William Tyler
Four Slave Rebellions, Part 2: Zanj Rebellion of African Slaves in Arabia

William Tyler | Four Slave Rebellions, Part 2: Zanj Rebellion of African Slaves in Arabia

- Thanks very much indeed and welcome everyone to this second in the series of four that I’m doing on slave rebellions. Now, last week’s was the talk about Spartacus, and everyone, I guess, had heard of Spartacus, if only by seeing the film with Kirk Douglas produced in 1960. Now, today, I guess most of you, maybe even sort of 90% plus of you, have not even heard of the rebellion I’m talking about. And it’s not surprising. There’s very little written in English on either side of the Atlantic. There’s one book which has been translated into English but translated so badly, you can’t use it. And I think there’s an article in a Princeton journal of some years ago, but there’s very little in-depth or anything in-depth written. So this required on my part a bit of research, which is fun, and to decide how to present it to you. Where I’m going is back to the Middle Ages. To be precise, back to the 9th century CE, or if you prefer AD, the 9th century, the 800s. And I’m specifically going to the area of the world, which is the Middle East. And the story of the Middle Eastern slavery, which is predates the revolt in the 9th century and indeed continues to the present day is the enslavement of Black Africans by Arabs of the Middle East. And the centre of my talk is called the Zanj, Z-A-N-J, and I will explain what that means later, the Zanj rebellion. It was a slave rebellion, as I say, of the 9th century, therefore, by Black Africans against Arabs based on the southern Iraqi city of Basra, which we will all remember grimly from the Iraq wars.

This rebellion of slaves lasted incredibly 14 years, four months, and six days. To be precise, from 869 to 883. But as I said last week, with the exception of the rebellion in Haiti, all slave rebellions failed. And although this was kept going, if you like, for 14 whole years and threatened the capital of the Arab Empire it was fighting, nevertheless, it also ended in failure. So that’s a little bit by way of introduction if you like. Now to some background on Arab slavery. Prior to the revolt of the Zanj, Z-A-N-J remember, in the 9th century, slavery existed in the Arab world and in the Middle East prior to, well, prior to the coming of Islam, the Arab world was Middle East, of course. It existed there in the Middle East prior to the coming of Islam. No surprise because as we learned last week with ancient Rome, slavery existed throughout the ancient world, whether it was in the Middle East or Western Europe. It existed. But the first-ever account of slavery that we have, the first written account of slavery, in fact, comes from what today is called Iraq and at the time was called Uruk, U-R-U-K. You don’t need to remember that. Comes from Iraq. And Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his fantastic book, “The World”, this hugely thick volume, writes this. He says, “Around 3100 BCE,” BC, if you prefer. “Around 3100 BC, the people of Uruk, which meant the place and we now call Iraq, may have invented writing initially pictograms, but then took to marking clay with the wedge end of a reed, a process that we call cuneiform writing. The first named people in history are an accountant.” Well, what a surprise. “That is an accountant, a slave master, and rather surprisingly, two enslaved people.

The first receipt confirmed by the first signature, the first named person, the accountant, reads this, ‘29,086 measures of barley, 37 months. Signed Kushim,’ who was the accountant. Another record the ownership of En-pap and Sukkalgir, the first named slaves. These were slave-owning societies. We do not know when slavery started because it was there before writing. We don’t know when it started, but it was probably at the same time as organised fighting. Most enslaved people were war captives or debtors.” And that also we gathered when we talked about Rome last time. “Royal taxes paid for soldiers who captured the slaves, who now built the cities or toiled within family households.” And that is the beginning of slavery. So, the first written record of slaves, therefore of slavery, is from the Middle East itself. It does not mean that that is where slavery began. That’s an impossible question to answer, but it does put the Middle East firmly in, as it were, the pole position. Once Islam arrived in the early 7th century CE or AD, slavery continued, and as we know, still exists today in parts of the Middle East. In the book that I said was so badly translated into English called “The Revolt of the ZANJ” by Henry Moa, if I can try and read a paragraph here and correct the English as I go, “The Muslims, Islam as a religion, admitted two legitimate grounds of slavery, birth under the condition of a slave, you were born into slavery, or your capture in war. The child who was born was slave if the mother was slave, but if she was free, then the child was free. If the father was a slave and the mother was free, the child was still free.” There’s another group, which is of importance in the 21st century, which I will refer to again right at the very end of my talk today.

