Slavery in Egypt

[1] The 10th-century Ḥudūd al-ʿālam claims that Egyptian merchants kidnapped children from the "Blacks" south of Nubia, castrating the boys before trafficking them into Egypt.

[4] For example, during the Fatimid occupation of Cairo, Egyptian eunuchs controlled military garrisons (shurta) and marketplaces (hisba), two positions beneath only the city magistrate in power.

One eunuch, Jawdhar, became hujja to Imam-Caliph al-Qa'im, a sacred role in Shia Islam entrusted with the imam's choice of successor upon his death.

[7] Rifq was an African eunuch general who served as governor of the Damascus until he led an army of 30,000 men in a campaign to expand Fatimid control northeast to the city of Aleppo, Syria.

Barjawan was a European eunuch during late Fatimid rule who gained power through his military and political savvy which brought peace between them and the Byzantine empire.

Given his reputation and power in the court and military he took the reins of the caliphate from his then student al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah; then ruled as the de facto Regent 997 CE.

[10] The third rank harem women were slave-girls trained in singing, dancing and playing music to perform as entertainers; this category was sometimes given as diplomatic gifts between male power holders.

The most famous member of the Ayyubid harem was Shajar al-Durr, who enterred as a slave concubine, was manumitted by the birth of an awknowledged child and, in a unique case, conquered the throne after the death of her former enslaver.

Even after Makuria collapsed in the thirteenth century, the Egyptians continued to insist upon its payment by the Muslim successor kingdoms in the region.

[27] During the 13th-century, Indian boys, women and girls intended for sexual slavery, were trafficked from India to Arabia and to Egypt across the Red Sea slave trade via Aden.

[33] If a male enslaver chose to awknowledge the child he had with a female slave, which was voluntary, then the child would become free and the mother became umm walad, which meant that she could no longer be sold and would be free upon the death of her enslaver; however, as long as he was alive, she would remain a slave and could still be sexually exploited by him, rented out for work, or manumitted and married.

[35] Other slave girls served the consorts of the Sultan in a number of domestic tasks as harem servants, known as qahramana or qahramaniyya.

[36] The next best race were the Circassians, who were stereotyped as braver than the Turks, "always ready strike first blow" and with excellent group solidarity, suitable for soldiers.

[36] However, they were haughty if untrained, lacked work ethic and the patience and perseverance necessary for long military campaigns, and required hard training.

[36] African slaves were not considered suitable for arts such as singing and dancing, and were not used for Mamluk elite slavery, but mainly for lowly labor and domestic tasks.

"[60] Greek (rumi) male slaves were seen as obedient, serious, loyal, trustworthy, intelligent and parsimonious, with good manners and excellent knowledge of the sciences.

Armenian slaves were described as strong and of good health and looks, but also as dishonest, lazy, greedy, unreliable, morose and of a character to neglect personal hygiene.

[36] Light-skinned Franks (a term for Europeans) were, in the case of men, described as rough, courageous, miserly, stupid and uneducated, strongly religious, skilled in a number of manual tasks but not trustworthy slaves.

[65] After the Alexandria expedition of 1807, 400 British prisoners of war captured by Egyptian forces under Muhammad Ali Pasha were marched into Cairo and were either condemned to hard labor or sold into slavery.

Colonel Dravetti, now advising Muhammad Ali in Cairo, persuaded the ruler to release the British prisoners of war as a gesture of goodwill, sparing them the (in the Islamic culture) usual fate of becoming slaves to their captors.

Agricultural slavery was virtually unknown in Egypt at this time, but the rapid expansion of extensive farming under Muhammad Ali and later, the world surge in the price of cotton caused by the American Civil War, were factors creating conditions favourable to the deployment of unfree labour.

Muhammad Ali was appointed vice roy of Egypt in 1805, and by Imperial Ottoman example assembled a harem of slave concubines in the Palace Citadel of Cairo which, according to a traditional account, made his legal wife Amina Hanim declare herself to henceforth be his wife in name only, when she joined him in Egypt in 1808 and discovered his sex slaves.

[69][71] The khedive's harem was composed of between several hundreds to over a thousand enslaved women, supervised by his mother, the walida pasha,[72] and his four official wives (hanim) and recognized concubines (qadin).

[69][73] The enslaved female servants of the khedivate harem were manumitted and married off with a trousseau in strategic marriages to the male freedmen or slaves (kul or mamluk) who were trained to become officers and civil servants as freedmen, in order to ensure the fidelity of their husband's to the khedive when they began their military or state official career.

[79] In the mid 19th-century, the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms abolished the custom of training male slaves to become military men and civil servants, and replaced them with free students.

[69][80] To prepare for the training of his Sudanese slave army, Muhammad Ali sent a corps of Mamluks to Aswan, where, in 1820, he had new barracks built to house them.

The head of the military academy at Aswan was a French officer who had served under Napoleon, Colonel Octave-Joseph Anthelme Sève, who became a Muslim and is known in Egyptian history as Sulayman Pasha al-Faransawi.

[83] Muhammad Ali's Turkish and Albanian troops who partook in the Sudan campaign were not used to the weather conditions of the area and attained fevers and dysentery while there, with tensions emerging and demands to return to Egypt.

[84] In addition the difficulties of capturing and raising an army from Sudanese male slaves during the campaign were reasons that led Muhammad Ali toward eventually recruiting local Egyptians for his armed forces.

[69][73] In 1922, Rashid Rida, editor of the progressive Egyptian newspaper al-Manar, condemned the purchase of Chinese slave girls for concubinage and said that it should not be seen as legitimate.