Bernard Lewis - Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

BERNARD LEWIS

The research presented in this book was first undertaken as part of a group project on tolerance and intolerance in human societies, for which I was asked to prepare a paper on the Islamic world. I began by examining this topic in conventional terms and collected data on the relations between different religions-that is, in the sense in which the words "tolerance" and "intolerance" have in the past normally been used. At a certain point it occurred to me that such an enquiry need no longer be bound by the habits and concerns of a previous generation, concerns which have lost their sharpness for many of us at the present time, at least in the Western world. But if these concerns have diminished or disappeared, they have been replaced by others no less acute. In the present climate of opinion what matters most in this respect is not creed, or even class, but race. This is seen as the ultimate basis of identity and of difference; and it is in this area that, in much of the world, the crucial test of tolerance or intolerance is now applied. I therefore turned to this problem and, in the course of my work, began to examine certain assumptions hitherto unquestioningly accepted by Western as well as Islamic scholars.

The group project on tolerance and intolerance was never completed. The material on Islam, however, aroused some interest, and I was stimulated to pursue it further by an invitation to lecture on the subject at a combined meeting of the three institutes of Anthropology, International Affairs, and Race Relations in London. The lecture was delivered in December 1969 and published in a slightly expanded form in the London monthly Encounter in August 1970. This was, in turn, further expanded and published as a small book in New York in 1971, entitled Race and Color in Islamn.

The publication of a French translation in Paris in 1982 gave me the opportunity to make a number of substantial changes. In addition to correcting some errors, I added new documentation and discussed some further topics not touched upon in the earlier versions. I also appended a selection of relevant original sources, most of them translated from Arabic.

The study of race led inevitably, in the Islamic world as elsewhere, to the problem of slavery, by which both race relations and racial attitudes were profoundly affected. In preparing my successive earlier treatments of this topic, I was obliged to devote increasing attention to this aspect and to examine it in a Middle Eastern rather than in an Islamic context. In embarking, after an interval of years, on a new exploration of the theme, I decided to give the institution of slavery a more central position.

This immediately raised serious difficulties. One of them is the remarkable dearth of scholarly work on the subject. The bibliography of studies on slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds, or in the Americas, runs to thousands of items. Even for medieval Western Europe, where slavery was of relatively minor importance, European scholars have produced a significant literature of research and exposition. For the central Islamic lands, despite the subject's importance in virtually every area and period, a list of serious scholarly monographs on slavery-in law, in doctrine, or in practice-could be printed on a single page. The documentation for a study on Islamic slavery is almost endless; its exploration has barely begun.

Perhaps the main reason for the lack of scholarly research on Islamic slavery is the extreme sensitivity of the subject. This makes it difficult, and sometimes professionally hazardous, for a young scholar to turn his attention in this direction. In time, we may hope, it will be possible for Muslim scholars to examine and discuss Islamic slavery as freely and as openly as European and American scholars have, with the cooperation of scholars from other countries, been willing to discuss this unhappy chapter in their own past. But that time is not yet; meanwhile, Islamic slavery remains both an obscure and a highly sensitive topic, the mere mention of which is often seen as a sign of hostile intentions. Sometimes indeed it is, but it need not and should not be so, and the imposition of taboos on topics of historical research can only impede and delay a better and more accurate understanding. In this little hook, I have tried to deal fairly and objectively with a subject of great historical and comparative importance and to do so without recourse to either polemics or apologetics.

The present volume incorporates most of what was said in my early treatments. This has, however, been extensively revised, expanded, and recast, and a considerable body of new material added, including several new chapters, making it a new book dealing with a related but different topic. I have also added a documentary appendix, translated, where necessary, from the original languages. Some of the documents included in the French edition have been omitted, as they are already available elsewhere in English in print. Others have been added, including several translated for this purpose.

There remains the pleasant task of thanking those who have, in various ways, contributed to the completion of this book. My thanks are due to the authorities of the Public Record Office, the India Office Records, and the British Library in London; the Topkapi Saray Museum in Istanbul; the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; and Mr. Arthur A. Houghton, for permission to reproduce documents and pictures in their possession. Crown copyright mate rial in the Public Record Office and the India Office Records is reproduced by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

I am indebted to David Goldenberg, John B. Kelly, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, and Michel Le Gall for suggestions and help of various kinds. Above all, I would like to record my profound gratitude and appreciation to my assistant Leigh Faden, for her untiring and highly effective work in the preparation and numerous revisions of my text, to my research assistant Jonathan Berkey, whose scholarly knowledge and unstinting efforts in many ways lightened the labor of both research and writing and improved the quality of the results, and to both of them for preparing the index. Whatever faults and errors remain are entirely my own.

August 1989