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As If Silent and Absent
BONDS OF ENSLAVEMENT IN THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE EAST
By EHUD R. TOLEDANO YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Yale University
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-12618-1
Chapter One
Understanding Enslavement as a Human Bond
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was the last and greatest Islamic power of the modern era. In many ways, the history of the Middle East between 1516/1517 and 1918 is a chapter in Ottoman history, and Ottoman traces have lingered in the eastern Mediterranean many decades after the demise of the Empire. Some major features of political, social, economic, and cultural life born and developed under the sultans survived well into the twentieth century and arguably are detectable even today. While often viewed in the West as a paragon of conservatism and stagnation, the Ottoman Empire was a complex and fascinating entity through many periods of its long history; it was dynamic and adaptable, pragmatic and resilient, tolerant and accommodating, as the past two decades of intensive research have shown. There were periods in which it resembled its negative image, but an overall account of the teeming and diversified social life under its rule certainly defies that image.
The "long nineteenth century," from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth, was a period of greattransformation inside the Ottoman Empire and in its international milieu. To cope with growing European expansionism and intervention, the Ottomans adopted their version of self-evolved, self-styled modernization. Some reform measures were tailored to Ottoman needs; others were resisted and rejected. Through all this, however, the increasing European presence in Ottoman societies became an undeniable reality in the Mediterranean and beyond. As I have argued elsewhere, policies to do with enslavement and the slave trade were among the most striking examples of the Ottoman attempt to resolve and contain European, mainly British, pressure: the Empire prohibited the traffic in Africans in 1856 and had gradually suppressed it by the end of the nineteenth century, whereas enslavement remained legal. In this book we shall see how British representatives in the Empire became-in the eyes of the enslaved-part and parcel of the patronage system.
THE EMPIRE AND THE ENSLAVED
Scattered data and reasonable extrapolations regarding the volume of the slave trade from Africa to the Ottoman Empire yield an estimated number of approximately 16,000 to 18,000 men and women who were being forcibly transported into the Empire each year during much of the nineteenth century. The most reliable estimates for the total volume of coerced migration from Africa into Ottoman territories during the long nineteenth century are Ralph Austen's: from Swahili coasts to the Ottoman Middle East and India-313,000; across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden-492,000; into Ottoman Egypt-362,000; and into Ottoman North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya)-350,000. If we exclude the numbers going to India, a rough estimate of this mass population movement would amount to more than 1.3 million people. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the shrinking Atlantic traffic swelled the number of enslaved Africans coerced into domestic African markets, as well as into Ottoman ones. These figures should have resulted in a fairly noticeable African diaspora into both Turkey and the successor Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa and even into the Balkans.
However, if we look for persons of African descent in these regions, we find only scattered traces. In Turkey, there are African agricultural communities in western Anatolia, in such towns and villages as Torbali, Söke, Ödemis, Tire, and Akhisar, with a larger concentration in the province of Aydin near Izmir and in the region of Antalya. Even in the city of Izmir itself, where the largest African population in the Ottoman Empire lived at the end of the nineteenth century, an estimate that it had two thousand African residents in the first half of the twentieth century is disputed as possibly too high. Since African Ottomans and African Turks were considered Muslims and Turks, respectively, they are, in the words of one scholar, "virtually statistically nonexistent in the official demographic records" of the Empire and the later Republic. They are absent from standard reference sources such as yearbooks (salnames), directories (rehbers), and statistically compiled indexes. By comparison, persons of African extraction live in greater numbers in the post-Ottoman Levant, in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and North Africa, among the various Bedouin tribes in desert areas, and in settled villages bordering on desert areas. In Egypt, Africans seem to have a larger presence than elsewhere in the Middle East.
All in all, the impression is that only a small fraction of the descendants of enslaved Africans are still in the post-Ottoman Mediterranean region. Where have they all gone? Several explanations have been offered, including some plausible ones. The most common is that many enslaved persons perished because they were not used to the cold weather and because they suffered from contagious pulmonary diseases. The life expectancy of survivors was also quite low. In addition, Islamic law and Ottoman social norms sanctioned concubinage and subsequent absorption into the host societies. An enslaved woman impregnated by her owner could not be sold, her offspring were considered free, and she herself was freed upon the death of her master. Thus, the passage of several generations ensured not only the social absorption of such free children but also their visible disappearance.
