Part of a series on |
Slavery |
---|
Slavery existed in the territory of the modern state of Syria until the 1920s.
Syria was one of the destinations of the Red Sea slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade of enslaved Africans until the late 19th century. During the Armenian genocide in 1915–1923, many Armenians were enslaved by Muslims in Ottoman Syria and Iraq, many of whom where liberated when the areas was conquered by the British during the first world war. Slavery was formally abolished in Syria by the French colonial authorities in 1931. Many members of the Afro-Syrian minority are descendants of the former slaves.
In the 21st century, Islamic terrorists again practiced slavery in areas under their control in Syria and Iraq.
Syria both exported and imported slaves. There was a centuries old export of Syrian girls. Ibn Battuta met a Syrian Arab Damascene girl who was a slave of a black African governor in Mali in the 14th-century. Ibn Battuta engaged in a conversation with her in Arabic. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] The black man was a scholar of Islam and his name was Farba Sulayman. [6] [7] Syrian girls were trafficked from Syria to Saudi Arabia right before World War II and married to legally bring them across the border but then divorced and given to other men. A Syrian Dr. Midhat and Shaikh Yusuf were accused of engaging in this traffic of Syrian girls to supply them to Saudis. [8] [9]
A major slave route to Ottoman Syria was that of African slaves trafficked from the Red Sea slave trade to Jeddah, and by caravan via the Hajj pilgrime passage from Mecca over the desert to the slave market i Damascus in Syria, which received about 200 slaves annually. [10]
The slave market in Damascus was held annually when the pilgrims returned home to Damascus from Hajj and the slave market of Mecca. [11] A Western traveller described the Damascus slave market in the 1870s as smaller than those of Constantinople and Cairo, but that in contrast to them it was held openly and not hidden away from foreigners, and that he witnessed the sale of African women and boy eunuchs as house slaves. [12]
One slave route to Ottoman Syria was the Indian Ocean slave trade by way of Ottoman Iraq.
In 1847, the British consulate in Baghdad reported:
The average import of slaves into Bussorah is 2000 head - in some years the numbers have reached 3000, but for the year 1836, owing, it is supposed, to the discouragement which the traffic has sustained from the Imam of Muscat, no more than 1000 slaves were imported. [...] Of the slaves imported, one half is usually sent to the Muntefik town on the Euphrates, named Sook-ess-Shookh, from whence they are spread all over Southern Mesopotamia, and Eastern Syria; a quarter are exported directly to Baghdad and the remainder are disposed of in the Bussorah market. [13]
Ottoman Syria was a province close enough to Constantinople to be more affected by the official abolitionist policies to curb the slave trade initiated by the Ottoman regime during the Tanzimat Era than many other, and while the slave trade to Syria did not end, it slowed down during the late 19th-century, at least according to official reports.
After a number of regulations against the slave trade caravans from Mecca by the local governor, only sixteen slaves were officially reported to have arrived at the Damascus slave market in the year of 1880. [14]
During the Armenian genocide in 1915–1923, many Armenians, primarily women, girls and boys under the age of twelve, were enslaved by Muslims in Ottoman Syria and Iraq. [15] Throughout the genocide the men were given free licence to do as they pleased with Armenian women. [16] Armenian women and children were displayed naked in auctions in Damascus, where they were sold as sex slaves. The trafficking of Armenian women as sex slaves was an important source of income for accompanying soldiers. In Arab areas, enslaved Armenian women were sold at low prices. The German consul at Mosul reported that the maximum price for an Armenian woman was "5 piastres" (about 20 Pence Sterling at the time). [17]
Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic servants, or as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of tasks.
Slaves in Islam were mainly directed at the service sector – concubines and cooks, porters and soldiers – with slavery itself primarily a form of consumption rather than a factor of production. [18] The most telling evidence for this is found in the gender ratio; among slaves traded in Islamic empire across the centuries, there were roughly two females to every male. [18] Outside of explicit sexual slavery, most female slaves had domestic occupations. Often, this also included sexual relations with their masters – a lawful motive for their purchase and the most common one. [19] [20]
In Ottoman Syria, it was common for wealthy people, both Muslims, Christians and Jews, to own enslaved African women used as domestic servants. [11] According to Ottoman law, non-Muslims or dhimmi were not allowed to own slaves, but this prohibition was normally not enforced, especially not in Syria and Lebanon, which had a big Christian and Jewish population. In May 1842 however, the Governor of Damascus, Najib Pasha, encouraged the Muslims to attack Christians and Jews to liberate their slaves, since sharia allowed only for Muslims to own slaves. On request from the European consuls, the Christian and Jewish communities then liberated their slaves, to avoid a violent attack from the Muslims. [11] This parcial emancipation did however not affect the people enslaved by the Muslims however.
