Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c11.9

c11.9

The fate and fortune of the black Africans was not that good. For a general term they may be called Habshis or Abyssinians. A few, but only a few, rose to high positions like Malik Yaqut the Personal Attendant of Sultan Raziyah, but the contemptuous attitude of Turks towards him shows the position of Africans in the early years of Muslim rule in India. Later on some rose to become the Sharqi kings of Jaunpur and some kings in Bengal and the Deccan. But the majority of them were treated as lesser Muslims. Barbak Shah of Bengal (1460-74) maintained a large number of Abyssinians as protectors of his throne. He recruited 8,000 Habshis and gave them high positions in his government.¹⁴ The sultans of Gujarat and the Deccan also invited groups of Abyssinians and gave them positions of respect and trust.¹⁵ Male and female Abyssianian slaves were brought as presents for the Mughals.¹⁶ Habshi women were employed as harem guards in Malwa and other Muslim kingdoms. But the largest concentration of Habshis was in the Deccan where they formed even powerful political groups.¹⁷ The Quran and Sharia show no awareness of racial or colour prejudice. In the early seventh century, neither slavery nor bitter ethnic and national rivalries seemed to generate what the modern world would define as racism. By the late seventh century, however, blackness of skin was becoming a symbol that evoked distaste and contempt. Bernard Lewis points to the overwhelming evidence that racial slavery, as the modern world has come to know it, originated in medieval Islamic societies. Light-skinned Arabs, Berbers and Persians invented the long-distance slave trade that transported millions of sub-Saharan captives either by camel caravans across the deserts or by slave ships from East Africa to the Persian Gulf. Arabs led the way in classifying the diverse peoples who lived from the Horn of Africa on the east to the state of Ghana in the west as blacks - a single lowly group especially submissive to slavery because, as the famous fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun put it, they have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals! Some Muslim writers ranked the Nubians and especially the Ethiopians somewhat higher than the despised Zanj, a vague term applied to the Bantu-speaking labourers imported from East Africa. In short, medieval Muslims came to associate the most degrading forms of labour with black slaves. In fact, the Arabic word for slave, abd, came to mean only a black slave.¹⁸