The enslaved Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, Slavs, and other non-Africans who entered Ottoman territory either voluntarily or by force were absorbed in a similar matter. The enslaved Circassians were mostly refugees riven from the Caucasus by the Russians from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s. In the Caucasus, Circassian society comprised several tribal units sharing related languages, cultural traditions, and social organization. Under Russian rule, the bonded class of agricultural workers (in Adygé Circassian, pshitl) was considered enserfed, but in Ottoman law they were accorded the status of "slave" (Turkish, köle). In reality, the pshitl were more the clients-protégés (Arabic, tabi') of each landlord-patron (Adygé Circassian, pshi; Ottoman Turkish, bey). This status was hereditary, and the offspring of free and bonded marriages inherited the status of the enslaved parent.
Other Circassians and Georgians, largely young women, were brought into the Ottoman Empire by slave dealers for service in urban elite harems. A preference for white women prevailed among male members of the Ottoman imperial elite in the long nineteenth century and even before. Accordingly, agents for the imperial harem and agents of leading households were instructed to recruit young women among the Circassian and Georgian populations of the Caucasus. These women were trained in the recruiting household and socialized into elite household roles. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, recruitment declined under the growing restrictions imposed on the practice by the Ottoman government, but even the imperial harem and some of the top-ranking officeholders continued to recruit.
Another phenomenon that gradually disappeared, although it was still visible in the nineteenth century, was for households to purchase Circassian, Georgian, Slav, and other light-skinned men and train them to be members of the Ottoman military-administrative elite. These men were known as kul, in Arabic mamluk, and for centuries formed the backbone of the Ottoman imperial elite. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the monopoly held by the imperial household over the recruitment of kuls was broken, and many heads of elite households, mainly in the provinces but in the capital as well, began to recruit enslaved retainers for their own militias. Well into the nineteenth century, these were known as the kuls of the kuls (Turkish, kullarin kullari); I will call them kul-type slaves. Because kuls and kul-type recruits were linked to the female cognate phenomenon of harem slavery, I refer to them together as kul/harem slaves. This group comprises one more element: the eunuchs, who were the mediators between the women of elite harems and the male world. At the court, the Chief African Eunuch and his corps of African eunuchs had great influence even as late as the early twentieth century. There are a few remaining types of unfree labor. First, it should be noted that agricultural enslavement also existed in Egypt during the cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War in the early 1860s. Enslaved Sudanese were carried into the Egyptian countryside to work the cotton fields. The most prevalent form of enslavement in the Empire, however, was domestic service in elite households, which was largely performed by African, Circassian, and Georgian women. Enslaved men performed such menial tasks such as diving for pearls, mining, and occasionally constructing public works. The large variety of functions performed by enslaved persons in Ottoman societies, coupled with the equally varied places of origin from which the enslaved were wrenched, are the subject of considerable research. Rather than thinking of all the types of enslavement as unrelated, we will more fruitfully see them on a continuum of varying origins, cultures, functions, and statuses. By the end of the nineteenth century the size of the enslaved population hovered around 5 percent of the total population. As Madeline Zilfi observes, enslavement was "the practice of a small, privileged minority and as such scarcely reflected the experience of the majority." The overwhelming number of families, she adds, were monogamous and did not own slaves nor employ free servants. Nonetheless, the complexity of the practice makes it necessary to look for an approach that can accommodate its internal contradictions and seeming intractability: high and low status are mixed, honor and shame appear intertwined, even to someone trained in non-Ottoman, non-Islamic forms of enslavement. To better understand the phenomenon we may classify the position of enslaved people according to six main criteria that affected their treatment and fortunes:
the tasks the enslaved performed-whether domestic, agricultural, menial, or kul/harem
the stratum of the slaver-whether a member of an urban elite, a rural notable, a smallhold cultivator, an artisan, or a merchant
location-whether in the core or a peripheral area
habitat-whether urban, village, or nomad
gender-whether male, female, or eunuch
ethnicity-whether African or not
The following observations emerge from this matrix:
Enslaved domestic workers in urban elite households were better treated than enslaved workers in other settings and predicaments.
