Thirteen Centuries of Traffic, and Why It Left No Great Diaspora to Testify
In November 1962, by royal decree, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia abolished the legal status of slavery. Yemen had done the same weeks earlier, Oman would follow in 1970, and Mauritania, last in the world, abolished by presidential decree in 1981, criminalized slaveholding only in 2007, wrote the crime against humanity into its constitution in 2012, and restated it in Law No. 2015-031. Readers of this series who are sixty-five years old were alive when a man could still be lawfully owned in Arabia. That fact belongs at the front of this part because the trade examined here is not sealed in a distant century in the way the Atlantic trade is sealed. It ran from the seventh century into the memory of the living.
CHARGE: a traffic in African human beings ran north across the Sahara and east across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean for some thirteen centuries, carrying a number of people broadly comparable to the entire Atlantic trade, licensed throughout by jurisprudence that made unbelievers lawfully enslavable — and it produced no Americas-scale successor population able to press a claim, for reasons that are themselves part of the record.
Counting is the first difficulty, and it should be stated plainly instead of smoothed over. Atlantic historians work from a database of voyages assembled from customs records, insurance papers, and ships’ manifests, which yields a figure of roughly twelve and a half million Africans embarked. Eastern estimates rest on caravan reports, market observations, traveler accounts, and taxation records, and they are correspondingly rougher. Ralph Austen’s censuses of the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and East African routes, the standard quantitative work, produce totals that cluster in a range broadly comparable to the Atlantic figure, and Paul Lovejoy’s tables reach a similar order. Scholars disagree, sometimes sharply, and any writer who states a precise total for the eastern trades is claiming a certainty the sources do not support. What survives every disagreement is the shape: comparable magnitude, spread across some thirteen hundred years rather than four, at a rate that emptied the same regions more slowly and for far longer.
Legal ground for the traffic was worked out early and held firm. Classical jurisprudence across the schools treated capture in warfare against unbelievers as a lawful source of slaves, treated the enslaved as property that could be sold, inherited, and used sexually, and treated a Muslim as not lawfully enslavable, which made the frontier between belief and unbelief the frontier of the slave supply. Consequences of that rule fell on Africa with particular weight, since the frontier moved south and the raiding followed it. Sokoto, Bornu, the Nile valley, the Ethiopian marches, and the country behind Kilwa and Zanzibar supplied the caravans and the dhows for century after century, and the jurists who wrote about the traffic argued over the status of particular peoples, never over the lawfulness of the institution.
Successor populations are where the two trades diverge most sharply, and the divergence needs stating precisely, without drama. Descendants of the Atlantic trade number in the tens of millions across the Americas and the Caribbean, counted in censuses, and they have written, sung, marched, and litigated their history into the record. African-descended communities of the eastern trade do exist and should be named: Afro-Iranians along the Gulf coast, the Siddi of India and Pakistan, Afro-Turks around Izmir, Afro-Iraqis at Basra, and the Zanj-descended populations of the Gulf states. Ronald Segal, whose study of the eastern traffic this file relies on, titled it for that other diaspora.
What is absent is scale and separate enumeration, and three mechanisms contributed to that difference without fully explaining it. Female captives outnumbered males, entered households as concubines and domestic workers, and children fathered and acknowledged by an owner were free and legitimate under Islamic law and absorbed into the owning population within a generation. Some proportion of males destined for palace and harem service were castrated, an operation documented across the sources and performed at known centers along the routes, with a mortality contemporaries described as severe and modern scholars decline to quantify. Slave status was also inherited far less reliably than the American plantation made it inherit, since children acknowledged by an owner were free and other routes out existed, so the enslaved population compounded across generations much less. These three contributed to the difference without fully accounting for it, and the scholarship is careful to say so. Absorption, not extinction, is the finding, and a community absorbed leaves few institutions through which to press a claim.
Resistance is documented, and it deserves naming. Between 869 and 883 the Zanj, East African captives set to draining the salt marshes of southern Iraq, rose in a revolt that held territory, built a capital, defeated caliphal armies repeatedly, and took fourteen years to crush. Al-Tabari, writing within living memory of the events, recorded it in detail.
Scale of that rising measures how completely this history has fallen out of the account. The largest slave revolt of the medieval world was fought by East Africans against the Abbasid state, and it is barely taught in the schools of the countries the Zanj came from. Neither is the Nubian quota, nor the caravan routes out of Bornu and the Sahel, nor the Zanzibar market that was still selling people when Livingstone reached it. A trade that ran for thirteen centuries occupies less space in African public memory than four centuries of Atlantic traffic, and the reason is not that it was gentler.
Serious opposition here comes from African Muslim scholarship and would be dishonest to compress. Islamic law did not invent African slavery and did not racialize it; the Qur’an commands the freeing of captives as an act of righteousness and as expiation, provides for a contract by which an enslaved person purchases freedom, and treats manumission as meritorious, so that routes out existed which the Atlantic plantation deliberately sealed. One point is often stated loosely in this argument’s favor: the law barred the enslavement of a free Muslim, but conversion after capture did not by itself release anyone already held. Beyond the text stands a witness this file will not leave out. Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu, an African Muslim jurist writing around 1615 in reply to questions from the Saharan trade, held that unbelief and not blackness was the ground of lawful enslavement, that many peoples of West Africa were Muslims and could not lawfully be taken, and that the racial reading of Noah’s curse examined in Part 17 of this series had no standing. An African scholar refuted the Hamitic doctrine two centuries before European abolition, and no honest account of this trade can omit him.
None of that settles the account, and Ahmad Baba shows why. His own opinion, having rejected the racial test, proceeded to list which West African peoples counted as unbelievers, and in doing so supplied the traders with a working license for everyone on the other side of the line. A legal system that regulates a traffic, softens it, and grades its victims is still the system that authorizes it, and the regulation lasted thirteen centuries while the abolition arrived in 1962 under diplomatic pressure from outside.
Owners in Mecca and Muscat and Marrakesh were not, on the whole, men who believed themselves to be doing evil, which is what this series also found of the Christian slaveholder in Barbados. A householder who frees a slave as an act of piety and buys another the following season has an ethical system working exactly as designed. Against all of that runs the record the system generated: thirteen centuries of traffic, a scale that competes with the Atlantic, a jurisprudence supplying the license, concubinage, castration, and weak intergenerational transmission that helped leave little separately counted successor population, a revolt in the marshes that took fourteen years to put down, and abolition in Arabia in the year the Nigerian republic was two years old. Volume III established what the cross did on the ocean. This part establishes what the crescent did across the desert and the sea, over four times as long, to the same continent, with the paperwork kept by the traders and the jurists and the caliphs.
Sources for this part appear in the Evidence Docket at the close of this volume.