And that is a child born to an Arab master and an African slave, an African female slave bearing the child of her Arab master, a mixed-race child. We’ll come to that story right at the very end because it has reverberations in the 21st century. Now, my last quotation from a book today comes from the American historian Heather Williams in her book, “American Slavery”, written for the Oxford University Press. And I just thought this was a very interesting piece. “Europeans and Africans had practised slavery for centuries.” In other words, Arabs taking Africans into slavery was only matched by Africans taking Africans into slavery. No one’s hands are cleaner blood when it comes to slavery. “Europeans and Africans have practised slavery for centuries. In ancient Europe, slavery was common in the Roman Empire,” which, of course, we saw last week. “But the institution declined the economic and political reasons between the 5th and the 8th century CE/AD, when European countries developed systems of serfdom.” And serfdom meant you were tied to the land. You weren’t a slave, you had certain rights, but one of the rights you did not have was the move. And remember, serfdom wasn’t abolished in Russia until 1861. So serfdom, many people think of serfdom and slavery as the same. To the serf, it might well have appeared much the same as slavery, particularly in Imperial Russia right into the second half of the 19th century. “With the expansion of Islam in the 8th century,” the diaspora of Islam across, well, at least North Africa.

“With the expansion of Islam, Muslim merchants carried on a thriving trade of mostly women and children from Sub-Saharan Africa to Northern East Africa and, from there on, also into Arabia. Muslim traders relied on having a steady supply of captives from conquered lands.” Now, this is an interesting piece, which I have not mentioned, and again, emphasises everyone’s hands are covered in blood. “At the same time, the Italian merchants carried out a slave trade in which they sold people from Slavic countries such as Armenia, Bulgaria, and Russia to purchases in the Mediterranean and to the Arabs in the Middle East. So prevalent was the Italian-operated slave trade that the word slave was derived from the word of the people whom the Italians had captured.” They were slavs. Slav gave us the word slave. So before I get right into the slavery of the Middle East and of Islam, it’s worth remembering that slavery is not something that one particular part of the world can be accused of. All parts of the world can be accused of and I remember mentioning last week that in my home city of Bristol in the west of England, we traded in Irish slaves in Saxon England.

Slavery is, I think I said last time, the Victorian said poverty is always with us and you can say slavery is always with us. And I will come to the issue of modern slavery in relationship to the Middle East, again, towards the end of my talk. As for the slaves in the Middle East, they were drawn from a wide geographical area. Some came from Eastern Europe, and we just mentioned the Italians involved in that trade. Some were native Arabs themselves who were taken from Arab desert tribes in battles, but actually, most came from Africa across the Red Sea, the Red Sea route from Africa. And, of course, you could become a slave in the Middle East as you could in ancient Rome by committing certain crimes and being condemned to slavery and of course, again, as in Rome, you could be born into slavery. You were bought and sold in slave markets. Again, think of the southern states of the United States or how you were done. In 1416, an Arab commentator and slave trader, an Arab said he brought 1,700 slaves with a band of pilgrims to bring them to Mecca as slaves. And they came from North Africa, and they were bought in the slave markets of Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Cairo.

So this man is a entrepreneur leading pilgrims to Mecca, but making considerable extra money by picking up slaves to be sold in the slave market in Mecca in 1416, one year after the Battle of Agincourt. If we get fast forward in time to 1811, 1811, Thomas Smee, who was a British naval officer, visited a market, a slave market in Zanzibar. And he provided us with this description, which really is a description which fits all slave markets in all times. He wrote this, “The show commences about 4:00 in the afternoon. The slaves set off to the best advantage by having their skins cleaned and burnished with coconut oil, their faces painted with red and white stripes and the hands, nose, ears, and feet ornamented with a profusion of bracelets of gold and silver and jewels arranged in a line.” This is for how they’re like an agricultural show where the cattle are cleaned and perfumed and all the rest of it to show them at their best. And so you get with slaves. “They were placed in a line commencing with the youngest and increasing to the rear according to their size and age. At the head of this file, which is composed of all sexes and ages from the age of 6 to the age of 60, walks the person who owns them. Behind and at each side, two or three of his domestic slaves, armed with swords and spears serve as a guard. Thus order, the procession begins and passes through the marketplace and the principal streets.” So everyone can have a good look. “When any of them strikes a spectator’s fancy, the line immediately stops and a process of examination ensues, which, for minuteness, is unequalled in any cattle market in Europe.

