The Iranian Air Force 1979-1982

[1]
Their Last Mission:
The destruction of the Iranian Air Force 1979-1981

Seth J. Frantzman

March 25th, 2005






In the spring of 1979 Iran had one of the most highly trained air-forces in the world, flying some of the latest American made Jet aircraft. Three years later, after the turmoil of revolution and the outbreak of war with Iraq this glorious arm had been shattered, its more then 445 combat aircraft reduced to less then 90. The number of personnel working in the air force had declined from 100,000 to less then half that number. The majority of these losses and the collapse of the Iranian air force was however not merely a result of the conflict with Iraq, rather the decline in Iran’s air force can be seen as a magnified symbol of the twin shocks of revolution and total war. Sources on the Iran-Iraq war are by and large dated, having been written from the period 1986-1991. The coming of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing conflict with the United States changed the focus of much of the research on the conflict and today it has receded from memory. Yet through the lens of the Iranian Air Force and its performance in the opening days of the war we can see many of the themes of the war brought to the surface, and hopefully shed new light on the many perspectives surrounding the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iranian Air Force before September 22, 1980

The Shah’s relationship with the Iranian Air Force was not untypical of relationships between various Middle Eastern leaders and their air forces. Traditionally the Air arm has been a coveted source of pride for the nations of the Middle East, a place from which leaders of nations have materialized. This is the case in Egypt and Syria, and King Hussein was an avid pilot himself. Having come to power in 1941 Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi worked to make his air force not only modern but also larger and more advanced then any of his neighbors in the Gulf region[2]. As a staunch ally of America Iran’s air force was equipped with the latest F-4 and F-14 aircraft, and the first batch of 160 F-16s were to be delivered in 1980[3].
A rare photo of a female member of the Shah’s Air Force courtesy iiaf.net

The Air Force became politicized along with the rest of Iran in the late 1970s. After the Shah departed for exile on the January 16th, 1979 the soldiers in the Air Force became increasingly involved in politics. On the 3rd of February many technicians began to be involved in street demonstrations and the daily factional fighting in Tehran. At the Doshan-Tapeh air base outside Tehran personnel “refused to arm, or service, combat aircraft or helicopters that might be used against anti-Shahist demonstrations.”[4] During the street fighting of the 9th through 11th of February some ‘units’ of the Air Force engaged in armed clashes with the pro-Shahist units of the Imperial Guard and other loyal army units. It appears as if these Air Force personnel were mainly enlisted men, maintenance people, and lower ranks, but the fact that the Air Force, usually considered so loyal, should have been involved at all is proof to the havoc that the revolution had wrought on the country.
The 11th of February marked the end of the military involvement in the chaos that had consumed Iran since the Shah’s departure. The resignation of Prime Minister Bakhtiar and his replacement by Khomeini supporter Mehdi Bazarghan was the first in a series of events that led to the installation of the Islamic revolution in Iran. This turmoil affected the army because from the period of January 17th Khomeini had been calling on soldiers to desert their units and many of the more radical anti-shah elements were now campaigning to have a ‘People’s Army’. [5] These factors contributed to a massive decline in the number of people employed by the Air Force, its strength falling from 100,000 on the first of the year to around 65,000.
The decline in manpower can be inferred to have affected the lower ranks more, but the officers were also affected, not as much by desertion but rather by the purges of the new Islamic regime. These purges began in February and would last through the end of 1979. In all about 85 senior officers were shot, and most of the highest ranks forced to retire. Later in the year a wider purge took place which netted a total of 12000 members of the regular army. It can be estimated that as many as 2000 Air Force personnel were removed, and forcibly retired. In addition Air Force commander General Amir Hossein Rabbiie was executed on April 9th, 1979 and General Nader Jahanbani was shot on March 12th. In all the Air Force is estimated to have lost half of its pilots and 15-20% of its officers, NCOs and technicians in this period.[6] At the same time as the officer corps was being purged the Air Force suffered the turmoil of having 3 commanders in a six month period.[7] The creation of a ‘Revolutionary Guards Corps’ on 16 June 1979 inaugurated a new era in Iranian military thinking whereby the regular army, considered hostile to the regime or at least not supportive, was to be shunted aside in favor of more loyal units. This, like the rest of the turmoil of 1979 had the affect of starving the Air Force of recruits loyal to the regime and of depriving it of the financial and technological support a modern air force needs to survive.
Throughout the Spring and summer Iranian Air Force personnel had continued to be killed by the regime, this included 4 who were killed in January 26th and three more on June 7th. One can assume that even if the executions were results of actual plots, these killings had an adverse affect on the opinion of the Air Force for the government. The third phase of the purge of the air force began following the ‘Nojeh’ coup attempt of July 20, 1980. In all 50 Air Force personnel, including 2 generals, a colonel and four majors were executed for involvement. The details of the coup attempt involved pro-shah forces from the top echelons of many of the military branches and a half baked plan to bomb Khomeini’s residence and raise an army of Baluchi troops to take Tehran.[8]
If one assumes that the Air Force had a pilot to plane ratio of 2 to1, then one can infer that by the end of 1979 their would still have been enough pilots left in the Air Force to fly many of the planes necessary. However the revolution had wreaked havoc not only on the Air Force personnel but also on the hardware available to it. America had been Iran’s major supplier of military hardware since the outbreak of the Cold War. The arrival of an Islamic regime uniquely hostile to American interests meant not only the canceling of the F-16 deal but also the end of any shipments of spare parts or equipment destined for the Iranian Air Force[9]. The most advanced plane in Iran’s arsenal, the F-14, was deprived of its avionics with the departure of American military advisors. The F-4 and F-5 fleets, which made up the bulk of Iran’s combat aircraft, now were deprived of spare parts. In an organization now numbering 60,000 people, with a close knit group of officers these deprivations as well as the killing of their comrades put the Iranian pilots into a disturbing situation, not unlike the one faced by Russia’s army under Stalin’s purges.











Iranian Air Force Bases 1980

Courtesy iiaf.net
The Outbreak of War, September 22nd, 1980-1982

On September 21st, the day before the Iraqi invasion, the Iranian Air force had 447 combat aircraft stationed at 10 air bases throughout the country.[10] There were 79 modern F-14s and 209 F-4s and 167 F-5s.[11] In theory Iran’s Air Force was more then a match for the Iraqi one. On paper Iraq only possessed 332 combat aircraft, consisting mainly of Mig 17s, 21s and 23s.[12] Since the Iranian pilots had adhered to NATO requirements for flying time(training time in the aircraft) whereas at the outbreak of war the Iraqi pilots had “limited hours flying time” it would have been surprising if the Iranian Air Force had not proved dramatically superior.[13] It is for this reason that Saddam Hussien opted for an Israeli style air raid on Iranian Air fields, to be followed up by an armored blitzkrieg to capture the province of Khuzestan in south west Iran.
The Iraqi plan to catch Iran’s Air Force on the ground succeeded, in the sense that Iran appeared to be completely surprised and its Air Force made few attempts to intercept the attack. The Iraqi air assault on September 22nd hit six Iranian Air bases, and 4 Iranian Army bases.[14] However, having learned from the Six Day War, Iran had established concrete bunkers where most of its combat air craft were stored, thus the Iraqis succeed mainly in cratering a few Iranian runways, without causing any significant damage to Iran’s Air Force.
The Iranian Air Force, despite low moral and declining maintenance standards, responded quickly, bombing a series of Iraqi installations on September 23rd. In much the same way as the Nazi invasion of Russia caused the Russian people to rally around a regime that under normal circumstances would be hated, the Iranian Air Force likewise rallied around its nation, the Persian, Shia nation defending itself from the Arab onslaught. By the night of the 23rd more then 140 Iranian Aircraft had completed sorties into Iraqi airspace. The Iraqis, anticipating such a counterstroke had meanwhile evacuated most of their aircraft to other Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia.[15] The Iranian counter attack is evidence that despite the shake ups in the command structure the pre-revolution plans for countering an Iraqi attack had been left intact and the pilots were able to execute these plans efficiently. The best evidence for this is that although the Iranian air force was able to maintain an “aerial siege” of Iraq in the first weeks of the war, these capabilities quickly trailed off as the number of sorties and targets of mission declined dramatically.
The reasons for the precipice like drop off in the capabilities of the Iranian Air Force had little to do with the Iraqi ability to combat the Iranians and more to do with the nature of the Iranian Air Force’s hardware, which consisted of American made items that were no longer available. The lack of plans for an extended war with Iraq can also be blamed and it here that we see the affects of the revolutionary regimes purges taking their greatest affect. The destruction of the higher echelons of the air force left a planning vacuum, that could not be filled, and their was little in the was of training facilities left to fill it. The pilots who reacted in September 23rd did so out of loyalty to their nation and with practiced plans, as time progressed no more concrete ideas would be forthcoming.
Calculating Iranian losses in the opening stage of the war is relatively easy, since a number of online databases have been maintained with accurate statistics on the subject.
By the end of 1980 the Iranian air force had lost 34 airplanes in air to air combat. By contrast in 1981 the Iranian Air Force lost only 13 planes in air to air combat, and in 1982 only 9 were lost. The decline in numbers is not actually indicative of Iranian ability to out-fly the Iraqis, rather it is indicative of the far fewer sorties being flown by Iran.
The best way to understand this is to take the case of Iran’s 79 F-14s based in Shiraz and Isfahan. In the first three years of the war Iran is estimated to have only lost 3 of these planes. Yet by February 11, 1985 when the entire F-14 squadron did a flyover of Tehran(to prove that Iran still had an Air Force) it consisted of only 25 planes.[16] The fate of these planes is connected with a policy that Iran enacted soon after the war began, the directive of ‘vulturisation’ of the planes with mechanical problems to help keep the best planes flying. Iran, cut off from her U.S sources, was reduced to “scavenging the world’s arms bazaars for spares”.[17]
Getting at the numbers of Iranian aircraft that were air worthy or flying at any given time is tough not only because the Iranian government broadcasted propaganda but also due a simple lack of information. The worst problem plaguing the aircraft was not the Iraqis but rather the lack of spare parts for the aircraft. The ‘vulturisation’ process reduced the Iranian air force to about 100 planes by the end of 1981.[18] Losses of planes due to combat can be said to have roughly equaled those due to ‘vulturisation’ if we accept the figure of 90 Iranian planes being lost by the end of October 1980.[19] It is estimated that by the spring of 1981 the Air Force had reached as low of perhaps 25 airworthy aircraft.[20] This number would increase to about 50 as the years passed, and as the Iranian government obtained spare parts from clandestine American and Israeli sources and other countries including South Korea and Libya.[21] The virtual grounding of the Iranian Air Force in late 1980 and early 1981 due to technical problems helps to explain a second dimension of the conflict waging within Iran’s armed forces. With the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war many Iranian veterans had volunteered their services and many of those who had deserted their units in the spring returned, swept up in a mood of national preservation to expel the Arab invader. The President of Iran, Bani-Sadr persuaded Khomeini to release many of the imprisoned Air Force personnel, mostly urgently needed pilots and technicians. Former senior officers were even recalled as ‘consultants’.[22] At this time Iranians who had even left the country began to return hoping to help their country during the ensuing conflict. The amnesty for certain necessary pilots and the return of other pilots helped the Iranian Air Force in the opening days of the war, and was instrumental in slowing the Iraqi advance and spreading fear in Baghdad itself.
The increased efficacy of the Air Force can be seen in some of the more daring raids it engaged in during the last months of 1980 and the spring of 1981. On the 30 September, 1980 Iran bombed, but failed to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor(Osirak, later destroyed by Israel). On April 4, 1981 Iran embarked on an 810 kilometer raid deep into Iraq, bombing a series of Iraqi Air fields.[23] In 1980 alone 70 Iraqi planes were defeated in Air to Air combat. The number of enemy aircraft destroyed in the same manner in 1981 was reduced to 24, still a significant number for an Air Force that was only able to put a few dozen planes in the air at any one time.
The return of the exiled and imprisoned pilots gave the Iranian Air Force a burst of man power and fresh crews, but it also led to heightened by suspicions by the Islamic authorities. The fears of fresh purges were realized over the years as 4 Colonels and 4 Majors who had returned were later imprisoned and shot by the government in renewed witch hunts of those accused of disloyalty.[24] The irony of this is that the government was not altogether false in its feeling that the Air Force was more loyal to the nation then it was to the new regime.
The decline in the air capabilities of the Air Force also corresponds to a renewed crack down and a renewed purge of the Air Force in the spring and summer of 1981. A year previously Air Force officers had involved themselves in the Nojeh coup, against Khomeini and president Bani-Sadr, now the Air Force was implicated in aiding Bani-Sadr as he fled the country in August, 1981. The accusation was justified, since the pilot who flew Bani-Sadr into exile was one of the men he had helped obtain the release of to fight in the war. The Air Force was grounded following the incident and 200 pilots and their crews were imprisoned. The Islamic regime now realized the Air Force had to be brought totally under its thumb and a tribunal of ‘Mullahs’ was put in place to authorize every flight. The Islamic authorities had apparently learned this idea from the Soviets who likewise kept political officers within the ranks to sniff out disloyalty. When pilots were allowed to fly they were given “the minimum of fuel required to for the mission. Apart from being demoralized, Iranian pilots lacked sufficient flying time and experience owing to being grounded so often and for so long”.[25] For this reason, of the more then 81 Iranian pilots killed in the Iran-Iraq war, not one was brought down in the summer of 1981. To be an Iranian Air Force officer in that time meant one was more at risk of imprisonment or execution on the ground from the Islamic government then they were in the air from Iraqi missiles and anti-aircraft fire. Likewise during the period, not one Iraqi plane was destroyed in Air to Air combat between May 16th and September 1st. The Iranian Air Force basically ceased to function.
Iran’s premier aircraft, the F-14 had disappeared from the skies during this time. The Mullahs did everything they could, short of disbanding the Air Force, to ensure that it fell into line and could no longer participate into anti-Khomeini acts. Nevertheless the increased purges, and heightened state of government surveillance helped make the pilots decisions for them, by 1983 they began to defect, and at least one even flew to Iraq.[26]
General Hazin(right), who had been a captain in 1980 survived the purges and the war. In the background is an F-14, Iran’s premier aircraft, which suffered due to lack of spare parts. Courtesy iiaf.net.
In the book Every Man a Tiger American Air Force General Chuck Horner makes a series of observations regarding the Iranian Air Force. “Among every nation in the world you’ll find a few ‘aces’-young men, and now women, capable of winning aerial engagements time after time…The Iranian pilots, while eager obviously suffered as a result of the fundamentalist revolution.”[27] In the end, as the war progressed Iran did retain some pilots who, despite the tremors of the revolution and war, remained loyal to the regime and continued to fly into the late 1980s. Some of these pilots had obviously been vetted by the ‘mullahs’ following the 1981 purges and they had found them sufficiently ‘Islamic’. Edgar O’Ballance in his study of the war explains that after 1982 the Air Force was “distrusted, suspected and grounded most of the time; and there were frequent purges of pilots, flying crew and technical staff.”[28] On 28th of May 1983 five more officers were arrested and accused of plotting a coup. Former Iranian Air Force personnel now living in exile confirm that many ‘war heroes’ stayed on in Iran, some climbing to be generals of the Air Force during the war, and retiring afterward. In some of the photographs of these men it is clear by their new found beard growth that they are attempting to fit in or at least prove their loyalty to the regime.
General Abbas Babaie was religious before the revolution, pilots such as these give an example of the way in which the Iranian Air Force was a microcosm of the society as a whole. Picture courtesy iiaf.net.

