Download PDF | Elizabeth Urban - Conquered Populations in Early Islam_ Non-Arabs, Slaves and the Sons of Slave Mothers-Edinburgh University Press (2020).
228 Pages
Introduction: Why Muslims of Slave Origins Matter
This book traces the journey of new Muslims in the first and second centuries AH (seventh and eighth centuries CE), as they joined the nascent Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses particularly on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the Islamic religious community but whose slave backgrounds linked them to the outside world and rendered them somehow alien. By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, this book reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic community. Particularly, it illuminates how Islam transformed from a small and relatively egalitarian piety movement in Western Arabia into the official doctrine of a Near Eastern empire that tried to uphold a hierarchical distinction between the conquerors and the conquered.
This monograph concentrates on three groups that inhabited a grey area between insider and outsider in early Islamic history: 1) the mawālī (singular: mawlā) – freed slaves, captives and other conquered people who became subordinate members of conquerors’ households, often glossed as ‘non-Arab Muslims’; 2) enslaved women (jawārī) who acted as prostitutes, concubines and courtesans in the Islamic community; and 3) ‘mixed-breed’ or ‘halfblood’ (hajīn) children born to enslaved mothers and free Arab-Muslim fathers. Each of these groups is worthy of its own individual study, but taken together as three different types of unfree or liminal Muslims, they intersect in illuminating ways. For example, it appears that enslaved men and women played an active role in negotiating the boundaries of the earliest community under Muªammad (c. 610–632 CE). However, later rulers such as ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705) instituted a stronger socio-political hierarchy that rendered enslaved and freed persons subalterns whose ties to the non-Arab, non-Muslim world needed to be controlled.
In this hierarchical, imperial setting, enslaved people could gain power by mastering Arabic, but they had to use their linguistic expertise in ways that pleased their masters. Additionally, it appears that the children of enslaved mothers resolved their liminal position by re-defining themselves as full ‘Arabs’ by the mid-second/ eighth century; they were only able to do so by excluding the mawālī as ‘nonArabs’. Moreover, one can only understand how these children of enslaved mothers transformed from liminal ‘half-breeds’ into full ‘Arabs’ by analysing the position of the enslaved mothers themselves. Thus, by examining these groups together as three facets of the same prism, this monograph sheds light on the expansion of the young Islamic community and its accommodation of diverse peoples. It is difficult to paint a comprehensive picture of enslaved and freed persons in the Islamic sources – they are everywhere, from anonymous servants and nameless mothers to famous bureaucrats and consorts of prophets. In order to make sense of this overwhelming material, this book analyses multiple types of Arabic-Islamic sources, using multiple scales of enquiry.
For instance, on a small scale, it analyses specific verses of the Quran and individual biographies from sources such as al-Balādhurī’s Ansāb al-Ashrāf (Genealogies of the Notables) and Ibn ʿAsākir’s Tārīkh Madīnat Dimashq (History of Damascus). To get a large-scale picture of demographic patterns and institutional changes, it presents quantitative analyses of sources such as Ibn Saʿd’s Al-Tabaqāt al-Kubrā (Greatest Generations) and al-Jahshiyārī’s Kitāb al-Wuzarā’ wa-al-Kuttāb (Book of Viziers and Scribes). To compensate for the difficulties of the Arabic-Islamic source material, this book also employs a range of historical methodologies. For instance, it analyses oral chains of transmission to pinpoint more accurately when and where particular prophetic traditions were circulating. It uses literary analysis to show how different authors, working in different genres, wrote about early Islamic history in ways that fit their wider ideological visions. Throughout, it uses feminist historical analysis to attempt to recover the experiences of women and subalterns, as well as their interpretations of normative texts. By using these varied sources and techniques, this monograph paints a pointil-list image of early Islamic history, made up of a dozen little bright spots of insight.
