Slavery, Slave Trading and the Law in the Pre-Islamic Middle East

_full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (oude _articletitle_deel, vul hierna in): Slavery, Slave Trading and Law in Pre-Islamic Middle East _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 20 Chapter 1 Chapter 1 Slavery, Slave Trading and the Law in the Pre-Islamic Middle East Map 1.1 The Ancient Middle East (including the Indus Valley). Map drawn by Mujahid Khan When the Prophet Muhammad received the first revelations that ultimately led to the promulgation of the Qurʾan and the emergence of the new religion of Islam, slavery and slave trading were central features in human life and society.1 The practice of slavery flourished at that time in practically all of the 1 The use of the term “Middle East” for this chapter is somewhat inexact. Hodgson argued that historians ought to use the phrases “lands from Nile to Oxus” or “Nile to Oxus region” to describe the region and the phrase “Irano-Semitic” to describe the cultural complex that existed in the pre-Islamic era. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1:115n8, 1:117n9. Hodgson’s suggested “Irano-Semitic” nomenclature is also inexact in my view, as it does not recognize the presence of Egyptian, Sudanic, and East African languages and cultures in the complex. I will therefore use the term “Afro-Irano-Semitic” to describe the cultural complex of the peoples inhabiting © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398795_003 Bernard K. Freamon - 9789004398795 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:08:54PM via free access _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (oude _articletitle_deel, vul hierna in): Slavery, Slave Trading and Law in Pre-Islamic Middle East _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 Slavery, Slave Trading And Law In Pre-islamic Middle East 21 communities on the Arabian Peninsula, in the larger Middle Eastern region, and, indeed, throughout most of the known world.2 Evidence drawn from legal, archaeological, and literary sources suggests that the institution was char- acterized by a great multiplicity of rules, norms, and practices.3 This array of rules, norms and practices can be rather daunting for the legal historian. Some years ago, Moses Finley, the great historian of the Greco- Roman classical world, warned that, in any inquiry like this one, the inquirer must first carefully define what he or she means when using the words “slave” the region. I have, on the other hand, chosen to largely stay with the geographical term “Middle East” to describe the region, even though the “Nile-to-Oxus” nomenclature is probably more accurate. This is because the term “Middle East” is very familiar to most readers and to use another term will cause geographic confusion. When I use the term “Middle East” in this book, therefore, I mean to describe the lands between the Nile River and the Oxus River, including the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the western Indian Ocean between what is today Somalia and the west coast of India (sometimes described as the Arabian Sea). As the geographical reach of the story expands beyond the “Middle East,” as I have defined it, (which would exclude, for example, West Africa, or lands along the Silk Roads east of the Oxus River) I will use the term “Afroeurasian,” denoting an area larger than the Middle East. I will also use the term “Indian Ocean world” and this description will sometimes overlap with my descriptions of the Middle East. The term “Indian Ocean world” de- scribes the entire littoral of lands around the ocean, including East Africa, lands along the shores of the Red Sea, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the western and eastern coasts of India, as well as what is today Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Southeast Asian Archipelago. All of these locales are highly relevant to any discussion of slavery and slave trading in the Muslim world. For further elucidation, please consult Maps 1.1 through 8.2. 2 Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7; Daniel C. Snell, “Slavery in the Ancient Near East,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1: 6; Various authors, “Ancient Middle East,” in Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Paul Finkelman and Joseph C. Miller (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 1: 63–70; Junious P. Rodriguez, “Introduction: Slavery in Human History,” in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, gen. ed. Junious P. Rodriquez (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 1: xiii; Laura Culbertson, ed., Slaves and Households in the Near East (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2011). 3 On archaeological sources on the existence of slavery see, e.g., Ian Morris, “Archaeology and Greek Slavery,” in Bradley and Cartledge, Cambridge World History, 1: 176–193; Peter Mitchell, ed., The Archaeology of Slavery (London: Routledge, 2001); Lydia Wilson Marshall, ed., The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015); Frederick Hugh Thompson, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Duckworth, 2003); Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Peterson, The Material Life of Roman Slaves (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Paul Lane and Kevin C. MacDonald, eds., Slavery in Africa: Archaeology and Memory (Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Elizabeth N. Arkushard and Mark W. Allen, eds., The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). Bernard K. Freamon - 9789004398795 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:08:54PM via free access 22 Chapter 1 and “slavery” as historically descriptive concepts. There were many relationships described or depicted in ancient and medieval sources that might look like slavery to the modern observer but were actually not within ancient and medieval understandings of the concept. Ancient forms of marriage, certain parent–child relationships, and many debtor–creditor arrangements were among such affinities. On the other hand, a soldier in an ancient army might not be described as a slave in the sources but, in fact, he was owned, “lock, stock and barrel,” so to speak, by the head of state or the military commander and therefore had no individual freedom in any real sense. Although he might have functioned as a soldier in his daily life, he was, in reality, no more than a human chattel, albeit sometimes a well-armed and very dangerous chattel, but human property nonetheless. One scholar has observed that it is “difficult to create a definition of slavery comprehensive enough to cover all social institutions generally classified as slavery yet sufficiently clear to distinguish it from other forms of dependence.”4 This is certainly true of the ancient and medieval worlds and such difficulties makes any effort to craft a legal history of old-world slavery—in any culture, and certainly in Muslim cultures—problematic. To ensure a modicum of ac- curacy, the historical understandings employed must therefore be as free of “faulty classifications” based on “faulty theory, or at least inadequate conceptu- alization” of the classifications as we can make them.5 Such “faulty classifications” and “inadequate conceptualizations” are problematic primarily because they tend to impose modern understandings and definitions of slavery on ancient and medieval relationships. I will endeavor to avoid this problem by mak- ing sure that the terms describing slavery employed in this book are used in the same context and with the same meaning, as best as can be discerned, as was probably understood by the persons involved in the practice. The sources con- taining these terms, usually religious texts, written legal codes, legal docu- ments used in practice, administrative and commercial records, inscriptions and artwork on monuments, and some literary sources, like papyri and letters, are very often notoriously terse, difficult to decipher, and unevenly recovered by scholars.6 The reader should understand these difficulties and therefore not read too much into the sources. Sometimes we will just not know what the context was. I will do my best to make sure the sources are not misused or over- historicized in such cases. The reader may also find that definitions and 4 Ruth Mazzo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 5. 5 Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, ed. Brent D. Shaw, exp. ed. (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998), 137. 6 Cultbertson, Slaves and Households in the Near East, 1, 3–4. Bernard K. Freamon - 9789004398795 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:08:54PM via free access Slavery, Slave Trading And Law In Pre-islamic Middle East 23 conceptions of slavery have changed over time, both in the Islamic world and in other societies, and that definitions and conceptions were varied, depend- ing on the locale and the culture. The first step, then, is to understand, as best we can (given the sources), the conceptions of slavery as they were contemplated in the Afro-Irano-Semitic legal cultures that predated Islam and were practiced in the pre-Islamic Mid- dle East. The pre-Islamic conceptions and practice of slavery in the Afro-Irano- Semitic legal cultures in the Middle East had a significant impact on the practice as it emerged in the Islamic era. Even though this impact was substan- tial, with the advent of Islam conceptions of slavery in society, especially legal and political conceptions, changed quite radically in many of the locales that came under the aegis of Islamic law and jurisprudence.

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