How widespread was the Arab slave trade?
Question by Ahmed: How widespread was the Arab slave trade?
I want to be set straight about this. I’ve read that it extended into Persia(Iran) and Turkey and India too.
What do you think? Answer below!
One Response to How widespread was the Arab slave trade?
Leave a Reply
At times it extended into Persia and India. Persia was part of the Islamic Caliphate during the era (Ummayad, Abbassid) when Arabs dominated. It was also during this era when the first Muslim conquerers and traders made their way into the Indian subcontinent. By the late Abbassid period, though, Arab influence in the Caliphate greatly waned, replaced by rising Persian cultural influence and then the military and political influence of Turks. Nonetheless, Arabs continued to play a major role in Islamic trade networks, centered in North Africa and Southwest Asia but also extending across the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean (the origins of the “Sinbad” stories, by the way).
Slaves were long a big part of the Arab trade system. However, Islamic law forbad Muslims to enslave other Muslims, so once most Persians and other peoples around what is now Afghanistan converted to Islam then those regions ceased to be a source of slaves. Instead, Turks of Central Asia became a more common source — particularly as mamuks (slave-soldiers). But, the Turkish tribes of Central Asia quickly converted to Islam and conquered most Muslim dominions in the Middle East. The peoples of northern India also at times were a source of slaves, but once Turkish conquerers establish principalities in the subcontinent they typically stopped the enslavement of Hindus in an effort to secure their rule and prevent local resistance.
Subsaharan Africans and Eastern Europeans (especially from the Black Sea region) long provided the bulk of slaves in the Islamic trade network, well into the 1700s. The largest slave market in the world in 1750 was not New Orleans or anywhere in the Americas — it was the Arab market in Cairo, Egypt. Under technical Islamic law, monotheistic Christians and Jews were not supposed to be enslaved, but this was not always enforceable.
The Arab slave trade by itself never extended into Asia Minor, which was part of the Byzantine Empire for much of the medieval period. After 1100, though, large parts of it passed under Turkish rule and eventually, by the 1400s, became the heart of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans participated in and their empire eventually came to include the Arab trade network, but Arab slave traders were not using Asia Minor as a source of slaves. The Ottoman rulers, though, did practice a kind of child slavery called the ‘devshirme’ in which each non-Turkish family gave one child to the government like paying a tax, and the child was converted to Islam and raised to be a state servant, often a soldier (‘janissary’) but sometimes a bureaucrats, labors, or palace workers. The Ottoman devshirme children were not sold in the Arab trade network.
Prof Scott
January 9, 2013 at 3:23 am