Abstract
“What is Islamic about slavery in an Islamic society in Africa?”, historian Frederick Cooper asked in 1981. He explored the answer in terms of how Islam acted as a hegemonic ideology in nineteenth-century East Africa, drawing both masters and slaves into its legal and cultural world view. Almost forty years later, McDougall argues that Cooper’s question is still central; we have not yet fully understood the role gender played in this process. She asks: “How did the experience of being female, rather than male, shape the reality of Muslim masters’ and slaves’ lives?” Cooper had also reminded us that slavery was an institution shaped by a dynamic between owners and owned. Since, research in a variety of Muslim societies has revealed other networks of relationships between slaves and slaves, and slaves and freed slaves, for example, that are also ‘gendered’ in essence but almost invisible if viewed only through frameworks focused on dichotomies of power.
McDougall’s exploration of these realities and relationships is based on oral histories of female masters, slaves and concubines from the author’s fieldwork in Morocco and Mauritania, alongside published accounts by M.G. Smith (Northern Nigeria) and Margaret Strobel (East Africa). Her focus on the household highlights the role of mistresses in managing the labour and lives of their slaves, often including intra-slave/freed slaves’ marriages, habitation, birth and other rituals, while always necessitating responsibility for ensuring early Islamic education and morality. The controversial notion of ‘constructed kin’ is invoked in this context, not only between mistresses and slaves but between slaves and freed slaves themselves. The focus on the concubine argues that the elusive element of what makes Islamic slavery Islamic may be in large part located in this core female-slave legal status—“the most detailed area of social life in Islamic texts” (Cooper). The stories reveal differences in how individual masters and mistresses treated concubines and their legitimate offspring, as well as between ‘customary practices’ that inserted themselves locally into religion. But most importantly, they illuminate a widely shared understanding that the concubine articulated a crucial intersection between Islam, slavery and society that has left a living legacy.
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Notes
- 1.
“Islam and Cultural Hegemony: The Ideology of Slaveowners on the East African Coast”, in Paul E. Lovejoy (Ed.), The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Sage Publications, Beverly Hills: 1981):271–308; question p. 271.
- 2.
With the exception of quotations or very specific arguments for which I provide page references, my presentation of Cooper’s chapter should be understood to be drawn from it passim.
- 3.
“Islam and Cultural Hegemony”, pp. 292–3; reference to interviewing former masters, p. 288.
- 4.
Ibid., pp. 275,6.
- 5.
As discussed by Cooper, pp. 275, 6.
- 6.
Ibid., pp. 275–8.
- 7.
Ehud Toledano’s Ottoman slave trade and its suppression 1840–1890 (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ: 1982) had not yet appeared. And Cooper’s original work had been published much earlier in Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977).
- 8.
“Islam and Cultural Hegemony”, pp. 285–9.
- 9.
Islamic scholars.
- 10.
One of the best discussions of these issues in a general sense is still Jonathan E. Brockopp, Early Maliki Law (Brill: 2000). More recently, Ghislaine Lydon and Bruce Hall also point to changing uses of precedent in the West African Sahara: “Excavating Arabic Sources For the History of Slavery in Western Africa,” in African Slavery/African Voices, Volume 2 (Ed.) Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, Carolyn Brown and Martin Klein, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 15–49.
- 11.
“Islam and Cultural Hegemony”, p. 286.
- 12.
Ibid., pp. 286–8.
- 13.
With full understanding that the corollary to this is ‘if, when and how it is applied – and if, when and why it changes over time’.
- 14.
Cooper, “Islam and Cultural Hegemony”, pp. 286, 7. A fascinating and accessible first-hand account for the latter is Emily Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Dover Publications, 2009).
- 15.
Ibid., pp. 287, 8.
- 16.
For example, John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell (Eds.), The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands (Marcus Weiner: 2002), among its primary documents is included what is presented as a ‘sample’ or ‘typical’ manumission contract; for a more recent and critical view, see Lydon and Hall, “Excavating Arabic Sources”.