The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war was most likely looked upon as a good testing ground for new Soviet equipment and by 1982 the Soviets had returned as technicians in Iraq, after withdrawing personnel at the outbreak of war. The Americans, although hostile to the Iranian regime, were also interested in seeing how their F-4 and specifically F-14s would hold up against Soviet SAM systems and the Mig fighters. The first of December 1981 brought the first downing of a French made Mirage and December 1982 saw the first downing of a Mig-25. During the course of the war more then 100 Iraqi fighters would be brought down in Air to Air combat. Certainly in the case of the Americans since the Iranian pilots had mostly been trained at Miramar, in America, it could be concluded that the American weapon system was superior. In this case the Americans might have been more impressed with the Iranian victory over the Iraqis then the Israel aerial victory over Syria in the same period, since the Iraqi’s were believed to be better trained. The defeat of French Mirage’s may have also been studied by the British before they embarked on their overseas adventure to recover the Falklands from Argentina in 1982. Argentina had been supplied with similar French airplanes.
The superpowers were also certainly monitoring the anti-aircraft systems that each had supplied to the hostile nations. In his Military Analysis of the Iran-Iraq war Efraim Karsh writes “Both Iraq and Iran began the war with impressive air defense systems…despite the large inventories, the air defense systems have been most disappointing in action…Iraq and Iran failed totally to integrate their air defense elements into an overall system.”[29] In the case of Iraq it is not clear why this was the case, but in the case of Iran all these disappointments rest squarely on the shoulders of the revolutionary regime and its draconian policies against the Air Force.







Why the Iranian Air Force?
The Iran Iraq war was a massive war, and can be analyzed from more then a dozen viewpoints.[30] The Iranian air force however presents a smaller controlled body that can be viewed not necessarily as symbolic of the country but symbolic of many of the clashes between the regime, the nation and the conflict waging around it. The Iranian air force, its performance and the purging of it, including the total sapping of its strength, not from combat losses, but from mechanical and other losses, is a mirror of the nation as a whole, destroyed not only from without but also in many ways rotting from within, at war with itself almost as much as it was with the Arab enemy.




Notes on Sources


The Sources used as a bases of this study are primarily books written in the period 1986-1992 and websites where recent data has been compiled regarding pilots killed in the war and aircraft downed during the conflict. The sources written as the war was going must be judged by the fact that they relied in many cases on news print accounts and radio broadcasts, some of which may have been fabricated or issued for propaganda purposes. The website iiaf.net contains a plethora of data and first hand accounts by people who were employed by the Iranian Air Force before and in some cases during the war. However since the website is run by Iranian exiles not sympathetic to the current regime, although deeply sympathetic to their country, it is politically motivated and must be judged accordingly. The website acig.org is maintained by military enthusiasts and makes a point of vetting its sources and coding its data accordingly, and thus it is more reliable, although mostly useful for the military enthusiast.





Appendix I

Major operations by Iranian Air Force 1980-1982(not a complete list)[31]

September 23, 1980 140 Iranian F-4D/E Phantoms, F-5E/Fs and F-14s aerial ‘onslaught’ against Iraq.
September 30th, 1980 Iran bombs Iraqi nuclear reactor
October 7th Iranian aircraft bomb Iraqi oil installations at Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyeh
April 4, 1981 F-4s strike H-3 oil and military complex
February 1982 Iranian Aircraft bomb Kirkuk



Appendix II
Iranian Air Force Personnel executed by the government since 1979[32]

1-General Amir Hossein Rabiie- ( Pilot) April 9, 1979 Tehran2-General Nader Jahanbani - ( Pilot ) March 12, 1979 Tehran3-General Hashem Berenjian - ( Pilot ) April 14,1979 Tehran4- Colonel Siavash Bayani ( Killed after returning back to Iran)5- Colonel Ali Gilani (Pilot) ( Killed after returning back to Iran)6- Colonel Bahram Ikani (Pilot) ( Killed after returning back to Iran)7- Colonel Satar Satari ( Killed after returning back to Iran)8- Colonel Masoud Babaii ( Pilot) ( Killed in Iran) 9-Colonel Ahmad Moradi Talebi (August 10, 1987 Geneva- Switzerland ) 10-Major Ghodrat Torkaman - ( Pilot ) Dec. 21, 1981 Tehran 11- Major Mir Heydar Mokhayer ( Jan. 26, 1980 Tabriz )12- Major Behrooz Behroozi (Pilot) ( Killed after returning back to Iran)13- Major Bahman Partovi (Pilot) ( Killed after returning back to Iran)14- Major Mohammad Hossein Azizian ( Killed after returning back to Iran)15- Major Aliakbar Mohammadi ( Pilot ) Jan-16-1987 Hamburg- Germany 16- Capt. Hamid Nemati (Pilot) ( He was kidnapped in Greece and smuggled to Iran)17- Lt. Hatam Doakhan (Pilot)( Was killed in Kordestan) 18- Lt. Allahverdi Hajesfandiyari ( Jan. 26, 1980 Tabriz )19- Homafar ( Later Col. ) ...? Pedram killed in 2001 ( Killed after returning back to Iran) 20- Sgt. Mehdi Babaei Farshbaf ( Jan. 26, 1980 Tabriz )21- Sgt. Sirous Pazireh ( Jan. 26, 1980 Tabriz )22- Sgt. Bahman Davoudi ( Jun. 7, 1980 Tabriz )23- Sgt. Mansour Farzam ( Jun. 7, 1980 Tabriz )24- Sgt. Kazem Lotfi ( Jun. 7, 1980 Tabriz )25- Sgt. ......... Javan Mardi ( Feb. 6, 1980 Bushehr )26- Sgt. Siawash Nourouzi ( May 16, 1980 Hamedan )Killed in Nojeh uprising: 27- General Saeed Mehdioun (Pilot) August 15, 1980 Tehran28 - General Ayat Mohagheghi (Pilot) July 20, 1980 Tehran29 - Colonel Daryoush Jalali (Pilot) July 31, 1980 Tehran 30 - Major Faroukhzad Jahangiri (Pilot) July 20, 1980 Tehran31- Major Iraj Soltani Jay (Pilot) August 7, 1980 Tehran 32- Major Kavous Alizadeh August 7, 1980 Tehran 33- Major Omid Ali Boveiri (Pilot) July 24, 1980 Tehran 34 - Captain Mohammad Malek (Pilot) July 20, 1980 Tehran35 - Captain Bijan Iran Nejad Sabet July 20, 1980 Tehran36 - Captain Karim Afrouz (Pilot) July 24, 1980 Tehran 37- Captain Mohammad Behrooz Fard (Pilot) July 31, 1980 Tehran38 - Captain Hormoz Zamanpour August 15, 1980 Tehran39 - Captain Ali Asgar Soleymani (Pilot) July 24, 1980 Tehran 40 - Captain Nasser Zandi (Pilot) July 24, 1980 Tehran41- Captain Ali Shafigh Sept. 16, 1980 Tehran42- Lt. Nejat Yahya (Pilot) July 31, 1980 Tehran43 - Lt. Mohammad Ali Saghafi (Pilot) August 7, 1980 Tehran44 - Lt. Hossein Shokri (Pilot) August 7, 1980 Tehran 45 - Lt. Jafar Rastgoo August 7, 1980 Tehran 46 - Lt. Nasser Rokni (Pilot) August 7, 1980 Tehran 47- Lt. Jalal Asgari August 7, 1980 Tehran 48 - Lt. Ayoub Habibi July 24, 1980 Tehran 49- Lt. Mohammad Mehdi Azimi Far (Pilot) July 24, 1980 Tehran50 - Lt. Mohammad Ali Farzam July 31, 1980 Tehran 51- Ho22mafar Yousef Pour Rezaee July 20, 1980 Tehran52 - Homafar Jafar Mazaheri Kashani July 24, 1980 Tehran 53 - Sgt. Hossein Karimpourtari July 31, 1980 Tehran54 - Sgt. Mojtaba Moradi July 31, 1980 Tehran55 - Sgt. Siawash Nouroozi July 31, 1980 Tehran56 - Sgt. Ahmad Mohamadi July 31, 1980 Tehran57 - Sgt. Bakhsh Ali Karimian
( and 22 other enlisted personnel )


























Appendix III

Iranian Combat Aircraft downed by Iraqi’s 1980-1982[33]


Date Aircraft
23Sep80
F-5E
23Sep80
F-5E
23Sep80
Il-76MD
25Sep80
F-4
26Sep80
F-5E
30Sep80
F-5E
12Oct80
F-5E
12Oct80
AB.214C
12Oct80
AB.214C
15Oct80
F-4E
15Oct80
F-4E
15Oct80
F-4E
15Oct80
F-4E
16Oct80
F-4D
19Oct80
F-4E
20Oct80
F-5E
20Oct80
F-5E
23Oct80
F-5E
23Oct80
F-5E
24Oct80
F-14A
1Nov80
F-5E
14Nov80
F-5E
22Nov80
F-4D
26Nov80
F-5E
26Nov80
F-5E
28Nov80
F-4E
16Oct80
F-4E
16Dec80
MiG-21
16Dec80
F-5E
16Dec80
flew himself into ground
9Jan81
F-4E
12Jan81
AH-1J
18Jan81
F-4E
4Feb81
F-4E
Apr81
MiG-21R
3May81
Gulfstream III
??May81
F-4E
??May81
F-4E
??May81
F-5E
??May81
F-5E
??May81
AH-1J
7May81
F-4E
8May81
F-5E
1Apr82
F-5E
??Oct82
AH-1J
??Oct82
F-4E
27Jan82
RF-4E
26Feb82
F-5E
16Jul82
F-4E
??Oct82
AH-1J
??Dec82
F-5E





Appendix IV

Iranian Pilots Killed in Action 1980-1982[34]



