There is hardly a source on early Islam that does not mention slaves in one way or another. They were ubiquitous companions of events, occasions, and incidences. But they played marginal roles in historical accounts. The numerous fragments of information, anecdotes, and offhand references concerning slaves during the rise of Islam call to be collected and analyzed to piece together a picture of various aspects of slavery during this period. References to slaves are especially prevalent in legal texts, as slaves provided useful cases to Muslim jurists to think through legal questions. The discussion of examples of slaves, walāʾ (clientele relationships), and manumission in hadith, exegesis, and jurisprudence has not only provided significant insight into the legal status of slaves, but has also helped scholars to develop a methodology for verifying and evaluating the source material itself.Footnote 1 In this essay, I examine pieces of information available in historical and biographical works on early Islam to address the question of the provenance and procurement of slaves in Mecca, Medina, and the Hijaz during the time of the Prophet Muhammad.Footnote 2 Reconstructing this story involves dealing with narratives transmitted in various short, spurious, and often unrelated accounts. The source material for early Islam is, as is often pointed out, problematic and at times contradictory. It is laced with topoi and leitmotifs, and frequently proves tendentious, reflecting the opinions and biases of those who wrote them more than what actually happened. Nevertheless, reading beyond the topoi, leitmotifs, and tendentiousness, we find that “in the Traditions there is an undeniable core of ‘fact’”Footnote 3 with which we can work and assume to be valid until shown to be false.
A look at the lists of slaves and ex-slaves belonging to Muhammad in Ibn Saʿd and al-Tabari, as well as the lists of the slaves who participated in the battle of Badr (624), reveals a diverse picture.Footnote 4 Apart from the large number of enslaved Arabs, the sources identify Abyssinians (used as a general term for East Africans), Persians, Nubians, Copts, and Byzantines.Footnote 5 Although Arab slaves were the majority, the number of African slaves (about one-third of those listed) was also relatively high.Footnote 6 What led to such a diverse offering of slaves in Mecca of the 6th and 7th centuries?
The vast majority of slaves in pre- and early Islamic times seem to have been Arab prisoners of war, victims of intertribal warfare reminiscent of the ayām al-ʿarab (the battle days of the Arabs in pre-Islamic Arabia).Footnote 7 These captives were enslaved if the ransom on them went unpaid. Women and children often accompanied men on these intertribal raids and battles—the Quraysh during the battle of Uhud still seem to have engaged in this custom—and thus could also become captives and slaves. The women were either married off or served as concubines; children were not to be separated from their mothers.Footnote 8 The marriages to captive women do not seem to have been equal to marriages with free women. For example, when the children of a Ghifari captive, Salma, were insulted as “children of a prisoner,” her husband, ʿUrwa b. al-Ward, returned to her family so that they would marry her back to him as an equal woman.Footnote 9 Under Islam, captives of war continued to constitute a main source of enslavement, with some legal restrictions and modifications. The creation of the umma in Medina implemented a principle of classification opposing believers and nonbelievers. Under this new division Muslims could not be enslaved, and the captives acquired through war were part of the spoils (ghanīma) to be distributed to those eligible to receive them. Captives of war could also be used to free Muslim prisoners held by enemy armies, or could be freed for a ransom or killed. The prisoners could also buy their freedom.Footnote 10
To further fill in the picture of the diverse slave population in Arabia, it is necessary to see Mecca's relationship with Yemen and Ethiopia at the time in a larger geopolitical context. Arabia in the century before Muhammad was a site of contestation over trade routes between the Persian and Byzantine Empires, the latter allied with the Abyssinian Kingdom. This power struggle was often carried out in the south, in Yemen and Hadramawt, and led to a strong presence of Abyssinian forces in southern Arabia. In 523 the Negus (the Christian King of Abyssinia) is supposed to have sent 70,000 (a figure that surely is to be understood figuratively) Abyssinians to depose King Dhu Nuwas and conquer southern Arabia.Footnote 11 A few years later in 570 Abraha led a famous expedition against Mecca and the Kaʿba during the Year of the Elephant (ʿām al-fīl).Footnote 12 Ultimately, one of the consequences of the military conquest of southern Arabia was that it propelled the influx of a large number of Abyssinians to Southern Arabia and the Hijaz,Footnote 13 who in turn represented a large pool of potential slaves once the Abyssinians were defeated by the Persians in 575.Footnote 14 Some of those who were enslaved seem to have been transported to Persia.Footnote 15 It is thus probable that many of the east African slaves in the Hijaz referenced in the sources became slaves through the military conflicts with the Abyssinians during the second half of the 6th century. The enslavement of Abyssinians in Arabia was predominantly a consequence of war, not the international slave trade, which would be the case in later centuries.
