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Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

by Bernard Lewis (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 48 ratings
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From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions and others, examining the history of slavery in law, social thought, and practice over the last two millennia.

With 24 rare and intriguing full-color illustrations, this fascinating study describes the Middle East's culture of slavery and the evolution of racial prejudice. Lewis demonstrates how nineteenth century Europeans mythologized the region as a racial utopia in debating American slavery. Islam, in fact, clearly teaches non-discrimination, but Lewis shows that prejudice often won out over pious sentiments, as he examines how Africans were treated, depicted, and thought of from antiquity to the twentieth century.

"If my color were pink, women would love me/But the Lord has marred me with blackness," lamented a black slave poet in Arabia over a millennium ago--and Lewis deftly draws from these lines and others the nuances of racial relations over time. Islam, he finds, restricted enslavement and greatly improved the lot of slaves--who included, until the early twentieth century, some whites--while blacks occasionally rose to power and renown. But abuses ring throughout the written and visual record, from the horrors of capture to the castration and high mortality which, along with other causes, have left few blacks in many Middle Eastern lands, despite centuries of importing African slaves.

Race and Slavery in the Middle East illuminates the legacy of slavery in the region where it lasted longest, from the days of warrior slaves and palace eunuchs and concubines to the final drive for abolition. Illustrated with outstanding reproductions of striking artwork, it casts a new light on this critical part of the world, and on the nature and interrelation of slavery and racial prejudice.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0195053265
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0195053265
  3. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  4. Publication date
    April 30, 1992
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    9.16 x 0.69 x 6.14 inches
  7. Print length
    224 pages
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A realistic, well-documented study. Important illustrations and primary evidence now made accessible."--Irving R. Mix, Elmira College

"An important book which explains the issue of slavery in the Middle East."--Robert A. Hess, Messiah College

"An excellent and timely work on an important and rather neglected issue."--Ehsan Yarshater, Columbia University

"Splendid--should supplant all previous discussions."--Paul A. Rahe, University of Tulsa

"A splendid discussion of a difficult subject."--Paul A. Rahe, University of Tulsa

"Deceptively brief, delightfully easy to read, and beautifully illustrated."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Bernard Lewis an exceptionally distinguished historian of the Middle Eastern world....[A]uthoritative addresses to reality like his will serve excellently instead, and they make him a matchless guide to the background of Middle East conflict today."--David Pryce-Jones, Commentary

"[A] pioneering work."--David Warren Bowen, Magill's Literary Annual

"Highly readable."--The New York Review of Books

"This book will foster Bernard Lewis's reputation as the doyen of Middle Eastern studies."--The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Lewis's knowledge of Islamic history, literature, and jurisprudence is so detailed, expansive, and profoundly integrated that it is enough for him to merely refer to a period or an instance to be able to envision the entire context."--The Washington Times

"His scholarship must be respected...He skillfully sets up and explicates the primary paradoxes of the Islamic view of slavery and of race...[A book] that surely should be read."--Journal of Social History

Book Description

With 24 rare and intriguing full-color illustrations, this fascinating study describes the Middle East's culture of slavery and the evolution of racial prejudice.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (April 30, 1992)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195053265
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195053265
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.16 x 0.69 x 6.14 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 48 ratings

About the author

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Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis

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Bernard Lewis, FBA (born 31 May 1916) is a British-American historian specializing in oriental studies. He is also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis' expertise is in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West. He is also noted in academic circles for his works on the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Lewis served as a soldier in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps during the Second World War before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern History.

Lewis is a widely read expert on the Middle East and is regarded as one of the West's leading scholars of that region. His advice has been frequently sought by policymakers, including the Bush administration. In the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Martin Kramer, whose PhD thesis was directed by Lewis, considered that over a 60-year career Lewis has emerged as "the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East."

