kingdom the slaves (even those we would consider “military”) were formally absorbed into the ruling family. Thus, in 815 the famous Caliph al-Ma’mun counted 33,000 members in the ‘Abbasid family, a number which could only be explained by including the military slaves.16 Fatimid elite slaves often used their master’s patronymic, and usage of family terms was very widespread.17

In my own research on seventeenth-century Palestine, 1 found the familial relations to be even more complex. In one such case the initial

״ Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse o f Biology: An Anthropological Critique o f Sociobiology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976). 75.

״ Wahida, Usui, 58-63. Wahida emphasizes the fact that ties between the slaves themselves were modeled on ties of brotherhood. Some examples of these relationships in the Ottoman period: J. E. Blunt. The People ofTurket (London, 1978), 112, 126-27, 149. Charles White, Three Tears in Constantinople (London, 1845), 320 21; Z. Duckett Ferriman, Turkey and the Turks (London: Mills and Boon, 1911), 111-13; J.C. McCoan, Egypt as it is (New York, 1877), 335-36. There are numerous examples also in Robert Dankoff. The Intimate Life o f an Ottoman Statesman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

16 Forand, “The Relation o f Slave and the Client,” 60.17 Yaakov Lev, State andSociet)’ in Fatimid Eg)׳pl (Leiden: Brill. 1991), 86-87.

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master family, the Ridwans (Rizvan) em braced the ir slaves as sons. They made one of them, Ferruh, governor o f Jerusalem and betrothed him to their daughter Very close ties were m aintained betw een both families throughout the century until they almost m erged com pletely. O ther senior slaves of the family were treated in sim ilar m anner." N eed less to say, the Ridwans only reflected prevalent Ottoman practices com m on everywhere from the royal court to the smallest households.

It is important to emphasize that this kind o f inform al adoption was carried out while the future lords were still slaves and that in many cases they were never officially manumitted. T he m etam orphosis seem s to have been so full and far flung that need for m anum ission was forgotten. No other civilization exhibited such flexibility. N o o ther c luster o f cultures was so wil ling to allow complete strangers acquired as slaves simi lar access to the holy of holies—the family. In the M amluk and O ttom an household this concept was already entrenched to such an extent that the differences between surrogate family and “real" family were blurred beyond recognition. Slaves found their way very easily into the family. W hen this stage was completed, and the stranger was fully incorporated into the family and the clan, he (or she, in cases of elite women slavery) could then go on to greater glory.

^ An °"?mm Cen“«y: The District o f Jerusalem inthe 1600s (Ithaca: State University of Mew York Press, 1996), Chapter 2.

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