Abbaszadeh Khosrow Abdolkarimi ( F-4 ) Bandar Abbas Abolhassan Aboulhassani ( F-5 ) over Ducan Dam Aboutalebi ( F-4 ) Bushehr Hassan Afshin Azar ( F-5 ) Mossel Nosratolah Aghaee ( C-130 ) Kermanshah 7 Jan. 1981 Abbas .Akbari ( F-4 ) Iraq Khosrow Akhbari ( F-4 ) Davood Akradi ( F-4 ) Karkook 30 Oct.1981 Ali AliAkbaree ( F-4 ) Bushehr 29 Sept. 1980 Masoud Amiri ( F-4 )Oct 1980 Asdolah AssadZadeh ( F-5 ) Over Faw Asadolah Barbari ( F-5 ) over Rawanduz Sept 1980 Mohammad Balazadeh ( F-5 ) Bazargan ( F-5 ) Mohammad Hossein Darabee ( F-5 ) 17 Mar. 1981 Ebrahim Delhamed ( F-5 ) 70 NM from Mosul Masihollah Din Mohammadi ( F-4 ) Abbas Dooran ( F-4 ) Baghdad 22 Jul. 1982 Ali Eqhbali ( F-5 ) over Aqrah Mohammad Eshghipoor ( F-4 ) Abbas Eslami Nia ( F-4 ) Baghdad 1980 Farahani ( F-4 ) Ghasre Shirin Abbas Fazilat ( F-5 ) over Rawanduz Hassan Ghahestani ( F-4 ) Reza Gharabaghi ( F-4 ) Gholam Gholamrezaee ( F-5 ) Karkheh1980 Khalil Ghobadi ( Helicopter ) Iraq Mansour Ghoreyshi ( F-4 ) Mahshahr 7 Feb. 1981 Bijan Haji ( F-4 ) Over Iraq 10 Oct. 1980 Bijan Harooni ( F-5 ) Dezful Hassani ( F-4 ) Ghasre Shirin 1980 Alireza Hashemian Heidarian ( F- 4 ) Homayoun Hekmati ( F-4 ) Over Persian Gulf 5 June 1984 Behzad Hessaree ( F-4 ) Bushehr 31 Jul.1982 Ali Ilkhani ( F-4 ) Ghasre 1980 Ali Jahan Shahloo ( F-5 ) Iraq Ghafoor Jeddi ( F-4 ) Jooraki ( F-5 ) West of Dezful 5 Oct. 1980 Kadkhoodaee ( F-4 ) Over Mahshahr 28 Sept. 1980Mohammad Kambakhsh Ziaee ( F-5 ) 24 Nov. 1980 Mohammad Reza Karimi ( F-4 ) Over Mahshahr 28 Sept.1980 Parviz Keyhani Nejad ( F-4 ) Over Persian Gulf ( F-4 ) Ghasre 1980 Youness Khoshbin ( F-5 ) Karkheh Gholamhossein.Khoshniyyat ( F-5 ) Karkheh Ali Khosravi ( F-4 ) Ghodrat Kianjoo ( F-4 ) Back seat of Bijan Haji Masoud Mohammadi ( F-4 ) Bushehr 2 Oct. 1980 Darioush Nadimi ( F-4 ) Ali Naghdi ( F-5 ) over Sahand & Sabalan-Tabriz Reza Nooroozi ( F-4 ) West of Ahwaz Mohamad Ali Oshrieh ( Farzin ) ( F-5 ) Over Ahwaz Firooz Rahmatian ( F-4 ) Gholamreza Ranjbaran ( F-5 ) 7 Oct. 1980Roozitalab ( F-4 )Salehi ( F-4 ) (Pour Rezaee's Wingman 19 Sept.1980) Mostafa "Hamid" Saghiri ( F-4 ) 25 Sept.1980 Changiz Sepehr ( F-5 ) West of Dezful 5 Oct. 1980
Mohammad Shademan Bakht ( F-4 ) 24 Oct. 1981
Ali Shamsbeigi ( F-4 ) was killed on Helicopter crash over Kurdestan
Homayoon Shoghi ( F-4 )Mohammad Shokoohnia ( RF-4 ) Ali Soleimani ( F-4 ) Persian Gulf Shahab Soltani ( F-5 ) West of Dezful Abbas Soltani ( RF-4 ) Hassan Taleb Mehr ( F-4 ) Ghasre1980 Ebrahim Tavakoli ( F-5 ) over Ahwaz ( F-4 ) 1980 Mahmood Yazdanpanah ( F-5 ) Parviz Zabihi ( F-5) NE of Mosel 13 Nov. 1980Zanjani ( F-5 ) Soleymanieh (Sharifi's Wingman)Kazem Zarifkhadem ( F-5 ) West of Khaneh inside Iraq 25 Sept. 1980 Fereidoun Zolfaghari ( RF-4 ) Over Majnoon Islands 10 June 1980Mehdi Zooghi ( F-4 ) Iraq Rahim Zooghi Moghadam ( F-5 ) 12 Jul. 1982

Total: 78 pilots



Appendix V

Air Forces[35]

1979 1982 1986
Iran
Combat Aircraft 447 90 80-105
Personnel 70,000 ? 35,000

Iraq
Combat Aircraft 339 330 400-500
Personnel 38,000 ? 40,000









End Notes
[1] Left to Right: Cpt.Azizollah Ja'afari(F-4)K.I.A. in 5th day of the war over west of Iran, Lt.Touraj Yousef(F-5)K.I.A. in Sept.22/1980 Dezful ,before landing. Lt.Khosro Akhbari(F-4)K.I.A. in Feb.5/1981 courtesy iiaf.net
[2] In 1979 Iran’s air force numbered 447 combat aircraft(Cordesman page 75) compared to Iraq 339, Egypt 563, Israel 576 and Saudi Arabia 178. In addition Iran’s air force was primarily equipped with F-4Es. These aircraft were delivered to Iran in 1971(iiaf.net). Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Americas other major Muslim allies in the region received these planes in 1972 and 1974 . Israel received the plane in 1969(http://home.sprynet.com/~anneled/IAFinventory.html). This pattern whereby Iran was the first nation in the region to receive America’s newest technology would continue until the fall of Shah.
[3] On October 27, 1976 Iran ordered 160 F-16s, with an additional 140 to be purchased later. By 1977 spare parts were shipped to Iran, however the aircraft themselves were never sent due to the Islamic revolution. Instead some of the F-16s were sold to Israel, where they were immediately used in the raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear installation on June 7th, 1981. Karsh, Efraim The Iran-Iraq War page 15 confirms the canceling of the order.
[4] O’Balance, Edgar. The Gulf War page 18.
[5] O’balance page 20 and Karsh, Efraim The Iran Iraq War a Military Analysis page 14.
[6] Karsh 14, Balance 20
[7] General Rabbiie was removed on Feburary 12th and shot on April 9th(O’balance 21 and iiaf.net), General Seyyed Mahdiyoum succeeded him and was removed in three days, while his replacement General Shahpour Azbarzin was in charge for only two weeks. In August General Bahman Bagheri was made Commander/Chief of Staff of the air force.
[8] See Nice Try, Top Gunned Down, or Anatomy of a Coup all published in Iranian.com. Also one can consult iiaf.net for lists of the officers killed as a result.
[9] The Shah’s Air Force had been named the Imperial Iranian Air Force, the Islamic government removed the word ‘Imperial’ and it became the Islamic Republic Iran Air Force.
[10] Tehran, Tabriz, Hamadan, Dezfull, Agha Jari, Bushehr, Shiraz, Isfahan, Bandar Abbas, Chabahar(iiaf.net)
[11] Iran also possessed 500 combat helicopters, Chubin, Shahram Iran and Iraq At War page 303.
[12] In 1980 and 1981 the first Mig 25s and French made Mirage F-1were delivered to Iraq. Balance page 71-72.
[13] Balance page 44
[14] iiaf.net
[15] The Iraqi evacuation and the Iranian assault are confirmed in most accounts of the war. Balance 42 and http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_205.shtml.
[16] iiaf.net and Balance as well as acig.org confirm the flyover and the losses.
[17] Balance 125
[18] ibid page 71
[19] Karsh 37, at least 50 pilots were also killed during the first 6 months of the war, iiaf.net.
[20] Balance 44
[21] Staudenmair 44
[22] Balance 51
[23] Staudenmaier 43
[24] iiaf.net
[25] Balance 71
[26] Balance 125 and iiaf.net
[27] Clancy, Tom. Every Man a Tiger. Page 357.
[28] Balance 125
[29] Karsh 40
[30] Arab-persian, Shia-Sunni, Semite-Aryan(Pipes), Economics, weapons systems, cold war, oil, gulf versus Iran, regional perspective, Secular vs. Islamist, pan-arab versus pan-islam. The perspectives and aspects of the war are almost endless. The chemical weapons and development of WMD. Minorities. Language. Kurdish. International involvement. Legal issues and international law.
[31] Compiled from Balance The Gulf War and Staudenmaier page 43
[32] iiaf.net
[33] iiaf.net
[34] iiaf.net
[35] Cordesman, Anthony, The Gulf War page 74 and Chubin, Shahram Iran and Iraq at War page 303


Bibliography

Chubin, Shahram. Iran and Iraq at War. London, 1988.

Clancy, Tom. Every Man a Tiger. New York, 2000.

Cooper, Tom. Iranian F-4 Phantom II Units in Combat. Schiffer publishing, 2000.
Cooper, Tom. Iranian F-14 Tomcat Units in Combat. Osprey Publishing, 2004.

Cooper, Tom. Iran-Iraq War in the Air. Osprey Publishing, 2004.

Maull, Hanns W.(ed). Cordesman, Anthony H. The Regional balance in The Gulf War: Regional and International Dimensions. London 1989.

Karsh, Efraim. The Iran-Iraq War: A Military Analysis. Adelphi Papers, London, Spring 1987.

The Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War, Maj. Ronald E. Bergquist, Air University Press, Maxwell AFB, 1988

The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict, Dilip Hiro, Routledge, New York, 1991

The Lessons of Modern War, Vol. 2, The Iran-Iraq War, Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990

The Iran-Iraq War: A military Analysis, Efraim Karsh, The International Institute For Strategic Studies, Adelphi papers, No. 220, Dorchester, UK: Henry Ling, 1987

The Gulf and The West - Strategic Relations and Military Realities, Anthony H. Cordesman, Westview Press/Mansell Publishing Ltd., 1988

Edgar O’balance. The Gulf War. London. 1988.

Khadduri, Majid. The Gulf War: The Origins and Implications of the Iraq-Iran Conflict. Oxford, 1988.


Marine Corps historical publication. FMFRP 3-203, Lessons Learned: Iran-Iraq War. 10 December 19990. accessed March 20th 2005. http://fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/appd.pdf

Tahir-Kheli, Shirined(ed). The Iran-Iraq War: New Weapons, Old Conflicts. A Strategic Anlysis by William O. Staudenmaier. New York, 1983.

Egyptian Air Force. Global Security. Accessed March 20th, 2005. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/egypt/airforce.htm

Royal Saudi Air Force. Global Security. Accessed March 20th, 2005. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/gulf/rsaf.htm

Modern Persia and Iran. Accessed March 20th, 2005. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775363.html

Israel Air Force Aircraft inventories. Updated september 2, 2004. Accessed March 21, 2005. http://home.sprynet.com/~anneled/IAFinventory.html

I Persian Gulf War. http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_205.shtml. Accessed on March 21, 2005.

Nice Try. July 12, 2004. Iranian.com. Accessed March 19th, 2004.

- Top Gunned Down. http://www.iranian.com/Ghaffari/2004/July/Mehdiyoun/index.html
Anatomy of a Coup: a Desperate attempt to save Iran. July 23, 2004. http://www.iranian.com/Pesar/2004/July/Nojeh/index.html. Accessed March 21, 2005.