Lewis' views on the Armenian Genocide have attracted attention. He acknowledges that massacres against the Armenians occurred but does not believe it meets the definition of genocide. He is also notable for his public debates with the late Edward Said concerning the latter's book Orientalism (1978), which criticized Lewis and other European Orientalists.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Photo credit: Office of Communications, Princeton University. (1 English Wikipedia) [Attribution, GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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4.5 out of 5 stars
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48 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Lionel(Bo)
5.0 out of 5 stars Quick read on some basic information
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2024
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Glad I purchased this book for my collection. Great information. Knowledge is power.
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Matthew
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Informative Guide to the Ancient Society of the Middle East
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2017
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Highly detailed, well-sourced and nuanced book on how the ancient peoples of the Middle East regarded issues considered highly sensitive today, such as race and how they helped shape and defined relations between various ethnic groups at the time, as well as how mutual perceptions of each other came to impact their world for generations to come.

In essence, Lewis shows us that while many religions and belief systems may in theory call for and advocate racial equality and justice, the reality can at times be far more complex and ultimately present a much more multi-faceted picture.
4 people found this helpful
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J. Ducharme
5.0 out of 5 stars Professor Lewis in top form as usual. Professor Lewis ...
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2018
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Professor Lewis in top form as usual. Professor Lewis identifies the reality of the Middle East vs Edward Said's delusions and victimology. Professor Lewis, RIP.
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sz
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2014
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good
2 people found this helpful
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Bill
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2017
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An excellent tour of historical race relations and subjugation in medieval times.
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Harry Eagar
3.0 out of 5 stars O, master, you are too kind
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2007
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I have been told several times by Muslims that Islam does not allow slavery, and similar assertions can be found on websites aimed at educating infidels about the religion.

It's not easy to understand the motive for such claims. The truth is that, unlike other salvationist, universalizing religions like Buddhism or Christianity, Islam depended on slavery to make conversions.

In "Race and Slavery in the Middle East," Bernard Lewis, as usual, provides many documents to illustrate his point. No honest person can deny that Islam countenanced slavery. Lewis is concerned to trace the evolution of racism along with slavery.

There is good evidence that the pre-Islamic Arabs did not make racial judgments. In this they were like classical, civilized people. The doctrine of Islam is clearly anti-racist. The dogma of equality (not extended, of course, to women) is unquestionable.

Nevertheless, almost as soon as they became Muslims, the Arabs turned racist. Lewis traces this to a general competition in the second and third generations, when the few Arabs who conquered so many were in danger of being swamped by non-Arab Muslims, and, even more, by half-Arabs -- their own children by slave mothers of the conquered groups.

The brief essay (over half the 184 pages are endnotes and translations of documents) accepts -- most of the time -- the claim of 19th century Jewish (!) scholars that slavery under Islam was less "oppressive" than in the Americas or than the official racism in South Africa (still under apartheid) when this book was published in 1990.

Lewis even accepts, absurdly, that being a Muslim slave was an improvement on being a slave of a Greek or Roman. This might be so (or it might not), but it is irrelevant. The early slaves had theretofore been free men, so the kindness of the Muslims in robbing and enslaving them probably did not seem as admirable to them as it does to Professor Lewis.

This is very strange.

The strangeness -- aside from the lapses in judgment by the usually reliable Lewis -- is that Muslim apologists despise Lewis for misrepresenting Islam to Dar-al-Harb. Yet in almost all his many books, Lewis gives the benefit of the close calls to Islam. Never more flagrantly than here.

The evidence that the humanity of Islamic slavery is a hoax is fully evidenced within this book (and elsewhere), even if Lewis ignores his own writing.

To begin with, Lewis admits (as did the Ottoman sultan, under British tutelage) that conditions from capture to sale to an Muslim buyer were horrible. Somehow, this part of the system "does not count," even though for many slaves it constituted a large part of their career as slaves -- for millions, all of it.

Secondly, Lewis marvels a bit that in the Middle East there are no large communities of blacks and mulattoes, as there are in the Americas. This despite the fact that the core lands of Islam imported black slaves for more than three times as long as happened in the Americas. (The Muslims took white slaves, too, until rising western military competence put a stop to it; a minor part of this book.)

Although there were times and places where African slaves in the Americas were worked to death, in general they reproduced at far above replacement rates. In Muslim hands, slaves hardly reproduced at all.

This could not have happened if, in fact, Muslims treated their slaves better than Europeans and Americans did.