The intending purchaser, having ascertained there is no defect in the faculties of speech, hearing, et cetera, that there is no disease present, next proceeds to examine the person. The mouth, the teeth are first inspected and afterwards, every part of the body in succession, not even excepting the breasts of the girls, many of whom I’ve seen handled in the most indecent manner in the public market by their purchasers. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the slave dealers almost universally forced the young girls to submit to their lust previous to their being disposed of. From such scenes, one turns away with pity and indignation.” And indeed, it was the British bringing pressure on the Zanzibar authorities that stopped slavery in Zanzibar. One of the things that sometimes gets forgotten in the debate on 19th century slavery and early 20th century is that the British took a major role in abolishing slavery across not only their empire, but wherever they came across it. If you say, well, how many slaves, how many slaves did the Arabs of the Middle East have? Well, look, with any of these statistics, you take an enormous binge of sort because we simply don’t know. I mean, there are those historians who think it was something in the region of 6 to 10 million. If you compare that, then the transportation of Black Africans over the Atlantic to the Americas, south and north from the 16th and the 19th century is estimated at 12 to 12 and a half million.

And again, that statistic is doubtful in its accuracy, but it is more accurate than any figure that we can get from the Middle East. Suffice it to say, it was a slave-owning society with an enormous number of slaves. And what were they used for? Well, Arabs used them for exactly the same purposes as the Romans or indeed, those in the southern states of America. They were used as farm workers. They were used as soldiers in the Middle East. They were used as domestic servants. They were used as miners. And, of course, they were used in prostitution. It was the hard physical labour that had to be undertaken by slaves in any slave-owning society and their poor living conditions in any slave society that led to revolts of the slaves against their masters throughout history. If you were a slave owner, you were all the time sitting on a powder keg. Think of the plantations in the southern states of America, all those slaves out there in their huts and large numbers of them and small numbers of you. But surprisingly, they sought to convert them to Christianity. But the pressure on the owner from the numbers of slaves was enormous. They didn’t mean that they sought to treat the slaves any better because they didn’t. Now I’ve used the term, I think, Black Africans because that is where the slaves came from. This was a generic term used by the Arabs. It translated from Arabic. They took them from the land of the blacks. Now, that meant from Central and East Africa because they could bring them to the ports and cross the Red Sea with them, but they also bought them from West Africa and brought them in slave caravans to the east for transportation to the west.

And again, as with the transatlantic slave trade, in later centuries, many of these slaves that the Arabs took were sold to Arab dealers who were in charge of finding the merchandise and shipping it to the Middle East were sold by fellow Africans, particularly Africans caught up in wars, wars against in the West Africa, against the empire of Mali and the empire of Ghana. In East Africa, in the Horn of Africa, think Somalia, they were Muslims. And the Muslims themselves, Indigenous Muslims, Indigenous peoples who’d been converted to Islam, they also took Black Africans and handed them over to the Arab slave dealers for transportation to the Middle East for money, of course. For money. Who transported them across? Well, they were largely Omanis and Yemenis. This was their trade across the Red Sea. Now, before I leave this quote from Arabic, the land of the blacks, there’s an interesting PS from the British Empire as late as the first half of the 20th century. In Sudan, you’ve been following it, I’m sure many of you, on the news, the Southern Sudanese are Black African. When the British went in in terms of the empire, they described Sudan as the land of the blacks, exactly the Arabic expression, the land of the blacks ruled by blues. Ruled by blues because these were Oxford and Cambridge graduates who weren’t the brightest pencils in the box. They were sporty rather than academic. They would never have got a job in British India. So where do they go?