Historical Background Following recent trends in the scholarship, this monograph divides early Islamic history into two general periods: a period of Islamic Origins in the first/seventh century, and a period of Imperial Elaboration in the second/ eighth century. While there is no hard-and-fast boundary between these two periods, it appears that the first period was more open and ecumenical, while the second was more hierarchical and imperial. The earliest decades of Islamic history were more fluid in terms of integrating enslaved members, or as Patricia Crone says, the earliest community was ‘open to reshuffling’ identity categories.1 As the empire spread and became increasingly centralised, identity categories hardened, and in particular the boundary between the subaltern conquered populations and the free conquerors became more rigid. However, the boundaries were never completely solid; there was always tension between more inclusive and more exclusive interpretations of who belonged to the umma.
The first period of Islamic Origins – which has also been called the ‘Believers’ Movement’ and ‘Paleo-Islam’2 – centres on the first-/seventhcentury Hijaz, in Western Arabia. It includes the career of the Prophet Muªammad and his immediate successors, the so-called ‘Rightly Guided’ caliphs (11–40/632–661). This period also witnessed the first wave of Islamic conquests outside Arabia, as well as the devastating First Fitna, or Civil War (35–40/656–661), which was eventually won by the Umayyad family. Arabic-Islamic source materials write extensively about this period as a Golden Age of piety and the triumph of God’s message. However, the problem with most of these Arabic-Islamic source materials is that they are late; most were written in the second to fourth/eighth to tenth centuries, a century or more after the events they purport to describe.
These sources have also been written by particular authors with particular agendas, shaped into salvation histories and moralising tales. Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars of early Islamic history have become critical – indeed sceptical – of these late literary sources and the vision of early Islam that they present.3 By instead relying on a few extant documents, inscriptions and non-Arabic writings from this period, historians have radically revised their interpretations of Islamic Origins.4 Several works of revisionist scholarship have informed the underlying assumptions of this monograph. First, following scholars such as Fred Donner and Aziz Al-Azmeh, I view the Quran itself as an authentic source from the first/seventh century, and I attempt to reconstruct it as a ‘polyvalent communicative act’ between Muªammad and his followers.5 I take it as axiomatic that these first decades of Islamic history were not an ossified golden age, but a period of dynamism, creativity and adaptability. I heed Al-Azmeh’s call to analyse ‘Paleo-Islam’ on its own terms, rather than ‘looking backwards’ at this period from the viewpoint of the Classical Islamic tradition elaborated in the second to fourth/eighth to tenth centuries in imperial centres such as Damascus and Baghdad.6 I also accept Donner’s thesis that the earliest adherents of Muhammad’s message did not call themselves ‘Muslims’ or think of themselves as constituting an entirely new religion; rather, they called themselves ‘Believers’ and represented an ecumenical reform movement that could include all kinds of righteous, pious monotheists.
In addition, I accept Peter Webb’s recent thesis that the earliest Believers did not view themselves as ‘Arabs’, but rather the notion of ‘Arabs’ as an elite class of Muslim conquerors only emerged in the Umayyad period.7 The first three chapters of this book contribute to this field of Islamic Origins, using the text of the Quran and close analysis of later literary sources to understand how enslaved persons belonged to the nascent Believers’ Movement in the Hijaz. The second period, Imperial Elaboration, covers the Umayyad caliphate (r. 41–132/661–749) and the first decades of the Abbasid caliphate (r. 132– 656/749–1258).8 During this period, caliphs and governors grappled with the practical realities of governing a vast empire, including the need to define the relationship between religion and politics.
