Race, gender and slavery in early Islamicate history

Abstract

Slavery was practiced in parts of the Islamicate world from the 7th through 21st centuries. Until the late 20th century, many authors claimed that Islamicate slavery was relatively benign and free from racism. However, recent scholarship has found evidence of race-thinking in Islamicate history—particularly anti-Black racism and an association between Blackness and enslavement—tracing back at least to the ninth-century CE. Scholars still contest what racial categories or forms of race-thinking existed in the first centuries of Islamicate history. The Quran is free from overt race-thinking, but the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries seem to have precipitated the articulation of new racialized categories and the application of old ones from the Biblical and Greek traditions. Considerations of gender further complicate the picture, as most of those enslaved in early Islamicate history were women, and many enslaved concubines bore children for their enslavers. The identity of these children was contested in the seventh century, but they seem to have defined themselves as full Arabs by the mid-eighth century. Ultimately, the intersection of race, gender, and slavery in early Islamicate history is not a linear narrative, but a complex story of negotiation and contestation.