In the 1870s, it was reported that there was about 5000 African slaves (women or boys) in Damascus alone, the majority of them women, and about 100 Circassian slave women imported each year. [21]
The British liberated many enslaved Armenians when the occupied Ottoman Syria and Iraq during World War I. When the British conquered Aleppo, Deir Zor and Cilicia in 1918, many enslaved Armenian were liberated, bought free or voluntarily handed over to the British. [22]
After the truce, the Ottoman government in Constantinople ordered the local governors in the Ottoman Empire to localise (enslaved) Christian women and children and hand them over to Christian bodies. [23] Syria was de facto ruled by king Faisal I of Syria, who was a British ally and who ordered all Arabs to return (enslaved) Christian women and children to "their people". [23]
Egyptian Armenians organized squads to resque enslaved Armenians from Beduins in Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq); one of these, led by Rupen Herian, raported that they hade liberated 533 enslaved women and children between June and August 1919. [23]
Several actors, among them the League of Nations, the British Friends of Armenia, the Syrian Armenian Relief Society and Karen Jeppe, worked to ensure the liberation of the enslaved Armenians, some of them active as late as in the 1930s. [24] In her raport to the League of Nations in Geneva in May 1927, Karen Jeppe stated that 1600 enslaved Armenians had been liberated from slavery in a five year period, foremost from Syria; [24] however, many thousands of Armenians remained in slavery. [24]
In 1923, former Ottoman Syria was transformed in to the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon under colonial French rule. On 20 July 1931, France ratified the 1926 Slavery Convention on behalf of both Syria and Lebanon, which was enforced on 25 June 1931. [25] In 1956, Syria ratified the 1926 Slavery Convention a second time, this time as an independent nation.
Many members of the Afro-Syrian minority are descendants of the former slaves.
For the revival of slavery in territories in Iraq and Syria occupied by the Islamic State in the 21st-century, see Slavery in 21st-century jihadism and Genocide of Yazidis by the Islamic State#Sexual slavery and reproductive violence.
Sexual slavery and sexual exploitation is an attachment of any ownership right over one or more people with the intent of coercing or otherwise forcing them to engage in sexual activities. This includes forced labor that results in sexual activity, forced marriage and sex trafficking, such as the sexual trafficking of children.
Slavery in medieval Europe was widespread. Europe and North Africa were part of a highly interconnected trade network across the Mediterranean Sea, and this included slave trading. During the medieval period (500–1500), wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery. As European kingdoms transitioned to feudal societies, a different legal category of unfree persons -- serfdom—began to replace slavery as the main economic and agricultural engine. Throughout medieval Europe, the perspectives and societal roles of enslaved peoples differed greatly, from some being restricted to agricultural labor to others being positioned as trusted political advisors.
White slavery refers to the slavery of Europeans, whether by non-Europeans, or by other Europeans. Slaves of European origin were present in ancient Rome and in the Islamic world, such as the Arab slave trade, the Barbary slave trade, the Black Sea slave trade and the Ottoman Empire.
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 Barbary slave trade involved the capture and selling of European slaves at slave markets in the Barbary states. European slaves were captured by African Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, Ireland and the southwest of Britain, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean.
During the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the CUP, Armenian women in the Ottoman Empire were targets of a systematic campaign of genocidal rape, and other acts of violence against women described by scholars as "instruments of genocide" including kidnapping, forced prostitution, sexual mutilation and forced marriage into the perpetrator group.
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.
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.
Cariye was a title and term used for category of enslaved women concubines in the Islamic world of the Middle East. They are particularly known in history from the era of the Ottoman Empire, where they legally existed until the mid-19th century.
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.
Slavery existed in Morocco since antiquity. Morocco 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. The slave trade was suppressed in Morocco in the 1920s.
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.
Open slavery existed in Bahrain until the 1930s. Slavery was formally abolished in Bahrain in 1937. Slavery ended earlier in Bahrain than in any other Gulf state, with the exception of Iran and Iraq. Many members of the Afro-Arabian minority are descendants of the former slaves. Slavery of people from Africa and East Asia was succeeded by the modern Kafala system of poor workers from the same region were slaves had previously been imported.
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 existed in the territory of the modern state of Iraq 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.