The first Umayyad caliph, Muʿāwiya (r. 41–60/661–80) appears to have been a brilliant administrator; he adopted many trappings of the Byzantine Empire, including minting Byzantine-style coins, introducing some Roman laws, and nominating his own son as heir apparent in typical imperial fashion.9 However, the Great Fitna, or second Civil War (60–73/680–692), revealed deep-seated, unresolved debates about the nature of Islamic rule and the structure of the Islamic polity. After defeating his rival ʿAbdallāh Ibn al-Zubayr and resolving the Great Fitna, the fifth Umayyad caliph, ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705), instituted imperial reforms that consolidated the Umayyads’ control over the empire. The period of ʿAbd al-Malik and his successors (known collectively as the Marwanids) was a period of internal contraction, as the caliph attempted to control more tightly who could belong to the imperial elite. ʿAbd al-Malik was apparently trying to gain greater control not only over the conquered populations, but also over the growing Islamic community itself. First, ʿAbd al-Malik and his children increasingly defined the empire as explicitly Islamic, as opposed to ecumenical or generally monotheistic. For example, in Jerusalem ʿAbd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock, which contains several anti-Trinitarian inscriptions; he also issued new coins that contained the so-called ‘double shahāda’, which professes faith not only in God but also in Muªammad as God’s messenger.10 Other scholars have noted that Christian soldiers and bureaucrats had played a prominent role in early Umayyad history but appear to have lost their place of prominence under the Marwanids.11 Milka Levy-Rubin has also argued that the earliest conquerors dealt with the conquered populations in relatively flexible, ad hoc ways, while the Marwanids began adopting more systematic, hierarchical and restrictive methods (familiar from other Late Antique empires such as the Byzantines and Sasanians) for differentiating the conquerors from the conquered.12
Second, ʿAbd al-Malik and the socio-political elites of his day increasingly defined the empire as Arab. Most famously, ʿAbd al-Malik and his sons adopted Arabic as the official language of the bureaucracy, and they had Greek/Byzantine and Persian/Sasanian government registers translated into Arabic.13 Recently, Peter Webb has argued that Muslim elites began using the term ‘Arab’ in the Umayyad period in order to differentiate themselves from the conquered populations. Before then, the elites had seen themselves as ‘Muhājirūn’ (Emigrants), that is, those who emigrated to garrison towns such as Basra, Kufa and Fustat in order to conduct the conquests. In the Umayyad period, as members of the Muslim elite settled down to civilian jobs and stopped emigrating and conquering, they needed a new way to differentiate themselves from the subalterns. ‘Arab’ – as the Quran’s description of its own language and as a marker of linguistic purity and transcendence – seemed like a good choice.
The final two chapters of this monograph address this field of Imperial Elaboration. I suggest that the Umayyad caliphs came to rely increasingly on concubinage as a reproductive practice, in order to consolidate political power in the Umayyad family alone. I also argue that, as the Marwanid government became increasingly centralised and autocratic, slaves and subalterns could access a certain degree of political power through their proximity to the caliph. Finally, I provisionally suggest that enslaved and unfree groups might have influenced the Marwanid desire to more rigidly define ‘Islam’.
Slavery and Unfreedom This monograph takes enslaved and freed persons as its main historical subjects.14 Thus, it is important to understand the basic parameters of early Islamic forms of slavery. It is particularly important that non-specialist audiences realise that the model of modern trans-Atlantic slavery does not accurately describe pre-modern Islamic slavery – early Islamic forms of slavery more closely resembled those of the ancient and Late Antique Roman world. Kurt Franz has recently identified four features of normative Islamic slavery, derived from the Quran and hadith: 1) slaves are ‘deemed in many respects to be humans and not mere chattels’; 2) slaves’ inferiority is legal, not ontological, making emancipation easy or even expected; 3) domestic slavery is the norm, and masters and slaves ‘relate to each other personally in a familiar household framework’; 4) and masters are repeatedly encouraged to be kind to slaves and to manumit them.15 It is also worth emphasising that several Quranic verses allow men to have licit sexual intercourse with ‘those their right hands possess (mā malakat aymānuhum)’, the common Quranic euphemism for slaves.16 While the master had sexual access to the female slaves in his household, the same exhortations towards kindness and manumission presumably still applied in this case.