Islam and Slavery

Slavery of the Mind: Western Scholarship, African Slavery and Quranic Law

Seth J. Frantzman
Selected Topics in Islam
Fall 2004




















The 2004 edition of Lonely Planet’s African travel guide explains that “In Africa, slaves led similar lives to many other poor men and women, but they had even fewer rights.” The same volume goes on to wax poetic regarding the 14,000 slave girls of Mansa Kankan Musa of the Mali empire[1] and the “exotic” sultan of Zanzibar where slaves lived in underground cells 2 feet high.[2] Taking this as a starting point, let us examine the actual scholarship as it pertains to the question of the role of the Quran in the lives of Africans enslaved in Islam. The West first learned of Islamic slavery principally through the abolition movement in England and through a few narratives published by Whites enslaved by the Barbary pirates. The study of Islamic slavery quickly devolved to “western apologists” who “focused on the variety of personal statuses available to the slaves, or ex-slaves, under Muslim religious law.”[3] This coincided with an obsession to prove that Islamic slavery did not have racial overtones, thus shedding light on its favorable comparison to the mostly race based slavery of the Americas. Thus western approaches to Islamic slavery favored two avenues, first that Islamic slaves had better status under Quranic law and second that these slaves, once emancipated or while enslaved, were not being suppressed due to their race[4]. Westerners also “emphasized the exotic and – by western standards – anomalous military and harem slaves often found in Islamic states.”[5] This attitude framed much of the scholarship on Islamic slavery in the late 20th century.
There are several myths and problems facing the scholarship on African slaves in the Islamic world. The first problem surrounds the habit of most books to heavily weight the importance of the 'Quran' in terms of describing the status and livelihoods of slaves in Muslim societies. Scholarship seems to take it for granted that the Quranic law on slavery was strictly followed throughout the Islamic world. Thus it is common to find an introductory paragraph that reads something like "Under Islamic law the children of slaves were considered free and therefore Africans assimilated and were accepted into Islamic society as a whole.” Similar statements might include "Racism is not to be found in the Quran therefore racism did not exist in Muslim societies and African slaves assimilated at a pace not found in the Americas.” These gaps in logic seem to offer simple answers to any deep question regarding the actual treatment of African slaves or the actual ability of these slaves to supposedly intermarry and quickly become 'equal' members of Muslim society. This problem of the importance given to the Quran in western scholarship is more deeply confounded by the question of the fate of the descendants of African slaves. By some accounts as many as 11 million African slaves were deported to Muslim lands, with as many as 2.3 million being sent between 1600-1800. These large numbers of Africans being imported into the Arab societies of North Africa should have had a huge demographic impact, not simply in Africa but throughout the later Ottoman Empire when slave routes stretched into Anatolia and India. Yet research has not shed much light on the actual fate of these large numbers of slaves. If one uses the Americas as a comparison one finds huge numbers of the descendants of African slaves, in some cases entire countries such as Jamaica are composed of former slaves. Thus the question should be asked ‘what was the demographic affect of African slavery on Islamic civilization and what was the fate of the descendants of African slaves?’


The Quranic Law

When one begins a book on Slavery in America are they likely to begin with the Christian Bible? No. Then what is the impulse when discussing things Muslim to immediately leap to the conclusion that the answer must be found in the Quran. . When one begins a book on the African slave trade to Arab countries why do they begin by quoting the Quran. Is it because the West’s notion of Muslims is that everything they do is grounded in the Quran. Which came first, the Arab man or the Muslim? Since obviously the Arab came first then why not begin a discussion of slavery in Arab societies by discussing Arab society, as one would discuss American society when discussing slavery’s role in it. Moroccan slavery scholar Mohammed Ennaji writes that “The majority of authors dealing with the subject draw their information from collections of Muslim Law, travel books and fiction.”[6] So what is the course of this venerable Quranic Law that has influenced so many in describing Muslim slavery? The following references from the Quran are divided into three categories, with a notation at the end indicating the Arabic word used for ‘slave’, Riqab/riqaba meaning ‘necks’ or ma malakat aymanukum meaning ‘those your right hand possesses. Abd/abid is the other popular Arabic word for ‘slave’ but is not as common in Quranic descriptions of slaves.

Slaves as those one sets free:

2:177 The righteous man is he who…though he loves it dearly gives away his wealth… for the redemption of captives/slaves(Riqab/riqaba)
4:92 Whoever kills a believer accidentally must set free a believing slave(riqab/raqaba)
5:89 the expiation for (breaking an oath is) liberating a slave
58:2 Those who divorce their wives by so saying(that their wife is their mother) and afterward retract their words, shall free a slave. (riqab/raqaba)
90:13 Would that you knew what the Height is. It is the freeing of a bondsmen(slave). (riqab/raqaba)

Slaves as those one is allowed to marry or have sexual relations with:

2:221 You shall not wed Pagan women, unless they embrace the faith. A Believing slave-girl is better then an idolatress.
4:2 But if you fear that you cannot maintain equality among them(women), marry one only or any slave-girls you may own. (ma malakat aymanukum Those whom your right hand possesses)
4:25 If any one of you cannot afford to marry a free believing woman, let him marry a slave-girl. (ma malakat aymanukum)
4:36 …you may marry other women who seem good to you: two, three, or four of them. But if you fear that you cannot maintain equality among them, marry one only or any slave-girls you own. (ma malakat aymanukum)
24:32-33 Take in marriage those among you who are single and those of your male and female slaves who are honest. (ma malakat aymanukum)
23:1-6 Blessed are the believers…who restrain their carnal desires(except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them. (ma malakat aymanukum)
70:28-30 worshippers…who restrain their carnal desire(save with their wives and slave-girls, for these are lawful for them). (ma malakat aymanukum)
33: 52 It shall be unlawful for you to take more wives or to change your present wives for other women, though their beauty please you, unless they are slave-girls whom you own. (ma malakat aymanukum)

On the treatment of slaves:

4:36 Show kindness…to the slaves you own. (ma malakat aymanukum)
4:33 as for those of your slaves who you wish to buy their liberty, free them if you find in them any promise…(ma malakat aymanukum)
4:34 You shall not force slave-girls into prostitution in order that you may enrich yourselves, if they wish to preserve their chastity. (ma malakat aymanukum)
9:60 Alms shall be only for the poor…and the freeing of slaves. (riqab/raqaba
16:71 In what he has provided God has favored some among you above others. Those who are so favored will not allow their slaves an equal share in what they have. Would they deny God’s goodness. (ma malakat aymanukum)
24:58 Let your slaves and those who are under age ask your leave on three occasions when they come in to see you: before the dawn prayer, when you have put off your garments in the heat of the noon, and after the evening prayer. (ma malakat aymanukum)
47:4 When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield…when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Then grant them their freedom or take a ransom from them, until War shall lay down her burdens.
30:28 He makes you this comparison, drawn from your own lives. Do your slaves share with you on equal terms the riches which We have given you? (ma malakat aymanukum)

(All quoted from The Koran translated by N.J Dawood penguin 1956 London, Notation for Arabic translation of ‘slave’ taken from The Human Commodity J.O Hunwick endnotes page 32)

This is the sum total of the mentioning of Slaves in the Quran, including the verses that mention “those your right hand possess’ which is commonly taken to mean slaves. By contrast the Tanach contains entire pages on the purchasing and treatment of slaves. Thus a cursory reading would lead one to the conclusion that Christian slaves would have been treated better. We know the horrors that Slaves crossing the Atlantic faced, thus we can conclude that the Bible had little impact on Christian slavery, although the Bible did influence those who came to abolish slavery in the 19th century.
The Quran’s treatment of slaves being as paltry as it is it is a wonder that so much scholarship was wasted on trying to ‘prove’ that Muslim slavery was affected in any way by Quranic law. Therefore much of the scholarship likewise focused on the Hadiths and their broadening of the rights and roles of Slaves in Islam. A small sampling of Hadiths as translated by John Hunwick.[7]

Hadith no 693 Abu Hurayra said: “The prophet said: ‘any man who frees a Muslim slave, God will spare him from Hell…’
Hadith no 696 Asma daughter of Abu Bakr said: “We used to be told to free slaves during a lunar eclipse’.
Hadith no. 720 Abu Musa said: “The Messenger of God-may God bless him and grant him peace-said: Whoever owns a slave girl and educates her, and is good to her, and frees her and marries her, shall have a double reward(from God).’”

Further Hadiths deal with the question of a slave owned by two people(697, 702) and Mohammed the Prophet himself engaging in slave raiding(no 717) among other small points. Nowhere in the Hadith does one encounter the ‘myth’ that westerners have painted of a Muslim law encouraging men to free their female slaves upon those slaves conceiving children by them or of the requirement that a slave be free upon the death of the master. Lovejoy in his Transformations in Slavery repeats the myth explaining:

“Because the status of concubines and slave wives changed, often leading to assimilation or full emancipation, the size of the slave population decreased accordingly. The children of slave wives and concubines by free fathers were often granted a status that was completely or almost free. Under Islamic Law, this was the most pronounced. Concubines could not be sold once they gave birth, and they became free on the death of their master. The children of such unions were free on birth”

This statement, taken from a general history of slavery, leads the reader to conjure up an image of benevolent slavery where the slave happily awaits the death of his master or marries free men and his children roam freely, no discrimination, no hardship above that of poverty. But this description of African slavery is a figment of the imagination, although it may have existed from place to place at a few times, the general framework here is largely a myth, constructed by Westerners and fed by Muslim scholarship that seeks to re-write the history of the Islamic slave trade. It is important to see just how the Quranic myth meets the reality.


The Acquisition of the slaves

47:4 When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield…when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Then grant them their freedom or take a ransom from them, until War shall lay down her burdens.


Although the Quran makes clear that one might possess ‘believing slaves’ it became the accepted and preferred practice to enslave only non-Muslims. Thus “according to Sharia, the reason why it is allowed to own (others) is (their) unbelief. Thus whoever purchases an unbeliever is allowed to own him, but not in the contrary sense.”[8] General E. Daumas explained “slaves come from raids made on the neighboring Negro states with which Hausa is at war, and into the mountains of the land where the Koholanes who have refused to recognize the Muslim religion are brought back.”[9] It is accepted that Africans had been practicing slavery for quite some time and it is even true that a light slave trade was already taking place north to the Red Sea with the coming of Islam in the 7th century. For the next 800 years, until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1450, Muslims would dominate that African slave trade, and Africa would provide a major reservoir for cheap human commodities. Because Africans were not quick to convert to Islam and because they were not ‘peoples of the book’ and since Africans already had an institution of slavery it was logical that the Arabs would look to Africa first for a supply of slaves. Later supplies of slaves would open up among the Georgians, and in the Balkans and even among captured British merchant shipping, but Africa remained the cheapest and least troublesome place to find slaves, and in the Sudan that remains true even today.
The enslavement of people captured in war had been envisioned in the Quran and the Hadiths but the practice that Islam became known for and the practice that became the staple of African slavery was the slave raid. Although some Muslim states had treaties that guaranteed slaves as tribute these frequently were not enough and thus the leader of a Muslim state might order his army or some merchant to procure slaves for the army or the Sultan. A common description begins “Towards the end of 1838, the viceroy ordered the province of Cordofan to procure 5000 slaves.”[10] More often though the raiding was done by individual parties, merchants and traders.
The question should be asked whether the creation of an economy of slave raiders was in practice with the teaching of the Quran or whether it was a separate creation, like its western counterpart, a logical outgrowth of the demand of the Muslim empire for slaves. First, did the slave raids take place as part of a general ‘war’ between the ‘unbelievers’ and the Muslims? Around the island of Zanzibar, East Africa’s principle base of slaving, the African countryside in concentric circles began to be become depopulated. The best sources we have for this is the many accounts by the English, German and Belgians who, in the 19th century, were busy colonizing South Africa, the Congo and Tanzania respectively. These sources are not altogether unbiased for “the search for a way to open Africa to Christianity and civilization was made still more urgent by the discovery that slavery was still thriving[11]”, but they are the only western sources we have on the East African slave trade.
The sources confirm the presence of ‘war’ to acquire slaves but show that slave raiding and the existence of slave caravans was the predominant method of slave acquisition. Henry Morton Stanley, on penetrating Tanzania to find Dr. Livingston mentioned in his diary that he had encountered a “minor war between Arabs and Africans.”[12] It is pointed out in accounts that to some extent the villages became depopulated as the African men found shelter through joining roving bands of “brigands” and in some instances resorted to enslaving each other. Thus it is easy to see how an Arab slave expedition found many women destitute and willing to sell themselves into slavery. It is accurate to say that Non-believing Africans were selling eachother to Arab slavers but it is also true that by 1885, the year Africa was carved up at the congress of Berlin, Tipoo Tip “King of Arab slavers was firmly entrenched in the eastern Congo.”[13] Henry Morton Stanley himself mentioned that he had encountered Arab slavers around the area of Lake Tanganyika, on the border of the then Belgium Congo[14], a distance roughly equal to that from Rome to Paris. In 1858 Burton and Speke had likewise met Arab slave caravans far from the coast. The Arabs would not have been penetrating so far inland had they not exhausted the slave potential around the coast. This then was the affect of Arab slave expeditions, a total disruption of the African tribal systems anywhere bordering the Islamic world. The dividend, of course, was the addition of believers to the Islamic faith, at the expense that those Africans could no longer be harvested as slaves, without some pretense.
But the question still follows, was the Arab slave raiding contrary to Quranic teaching. The Arabs “made themselves unwelcome through their slave trading and so they had to stick to the safest routes, in many cases counting on the Africans themselves to supply them with slaves.”[15] It seems accurate to conclude that those who claim that the Quran was responsible for “reducing the avenues to enslavement and closing them off” are in fact wrong. The Quran did not decrease the number of slaves imported from Africa, if anything the creation of a cohesive Islamic empire, with surplus wealth increased the need for slaves. The creation of a slave raiding economy was not something envisaged in the Quran. By the 19th century various European observers concluded that out of a population of 250,000 on the island of Zanzibar, two thirds were slaves.[16] Does this square when compared with the optimistic conclusions regarding Islamic slavery put forth in an Arab textbook:

“The system of law in Islam…ordained in regard to dealing with slavery was the highest order of wisdom, combining the general good with mercy. It taught the slave, refined him and perfected him, and raised his status and made him equal with his master. It provided a livelihood for him and then freed him. In order to reach this goal Islam followed a threefold path: (1) reducing the avenues to enslavement and closing them off; (2) caring for the slave and perfecting him; (3) opening wide the gates to freedom for the slave”[17].