It is probably significant of Lewis's concern to lessen the obvious imputations about Muslim behavior that he gives hardly two sentences to the revolt of black slaves in southern Iraq in the 10th century, and not a word about the death toll. No one knows what it was -- Muslim sources are silent or faked -- but historians believe it was probably the biggest slave revolt in history. Nine hundred thousand slaves may have been killed. Comparable to the population at the time, this was a slaughter worse than anything 20th century Germans achieved.

In his final words, Lewis says that his study assumed that the extreme claims on either side -- of the savagery of Islamic slavery or its mildness (he does not consider claims that it did not exist) -- could not be right. But even the evidence of his own book, not to mention widely available evidence elsewhere, shows that he has sugarcoated Islamic slavery.
55 people found this helpful
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DesiWitcher
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2017
Informative work. Helps me understand some of the complexities I see today
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A unique look at the complex racial dynamics of the Mideast
Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2002
I've read some of Prof. Lewis' other books and they all have a common theme, impartial academic analysis. This book tackles a difficult subject without prejudice, slavery and racism. Prof. Lewis knows his subject well. He ignores common "western" perceptions of the region, employs corroborating primary sources, and a very readable rendition of how race is perceived (and not perceived) in the Middle East, past and present.
The pictures alone are an amazing collection from around the Islamic world and illustrate local perceptions. Even parallels that seemingly would never occur in most peoples' minds come up such as the fact that many stories in the Arabian Nights depict blacks as slaves, while the Arabs are often "white supremacists" (not to be taken as literally the same as the context in America). The perception of people in the region greatly varies from place to place and from time to time. At times, they struggle with their own racist ideas and the eloquence of some blacks (either former slaves or those born from such unions as well as the occasional martial slave) in the Mideast who became prominent poets, writers, and popular figures in-spite of the racial prejudice. This is an enlightening journey and you'll learn more from this small book then most huge volumes that cannot even grasp what Prof. Lewis has completely understood. Highly recommended.
26 people found this helpful
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DAVID
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting book
Reviewed in Italy on September 28, 2020
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It's a very interesting book. I suggest it. This book is written in a very simple way. It's full of important information.
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Martha McCulloch
5.0 out of 5 stars I was amazed going through this book
Reviewed in Canada on October 19, 2014
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I was amazed going through this book. It gave me so much perspective on the history of interactions among the Arabian, Egyptian, North African and Saharan states. It was fascinating to read about that period without the 'weight' of European point of view weighing as heavily as it normally does.
One person found this helpful
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Sorsha Jan
5.0 out of 5 stars DIE Zusammenfassung für Rassen(vorurteile) und Sklaverei im Mittleren Osten von einem Kenner geschrieben
Reviewed in Germany on September 14, 2014
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Bernard Lewis ist ein Kenner des Mittleren Ostens, auch in diesem Buch ist dies deutlich spürbar.

Das brisante Thema der Sklaverei und der Rassen im Mittleren Osten wird aufgrund des profunden Wissens Lewis hervorragend in diesem Buch aufbereitet und dargestellt. Vorurteile und Mythen werden aufgedeckt und berichtigt. Dabei wird von den Grundlagen des Islams her das Wissen zur Sklaverei und Rassen herausgearbeitet. Zwar kennt der Islam nur Gläubige, die ohne Rassenvorurteile alle gleich sein sollen, Lewis kann jedoch zeigen, dass die Realität anders aussah. Trotzdem standen Sklaven erstaunliche Aufstiegschancen zur Verfügung.

Das Buch ist für historisches Verständnis, Religion und interkulturelle Studien hervorragend geeignet, aber auch für den interessierten Leser gut verständlich.
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Mo
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to slavery in early Islamic history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 1, 2012
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There is plenty of exagerated and distorted perceptions in the west about slavery in early Islam and middle east.

Although this may be a short introduction, it goes in depth of the rights and social status of slaves and concubines in early Islamic history and the development of the concept of slavery. Slavery in the middle eastern societies was defined differently in status, ranks and ethics in comparison to what it was like in the west. A book worth reading
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Patrick Patton
4.0 out of 5 stars I should have liked more on the activities of Arab slavers on the ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2016
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Very interesting. I should have liked more on the activities of Arab slavers on the westward trade, towards the Americas
2 people found this helpful
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