The lower the stratum of the slaver and the farther from the core and the less densely populated the habitat, the greater the chances the enslaved had to receive bad treatment.
The lives of enslaved Africans and enslaved women were more often than not harder than the lives of enslaved whites and enslaved men.
Thus, for example, women in urban elite households-where, arguably, enslavement was the mildest-could be, and not infrequently were, exposed to uncomfortable situations that would be seen today as sexual harassment at best and sexual enslavement at worst.
An initial obstacle to an open and honest treatment of enslavement in Ottoman and other Islamic societies is the "attitude hurdle." Writers about Islamic societies in general have been sensitive-some might say, overly so-to any shred of criticism, be it hedged, balanced, or even implied. The Orientalist tradition, or paradigm, in Middle Eastern studies has been seen, often with good reason, as judgmental, patronizing, moralistic, and deprecating toward Arabs and Muslims, their culture, their religion and belief systems, and their political and economic life. All have been seen as reinforcing negative political attitudes toward contemporary causes espoused by Arabs and Muslims, ultimately marginalizing or even excluding them from the international community.
Too often the debate over the history of enslavement has been suppressed by the reluctance of Arab and Muslim writers to engage in an open discussion with their foreign counterparts about human bondage. Excepting modern Turkish scholarship and a few contributions from scholars in Arab countries, the work produced by Arabs and Muslims has been apologetic and polemical; it has taught us very little about the life of enslaved people in Islamic societies. All the while, various aspects of slavery have been hotly debated and thoroughly researched and analyzed in most non-Islamic societies. There are, however, some indications that the defensive indigenous posture about Islamic enslavement is being remolded.
Still, we can hardly fault Arab and Muslim writers who feel that their cultures and values are being constantly scrutinized and who perceive their countries as being politically, and at times militarily, under attack from stronger and richer countries. Threatened by the knowns and unknowns of globalization, many find solace and a sense of security in local culture, in Islamic tradition, and, on the margins, in radical, violent activism. While globlization and the reactions to it in Muslim societies are relatively recent, the defensive attitude regarding enslavement in Islamic societies is at least a century and a half old. It dates back to the early attempts by British abolitionists through their powerful government representatives in Islamic countries, especially in the Ottoman Empire, to persuade local and imperial authorities to suppress the slave trade and abolish slavery. European criticism of Ottoman slavery elicited a defensive-though complex and differentiated-reaction from Ottoman officials, writers, and intellectuals. By and large, it was seen as an interference that targeted the very foundations of the Ottoman social order, because slavery was an integral part of family and culture. Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did local opponents articulate their views in published works, which, at the same time, began to reflect the growing number who criticized enslavement on moral grounds.
In an earlier book I put the main argument that constituted the defensive position in the following words:
The crux of the Ottoman argument was that slavery in the empire, as in other Muslim societies, was fundamentally different from slavery in the Americas. In the main, it was far milder because slaves were not employed on plantations, were well treated, were frequently manumitted, and could integrate into the slave-owning society. Islamic law, it was further maintained, encouraged owners to treat their slaves well, and manumission was considered a pious act, for which the believer could expect remuneration.
On the whole, scholars working on Islamic and non-Islamic slavery tended to accept this view. Following the analytical categories that were developed over decades of research on various types of enslavement, Islamic societies were classified as "societies with slaves" rather than "slave societies." Slavery in these societies was believed to have been milder, better integrated, more open to inclusion, hence its abolition occurred late and never constituted a major political issue. However, perceptions have been changing over the past two decades or so, on the whole becoming more critical, less accepting, perhaps less prepared to tolerate the broader implications of what we may call the good-treatment thesis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from As If Silent and Absent by EHUD R. TOLEDANO Copyright © 2007 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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