If the majority of the people inhabiting the largest Muslim city in east Africa were slaves then either the Islamic ‘gates to freedom’ were simply not wide enough for so many people or the Islamic law simply was not the liberating influence many assume it was. The end of slavery in Zanzibar came in 1873, not because of Islamic initiative but because of European imperialism and the abolitionist impulse of England[18].

Freedom of Slave children and slaves upon the death of the owner

2:177 The righteous man is he who…though he loves it dearly gives away his wealth… for the redemption of captives/slaves.

4:92 Whoever kills a believer accidentally must set free a believing slave.

5:89 the expiation for (breaking an oath is) liberating a slave.

58:2 Those who divorce their wives by so saying(that their wife is their mother) and afterward retract their words, shall free a slave.

90:13 Would that you knew what the Height is. It is the freeing of a bondsmen(slave).


The most frequently cited example of Islamic law intervening in a specific way to curtail slavery is the idea that the children of slaves by a free man became free and that slaves received their freedom upon the deaths of their owner. The only truth to be found in this is that the owner could promise to free his slave upon the owners’ death. The declaration, however, must have been made while the owner was in ‘good health[19]’. Even after such a promise had been made the owner “may confiscate his slaves possessions, so long as the slave is not ill.”[20]
“Emancipation on the death of the owner(tabdir), which did not deprive him of his slaves services during his lifetime found much favor among the faithful…emancipation was hardly the rule despite some foreign observers allegations that freedom lay automatically at the end of any slave’s career”[21] One of these Europeans was a man named Morrell who wrote concerning Algeria in the 1850s that “scrupulous Musselmans think themselves bound to offer liberty after nine years’ good service.”[22] Nevertheless a separate source writing on slaves in Mekka claims “Of a black female slave the highest ideal is to work in a good house so long as her strength allows it, for then in her old age she is affectionately cared for”[23]. Little data exists on how many slaves were emancipated and at the end of how many years. One would imagine however that if a majority of slaves were emancipated after only 10 years service then a much larger population of freed slaves retaining their native cultures would exist in Muslim societies, as indeed they do in the Americas after being enslaved for generations.
When one thinks of the Harem, the wonderful erotic paintings of the French, English and American orientalists does one picture thousands of children? Yet the Harems of royalty did consist of many hundreds of women. One would have assumed using modern statistics for birth rates among Muslim women that a hundred Harem women would have produced 700 or more children. The owners of these ‘concubines’ had sexual access to them at any time, and thus one would wonder where are all the children. The reality was that since a slave mother upon conceiving became umm walad or ‘mother of a child’ she was entitled to certain rights(such as being freed upon the owners death and the master could no longer sell her) and therefore it became the practice for owners to either discourage or actively seek to not have their sexual slaves become pregnant. Had the Harems produced hundreds of slaves these children would have been entitled to equal portions of the owners estates and thus rivals with the children born to the free wives of the slave owner. In morocco “Contraception and abortion were in fact widespread among concubines”[24]. When contraception failed it was reported in Morocco in 1890 that “shameless masters pretending not to recognize their own children by slave women, in order to sell them with impunity.”[25] How common these practices were is not clear from the available first hand accounts, but it would be judicious of those studying Islamic slavery to not simply give the Islamic law the benefit of the doubt but rather to explore the realities of the situations of those involved.
“A slave mother, supposedly automatically free, did not benefit easily from her rights; once her master died, his family generally denied his paternity of her children”[26] This was possible because for a woman to be recognized as umm walad much of the responsibility for claiming paternity lay with the father. He may claim “that she underwent a period of waiting to ascertain absence of pregnancy and that he did not thereafter have sexual intercourse with her. In such a case he is to be believed and the child is not to be considered his.”[27] If he denies that the child is his then two witnesses are necessary. One might ponder where such witnesses would have come from in a society where group sex was frowned upon. Either way it is quite reasonable that in a situation where an owner of a slave is not interested in his ‘concubines’ having his children he could simply deny being the father without accusing them of adultery. Any resulting children would be the property of the owner of the female slave and he could sell them as he sees fit. Nevertheless it is mentioned by one writer that “As mother of one or more Mekkans she belongs to Mekkan society as a virtually free member, though nominally her slavery continues.”[28] Thus although the law provided that the children of a slave with her owner would be considered free the actual freeing of these children was most likely not the rule but the exception.
The avenues to freedom were certainly many but by contrast the avenues back into slavery or to be deprived of these avenues were also many. Slaves who bore their masters children sometimes found that the master simply denied the existence of those children. Slaves who were promised freedom were deprived of it. Since the word abid meant both slave and African in Arabic it was also common that former slaves would even find themselves victims of kidnappings and re-sale[29]. The subject of the kidnapping and sale of ‘believers’ is dealt with below as is the practice whereby men denied having children with their slaves.


The illegality of trading in Muslim slaves and Dhimmi

One of the most enduring myths in Islamic slavery is the claim that only non-Muslims were enslaved. Since as the Muslim scholar Ahmed Baba pointed out it was their unbelief which created the reason for their enslavement[30] and that slavery therefore provided a point of conversion for non-Muslims who emerged from their ordeal ‘believers’ and were subsequently assimilated into Muslim society. Mohammed is alleged to have said ‘On the day of resurrection, I will oppose three people’ one being those who sold a free person into slavery[31]. Therefore it was assumed that Muslims, being free, would not be enslaved.
Yet Muslims were enslaved. The primary way a Muslim found himself enslaved by one of his own was through a war between two Muslim states. The most obvious example of this was the war between various African states that had already converted to Islam, for instance between Songhai and Morocco that began when Morocco invaded her neighbor in 1591.[32] Since Islamic law permitted the enslavement of people during battle this event proved ‘tragic’ since both sides where Muslim. Arab countries had solved this problem by using slaves as soldiers, thus negating the possibility that freed Muslims would end up enslaved, but the African nations, with their surplus in manpower, were employing native troops. Since Africans had been slave-raiding eachother prior to the arrival of Islam the idea that their fellow Africans suddenly became un-enslaveable due to conversion was not altogether accepted. In fact in East Africa, the Sudan and in West Africa, all along the fluid borders of Islamic Africa, tribes that may have converted would be said to be insufficiently Muslim, and therefore enslaveble.
No figures exist for the total number of actual Muslims enslaved in this matter but Ahmed Baba, living in Timbuktu wrote an impassioned book in 1556 condemning the practice.[33] In 1391 the King of Borno, near lake Chad complained that his people, who had converted to Islam, were being enslaved by Arabs who were “selling them to the slave-dealers of Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.”[34] Likewise Ahmed b. Khalid al-Nasiri condemned the taking of Muslim slaves in the Sudan, explaining “how far the people of these lands had taken to Islam from ancient times.”[35] These slaves were frequently being taken under the auspices of a Jihad when in reality they were free Muslims not in any state of war with the raiders who had decided they were unbelievers. Such was the motivation of profits and the little attention to the laws of Islam that throughout the border states along Dar Al-Harb and Dar al-Islam Muslim slaves were taken and then sold.
The second major path to slavery for a Muslim was one in which former slaves, having converted to Islam or being the children of slaves and having been raised Muslim were sold back into slavery through their owners or through kidnapping after having been freed. Africans were the most vulnerable since they could easily pass for slaves, the word for Black itself being the same as slave in many Arabic speaking societies[36]. In the early 18th century the Moroccan ruler Mulay Ismail is reputed to have simply enslaved freed but dark skinned and poverty stricken haratin having accused them of being ‘runaways’. In 1882 “Caids…kidnapped blacks(haratin) by the dozen…losing all semblance of legality.” In one case 40 free women were carried off in a raid. Ennaji in his text on Moroccan slavery in the 19th century concludes that the “phenomenon of kidnapping had widespread currency; up to the beginning of the twentieth century”[37]. One can assume from these scant but powerful recollections that if Morocco couldn’t control its countryside in the 1800s then the phenomenon could have been even worse in past centuries. Certainly this is yet another clear example that those seeking slave trading as an occupation were not guiding themselves by the Holy Quran but rather by the almighty gold coin.
The last major path was the less frequent practice of freed people selling themselves into slavery. The sources for this are few and far between, but this usually resulted from a time of famine when destitute people found themselves so poor that enslavement and survival seemed the best option. Speaking of Morocco Ennaji remarks that “The custom” of selling family members into slavery reared its head “everytime a famine threatened.” It even happened that wives would allow their husbands to sell them into slavery so that the children and husband would not starve.[38] Perhaps the best example of Muslims selling themselves into slavery is the case of the Circassians and although this work is devoted to the African slave trade this case is worth noting for it may well be emblematic of a deeper more disturbing phenomenon.
The Circassians were a Muslim Caucasian people who were forcibly deported by the Russians between 1855 and 1866, thus their mass movement, although unique, also resembles what one might find in a famine starved country. The Circassians crowding onto the boats destined for the Ottoman empire were often asked by the captain of the boat to give over one child as a slave for every thirty people.[39] The practice of free people being sold as slaves among the Circassians and among the Turks became so widespread that the government worried it would “give Islam a bad name.” Nevertheless it was understood that “if parents sold their children out of their own free will, the sale…would be valid…but parents should be warned…they would incur the wrath of God.”[40] The degradation of the Circassians reached to the highest levels, for the palace looking for the best looking Circassian girls even found itself purchasing free born women from the governor of Konya(a province in Ottoman Turkey).[41] This is but one very well documented example of the selling of free born Muslims, a practice that although it incurred the ‘Wrath of God’ apparently didn’t dissuade people throughout the centuries.


The treatment of the slave

4:36 Show kindness…to the slaves you own.

4:33 as for those of your slaves who you wish to buy their liberty, free them if you find in them any promise…

9:60 Alms shall be only for the poor…and the freeing of slaves.

16:71 In what he has provided God has favored some among you above others. Those who are so favored will not allow their slaves an equal share in what they have. Would they deny God’s goodness.

47:4 When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield…when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Then grant them their freedom or take a ransom from them, until War shall lay down her burdens.

30:28 He makes you this comparison, drawn from your own lives. Do your slaves share with you on equal terms the riches which We have given you?

The treatment of slaves during transport is described again and again by many sources in much the same manner. The tale runs something like this “The dead ones thrown overboard to drift down the tide.”[42] The idea that slaves were thrown aside during the slaving expeditions was as common in the Zanzibar centered East African trade as it was in the Sudanese/Ethiopian trade as it was in the cross Saharan trade. Especially along the Saharan route where the Caravans crossed miles of open desert it was common for slaves to simply be left by the wayside. In the Saharan trade “mortality was high by any standards. Estimates vary greatly and range between 7 percent and 40 percent.”[43] Despite the fact that slaves did die en route to market it is also a fact that the Slavers would have done all in their power to not have this happen, as the more slaves surviving the journey the more profit for the operation.
Upon arriving at their destination of Zanzibar the treatment of the slave did not improve, thus the idea that the maltreatment was due to the equal suffering of all those on the slave caravan is not entirely accurate. Certainly the suffering endured by those slaves crossing the Sahara was equally visited to some extent upon those slavers leading the caravan. At the slave quarters in Zanzibar Niall Ferguson writes “You can still see the slave cells in stone town today: dark, dank and stiflingly hot, they convey as starkly as anything I know the misery inflicted by slavery.[44] They were “less than two feet high.”[45] Certainly such treatment was neither envisaged in the Quran and the idea that Islamic law in any way explains it is ludicrous. Rather the treatment of the slaves was one of pure economics, as were the similar conditions experienced by slaves destined for the plantations of the Americas.
One of the famous injunctions regarding Islamic slavery was the law that called for the freeing of slaves one ‘injures’. Unfortunately injury was defined as “Mutilation” or “gross disfigurement.”[46] This included the cutting off of any part of the slaves’ body. Many have cited that “the slave had recourse to the judicial authorities(the muhtasib) if he or she was mistreated”[47] This regulation proves exceedingly problematic when squared against certain realities. Eunuchs were the most highly priced slaves and the creation of eunuchs was something practiced usually soon after capture in Africa. It has been estimated that as many as 9 out of 10 slaves operated on died of this procedure[48]. Sources point to Egyptian Coptic priests or native Africans as the major supplier of African eunuchs. Since the Slave was in the possession of a Muslim then wouldn’t the slave have recourse to the very obvious law allowing him to be freed after the dreadful mutilation caused by becoming a eunuch? Either the slaver was entering some short term bargain with the non-Muslim operator or it was permissible for someone to damage a slave provided that person was not the owner, although it was permissible for the owner to pay for the mutilation of the aforementioned slave. One could thus conclude either Islamic law didn’t apply, or their existed a major loophole in the law, or perhaps the law was simply not followed.
The second instance of major transgression of the law was the death of slaves en route to the market. The freed African Yao slave ‘Swema’ tells of being sold into slavery to an Arab caravan in present day Tanzania. Her mother likewise sold herself into slavery to accompany the daughter. Along the Journey the Mother became weak. “The Arab leader ordered that Swema’s mother be chased out of camp…she was all but dead.” Later on seeing the girl was barely alive the owner ordered that she be buried saying “place this cadaver in a straw mat and carry it to the cemetery.”[49] Since this was a common occurrence, the death of a slave en route, one must wonder how the law of not ‘mistreating’ slaves squares with not having a law against simply killing them. It seems plain that the Islamic injunction, although on the surface seeming to ‘regulate’ and “alleviate the conditions of slaves in Muslim society”[50] did little to prevent the death of slaves from the mistreatment inherent in slavery.
One last observation is that in Islamic law it has been popular to make the connection that Slaves, women and Jews all figure in at the same level in terms of rights and therefore assume that the slaves were treated as ‘good’ as women and Jews. Yet one could make the similar conclusion that women and Jews were simply treated as badly as slaves. Rather then increasing the status and rights of slaves by comparing them to women under the law rather it simply diminishes the rights of women in Islamic society, not improving the lot of the slave.