Islamic law did not substantially change any of these features of slavery, although it added more details about categories and regulations. 17 For example, lawyers extrapolated from a single Quranic verse that all slaves who commit crimes should only be given half the punishment that a free person would receive. Lawyers clarified that female slaves must only cover their genitals and buttocks when in the company of strangers, while free females must cover most of their bodies.18 Lawyers decreed that no Muslim or Arab could be reduced from a state of freedom to a state of slavery.19 (Muslims could still be slaves, if they were born into slavery or if they converted to Islam after their enslavement.) Lawyers were also particularly interested in matters of inheritance and manumission, including the institutions of kitāba (contractual manumission) and tadbīr (automatic manumission upon the death of the master). For the purposes of this book, however, the two most crucial legal categories are the umm walad (slave-mother) and the mawlā (freedman). Neither of these legal concepts appears to have direct roots in the Quran; rather, they appear to have precedent in Near Eastern and Roman law, and they represent Islamic lawyers’ attempts to accommodate the many captives and slaves who entered Islamic society as a result of the conquests.20 As for the umm walad, classical Sunni law gives a female slave some limited rights if she bears a child that her master acknowledges as his own. By doing so, she becomes an umm walad, or ‘mother of a child’.
According to Sunni law, the umm walad could never be sold, and she was automatically freed upon the death of her master. Additionally, her child was considered freeborn and fully legitimate.21 (Conversely, Imami-Shii lawyers reserved none of these rights for the umm walad, who was treated like a normal slave who could be sold or inherited by her master’s heirs.) In some Sunni law schools, the umm walad was also exempted from menial labour, and she was often expected to be veiled or secluded, like a free wife. Ultimately, classical Sunni lawyers considered concubinage a perfectly legitimate form of sexual relationship and means of producing children,22 and motherhood also placed concubines on the path to manumission. As for post-manumission status, classical Sunni law insists that all freed persons maintain a tie of patronage with their former master.23 The legal term for this form of clientage is walā’, and both client and patron are called mawlā (pl. mawālī).24 There was much debate and discrepancy among early Islamic lawyers regarding walā’, but by the third/ninth century classical lawyers considered walā’ to be a form of kinship that permanently tied the freed person to the former master’s family.25 The patron was responsible for protecting his client and paying the fine for any crime that his client might commit; in return for this protection, the patron had a right to inherit some of his client’s estate.26 Thus, even after manumission, the freed slave was in some ways legally subordinated to his master. Classical Islamic law is immensely informative, but it is important to realise that such legal material does not encapsulate the institution of slavery. It tells us little about the experiences of the earliest slaves in the umma, the different occupations slaves held, the actual practice of buying and selling slaves, the kinds of social relationships slaves built or the ways that slaves could exercise political power. In fact, Islamic law seems in many cases to be completely divorced from, or uninterested in, contemporary social practice. Many scholars have analysed this gap between theory and practice.27
For instance, as Kurt Franz reminds us, Islamic lawyers write nothing about agricultural slavery or serfdom, military slavery or corvée labour – all of which existed in Islamic history. Likewise, Jonathan Brockopp has highlighted the divide between the theory and practice of concubinage: early Maliki jurists showed no interest in the contemporary Abbasid practice of using umm walads to produce heirs to the throne.28 Jamal Juda has also shown that mawālī provided all kinds of service for their former masters, including acting as business agents, messengers, water-carriers, scribes, personal bodyguards and many other activities not stipulated in Islamic law.29 Moreover, the classical Islamic law books provide no information on the qayna (pl. qiyān), that is, the courtesan or ‘singing girl’. Instead, scholars learn about the qiyān from the medieval Arabic-Islamic authors who devoted many literary anthologies, poetry collections and essays to them.30 Thus, while I certainly do not advocate a disregard for legal sources, this monograph focuses instead on narrative historical texts, biographies and genealogical literature in order to unpack the experiences of early Islamic enslaved and freed persons. In order to avoid over-emphasising normative legal definitions of slavery, this monograph suggests that the concept of ‘unfreedom’ is useful in studying Muslims of slave origins.31 Unfreedom highlights the personal, relational nature of enslavement, servitude and other forms of coercion; one is ‘unfree’ in relation to another person or entity. Unfreedom allows scholars to analyse those social bonds that limit personal freedom but also provide ‘social life’,32 bonds that embed people in unequal but mutually beneficial social networks. Put otherwise, unfreedom allows us to see the relationship between conquerors and conquered as reciprocal, if unequal.33 It allows scholars to analyse how the enslaved or freed person was expected to show loyalty to the master in return for receiving welfare, support and patronage. In many early Islamic contexts, it seems that the enslaved or freed person was assumed to have the master’s interests at heart; the enslaved or freed person was expected to practice ‘inter-agency’, that is, to make individual choices that served the greater needs of the master’s household.34 Enslaved persons may not have been fully equal to adult members of the natal family, but they were certainly not outsiders. They likely adopted the language, values, beliefs and social networks of their patrons. They were assimilated into the household, or they were at least on the path towards assimilation.