- 17.
Although dated, Daniel Pipes, “Mawlas: freed slaves and converts in early Islam”, in John Ralph Willis (Ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Africa, Vol. 1 (1985): 199–247, remains an excellent introduction from both a legal and an historical perspective. Most recently (in fact ‘forthcoming’ as this is written): Abdel Wedoud ould Cheikh, “Géographie de la liberté: Émancipation légale, émancipation foncière et appartenance tribale en Mauritanie”; and Benjamin Acloque, “Les liens serviles en milieu rural: le statut des Ḥarāṭīn et leur attachement à l’agriculture et à l’élevage”, in E. Ann McDougall (Ed.), Invisible People: a History of the Haratine of Southern Morocco and Mauritania [working title] (Editions Karthala; forthcoming).
- 18.
“Islam and Cultural Hegemony”, p. 288.
- 19.
Brockopp, Maliki Law, pp. 192–203; specifically on when one was considered umm al-walad, pp. 200–3.
- 20.
While not focused on slavery in either African or Islamic societies, Elizabeth Fox Genovese’s work on slavery as an institution within the household in the American context is undeservedly overlooked by Africanists. Although it identified the roles of ‘women’, it included those of both the ‘black slave’ and the ‘white mistress’ at a moment when Africanist academics were emphatically refusing to see both whites and masters as legitimate ‘African History’. [Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1988).]
- 21.
Abdul Sheriff, “Suria: concubine or secondary slave wife? The case of Zanzibar in the nineteenth century”, in Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne (Eds.), Sex, Power and Slavery (Ohio University Press, 2014): 66–80. Also (same collection), discussed in different context: E. Ann McDougall, “‘To Marry One’s Slave is as Easy as Eating a Meal’: the dynamics of carnal relations within Saharan slavery”, pp. 140–66.
- 22.
There are many ‘memoirs’ that indirectly address some (if not all) of these questions, but one of the most useful for the African and Islamic context is Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist 1879–1924 (Feminist Press at CUNY, 1987).
- 23.
‘Slavery Studies’ in Africa and increasingly in the Middle East continue to flourish. Research on women, households (royal and elite), concubinage and Islam cross-cut both and appear as chapters in collections as well as monographs and collections directed specifically to these inter-related topics. For example, Marilyn Booth, Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Duke University Press, 2010); Mary Ann Fay, Unveiling the Harem: Elite Women and the Paradox of Seclusion in Eighteenth-Century Cairo (Syracuse New York, 2012); Eve Troutt Powell, Tell this in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012); Sheriff (above). And very relevant from a legal perspective: Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2010).
- 24.
An observation: it is not that we fail to acknowledge that slave experience can be determined as much by gender as by institutional structure, but that we still stop short in most instances of integrating these distinct experiences into depictions of such structures. Interestingly, one area where we do see this gender consciousness is within studies of the harem, such as the seminal study by Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem (Oxford University Press, 1993). Although subtitled ‘women and sovereignty’, she approaches the harem as a household and identifies roles for male as well as female slaves, not only the better known eunuchs and concubines.
- 25.
Baba: Mary F. Smith, Baba of Karo (Yale University Press, 1954); Bi Kaje: Margaret Strobel and Sarah Mirza, Three Swahili Women (Indiana University Press, 1989); references here are from McDougall’s discussion of them in her “Hidden in the Household: gender and class in the study of Islam in Africa”, in E. Ann McDougall (Ed.) Engaging with a Legacy: Nehemia Levtzion (1935–2003) (Routledge, 2012; originally published as special issue of Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2008): 508–45.
- 26.
Faytma: “A sense of self: the life of Fatma Barka”, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 32, 2, 1998: 285–315; Aichata, Minata, Fatma: “Living the Legacy of Slavery in Mauritania: between discourse and reality”, Cahiers d’études Africaines #179–90; ‘Esclave modern ou modernité de l’esclavage?’, 2005:957–86, further developed in unpublished papers presented at Columbia University ‘Ifriqiyya Colloquium’ 2013 and Dept. of History, Dalhousie University, 2015; Medeym: “A topsy-turvy world: slaves and freed-slaves in the Mauritanian Adrar, 1910–1950”, in Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, The End of Slavery in Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; reprint 2005): 362–88, also in “Living the Legacy” (above).