Sexual relations and the Slave

2:221 You shall not wed Pagan women, unless they embrace the faith. A Believing slave-girl is better then an idolatress.

4:2 But if you fear that you cannot maintain equality among them(women), marry one only or any slave-girls you may own. (ma malakat aymanukum Those whom your right hand possesses)

4:25 If any one of you cannot afford to marry a free believing woman, let him marry a slave-girl.

4:36 …you may marry other women who seem good to you: two, three, or four of them. But if you fear that you cannot maintain equality among them, marry one only or any slave-girls you own.

24:32-33 Take in marriage those among you who are single and those of your male and female slaves who are honest.

23:1-6 Blessed are the believers…who restrain their carnal desires(except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them.

70:28-30 worshippers…who restrain their carnal desire(save with their wives and slave-girls, for these are lawful for them).

33: 52 It shall be unlawful for you to take more wives or to change your present wives for other women, though their beauty please you, unless they are slave-girls whom you own.

4:34 You shall not force slave-girls into prostitution in order that you may enrich yourselves, if they wish to preserve their chastity.

For a religion frequently seen as both moral and one that abhors the sexuality and promiscuity of the West, Islam in fact focused a disproportionate amount of time on sexual behavior. In terms of slavery this was most pronounced in the very liberal, one might say exploitative or libidinous, rules regarding the access to female slaves by male owners. Among these was “the masters unrestricted right to cohabit with any or all of his unmarried female slaves.”[51] At the same time “A slave girl who has not been brought up by her master from her childhood in his house is never bought as a virgin…her owner or some relation of her mistress deflowers her as soon as she has reached the age(12 to 14 years).”[52]
The reason for the taking of liberties with slaves was that “legal doctrine, very protective of the considerations shown a wife due a wife permitted much more concerning the black bodies of slaves, seemingly designed for pleasure.”[53] The sexuality of the Ethiopian Africans was ingrained rather early in Islamic fantasies and throughout the Muslim world Ethiopian women were highly valued for their sexual forte[54]. Sex was common with the enslaved African women, and many of them were sought out for that purpose. It was common for young men to lose their virginity to the female slaves owned by their parents, just as it was common for Latin American men to lose theirs to the maids of their households[55]. At the same time, as discussed in more detail below, the offspring of these unions were few due to the fact that they had not been purchased to produce children but rather to serve as sexual playthings in the bedrooms of the rich. Thus “The rich mans desire for black slave women was just as overwhelming as his disdain for similarly dark freedwomen.”[56]
Numerous sources confirm the sexual license taken by the slave traders themselves[57]. Since only the most attractive concubines destined for the best Harems were intended to be virgins it was common that sexual relations took place between those transporting the slaves and the female slaves themselves.[58] Once in the Harem the female ‘concubine’ slaves took on a special significance, jockeying for position and struggling to gain the ‘favor’ of their new owner. The obsession with these African ladies at the same time seems to have given the free Arab women a bad name. One remarks “If the ordinary Mekkan followed his inclination, he would unite himself only with Abyssinians(Ethiopians); it is however, part of ‘conveniences’ that a man should at least once in his life marry a freeborn woman.”[59] The common conception was that Black women were more exciting in bed. Sexual rules with them were more lax since they were not wives and Arab ‘white’ women were seen as ‘pale sickly with poor constitutions,”[60] with a “frigid unresponsive body.”[61]
Unfortunately for the slaves they were still chattel and although some did marry their owners it was not the rule since for the poor it was far too expensive to afford a slave whereas the rich had no interest in hundreds of children fighting over their estate. The treatment of the concubines did not in any way resemble the form of an Islamic marriage. But one might conclude that this area, in concubinage and sexuality, is the only place that Islamic law was certainly followed and exploited. Whereas laws enjoining owners to treat their slaves well or free the children they had with their slaves might have been gotten around, the laws regarding sexual advances on slaves was one that both in theory and in practice worked the way it was written. Slave women were envisaged in the Quran, it was seen that men would have sex with them and likewise men made use of those injunctions. The only mention of the breaking of the Islamic law in sources is that men may have had intercourse with their slaves before the required waiting period of several days had passed[62]. Mulay Abd al-Rahman reports “the sale of female slaves of concubine quality without observing the waiting period”[63] and Hurgronje Snouck reports similar “the Mekkans: it is to much for them to wait even two or three days(before sexual relations with new Concubines).”[64]
The Quran specifically forbade the using of Slave women as prostitutes and yet “Slave owners showed little consideration for the women they offered, in some rural regions, to overnight guests.” Other sources documented the same activity, explaining that “We have no clear indication how common it was for such women to be prostituted, the fact that writers on hisba warn the muhtasib to be on the watch for it, indicates that it cannot have been uncommon [also that] at the hands of a slave dealer prostitution was but a passing, though inevitably degrading experience.”[65] Similar reports from Sudan and Egypt in the 19th century as well as Libya in the 12th century indicate it was a regular practice.”[66] If an activity explicitly forbidden in the Quran was transgressed so much as to be reported as ‘common’ then one can conclude that many of the sexual injunctions regarding slaves were also not followed to the letter of the law.[67]

The Demographics of the Arab world today:

Bernard Lewis as well as others have tried to tackle the perplexing question of what became of the African slaves. If one compares the shear volume of African slaves taken to the Islamic lands they will find the numbers roughly correspond to those taken to the New World. Yet in the new world one finds entire countries populated by the descendants of slaves, history books filled with the stories of the slave trade, popular myths and vibrant tales associated with the same episode in history. A cursory glance at the Arab world will find no indication of a similar phenomenon. If the Atlantic slave trade, usually acknowledged to be far more harsh and cruel then its Islamic counterpart, produced so many African communities, then wouldn’t one expect to find more Africans retaining something of their identity in the Arab world? Perhaps the answer here lies in deciphering the fate of the roughly 11 million Africans exported to Islamic lands between the 7th century and the present[68]. Lewis provided two suggestions, first the existence of eunuchs among the male slaves, and the low birth rate among the female slaves. To these should be added a third hypothesis, that the structure of Arab society militated against the creation of vast numbers of slave offspring.[69]
Deducing accurate numbers for Arab slavery can be difficult but if one begins with the most modern period 1600-1900 there are at least some similarities between European sources based at the various embarkation and destination points of the slave trade. For the three main routes, the Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean the numbers are 2.2 million between1600-1800 and 2,134,000 between 1800-1900 for a total of 4,334,000 for the period.[70] If one accepts the common perception that the slaves were purchased at a ratio of 1 male for every 2 females[71] then one would actually assume that more offspring would have been produced than had the ratio been reversed. However the mechanics of Islamic slavery were vastly different than its New World cousin. The male slaves roughly fit into two categories, that of slave soldiers or eunuchs. Since eunuchs were so expensive and since there was a heavy attrition rate among those selected for the operation it is conceivable that a low percentage of the male slaves became eunuchs. The African slave soldiers saw service throughout the Islamic empire, but like the foreigners the Romans had recruited into the legion, these slave soldiers were also to some degree expendable, especially since Africans were not prized as professional soldiers.[72] The Janissaries and the Mamluk Soldier armies, the best Islam produced were made up primarily of European, Caucasian or Central Asian slaves. With the male African slaves off on campaign or hemmed in at some barracks the major impetus for African reproduction became the female slaves. This is worth a closer look.
The primary role of African female slaves has been shown as that of household domestic or sexual partner or some combination of the two. Since African women performed most of the chores in their native society it became natural that they would be prized both as workers and as sex objects.[73] What sources do exist suggest that “female slaves had few children, and contrary to what we would expect if women were preferred to men for their reproductive potential, they didn’t even ensure simple reproduction.”[74]. Why weren’t the female slaves reproducing?
Of the female slaves selected to do ordinary household work, the ‘domestic slaves,’ these were usually selected because they were not the choice beauties of the African world. Although African women were prized for their sexual abilities, their bodies ‘seemingly designed for pleasure’, the female slaves chosen for household work were rarely taken as concubines.[75] Since these same household slaves were only allowed the privilege of marriage if their owner approved it appears as if not many were producing children. Among the slaves chosen for the Harems or to be concubines a number of circumstances mitigated against them having many offspring. First it was not uncommon for some form of birth control to be practiced, whether some antiquated contraceptive device or Coitus Interuptus or even abortion to be used to prevent pregnancy and offspring.[76] It is noted that “there is no evidence that slaves who had children were favored over those who did not”[77] thus it can be assumed that based on at least some sources that concubines were not being encouraged to have children. Certainly the much smaller minority of slave women that were married to freed men were encouraged to have children. Whereas in the New World the plantation owners maximized birthrates to increase investment returns, the Muslim world had a setup that virtually guaranteed low returns from the very same numbers of slaves.
Does the virtual non-existence of African post-slave societies prove that ‘assimilation’ was not emblematic of Islamic slavery?[78] Not necessarily. One could conclude that the African slaves simply disappeared from Islamic societies because there were so few left to absorb. If one can slice away the third of the slaves that were men, and the third of the slaves that were female domestic then one is left with the concubines, and due to low birth rates and even deaths from disease one could say that their simply were not many African slaves left to reproduce. This doesn’t negate the assimilation argument but it definitely makes it less accurate as a blanket explanation
If we take the example of Morocco in the mid to late 19th century we can see this working in microcosm. In the south where slaves were being used to some extent as plantation labor we find that they were still producing barely one child for every two slaves. In the rest of Morocco we find that “cases of systematic coupling(marriage among the slaves) were rare, because of the large imbalance in the numbers of men and women, with women predominating.[79]
Demographics are a good way of coming to understanding of the nature of the treatment of slaves. The American version of slavery is generally acknowledged to have been brutal and nefarious, yet the slaves, although converting to Christianity, retained some parts of their culture and identity. If Muslim slaves, as is conjectured, had a higher status and more rights then one would think to find large African societies in Muslim societies. The major themes and often stressed points relating to Islamic slavery are first that slaves were assimilated[80], second that slaves were released after a certain term of service and third that the children of slaves were often freed. If one takes these three points to be accurate then one would likewise find large populations of freed Africans living in Arab and Muslim lands. After all the American form of slavery which lasted for hundreds of years produced such huge African remnants then therefore if slaves were kept for short periods and freed by the second generation they would have likewise produced large residual populations. Lewis comments “There is nothing in the Arab, Persian and Turkish lands that resembles the great black and mulatto populations of North and South America.”[81] Hunwicks comment on the same problem is “there is simply not enough data at our disposal to make any general statements about the existence or size of residual black communities in the Mediterranean world or to the extant to which freed slaves and their descendants have integrated into society.”[82]
Trying to reconcile these two viewpoints in light of the question as to how literally Islamic slavery mirrored its outlines in Islamic law produces one important reconsideration. Perhaps Muslim slavers and slave owners didn’t follow Islamic guidelines regarding their slaves. As has been shown these guidelines were frequently broken, therefore if such breaking was widespread what would have been the influence on the demographics of African former slave populations in the Arab world? As for the assimilation argument it is quite possible that due to the mechanics of the slave trade, as shown above, that few assimilated offspring were in fact produced. As for the argument that slaves were released early it can be shown that this was not the standard practice and that even if they were released their chances of being re-enslaved was a threat. If the children of African slaves were not always freed and their masters did not admit paternity there is further evidence that slaves were not being assimilated or even freed in the manner one usually supposes. The affect this had would have been to create slave populations that it is documented did not reproduce themselves and had to be constantly replenished with more slaves.
As proof of the fact that slaves were not replenishing themselves one can assume that “quite probably, the conditions of existence of slave women and the social climate within which they lived did not encourage them to procreate or to keep their children. [therefore] It seems that the primary value of the female slave was not in her reproductive capacity, unless we assume that slavery functioned everywhere on the basis of a misunderstanding.”[83] Lastly “those women who did not become concubines may not have been allowed to marry…Male slaves may have had little chance to marry”[84]. It has been shown that “Slaves tended not to maintain their numbers naturally, and slave populations usually had to be replenished” despite the demographic imbalances in the populations.[85]
As an extreme example of this one might look to the Harem for the best evidence that the African women were not reproducing in sufficient numbers. Since they were prized so much for their sexual attributes, the youngest most attractive African women in the midst of their child bearing years were sent to the royal or upper class Harems. Since Muslim law allowed four wives but an unlimited number of female slaves it was common for men of higher standing to have female sex slaves as part of their status. It was noted that even the grinding of teeth was enough for the female slaves destined for the bedroom to be unacceptable to a choosy buyer.[86] Yet in these Harems one does not find that large numbers of children are recorded in any of the many chronicles dating from the 19th century. In the Harems that included sometimes hundreds of women, few children were actually being produced. This harkens back to the previously documented use of contraceptives and abortion to prevent pregnancy, since offspring of the Harem girls would share in the inheritance of the owner then such offspring would have created havoc in royal households where the legal wives expected their children to inherit the wealth of their husband, not the son of a slave girl. Therefore in 1891 alone 15-20 girls were purchased for the imperial Harem in Istanbul, yet certainly these slave girls didn’t produce the 5 children each that a normal Muslim housewife at the time was likely producing.[87] Lovejoy sums the problem up best by explaining that “These two opposites Castrated males and attractive females-demonstrate most clearly the aspect of slavery which involved the masters power of sexual and reproductive functions[88].” With that power came the ability to regulate within reason the number of offspring a slave produced.
Perhaps the best evidence for the frequent breaking of Quranic injunctions regarding slavery is the prevalence of Arab and Berber populations in North Africa and the virtual non-existence of former slave populations in Arab countries. One might surmise that had the Quranic laws and Hadiths been followed properly African populations would not just be prevalent but in fact the dominant element in many Arab countries owing to the large numbers of Africans imported over the years of Islamic enslavement of Africans. The non-existence of such populations, the demographics of the Arab world, is partial proof that Quranic law was not followed by the majority of slave owning Muslims, at least not in regards to African slaves in the Arab world.