The second source of slaves was the slave trade. Mecca is traditionally regarded as a significant commercial city in the Hjaz and, situated as it was along major international trade routes, even an international trading center. As Mahmood Ibrahim notes, “Mecca's existence depended primarily on its location near the most important trade route in western Arabia which linked the surplus-producing region of Yemen with Syria.”Footnote 16 Beginning in the second half of the 6th century the Meccans maintained control over the trade routes and dominated the international trade network.Footnote 17 Mecca's economic development is usually attributed to its favorable geographical location, the presence of the holy Kaʿba, and the various security policies related to the Haram especially and the three holy months, from which foreigners, travelers, and pilgrims benefitted.Footnote 18 Since the late 1980s, this representation of Mecca has been revisited to varying degrees by different scholars, especially Patricia Crone, whose revisionist work has tried to reevaluate the sources and completely deconstruct this image of Mecca. Crone's work itself has been criticized, notably by R. B. Serjeant, and has polarized the discussion on Meccan trade.Footnote 19 Apart from H. Lammens and W. M. Watt, scholars such as M. J. Kister, M. A. Shaban, F. E. Peters, Robert Simon, Fred Donner, Ibrahim Mahmood, and others have laid the foundation for a more complex and differentiated understanding of Hijazi trade during the 6th and 7th centuries.Footnote 20
The sources do attest to Mecca and the Hijaz engaging in trade with neighboring regions during the 6th century.Footnote 21 This trade may have emerged out of the need to satisfy local demand for cloths, weapons, and other provisions, but it also created the opportunity for local elites to acquire non-Arab slaves.Footnote 22 The markets in ʿUkaz, Dhu al-Majaz, and Majanna, as well as those in Mecca and Medina, emerged as important points of sale and distribution for slaves. The sources also leave us the names of Arabic slave merchants (nakhkhās).Footnote 23 However, nothing in the sources indicates that Mecca was “un des plus important marchés d´esclaves” (one of the most important slave markets), as Henri Lammens put it.Footnote 24 Al-Azraqi's description of the pilgrimage sites and their markets does not suggest that Mecca had a predominant role in the slave trade.Footnote 25
The source material also does not provide any indication that slaves were brought directly to Mecca and the Hijaz in masses. The importation of Abyssinian slaves mentioned in the context of the east African ivory and gold tradeFootnote 26 does not seem to have occurred via the direct sea route to the Meccan port of Shuʿayba, but rather through Yemen.Footnote 27 East African slaves were a common commodity that reached Mecca and the Hijaz through Yemen, secured by the charters acquired by Hashim b. ʿAbd Manaf (Muhammad's great grandfather and head of the Qurayshi clan of Hashim) and others. The reason for the slave trade's apparently limited scale in Mecca during the first century of Islam might relate to the fact that converted Arabs in Arabia could no longer be enslaved. As a result of the rapid Muslim conquests, the borders of enslavement were pushed further and further away.
Apart from the main two sources of enslavement—slave trade and warfare—other causes of enslavement are mentioned in pre-Islamic Arabia, such as debt slavery, sacrificial enslavement, selling oneself or one's children, kidnap, and enslavement as punishment. Muhammad prohibited debt as a source of enslavement, just as he banned selling one's own children and sacrificial enslavement to deities and shrines, as well as tasyīb (unconditional manumission).Footnote 28 Several factors may have prompted Muhammad to make such a prohibition, including the need to distance Islam and Islamic practices from pre-Islamic pagan traditions of sacrifice to pagan deities. Apart from captivity through warfare, the only other source of enslavement that was recognized by Islam was birth—in other words, children of slaves became slaves.Footnote 29
In sum, medieval Arabic sources on slavery—fragmentary, cursory, and anecdotal as they are—document a significant number of accounts, events, and transactions. Their aggregation can help us to piece together the complex and dynamic picture of early Islamic slavery, the formation of which involved the Muslim community negotiating new Islamic ideals and practices into pre-Islamic conditions and institutions. Arabs constituted the majority of slaves during the rise of Islam, while African slaves were the largest non-Arab group. Though Mecca became a prominent international commercial center in the mid-6th century, its role as a major trade center for slaves seems to have developed later. Amongst other reasons, this lag might relate to the fact that rapid conquests and Islamization of Arabia reduced the number of available enslaved captives of war and pushed the borders of enslavement further away.
