Mamluk or Mamaluk were non-Arab, ethnically diverse enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world.
Harem refers to domestic spaces that are reserved for the women of the house in a Muslim family. A harem may house a man's wife or wives, their pre-pubescent male children, unmarried daughters, female domestic servants, and other unmarried female relatives. In the past, harems also enslaved concubines. In former times some harems were guarded by eunuchs who were allowed inside. The structure of the harem and the extent of monogamy or polygamy has varied depending on the family's personalities, socio-economic status, and local customs. Similar institutions have been common in other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations, especially among royal and upper-class families, and the term is sometimes used in other contexts. In traditional Persian residential architecture the women's quarters were known as andaruni, and in the Indian subcontinent as zenana.
A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, slaves were freed by manumission, emancipation, or self-purchase. A fugitive slave is a person who escaped enslavement by fleeing.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society. The main sources of slaves were wars and politically organized enslavement expeditions in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southeast Europe, and Africa. It has been reported that the selling price of slaves decreased after large military operations. In Constantinople, the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the 16th- and 17th-century population consisted of slaves. Statistics of these centuries suggest that Istanbul's additional slave imports from the Black Sea slave trade have totaled around 2.5 million from 1453 to 1700.
The city of Baghdad was established by the Abbasid dynasty as its capital in the 8th century, marking a new era in Islamic history after their defeat of the Umayyad Caliphate. It replaced Seleucia-Ctesiphon, a Sasanian capital 35 km southeast of Baghdad, which was virtually abandoned by the end of the 8th century. Baghdad was the center of the Caliphate during the Islamic Golden Age of the 9th and 10th centuries, growing to be the largest city worldwide by the beginning of the 10th century. It began to decline in the Iranian Intermezzo of the 9th to 11th centuries and was destroyed in the Mongolian invasion in 1258.
The History of slavery in Iran (Persia) during various ancient, medieval, and modern periods is sparsely catalogued. Slavery was abolished in Iran in 1929.
The history of slavery in the Muslim world began with institutions inherited from pre-Islamic Arabia. The practices of keeping slaves in the Muslim world nevertheless developed in radically different ways in different Muslim states based on a range of social-political factors, as well as the more immediate economic and logistical considerations of the Arab slave trade. As a general principle, Islam encouraged the manumission of Muslim slaves as a way of expiating sins, and many early converts to Islam, such as Bilal, were former slaves. However, Islam never banned the practice, and it persisted as an important institution in the Muslim world through to the modern era.
Qiyān were a social class of women, trained as entertainers, which existed in the pre-modern Islamic world. The term has been used for women who were both free, including some of whom came from nobility, and non-free women. It has been suggested that "the geisha of Japan are perhaps the most comparable form of socially institutionalized female companionship and entertainment for male patrons, although, of course, the differences are also myriad".
Slavery existed in the area of later Saudi Arabia until the 1960s.
The Black Sea slave trade trafficked people across the Black Sea from Europe and Caucasus to slavery in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Black Sea slave trade was a center of the slave trade between Europe and the rest of the world from antiquity until the 19th century.
Concubinage in the Muslim world was the practice of Muslim men entering into intimate relationships without marriage, with enslaved women, though in rare, exceptional cases, sometimes with free women. If the concubine gave birth to a child, she attained a higher status known as umm al-walad.
The Indian Ocean slave trade, sometimes known as the East African slave trade or Arab slave trade, was multi-directional slave trade and has changed over time. Captured in raids primarily south of the Sahara, predominately black Africans were traded as slaves to the Middle East, Indian Ocean islands, Indian subcontinent, and Java. Beginning in the 16th century, they were traded to the Americas, including Caribbean colonies.
The harem of the caliphs of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) in Baghdad was composed of his mother, wives, slave concubines, female relatives and slave servants, occupying a secluded portion of the Abbasid household. This institution played an important social function within the Abbasid court and was that part were the women were confined and secluded. The senior woman in rank in the harem was the mother of the Caliph. The Abbasid harem acted as a role model for the harems of other Islamic dynasties, as it was during the Abbasid Caliphate that the harem system was fully enforced in the Muslim world.
Slavery existed in the Sultanate of Zanzibar until 1909. Slavery and slave trade existed in the Zanzibar Archipelago for thousands of years. When clove and coconut plantations became a big industry on the islands, domestic slavery expanded to a point where two thirds of the populations were slaves. Zanzibar was internationally known as a major player in the Indian Ocean slave trade, where slaves from the Swahili coast of Eastern Africa were trafficked across the Indian Ocean to Oman in the Arabian Peninsula during the Zanzibar slave trade.
Slavery in Egypt existed up until the early 20th century. It differed from the previous slavery in ancient Egypt, being managed in accordance with Islamic law from the conquest of the Caliphate in the 7th century until the practice stopped in the early 20th-century, having been gradually abolished in the late 19th century. Slave trade was abolished successively between 1877 and 1884. Slavery itself was not abolished, but it gradually died out after the abolition of the slave trade, since no new slaves could be legally acquired. Existing slaves were noted as late as the 1930s.
Slavery is noted in the area later known as Algeria since antiquity. Algeria was a center of the Trans-Saharan slave trade route of enslaved Black Africans from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a center of the slave trade of Barbary slave trade of Europeans captured by the barbary pirates.
Slavery in al-Andalus refers to the slavery in the Islamic states in Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula in present day Spain and Portugal between the 8th-century and the 15th-century. This includes the Emirate of Córdoba (756-929), the Caliphate of Córdoba (929-1031), the Almoravid rule (1085–1145), Almohad rule (1147–1238) and the smaller Taifa principalities, notably the Emirate of Granada (1232-1492).
Slavery existed in the territory of the modern state of Syria until the 1920s.
Slavery was a major part of society, culture and economy in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), which during its history included most of the Middle East. While slavery was an important part also of the preceding Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), it was during the Abbasid Caliphate that the slave trade to the Muslim world reached a permanent industrial scale.
Bukhara slave trade refers to the slave trade in the city of Bukhara in Central Asia from antiquity until the 19th-century. Bukhara and Khiva was known as the major centers of slave trade in Central Asia for centuries, until the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the late 19th-century.