The proper place of the Quran in the Islamic trade in African slaves

Has the use of the Quran in describing African slavery in Muslim societies led scholarship to not sufficiently explore the question of African demographics among Arab and non-Arab Muslim societies? The assumption among much scholarship, despite evidence to the contrary, is that the Quran and Islamic law functioned as the determinative framework regarding the lives of African slaves exported to Muslim societies. This bias in favor of official Islamic legal opinions or traditions has led scholars to conclude that slaves ‘assimilated’ into Muslim society and that the treatment of those slaves was of a more gentle nature then the western version.
What is so convincing about referring to Quranic law that it seems to cloud the normally investigative judgment of scholarship? Is it perhaps the prejudice that leads many to assume either the best or worst regarding cultures other than ones own. Is it the same bias that directed scholars and researchers in the 1930s to believe that Stalin’s Russia was a socialist paradise? Most western scholars, although familiar with laws in America whereby racial discrimination was made illegal but the practice of racism still continued, seem to have been apt to disregard such obvious separation between what laws say and what people do when writing about Islamic societies and particularly Islamic law. Yet some scholarship has admitted that things are moving in a new direction.

“Islamic law is no longer the determinative framework, nor is the culture of the masters a transcending constant. Muslim masters like Romans or Brazilian planters turned to slavery where the opportunity presented itself…either side may have drawn where it could on Islamic ideals, but they did so in the midst of numerous other concerns... there were many kinds and experiences of slavery in Muslim lands, even as there were-and are-many versions of ‘Islam’.(Human commodity 251)”

Perhaps the best way to understand the non-application of clear Islamic laws is in understanding Ennaji’s point that “away from urban centers, the law indeed did fail…Even worse Sharia law often went unobserved in rural areas’[89] Thus like the Bedouin’s ancient customs which predated Islam, it was common as it is in most of the world for laws to lose their sting the farther one gets from the source. Today’s Islamic world, with a real time connection to Mecca has become increasingly homogenized in the dissemination of norms of behavior, but Islam in the past, although inhabiting a huge empire may have suffered from a breakdown in the following of the Quranic law. It is certainly plausible that scholarship when writing about Islam could see fit to cast away the aura surrounding a different religion and assume that Islamic societies have many of the commonalities to Western ones, so whereas the message of peace taught by Jesus rarely penetrated the slave plantations of the south, likewise the Quranic law did not penetrate into the outer regions of Islam. Islamic law may simply not be the best lens through which to see the Islamic world and certainly is not a good gauge as to the actual practices of Islamic slavery. .
At least part of the problem in dealing with Islamic slavery in Africa has been the absence of scholarship devoted to the subject. For example in a recent history of Slavery by Paul Lovejoy(Transformations in Slavery) four pages are devoted to the Islamic influence on African slavery before 1400. This radical bias in favor of the Atlantic slave trade cannot be attributed to the numbers of slaves actually taken, as is the popular reason given by most. As Lovejoy admits “Over 11 million slaves left the shores of the Atlantic coast of Africa; perhaps as many more found their way to Islamic countries of North Africa, Arabia and India.” Thus the bias can better be explained by a lack of western sources and a lack of interest in the subject. Certainly the only people originally interested in Islamic slavery were the abolitionists such as Dr. Livingston and the orientalist painters and writers interested in describing the ‘exotic’ scenes of the Harem and the eunuchs.
In the 1960s and 1970s scholarship shifted to focus on a comparison between western slavery and Islamic slavery. The remnant of this comparative literature lives on in recent works such as Teledano when he writes “True most sources are in agreement that, as a rule, Ottoman-Islamic chattel slavery was milder then its Western counterpart.”[90] Likewise Lovejoy explains that “A brief postscript is necessary to consider the special case of slavery in the Americas, because the American system was particularly a heinous development” turning to Islam he says “they were also more likely to be incorporated into Muslim society…In Islamic tradition slavery was perceived as a means of converting non-Muslims…assimilation into the society of the master as judged by religious observance was deemed a prerequisite for emancipation and was normally some guarantee of better treatment.[91]” Lastly Hunwick also digresses to claim that “Plantation slavery, with its concomitant brutality and degradation, was comparatively rare.”[92] This most recent scholarship can be added to works by Bernard Lewis and Mohammad Ennaji, which are finally painting a more accurate and deeper picture of all facets of Slavery in Islamic society.
Certainly slavery was sanctioned by the Koran and slavery clearly was destined to play a part in Islamic society but the idea that the treatment of slaves can in any way be determined by the lines written in the Koran is inaccurate, for once the slave trade became ingrained in Islamic life, the economics and the slave merchants became its driving force, neither war nor the certain ‘obligation’s’ of Islamic law served as a good determinant of the function of slaves in society. The proper role that the Quran should play in describing slavery in Islamic society is a cursory mention, certainly not the assumption that it was the bases for the treatment of slaves throughout the Islamic world. The various laws of the Islamic empire did include the basic assumptions that slaves should not be beaten, that the children of free men and slaves should be freed and the other important laws enumerated above. Yet, like the Catholic cannon law, it provides but a framework and not a true predictor of societal behavior. Since it is rare in western scholarship to include chapters on slavery in the Bible when discussing the New World slave trade it seems likewise appropriate that when dealing with the Islamic slave trade that the Quran not be given the focus that has been.







Notes

[1] Lonely planet Africa on a Shoestring page 25
[2] ibid 602
[3] Hunwick, John. The Human Commodity, 249
[4] Since this paper does not concern race but rather the legal aspects of Islamic slavery as they have been presented to a western English language audience and since as many have noted race is not mentioned in the Quran, I have not dealt with the fascinating subject here. One comment though, despite the often repeated remark that Islam is not a ‘racist religion’ one might wonder ‘is there a religion that is racist?’. Just because the religion of a people is not racist does not make individual members of that faith not racist. Bernard Lewis in Race and Slavery examines this subject in much detail.
[5] Hunwick, John. The Human commodity, 249
[6] Ennaji, Mohammed. Serving the Master, xxi
[7] Hunwick. The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam pages 6-7
[8] Lewis, Bernard page 148 quotes a fifteenth century fatwa from North Africa which makes slavery a punishment for unbelief: “slavery is a humiliation and a servitude caused by previous or current unbelief and having as its purpose to discourage unbelief.” And the same is found in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 24
[9] Daumas, Gen E. Le Grand Desert. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 62
[10] Daumas, Gen E. Le Grand Desert. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 53
[11] Ferguson Empire 128
[12] Ibid
[13] Legum, Colin. Congo. 27
[14] Ferguson Empire 161
[15] Theroux Dark Star Safari 249
[16] Beachey The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa 155
[17] Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 19
[18] Ferguson Empire 237 The colonizing of Africa ended the slave trade but it did not end slavery. Well into the 20th century slavery was alleged to have existed in Nigeria, the Seychelles and the Sudan. An interesting testament to the ongoing trade can be found in the testimony of John Rhys Davies:
“I grew up in colonial Africa. And I remember in 1955, it would have to be somewhere between July the 25th when the school holiday started and September the 18th when the holidays ended. My father took me down to the quayside in Dar-Es-Salaam harbor. And he pointed out a dhow in the harbor and he said, “You see that dhow there? Twice a year it comes down from Aden. It stops here and goes down [South]. On the way down it's got boxes of machinery and goods. On the way back up it’s got two or three little black boys on it. Now, those boys are slaves. And the United Nations will not let me do anything about it.””

[19] Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 30
[20] ibid
[21] Ennaji, Mohammed. Serving the Master 54
[22] Hunwick Human Commodity 24
[23] Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. 117
[24] Ennaji Mohammed. Serving the Master 55
[25] Ennaji Mohammed. Serving the Master 56
[26] Ennaji, Mohammed. Serving the Master 55
[27] Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 30
[28] Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. 117. The same is true of the late King Hussein of Jordan whose mother was Circassian, and either born a slave or most probably the descendant of slaves, as well as Anwar Sadat. To say that no men married their slaves or that the children of such marriages did not inherit their fathers position is not accurate, but to assume that all children born of freed men were recognized as such is also not accurate.
[29] Hunwick Diaspora xix
[30] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 31
[31] Ennaji Serving the Master 76, he also writes of Morocco “Shamelessly immoral people took part in the lowest form of trafficking, handing over their fellow Muslims for sale.
[32] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 31
[33] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 31
[34] ibid
[35] From The Kitab al-istiqsa in Hunwick Diaspora. 44
[36] Hunwick Human Commodity 30
[37] Ennaji. Serving The Master 76 Also in A Slave Narrative in Hunwick page 246 describes one slave families recollections of being afraid to leave their masters village even after being freed for fear of being re-enslaved and Sultan Mulay Abd al-Hafiz. Kunnasha in Hunwick 43-44 describes the re-raking of African slaves.
[38] Ennaji Serving the Master 83 “the oft-invoked wife’s consent to enslavement indicates the misery and privations they endured.”
[39] Toledano, Ehud. The Ottoman Slave trade and its suppression. 154
[40] ibid 158
[41] ibid 187
[42] Beachey East African Slave Trade 61
[43] Toledano The Ottoman Slave trade and its suppression. 30
[44] Ferguson Empire 128
[45] Lonely Planed Africa on a Shoestring 602
[46] Hunwick 27 Diaspora
[47] Hunwick Human commodity 31
[48] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 35. The process is described below:
Black eunuchs were captured from Egypt, Abyssinia and the Sudan. Black slaves were captured from the upper Nile and transported to markets on the Mediterranean Sea - Mecca, Medina, Beirut, Izmir and Istanbul. All eunuchs were castrated en route to the markets by Egyptian Christians or Jews, as Islam prohibited the practice of castration but not the usage of castrated slaves. Sandali, or clean-shaven: The parts are swept off by a single cut of a razor, a tube (tin or wooden) is set in the urethra, the wound is cauterized with boiling oil, and the patient is planted in a fresh dung-hill. His diet is milk, and if under puberty he often survives. Black eunuchs tended to be of the first category: Sandali, From: www.allaboutturkey.com/ harem.htm.

