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Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

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I've read some of Prof. Lewis' other books and they all have a common theme, impartial academic analysis. This book tackles a difficult subject without prejudice, slavery and racism. Prof. Lewis knows his subject well. He ignores common "western" perceptions of the region, employs corroborating primary sources, and a very readable rendition of how race is perceived (and not perceived) in the Middle East, past and present.

The pictures alone are an amazing collection from around the Islamic world and illustrate local perceptions. Even parallels that seemingly would never occur in most peoples' minds come up such as the fact that many stories in the Arabian Nights depict blacks as slaves, while the Arabs are often "white supremacists" (not to be taken as literally the same as the context in America). The perception of people in the region greatly varies from place to place and from time to time. At times, they struggle with their own racist ideas and the eloquence of some blacks (either former slaves or those born from such unions as well as the occasional martial slave) in the Mideast who became prominent poets, writers, and popular figures in-spite of the racial prejudice. This is an enlightening journey and you'll learn more from this small book then most huge volumes that cannot even grasp what Prof. Lewis has completely understood. Highly recommended.

Though we're all pretty familiar with the slave trade going to the western hemisphere, we're less familiar with the slave trade going from sub-sahara Africa to North Africa and the Middle East. Bernard Lewis covers this part of the slave trade well in Race and Slavery in the Middle East. He goes through time from pre-Islamic times to the 20th century. He discuses how slavery in that part of the world becomes more and more of racial concept that enslaves both whites, black and people from the caucasus montains and each group was perceived. Lewis also focuses on how other ethnic groups in the Middle East such as Persians were looked at. In addition, Lewis goes through how the growth of Europe slowed down slavery and eventually lead to its abolition in North Africa and the Middle East from initially cutting off supply from the Cacasuss Montains and Eastern Europe and then from Sub-Sahara Africa.

I have my problem with some of the works of Bernard Lewis but this work is a rare exception for me because I think it is excellent. The author does his best to shatter the myth that Islam is color blind. In the pages of this book time and time again he proves that the Arab Muslims may have been in fear of and were at the very least suspicious of the intentions and work ethics of Black converts to Islam.

The book is a work from a purely sociological standpoint and it also had great historical research to back it up. Also be sure to check out the several insightful examples of artwork provided to see how Black Muslims were portrayed in the art of the Arab world.

Overall-Lewis really has all of his ducks in a row here a wonderful book

This book offers an historical perspective on slavery in the Middle East allowing a comparison between slavery in the America's with the rest of the world.

Arab laws protecting slaves are available in the appendix. Also illustrations of mosaics depicting slavery in the Middle East are included.

I recommend this book to anyone interesting in the history of the Middle East or of the US because shows how African's viewed the institution of slavery before the European and American slave trade.

The realization that the enslavement of blacks (and others) by an expanding Islamic empire is both disturbing and something that is rarely addressed by historians in classrooms. Prof. Lewis presents the realities and the views of Muslim Arabs and others and explains their reasoning and practices in compact detail. The racist element is disturbing in that black African slaves were treated very badly, while white slaves were employed as soldiers or as part of harems. The dichotomy is disturbingly reminicent of European attitudes towards blacks in the more recent past. Slavery in the Middle East continued for decades after it ended in the Americas and in some countries in North Africa, blacks continue to be treated as second-class citizens and/or slaves (Tuaregs raiders and "white" Moors in Mauretania still practice slavery). Lewis covers an uncomfortable subject the best way possible, by presenting facts and remaining neutral as an observer and first-rate historian.

I have been told several times by Muslims that Islam does not allow slavery, and similar assertions can be found on websites aimed at educating infidels about the religion.

It's not easy to understand the motive for such claims. The truth is that, unlike other salvationist, universalizing religions like Buddhism or Christianity, Islam depended on slavery to make conversions.

In "Race and Slavery in the Middle East," Bernard Lewis, as usual, provides many documents to illustrate his point. No honest person can deny that Islam countenanced slavery. Lewis is concerned to trace the evolution of racism along with slavery.

There is good evidence that the pre-Islamic Arabs did not make racial judgments. In this they were like classical, civilized people. The doctrine of Islam is clearly anti-racist. The dogma of equality (not extended, of course, to women) is unquestionable.

Nevertheless, almost as soon as they became Muslims, the Arabs turned racist. Lewis traces this to a general competition in the second and third generations, when the few Arabs who conquered so many were in danger of being swamped by non-Arab Muslims, and, even more, by half-Arabs -- their own children by slave mothers of the conquered groups.

The brief essay (over half the 184 pages are endnotes and translations of documents) accepts -- most of the time -- the claim of 19th century Jewish (!) scholars that slavery under Islam was less "oppressive" than in the Americas or than the official racism in South Africa (still under apartheid) when this book was published in 1990.

Lewis even accepts, absurdly, that being a Muslim slave was an improvement on being a slave of a Greek or Roman. This might be so (or it might not), but it is irrelevant. The early slaves had theretofore been free men, so the kindness of the Muslims in robbing and enslaving them probably did not seem as admirable to them as it does to Professor Lewis.

This is very strange.

The strangeness -- aside from the lapses in judgment by the usually reliable Lewis -- is that Muslim apologists despise Lewis for misrepresenting Islam to Dar-al-Harb. Yet in almost all his many books, Lewis gives the benefit of the close calls to Islam. Never more flagrantly than here.