They go to the Sudan. And so there were large numbers of sort of people who had won their colours, played for Oxford and university, first teams in anything from cricket to rowing and won what it, for the Americans that aren’t sure of the terminology, they’re given a blue. It simply means they get a blue, a cap, which shows that they’d been in a university first team. There was many of these who went to Sudan. And strangely enough, when I was at Oxford, I met someone who was a doctor. I wasn’t very well. I went to a doctor. And he actually was an old boy at my school, and he was called WGRM Laurie, L-A-U-R-I-E. And he had been, in his youth, one of these blues. He won his blue in rowing who ruled huge parts of the Sudan. It’s worth, yes, for those of you interested in actors, his son is Hugh Laurie, the actor. But the father had begun his career in the Sudan. We are facing this lecture the reality that nobody’s hands on anything is clean. Neither the British Empire, the Ghanaian Empire, Africans, Italians, Arabs, everyone is involved with the seedier side of life, if you like. And it’s important, is it not? To remember that, but also to remember that all the peoples I’ve mentioned in that brief statement then contributed enormously to human culture. The Italians, the West Africans, the English, and the Arabs. Everyone contributed to the culture. So this is human life in the raw, the good of us and the bad of us. And indeed, that’s what makes up human society. And I suppose in terms of slavery, what we have come to recognise, and that’s a long story of why did we recognise it. We came to recognise that slavery was evil.

Partly in the West, we recognised it through religion in the 19th century and partly, but not with religion at all, but simply the enlightenment, the humanity of the enlightenment, which said this is wrong. And so, as we’ve done bad things as human beings, we’ve also sought to do good things. And none of us in any of the countries we are living would begin to think anything but evil of slavery. But take us back to the 18th century, the 19th century early on, then we didn’t think that in that way at all. So we must be careful in criticising those places in the world that still have slavery, even if it’s under the carpet because it’s not been long since we ourselves in the West, America, Britain, for example, have abandoned slavery and see how evil an institution it was. Now, let me turn to the Zanj rebellion itself. I promised to tell you the origin of the word. The word Zanj is simply an Arabic word, which refer to East Africans. And indeed, pretty well all Black Africans or whatever specific tribal or ethnicity they had, Zanj was the word they used. And the background to the Zanj rebellion itself was the need in the early 19th century for more and more slaves to do a particular job, to drain the salt marshes around Basra in southern Iraq. Some of you may have read Wilfred Thesiger’s book, “The Marsh Arabs”. That’s the area we’re talking about. The Basra-Arab economy depended as did the Southern United States economy on agricultural plantations.

But much of the land south of Basra in the marshlands, in the salt marshlands had been abandoned for agriculture because many of its own people had migrated further north of the cities simply because life was too hard there and jobs were available in the increasing number of cities in what was called Mesopotamia, but we can say Iraq, Iran, and so on. Moreover, they had flooding. Once they ceased cultivating, the waters, it’s a swampland. The waters simply overwhelmed it. And there was a need to introduce artificial irrigation so you could bring back this salt marsh into fertile agricultural land. Moreover, the caliph said, “Well, look, William, I will give you all these acres south of Basra, provided you irrigate the land and return it to cultivation.” And I said, “Well, okay. I’ll take the offer.” But then, where do I get the labour to create the irrigation systems? I can’t get local workers. They won’t come. So, I turned to slaves and large numbers of black slaves were imported in the 8th century and earlier to get these salt marshes back into agricultural production. That had begun in the 7th century CE/AD and there are two slave rebellions we know of before we get to the Zangz Rebellion in the 9th century. There was a slave revolt in 689 to 90 and another slave revolt in 694, but these were easily squashed by the government authorities in Baghdad. The final spur to revolt was the fact that the Abbasid Caliphate, now hang on. A-B-B-A-S-I-D, Abbasid Caliphate. Abbasid comes from the name of the first caliph of this dynasty, hence Abbasid caliph, whereas we might say the Tudor monarchy in England.