The sources provide plenty of evidence of slaves and mawālī in this familiar household context. Unfreedom also provides a flexible framework for understanding forms of subjugation that do not fall under the legal rubric of ‘slavery’ per se (as mawālī and the children of enslaved mothers were not technically slaves). The freedman was legally free, but socially he inhabited something like a state of extended adolescence – he could make many of his own decisions, but he was ultimately dependent on his patron’s support and curried his patron’s favour. Unfreedom presents itself as more of a fluid continuum than an artificially stark dichotomy; instead of viewing slavery and freedom as mutually incompatible opposites, unfreedom offers more of a sliding scale.35 Using this framework also allows scholars to analyse various manifestations of unfreedom. For instance, scholars can use this concept to parse the difference between mawālī and other subordinated or subaltern groups, such as serfs and dhimmīs. Finally, unfreedom provides value-neutral language for analysing the costs and benefits of being enslaved or manumitted, for examining the ways subalterns exercised agency and the ways their agency was limited, and for interrogating the ways enslaved and freed persons were subordinated but also active participants in society.36 While the Arabic-Islamic sources do not use the term ‘unfreedom’ to describe historical actors, I suggest that the term is nevertheless useful in interrogating the position of groups such as concubines, courtesans, mawālī and the children of enslaved mothers.
Book Layout
The book proceeds roughly chronologically, with the first three chapters treating the period of Islamic Origins, and the final two chapters focusing on the period of Imperial Elaboration. Chapter Two analyses two Quranic passages that express the liminal position of believing slaves. The first passage, 33:4–6, assures believers of unknown parentage that they fully belong to the umma as ‘brothers in religion’, but it also indicates that such believers lack deeper social bonds to other members of the umma. I argue that the key term mawālī in this passage refers to the bonds of support that cement all believers, but that such bonds do not necessarily entail full social equality. The second passage, 24:32–33, discourages men from forcing their slave women into prostitution, but it also indicates that believing slave women are unable to attain certain morality standards. I argue that the key term ‘taªa‚‚un’ in this passage places the master–concubine relationship somewhere between licit and illicit sexual activity for the slave woman. These two Quranic passages illustrate the tension of a first-/seventh-century community struggling to define the relationship between spiritual equality and social hierarchy. Both Chapters Three and Four build upon these ambiguous Quranic foundations to further elucidate first-/seventh-century Islamic history, as well as to show how later Muslims re-worked early Islamic history to fit their own ideological needs.
Chapter Three investigates an early Muslim freedman named Abū Bakra (d. 52/672) who appears in exegeses of Q 33:5. While Abū Bakra is not a particularly famous or prominent member of early Islamic history, he is important as a micro-historical case study precisely because his identity is so contested. I argue that during his lifetime in the first/seventh century, Abū Bakra was identified primarily as a ‘freedman of God’ (†alīq allāh), an anomalous phrase that highlighted his belonging to the umma. However, in the subsequent centuries, this inclusive designation lost its meaning, so that later authors sought to place Abū Bakra into the more familiar social categories of Arab and mawlā. Historians such as al-Balādhurī use Abū Bakra’s mawlā identity to illustrate the values of piety, humility and political neutrality; conversely, hadith compilers such as al-Bukhārī present Abū Bakra as an Arab in order to highlight literalistic legal standards for determining identity. Thus, Abū Bakra’s story helps us discern that seemingly straightforward identifiers such as mawlā and Arab are deeply intertwined in the wider narratives different authors hoped to tell about the trajectory of early Islamic history. Chapter Four analyses a group analogous to the early Islamic mawālī, namely enslaved prostitutes. Just as Abū Bakra invoked Q 33:5 to articulate his place in the early Islamic umma, so two prostitutes of the first/seventh century seem to have invoked Q 24:33 to seek justice and inclusion in the earliest umma. But by the third/ninth century, Quranic exegetes had downplayed or even forgotten the stories of these two prostitutes; they instead told symbolic tales of Muʿādha, a reformed harlot who stopped working as a prostitute when she converted to Islam. While exegetes tell this uplifting story of a ‘good’ prostitute, narrative historians instead focus on the figures of ‘bad’ prostitutes who enjoyed fornicating. Unpacking such dichotomous portrayals of female sexuality allows scholars to recover more nuanced and complex visions of the status of enslaved women in the earliest umma.
