Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c17.3

c17.3

That being so, Muslim holy men and men of jurisprudence, endowed the institution with supreme religious sanction. According to Bernard Lewis, they were upholding an institution sanctioned by scripture, law, and tradition and one which in their eyes was necessary to the maintenance of the social structure of Muslim life. For example, in 1855 the Ottoman Empire ordered the governors of its far-flung districts to ban the commerce in slaves. For rebellious Arabs in the Hijaz this was exactly the kind of anti-Islamic, Western-influenced measure they had been waiting for as case for throwing the Turkish rule. The Arab leader Shaykh Jamal issued a legal ruling denouncing the ban on the slave trade as contrary to the holy law of Islam. Because of this anti-Islamic act, he said the Turks had become apostates and heathens. It was lawful to kill them without incurring criminal penalties or bloodwit, and to enslave their children. The Ottoman Turks succeeded in suppressing their southern rebels in mid-1856. But as a conciliatory measure to prevent further secessionist movements, the Turkish government granted a major concession to the slave traders who had long made the Red Sea and the Hijaz a central route for transporting African slaves to the Middle East. The Sultans government exempted the Hijaz from its 1857 decree outlawing the trade in black slaves throughout the rest of the Ottoman Empire. As late as 1960, Lord Shackleton reported to the House of Lords that African Muslims on pilgrimages to Mecca still sold slaves on arrival, using them as living travellers cheques.³