The Abbasid Caliphate. So, where did the word caliphate come from? Well, from a caliph. And the caliph was a political and religious successor to Muhammad who claimed to be the leader of all Muslims, a title later held right into the 20th century by the Ottoman Sultan So, caliph, you think of in English as an emperor. This is the Abbasid Empire. It’s often referred to as that or the Abbasid Caliphate. It’s an Arab caliphate. It was founded by a man who gave his name the Abbasid and their capital was established at Baghdadi, modern-day Iraq and their rule existed from 750 AD/CE right through to 1258. But in truth, they are pretty well dead in the water by the 10th century. In other words, they were declining at the point at which the Zanj rebellion broke out. In other words, the central government was losing control. Now, that gave the slave revolt a real opportunity, and they’d only just come out of their golden age of the 8th century. Remember I said just now about the good and the bad of all societies? The 8th century for the Abbasids was an age of literature, of architecture, of philosophy, of painting, of glassworking, of pottery working, of textiles, of calligraphy, and even of science in areas such as medicine and astronomy and in technological developments like tidal and wind power. This was a very, very advanced culture. Some of you heard me talk about that before in terms of Arab culture. And we mustn’t forget that. In the crises that we face with the Arab world today, it’s important that we remember that there were times in which the Arab world was contributing in major ways to society as a whole.

We can only pray and hope that we might get back to such a position at some future date. The caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, was weakened in 861 by a series of internal political divisions. It’s known in the history of the Middle East as the anarchy. Somebody is the caliph, he’s deposed by someone who claims to have a better claim to the throne. And there’s also the intervention of military leaders, of generals, toppling caliphs and all the rest of it. It’s anarchy, it’s power. That’s what politicians are after, power. And as they fight and squabble, the government becomes more and more short of cash. And short of cash means it can’t pay its soldiers. If it can’t pay its soldiers, it gets mutiny. If it gets mutiny, it hasn’t the means to crush slave rebellions like the Zanj nor does it have the ability to crush the mutineers. So this is a society in the 9th century, which is in serious trouble. We know, for example, that six caliphs succeeded one another in like a revolving door that they were in and out. There were troop riots. There was even a full-scale civil war in 865 to 866, a great rebellion and virtual bankruptcy. In the provinces of the empire, individual regional rulers declared themselves independent or independent de facto from the central administration in Baghdad. All of these aided those in the slave society seeking to rebel. So, to come to the Zanj rebellion itself, as I’ve already said, it lasted over 40 years, from 869 to 883. It began amongst the slaves of the salt marshes south of Basra. It was fought against the armed forces of the Abbasid Caliphate.

They had two main leaders. We know the names of others, but the two main leaders were a man called Ali ibn Muhammad and another called Yahya ibn Muhammad. Yahya is spelled Y-A-H, Yahya, yeah, Y-A. Y-A-H-Y-A. The other one, Ali. There are others we know, but we don’t really know anything about them personally. We just know their names crop up in terms of being at such and such a place or such and such a battle during the Zanj rebellion itself. Slaves from other parts of the caliphate other than south of Basra and the salt marshes joined the rebellion as did a number of freemen whose own conditions were little better than those of the slaves themselves. And so it gathers momentum. Now, please don’t ask how many people joined it. We simply don’t know. Some people give a figure of as larger 600,000. I find difficulty in buying that. We simply don’t know. What we can say is it was a major rebellion that caused panic in the administration centrally in Baghdad. Don’t ask me how many people died on all sides during it. Again, we don’t know. And the best one can say is tens of thousands died. I mean, you simply can’t get figures from this far back. Yeah, of course, some contemporaries put figures in, but only to underline or supplement or give credence to their own biassed views against the slaves. It’s very, very difficult to judge. It was a major rebellion. We know it lasted 14 years. That in itself told you it was major. We know that there were slaves from all over the caliphate joined it, yes. And we know that freemen joined it, yes.