- 27.
Lydon and Hall, “Excavating Arabic Sources”, especially pp. 35–8.
- 28.
Smith, Baba of Karo, p. 68.
- 29.
For example, in Morocco and Bornu from the sixteenth century forward. The former continued to bring young ‘country’ girls into the Royal Palace in something resembling a harem well into the twentieth century.
- 30.
One of which is Ruette, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess. For Baba’s region, see Catherine Coles and Beverly Mack (Ed.), Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), especially Mack, pp. 109–28; and Heidi Nast, Concubines and Power: Five Hundred Years in a Northern Nigerian Palace (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
- 31.
McDougall, “Living the Legacy”, pp. 974, 5.
- 32.
McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”.
- 33.
An important point: when umm al-walads were freed, they did not become ‘free’, they became ‘freed’—that is to say, hartaniyya. This is an important distinction; their children born with their master were free because they were born from the sperm and blood of a free man. Hence they inherit from their father (and the family), while their hartaniyya mothers did not.
- 34.
McDougall, “Living the Legacy”, pp. 974, 5; see footnotes #47–50 for list of informants, interviews Dec. 2004–Jan. 2005. Also unpublished papers, 2013 and 2015.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Interview Swaifya mint Hamody, Nouakchott 2004.
- 37.
At least it did in 2004. The building and its courtyard, which was still standing, provided shelter to those in need.
- 38.
I can only cite ‘local gossip’; it would be inappropriate to name sources as this interpretation is a direct challenge to the status of Hamody’s family and has not been proven.
- 39.
McDougall, “Topsy-Turvy World”, most recently “Living the Legacy”, pp. 980–2; especially interviews with Swaifya mint Hamody 2004 and Selka mint Ismail (with whom one of Medeym’s sons came to live), 2005.
- 40.
Brockopp discusses the first Maliki legal text specifically devoted to the umm al-walad, Early Maliki Law, pp. 192–203. An umm al-walad was considered ‘like’ a wife in terms of a master’s responsibilities, including exclusive rights to sexual services (see also Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam).
- 41.
A small, seemingly insignificant story but it so vividly illustrates how these different legal statuses could affect daily life. And in this case, an economic crisis triggered what we normally think of as a personal or religious decision. Her son thinks she got her donkey back but is not certain (interview with Isselmou ould Hamody, Atar 2005).
- 42.
Interview with Isselmou ould Hamody, 2004.
- 43.
This story (and its interview source material) from McDougall, “A Sense of Self” and most recently, “Hidden in the Household”, especially pp. 530–2.
- 44.
This is fully discussed in McDougall, “A sense of self”, pp. 296–300 and passim.
- 45.
Mohamed Barka. He had been a wealthy trans-Saharan merchant based in Timbuktu but initially from Goulimine. My project at the time was looking at Moroccan families whose networks underpinned nineteenth-century trans-Saharan commerce into central and southern Mauritania.
- 46.
Messoud, a freed slave that re-appears several times in her story.
- 47.
Religious ‘learned man’ whom she venerates.
- 48.
McDougall, “A sense of self”, p. 288.
- 49.
Ibid.: specifically that she had ‘nothing to fear’.
- 50.
This story constitutes an epilogue to “A Sense of Self”. My thanks to Mohamed Nouhi, my original research assistant on the project, who undertook this return trip to Goulimine on my behalf and brought back a copy of Faytma’s carte d’identité. When I once presented this story to an audience of historians, their overall response was: ‘but this was not true; surely you made this point? How could the government issue an official identity paper that was a lie?’ And so on. In short, totally missing the significance of the experience.
- 51.