Chapters Five and Six move away from the history of the earliest umma in the first/seventh century, and into the Umayyad empire of the second/eighth century. Chapters Five and Six each study a dyad of male and female Muslims of slave origins, in order to elucidate how gender and slavery shaped Umayyad politics. Chapter Five examines Umayyad-era concubines (umm walads) and their sons. Concubines raised questions in the Umayyad period about the role of genetic lineage in determining who belonged to the umma, who counted as an ‘Arab’ and who deserved the right to hold the caliphate. In order to be embraced as full insiders, concubines’ children first had to demonstrate that they were true Muslims, loyal to the Islamic empire and knowledgeable in religious lore. Later, in order to gain political power as caliphs, the children of concubines had to re-define themselves as full ‘Arabs’. To do so, they dismissed their mothers as essentially inconsequential, and they justified this move by invoking paradigmatic examples of slave mothers from the Islamic religious tradition.
Thus, slave women indirectly changed the face of Umayyad politics, challenging the elite ‘Arab’ class to define its doctrine of lineage more clearly, and impelling the articulation of new political ideologies. Chapter Six turns away from mothers and their sons, and towards two subaltern groups who used their Arabic language mastery to gain political power in the Umayyad empire: the qiyān (courtesans) and the kuttāb (scribes). Both groups reveal the complex intersection of language mastery, cultural identity, unfreedom and political power in the Umayyad period. Both groups indicate that the increasing centralisation of the Marwanid ruling household (r. 64–132/684–749) provided increased opportunities for educated unfree persons to exercise political power. While these groups could be powerful, they were always in a precarious position, for they had to use their linguistic mastery in ways that pleased their imperial masters. For instance, the late-Umayyad courtesan Óabāba used her poetic and musical talents to gain a powerful position in the harem; yet, she was unable to secure the more lasting, systematised forms of power that later Abbasid concubinequeens would exercise. Likewise, Umayyad-era scribes could influence Arabic prose style and act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the caliph, but they could just as easily be cast out as scapegoats. The Conclusion chapter, in addition to reflecting on the main ideas of the monographs, suggests potential avenues for future research. In particular, it suggests that scholars should continue to study the mawālī through the lens of unfreedom, rather than through the lens of ‘non-Arab’ ethnicity. Many questions remain about the relationship between individual mawālī and the collective known as ‘the mawālī’ or ‘the society of mawālī’ (maʿshar al-mawālī).37
The lens of unfreedom may also help scholars discern subtle differences between various conquered groups, such as peasants, vassals, ahl al-dhimma and mawālī. Finally, it is worth considering the relationship between unfree groups and the emergence of ‘Islam’ as the official name of Muhammad’s religion. Ultimately, Muslims of slave origins provide a valuable window onto Islamic history because their identities are complex and contested. They reveal debates about who can belong to the faith, who can belong to the social elite and who can wield political power. They also reveal debates about the meanings of seemingly straightforward terms, such as ‘Arab’. They show that the meanings of these terms are neither simple nor obvious, but are re-negotiated as new members enter the Islamic community. For example, Muslims of slave origins raise tensions between more closed, lineage-based definitions of Arabness and more open, language-and-culture-based definitions. Rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, this monograph hopes to analyse what these tensions show us about the contested boundaries of the nascent umma.
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