The evidence that the humanity of Islamic slavery is a hoax is fully evidenced within this book (and elsewhere), even if Lewis ignores his own writing.

To begin with, Lewis admits (as did the Ottoman sultan, under British tutelage) that conditions from capture to sale to an Muslim buyer were horrible. Somehow, this part of the system "does not count," even though for many slaves it constituted a large part of their career as slaves -- for millions, all of it.

Secondly, Lewis marvels a bit that in the Middle East there are no large communities of blacks and mulattoes, as there are in the Americas. This despite the fact that the core lands of Islam imported black slaves for more than three times as long as happened in the Americas. (The Muslims took white slaves, too, until rising western military competence put a stop to it; a minor part of this book.)

Although there were times and places where African slaves in the Americas were worked to death, in general they reproduced at far above replacement rates. In Muslim hands, slaves hardly reproduced at all.

This could not have happened if, in fact, Muslims treated their slaves better than Europeans and Americans did.

It is probably significant of Lewis's concern to lessen the obvious imputations about Muslim behavior that he gives hardly two sentences to the revolt of black slaves in southern Iraq in the 10th century, and not a word about the death toll. No one knows what it was -- Muslim sources are silent or faked -- but historians believe it was probably the biggest slave revolt in history. Nine hundred thousand slaves may have been killed. Comparable to the population at the time, this was a slaughter worse than anything 20th century Germans achieved.

In his final words, Lewis says that his study assumed that the extreme claims on either side -- of the savagery of Islamic slavery or its mildness (he does not consider claims that it did not exist) -- could not be right. But even the evidence of his own book, not to mention widely available evidence elsewhere, shows that he has sugarcoated Islamic slavery.

In his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East, historian Bernard Lewis-called the "doyen of Middle Eastern studies" in America by an interviewer from the New York Times-examines the history of slavery in the Islamic world. Based on Lewis' previous work entitled Race and Color in Islam (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), Race and Slavery in the Middle East challenges, "certain assumptions hitherto unquestioningly accepted by Western as well as Islamic scholars" (p. v), namely that Islamic slavery was not based on racial discrimination. To the contrary, Lewis argues that racism was pervasive in the Muslim world, and was a defining element of slavery in the Middle East.
In the Preface, Lewis noted that the lack of scholarship in the field of Islamic slavery is in part due to "the extreme sensitivity of the subject" (p.vi). Lewis goes on to tacitly acknowledge this sensitivity in the first pages, beginning with the views of slavery expressed in the Koran. Lewis quickly determines that the followers of the text did not necessarily put its tenets into practice, and revisits this dichotomy between faith and reality often-thus attempting to separate the Islamic faith from the inhabitants of the empire it spawned.
The separation between church and state established, Lewis then launches into the history of Islamic slavery at a rapid pace, drawing on art, poetry, ancient texts and all manner of resources to establish elements of racial discrimination in all ages of the Muslim world. In 102 pages, Lewis manages to discuss the history of Islamic slavery, including examinations of all manners of slave (i.e. military, domestic); the discovery of Africa by the Muslim world; ancient Islamic ethnology, and the abolition of slavery. He uses resources that span centuries of political and social development in the Middle East, and includes an extensive notes section, bibliography, numerous illustrations, and a thorough index.
In total, Race and Slavery suffers from Lewis' rapid-fire approach to his topic. Much of the evidence Lewis provides to support his theories is slim at best, and there are great gaps in between each stretched tidbit. For example, in Chapter 8, entitled "In Black and White", Lewis quotes the son of Ibrāhīm al-Mawsilī as saying, "They used not to train beautiful slave girls to sing, but they used only to train yellow and black girls. The first to teach valuable girls to sing was my father...The price of these girls..was very much higher."(p. 56). This quotation would appear to support Lewis' claims of racism inherent in Muslim society, but he offers no context for the remark. Without context, the comment is useless-it is no great surprise that Muslim men in 804 AD would find the women most similar to them in appearance more attractive, and therefore would regard such slave women as more valuable. The fact that the speaker (whose name is never provided by Lewis) used the words "yellow and black" does not automatically mean he was racist-it could merely have been his attempt to identify women whose ethnic origin had been lost to slavery. Whatever the source of the comment, it is clear that it does not necessarily support Lewis' theories. Also in Chapter 8, Lewis refers to the change in ethnicity of slaves, from large numbers of white slaves, to large numbers of black slaves (pp. 55-56). Lewis offers no numeric data to support this statement, however, and does not give an indication of an actual span of time during which the racial change in Islamic slavery took place. Without the physical data, the reader is forced to take Lewis' word alone as evidence of this alleged change. Lastly, over the course of the eight pages in Chapter 8, Lewis covers "Black and White" issues in the Muslim Empire from the age of Aristotle to Medieval times-with very little attention paid to the individuality of each sector of the Empire. This approach ignores the cultural and political differences that could have affected views toward the various races present, in favor of a composite overview applied to the entire empire.
The flaws enumerated in Chapter 8 are only an example of the problems permeating the entire text. As a whole, Race and Slavery in the Middle East is less an examination of Islamic slavery than it is a presentation of a topic requiring further study. Lewis' writing here is reminiscent of a lecturer's notes or a dissertation proposal-thinly outlined information meant to be expanded upon later. At best, Race and Slavery in the Middle East provides a gross overview of racism and slavery in the Islamic empire; at worst, it is a thinly stretched argument over a quandary of little relevance.