[49] Alpers. Women and Slavery in Africa 198
[50] Hunwick Human Commodity 7
[51] Hunwick Human Commodity 31
[52] Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam.116
[53] Ennaji Serving the Master 34
[54] Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. 117 and Ennaji Serving the Master 34.
[55] Ennaji Serving the Master 34, “a mans very initiation to sex was often the work of a concubine.” Hunwick Diaspora 120 “the negresses that well-off burghers are in the habit of giving to a son as soon as he reaches the age of puberty.” Likewise Che Guevara confirms that he and most of mates in Argentina lost their virginity to the household help.
[56] ibid
[57] “most of the Abyssinian and black slave girls are abominably corrupted by the gellabs or Slave traders” Hunwick Diaspora 112
[58] William, Edward Lane Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833-34. found on page 112 of Hunwick Diaspora.
[59] Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. 115
[60] Tharaud, Jerome and Jean. Fez, ou les bourgegeoise de l’Islam. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. 119
[61] Ennaji Serving the Master 34
[62] Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam.116 “the law is much transgressed.” For a look at the idea that ‘concubines did not resemble wives’ see Ennaji Serving the Master 33 or Hunwick Diaspora 113.
[63] Ennaji Serving the Master 37
[64] Hurgronje Snouk Mekka in the Latter part of the 19th century in Diaspora.
[65] Hunwick Human commodity 16
[66] Hunwick Human commodity 16
[67] Other references for the place of female sexual slaves:
An insight into the purchasing of female slaves “three days trial is generally allowed to the purchaser…snoring, grinding of the teeth, or talking during sleep, are commonly sufficient enough reasons for returning her. Hunwick Diaspora 112 “in practice a master would short of money would use a single slave for everything from servant to concubine…one could find plenty of pregnant slaves on the market…buyers rarely scorned them” Ennaji Serving the Master 37

[68] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 12
[69] The second myth is harder to seek an answer to. One would assume that if the volume of the slaves being imported to North Africa and throughout the Islamic empire was high enough then large remnants of these slave populations would exist today, as they do in the New World. The usual excuse that the slaves “blended and intermarried” with society would mean that the resulting offspring would be Africanized, Mulatto, resembling the Cape Coloureds of South Africa or the people of Sao Tome, of mixed complexion, but obviously retaining some link to their African ancestors. Or one could look at the issue from a separate demographic viewpoint and ask ‘how much of the demographics of North Africa are due to the importation of Slaves’ which is to say to wonder if Hannibal and the Carthaginians resemble modern day Tunisians. If one accepts the first argument, namely that Africans have not demographically changed the look of North Africa or other Arab countries, then what happened to the slaves and their offspring? If one accepts the second argument, that the African slaves did have a major impact on North African demographics then one still is left with the question of what happened to the offspring of slaves shipped throughout the Ottoman empire.
Even an eminent scholar such as Lovejoy seems to have been taken in by the myth of Islamic slavery. He writes that children of slave concubines “were technically free and usually recognized as such(Lovejoy 2).” Then he explains that “Most children of slaves were assimilated into Muslim society, only to be replaced by new imports(Lovejoy 16).” And then there is the more interesting theoretical logic twisting where we learn that “the wives of slave origin in societies based on kinship were seldom sold either, and their status was closer to that of becoming a member of the kin group and hence free.” By this logic every slave is basically “free” as long as his chances of being resold are low. An extension of this argument would be to say that every slave is ‘hence free’. If we take this to be an accurate description then we must combine this fact of ‘most’ children being assimilated into Muslim society and deduce that of the 2.3 million slaves being imported to Muslim lands from 1600-1800(Lovejoy 62) then they would have produced perhaps 6 million ‘assimilated’ children. That would have created a largely Africanized Muslim world. But in traveling in most Muslim lands the majority of people are not African, nor do they have African features, in fact outside of North Africa and a few small islands in southern Iran it is rare to ever see anyone even remotely resembling an African in a Muslim country. So where did these children who were being assimilated in a paradise free from the ‘racial’ aspect of slavery(Lovejoy 8) . It is noted by North African countries themselves that their heritage is either ‘Arab’ or ‘Berber’ or a mixture of the two.
The volume of slaves exported to Islamic lands was 11 million(Lovejoy 12). In the case of the Americas we see that the resulting descendants today account for roughly 16% of the United States, as well as the vast majority of islands such as Jamaica, with mixed populations of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad also containing the descendants of African slaves. These numbers reach close to 100 million today. Where is the resulting 100 million slave descendants one would then expect to find spread throughout Islamic lands.

[70] For more discussion as to the volume of the trade see Transformations in Slavery by Paul Lovejoy page 62 and 142 or Ralph Austen ‘The trans-Saharan slave trade: a tentative analysis. In H.A Gemery and J.S Hogendorn(eds.) The Uncommon Market: Essays in the economic history of the Atlantic slave trade, pp 23-76. New York.
[71] Hunwick, The Human Commodity 26, further discussion can be found in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam as to the fact that female slaves were worth twice that amount of males. Also Lovejoy page 20 makes the same point.
[72] Ennaji Serving the Master 76
[73] Women and Slavery in Africa 54 explains that women were doing most of the traditional work in African society.
[74] Meillassoux, Women in African Slavery 52.
On demographics it is observed that “Slaves tended not to maintain their numbers naturally, and slave populations usually had to be replenished(Lovejoy 7).” Also the “Demographic imbalance between the sexes in slaves populations(Lovejoy 7)” is a second reason for this phenomenon. Europeans imported approximately 2 men for every woman(Lovejoy 20).
[75] Ennaji, Mohammed. Serving the Master 34
[76] Mentioned in Mohommed Serving the Master 35, and Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam 30. “concubines are often inclined to use the temporary preservative against fruitfulness(Hunwick Diaspora 117)” Also Ennaji, Mohammed. Serving the Master 55
[77] Strobel Women and Slavery in Africa 121
[78] Iran proves to be the exception, where large numbers of Africans and dark skinned Bedouins exist in southern Iran.
[79] Ennaji. Serving the Master 38.
[80] This idea is presented and not refuted in almost all English language texts and references regarding Islamic slavery. Lovejoy writes “Women and children were wanted in greater numbers then men. They were more likely to b e incorporated into Muslim society. Boys either eunuch or virile were trained for military or domestic service(Lovejoy 16). “Emancipation, concubinage, domestic servitude, political appointment, and military position also militated against the establishment of a slave class with a distinct class consciousness(Lovejoy 16).” Then: “they were also more likely to be incorporated into Muslim society(Lovejoy 16)…In Islamic tradition slavery was perceived as a means of converting non-Muslims…assimilation into the society of the master as judged by religious observance was deemed a prerequisite for emancipation and was normally some guarantee of better treatment.(Lovejoy 16).”Or “Emancipation was an implicit assumption of the Islamic system and many avenues were provided for it, some voluntary and some obligatory” and “Islamic law recognized only two basic conditions: freedom, which is the basic assumption regarding the human condition, and slavery, which is a state of legal incapacitation(hajr) of limited duration.”( Hunwick Human Commodity 31). If this was true then why did some slave populations create enslaved children as testified by Toledano when describing the Ottoman slave trade:
“when still in bondage, many parents-with the consent of their masters-sought to better their children’s lot, as well as their own, by selling them to harems in big cities.(Toledana 189)”

As an example here is a letter I received:
This is the full text of the letterFrom: "Alistair Boddy-Evans" <africanhistory.guide@about.com>To: "seth frantzman" <sfrantzman@hotmail.com>>Subject: Re: QuestionDate: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 20:23:36 +0200Dear sethThe simple answer to this question is that African slaves became incorporated into Muslim society. Unlike America, families were not necessarily allowed to stay together or new "familes" develop. Female slaves, usually used for domestic work or for sex, may have escaped by "marrying" into the Muslim family, once they had satisifed a basic condition of accepting Islam completely. (This proviso is often mentioned, but in reality was not asoften acted upon, slaves were just too precious a comodity.) Children would have been of mixed heritage. Over the years African culture was effectiviely eradicated (you became a Muslim or you died a slave), and decendents look just like everyone else. In Egypt's case, slaves were co-opted into the army, and there they were able to achieve a sort of freedom, and maintain families. There was also a longer history of use of African slaves in the particular region.>Regards
>Alistair

in response too:Dear Sir,I am doing reasearch on Islams African slaves and have been unable to fill in one major gap. What happened to the descendants of these African slaves imported to Muslim countries. Paintings and travelers from the 1800s show the presence of Africans in Muslim societies. We know that the ratio of women taken to men was 2:1, but we don’t see large African communities in any Muslim country accept Egypt. Yes in the western countries that imported slaves, like say America, one find huge communities of their descendants. What happened to the children of these Africans? Do you have any idea where to look? Thank you for any help,Seth Frantzman

[81] Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery 84
[82] Hunwick Human Commodity 26
[83] Meillassoux Women in African Slavery 51
[84] Hunwick, The Human Commodity 26
[85] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 7 a demographic breakdown might look something like this:

A demographic model for Islamic slavery: of 10,000 taken as many as 10 percent die en route leaving 9000. Of the 9000, 3000 are men. 3000 of the women are destined for household work. 3000 of the women are destined for some for sexual relationship with their owners. Of those who survive disease they may bear as few as 390 children[85]. Of these maybe a third would be considered ‘free’. If by assimilation authors have really meant disappearance then this is exactly what was happening, although most readers over time have come to think of assimilation not as extermination, but rather as incorporation into society, as a melting pot.

[86] The purchasing of ‘negresses of the bedroom’ is described in detail in Tharaud, Jerome and Jean. Fez, ou les bourgegeoise de l’Islam in Hunwick 119-120. and in Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick pages 114-118.
[87] Toledano The Ottoman Slave trade and its suppression. 191
[88] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 6
[89] Ennaji Serving the Master 84
[90] Toledano The Ottoman Slave trade and its suppression. 4
[91] Lovejoy Transformations in Slavery 8 and 16
[92] Hunwick Human commodity 31










Bibliography


Ahmed Baba. Miraj al-suud: Ahmed Baba’s Replies on Slavery in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 24-25

Austen, Ralph. ‘The trans-Saharan slave trade: a tentative analysis. In H.A Gemery and J.S Hogendorn(eds.) The Uncommon Market: Essays in the economic history of the Atlantic slave trade. New York, 1979.

Beachey R.W, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa New York, 1976.

Bok, Francis. Escape from Slavery, the true story of my ten years in captivity. St. Martin's Press; 2003

Davis Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim masters. White Slavery in the Mediterranean, Barbary Coast. New York, 1990.

Dawood, N.J(translator) The Koran . Penguin 1999 London

Daumas, Gen E. Le Grand Desert. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 57-64.

Edward Lane, William. Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the years 1833, 1844 and 1835. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 108-113.

Ennaji, Mohammed. Serving the Master: slavery and society in 19th century morocco. New York, 1998.

Ferguson, Niall. Empire. London, 2004

Hurgronje, Snouk. Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th century. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 114-118


Hunwick, John. The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Princeton 2002.

Hunwick, John(trans) al-Jami al sahih of al-Bukhari. In The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam Princeton 2002. 5-7.

A Slave Narrative. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 240-246.

Ibn Juzayy Manumission in. Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 27-28.

Ibn Juzayy Mother of her Masters child in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 28-29

Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani The Risala in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 30-32.

Juma Abd Allah, Muhammad. Al-Kawakib al duriyya fi’l-fiqh al Malikiyya in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pgs17-19

Khalid al-Nasiri, Ahmed b. Kitab al-istiqsa in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 44-49

Klien, Martin. Women and slavery in Africa . New York, 1997

Laffin, John. The Arabs as Master Slavers New York, 1992.

Legum, Colin. Congo Disaster. Penguin London 1961.

Lewis, Bernard Race and Slavery in the middle east: An historical inquiry. Oxford, 1992.

Lonely Planet: Africa on a shoestring. Lonely Planted Publications, Oakland. 2004.

Lovejoy, Paul. Slavery and the Muslim Diaspora: African Slaves in Dar Es-Salam. New York, 2003
Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A history of slavery in Africa. London, 1983.

Lovejoy, Paul. Slow death for Slavery: The course of abolition in northern Nigeria, 1897-1936 Cambridge. 1993.

Mende, Nazar. Slave. Public Affairs 2004

Sultan Mulay Abd al-Hafiz. Kunnasha in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 43-44

Pallme, Ignatius. Egypt and Mohammed Ali in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 53-54.

Powell, Eve Traut, Hunwick, John(eds). The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean lands of Islam. New York, 2002.

Rhys-Davies, John. Roundtable Interview. July 31 2003. http://www.worldmagblog.com/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=253

Savage, Elizabeth ed. the Human commodity Perspectives on the trans-Saharan slave trade. New York, 1992

Theroux, Paul. Dark Star Safari. New York, 2002.

Tharaud, Jerome and Jean. Fez, ou les bourgegeoise de l’Islam. in Hunwick The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton 2002 pages 119-120.

Toledano, Ehud. The Ottoman Slave trade and its suppression. Princeton, 1982.