Meaning that the Fulani regarded the Hausa as ‘bad Muslims’ and therefore eligible to be enslaved.
- 52.
The following from McDougall, “Hidden in the Household”, especially pp. 525–30.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 528.
- 54.
Again there is ambiguity: if he simply ‘married her off’ without freeing her, legally any children she had would belong to him. But here either she was first manumitted (and Bi Kaje simply omitted that fact) or the marriage was (by local custom) considered its equivalent—in which case the children would be hers (and her husband’s).
- 55.
A reminder that her former master still ‘owed’ her a husband: both of them clearly acknowledged this obligation. What she did while waiting for this to happen is unknown and also irrelevant with respect to her master’s obligation.
- 56.
Quoted in McDougall, “Hidden in the Household”, p. 528.
- 57.
Ibid. She spoke specifically of female slaves; it is not clear what was happening with males.
- 58.
Material on Baba drawn here from “Hidden in the Household”, pp. 519–25.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 521.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 522, footnote #38.
- 63.
This in accordance with Maliki law: a child may be cared for by a family but not ‘adopted’ in the sense of being considered part of that family. The exception is when a two-year-old-or-less baby is nursed by the caretaker mother; by this action the child becomes milk-kin and its relations with the family are governed by the ‘behaviour and etiquette’ of kin.
- 64.
Ibid., pp. 521, 2.
- 65.
Bi Kaje, quoted in McDougall, “Hidden in the Household”, pp. 526, 7.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 527. Another interesting contrast with West and North Africa, at least in earlier centuries when learned scholars clearly opined that conversion was not reason to manumit. While it was a good master’s duty to educate his (or her) slaves into Islam and there were many reasons for which said slaves could be freed (including upon the master’s/mistresses death), there was no obligation to do so; it was their status at birth which determined their rights (or lack thereof)—as with the slave children in Baba’s household who were considered Muslim at birth, but remained slave.
- 67.
Here echoing the main principle guiding the encouragement given to masters and mistresses who wished to be ‘good’ slave owners to educate their slaves into the religion.
- 68.
McDougall, “Hidden in the Household”, p. 529.
- 69.
Underscoring that even as we speak of ‘Islam’, there are different legal schools of thought that do not necessarily agree on questions having to do with slavery, marriage, ‘freed slaves’ and so on. On this issue, see Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam. And local custom also shapes how Islam is understood and ‘lived’. (More on this below.) Equally importantly as Lydon and Hall argue, local usage of juridical precedent also reflects changing local, historical conditions; see “Excavating Arabic Sources”.
- 70.
I contrast here perspectives of slave mistresses with those Cooper examined of slave masters. However, it is worth noting that even research on male slave owners has received little attention since Cooper’s seminal work. Especially noteworthy, therefore, is Sandra Greene’s recent Slave Owners of West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2017). Religious (in this case Christian), economic and family considerations are explored in the context of individual biographies (like those we have looked at), to explain slave holders’ decision making during the “nineteenth century of abolition”.
- 71.
It was their respective masters’ reactions that differed so dramatically; Faida’s removing her from the household because her child died, Faytma’s keeping her close in spite of the fact that she did not give him a child.
- 72.
Abdul Sheriff, “Race and Class in the Politics of Zanzibar”, Africa Spectrum 36, 3, 2001: 301–18.
- 73.
This was the argument central to Miers’ and Kopytoff’s pivotal although much challenged early attempts to define something ‘African’ about slavery: Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); articulated in Ch.1 “African Slavery as an Institution of Marginality”, pp. 3–84.
- 74.
The term and its meaning are both complex and have changed over time and place. Acloque, “Les Liens Serviles…”, notes that technically, mawali is applicable over only three generations, but ‘custom’ as practised in Mauritania overlooks that limitation. This understanding however, is more consistent with the notion of wala constituting ‘kinship’ (and therefore, perpetual—see ould Cheikh, “Géographie de la liberté”); also Bruce Hall, “Memory, slavery and Muslim Citizenship in the post-emancipation circum-Saharan world”, in McDougall (Ed.) Invisible People (forthcoming). And Pipes, “Mawlas: freed slaves and converts in early Islam”.
