Slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate

When the governing elite of the Caliphate established a permanent urbanized residence, the institution of slavery expanded in parallel with the growing access as well as the needs of a new urbanised and more sophisticated state apparatus.

During the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana against Queen of Bukhara in Central Asia in the 670s, 80 Turkic war captives were taken by the Umayyad army, who broke their promise to return them and instead deported them to slavery in Arabia, where they rebelled and killed their enslaver, after which they committed suicide.

Al-Hakam confirms that up to one hundred thousand slaves were captured by Musa ibn Nusayr and his son and nephew during the conquest of North Africa.

Even so, Musa "never ceased pushing his conquests until he arrived before Tangiers, the citadel of their [Berbers’] country and the mother of their cities, which he also besieged and took, obliging its inhabitants to embrace Islam.

"[3] The historian Pascual de Gayangos observed: “Owing to the system of warfare adopted by the Arabs, it is not improbable that the number of captives here specified fell into Musa’s hands.

It appears both from Christian and Arabian authorities that populous towns were not infrequently razed to the ground and their inhabitants, amounting to several thousands, led into captivity.”[4][5] Successive Muslim rulers of North Africa continued to enslave the Berbers en masse.

"[6] Arab chronicles record vast numbers of Berber slaves taken, especially in the accounts of Musa ibn Nusayr, who became the governor of Africa in 698, and who "was cruel and ruthless against any tribe that opposed the tenets of the Muslim faith, but generous and lenient to those who converted.

[9] Musa went out against the Berbers, and pursued them far into their native deserts, leaving wherever he went traces of his passage, killing numbers of them, taking thousands of prisoners, and carrying on the work of havoc and destruction.

When the nations inhabiting the dreary plains of Africa saw what had befallen the Berbers of the coast and of the interior, they hastened to ask for peace and place themselves under the obedience of Musa, whom they solicited to enlist them in the ranks of his armyWarfare and tax revenue policies was the cause of enslavement of Indians for the Central Asian slave market, which started during the Umayyad conquest of Sindh of the 8th-century, when the armies of the Umayyad commander Muhammad bin Qasim enslaved tens of thousands of Indian civilians and well as soldiers.

[11] After the rebellion of Governor Munuza of Cerdanya in the 730s, his Christian widow Lampegia were sent by the victorious Umayyad commander as a gift to the Caliph in Damascus.

While in Pre-Islamic Arabia, Arab war captives were common targets of slavery, importation of slaves from Ethiopia across the Red Sea also took place.

[15] The Red Sea slave between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula continued for centuries until its final abolition in the 1960s, when slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in 1962.

The governing elite of the Caliphate came to establish a permanent residence in an urbanised environment, abandoning the traditional nomad Bedouin lifestyle.

The urbanisation of the ruling elite resulted in a more sophisticated court life and state apparatus, which created an expansion of the institution of slavery.

[16] In the late 7th-century the Umayyad dynasty settled in Damascus, where they established a major Palace complex and developed a sophisticated court life and state apparatus in parallel with their permanent urban settlement in a capital.

[23] During the Early Muslim conquests of the 7th- and 8th-centuries, a system of military slavery grew in which non-Muslim men from the conquered peoples such as Berbs and Persians were captured, enslaved, converted to Islam, manumitted and then enlisted in the Caliphate army, a custom which blurred the lines between free recruits and slave soldiers.

When the Umayyad dynasty moved from Arabia to their new capital of Damascus, where a great palace complex was being constructed, an advanced royal court system developed.

An additional factor contributing to the expansion of the harem was the fact that the Caliphate essentially became a monarchy, creating a position of heir to the throne.

[34] The low status of Black people were stated in a number of contemporary anecdotes, such as for example in the comment of an Arab who expressed his dislike of a civil war among fellow Arabs referring to an "Ethiopian" (Black African), stating that he "would prefer to be a mutilated Ethiopian slave tending broody goats on a hilltop until death overtakes him, rather than that a single arrow should be shot between the two sides".

[35] During the first century of Islam, Black slaves and freedmen could achieve fame and recognition, but from the Umayyad Caliphate onward, Black freedmen (unlike white), are with rare exceptions no longer noted to have achieved any higher positions of wealth, power, privilege or success, and contemporary Arab Muslim writers contributed this factor to a lack of capacity.