- 75.
In some regions of Mauritania , different terms denote generational distinctions—some terms are even meant to imply that the originary relationship was one of ‘clientage’ not servility.
- 76.
For an accessible and recent discussion, see David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Case Study: Sokoto Caliphate, especially pp. 139–42.
- 77.
McDougall, “Hidden in the Household”, p. 524.
- 78.
Given that the information about Faytma’s relationship with Barka was revealed to us after her death and even then not by immediate family, there was no real possibility of exploring this situation further. Indeed, in all honesty, this is pushing into the intimacy of family relations—because yes, Faytma was regarded as family—in ways that would be totally inappropriate for a researcher.
- 79.
Interview with Selka mint Ismail, Atar 2005.
- 80.
Interview with Isselmou ould Hamody, Atar 2004.
- 81.
Another example of individual exercising of Islamic law: Hamody may not have exhibited expected behavior, but neither did his religion prohibit his keeping the relationship secret. In several interviews, I posed the questions as to why he might have done so, but no reason was ever suggested.
- 82.
Unfortunately, these, like most such cases, cannot be probed back into the family itself. One of the important reasons to identify (where possible) mistresses’ relations and gender-specific accounts with respect to (female) slaves is to try and get some general idea of how these relationships may have worked.
- 83.
McDougall, unpublished paper presented Dalhousie University, 2015. The ‘special relationship’ continued: in the early 1920s, Hamody was extending loans to the Emir’s mother (McDougall, “‘A topsy-turvy world’”, p. 380).
- 84.
‘Wala’. See footnote #17.
- 85.
On this subject, Cooper himself produced early research: From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya 1890–1925 (Yale University Press, 1980). More recently, Elisabeth McMahon, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (Oxford University Press, 2015), which also draws on the biography of a former female slave as a rich source of evidence for local (Pemba) society. Or for West Africa, Benedetta Rossi (Ed.), Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (Liverpool University Press, 2009) and Slavery and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Studies of ‘post-slavery’ societies are flourishing; for an introduction, see Eric Hahonou and Baz Lecocq (Eds), “Exploring Post-Slavery in Contemporary Africa”, special issue International Journal of African Historical Studies (May, 2015).
- 86.
McDougall, “A Sense of Self”, pp. 287, 8; 297–302.
- 87.
I am grateful to Zakeria for seeking me out those many years ago at an African Studies Association meeting and for arranging to have his wonderful brother Zein work as my assistant in Dec. 2004–Jan. 2005. I am equally appreciative of the hospitality of their family (mother, sister and father) in Atar and the information provided by Mohamed Salem ould Denne (great-grandson of Minata, paternal side; interview Atar Jan. 2004).
- 88.
From a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada grant (2008–12). Some work drawing on this research supports a discussion of concubinage as forced marriage in E. Ann McDougall, “Concubinage as Forced Marriage? Colonial jawari, contemporary hartaniyya and marriage in Mauritania”, in Annie Bunting, B. N. Lawrance, R. Roberts (Eds.), Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016): 159–177.
- 89.
McDougall (Ed.) Invisible People (Editions Karthala, forthcoming).
- 90.
M’Barak ould Beyrouk, quoted in McDougall “Concubinage as Forced Marriage?”, pp. 166, 7. (He is a well-known writer, a public figure; hence his interview is not anonymous.)
- 91.
Ibid., pp. 165, 6. Unfortunately, we did not push the question of ‘adoption’ further, so I cannot state with any assurance as to whether there was a milk-kin relationship established or not.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 171.
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Ann McDougall, E. (2019). “What Is Islamic About Slavery in Muslim Societies?” Cooper, Concubinage and Contemporary Legacies of ‘Islamic Slavery’ in North, West and East Africa. In: Fay, M. (eds) Slavery in the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59755-7_2
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