And we know that large numbers of people lost their lives. All of that, we know. Some Muslim historians have described it as the most vicious and brutal of slave uprisings. Some modern scholars say it’s one of the bloodiest and most destructive rebellions, which a history of Western Asia records. Everyone agrees how serious this was. But we know that only the Haitian rebellion was ever successful. Slave rebellions are difficult. Why? Because what are they aiming for? It’s very difficult to work out what this Zanj rebellion was aiming for. We know why it started. The appalling conditions at work and the appalling life that they led, and indeed, short lives that they led as well. We also know that they looted widely, but then so did the government troops loot widely. The longer the rebellion went on, the stronger the rebels became. They even built forts, and they created a river fleet of ships down in the marshes and in the canals. A river fleet. And they paid for it by taxing the areas they commanded. They even began to owe, sorry. They even began to mint their own coins. So, in a sense, they’re setting up, if you like, almost a state, but it all hacks on that word almost. They didn’t do it. It all began in September 869. By September 871, 2 years later, they had captured Basra itself, the regional capital after a four-day battle.

They were assisted in the battle by dissident tribesman from the desert who came to support them, who had their own grievances against the Abbasid government in Baghdad. The attack on Basra, its subsequent fall to the rebels and the appalling revenge exactly on the people of Basra really resound through history. A local notable, a magistrate or whatever, we don’t know, who was in Basra, came to the rebel leader who at the time is Yahya, whom we’ve met, Y-A-H-Y-A, and said, “Look, we need to surrender. Can we talk about it? What I want,” he said, “is to have a promise to protect the city’s civilian population.” He was given that assurance, and criers were sent outside the city. “Come to the palace, and your lies will be spared. Just come surrender at the palace.” And they did. But then Yahya had the streets around the palace blocked off. And at a signal from him, the rebels slaughtered the civilian crowd. And then following that, the following day, they slaughtered anyone else who hadn’t come to the palace to surrender. They slaughtered them, too. They destroyed merchandise, they destroyed livestock, they destroyed buildings. We have a record from the time of the conditions in Basra during this period of the attack. “A large number of people hid among the houses and in the wells. They appeared only at night and hunted dogs, rats, and cats. Then they ate the corpses of their companions who had died.” Cannibalism.

“And they watched each other, waiting for someone to die. The stronger killed their comrade and ate them.” And we also have a comment from a contemporary Muslim lamenting the ineffectiveness of the defenders of Basra. “Go forth, you nobles, light and heavy against these vile slaves. They manage well their enterprise, the destruction of our city of Basra whilst you were sleeping. Shame, shame upon the sleep of the sleepers. Make true the belief of your brothers, the people of Basra who had high expectations of you and put their hopes in you to help them in all vicissitudes. Exact vengeance for them, for that will be grateful to them as the restoring of their spirits to their bodies.” While the looting went on, the mosque was destroyed, the city port was destroyed. In fact, some people had hidden in the mosque for safety, so they didn’t were killed. And the consequences, this is a bloody mediaeval slaughter of civilians in a highly developed city for its time. The central government put in massive efforts now to end the rebellion. They did indeed capture Yahya and executed him along with others from other rebels that they managed to collect, but they couldn’t defeat the entire rebellion. They suffered defeats as they tried to drive further towards the headquarters. And disease within the army meant that they had to stop the attempts to crush it completely. Then, they decided on a second policy in Baghdad, a policy of containment. But the policy of containment itself failed as the Abbasid government sought to deal with other external enemies.

And actually, by 879, 8 years after, eight years after the fall of Basra, the rebels had recovered sufficiently. I know they wanted Basra, but they were dealt with firmly afterwards, at least at the beginning, by government forces. 8 years later, by 879, the Zanj rebels are within 50 miles of Baghdad itself. 50 miles only of Baghdad. So alarmed was the government in Baghdad. It sent a huge force against them. They were forced back, back, and back towards Basra in the south. With the tide now flowing in their favour, the central government offered terms to the rebels. “If you surrender, it’ll be fine. We even give you a job in our army.” And if you are in an army which is being pushed back, back and back, and if you are defeated in battle, you will be either die in battle or executed afterwards and someone’s offering you, offering you a job if you surrender. And because slaves don’t have, they don’t have anything that unites them. And that said was the same with Spartacus as slave if you remember. They fall out of love with their leadership. Many surrendered. And so the forces available to Ali, who is the now virtually the sole leader of it, become less and less. And the government forces become stronger and stronger. In the end, Ali himself is killed. There were various accounts of that. Some say he was only captured. Some say he was captured and killed and later killed, executed.

Others say he was killed in battle. But it doesn’t matter. He disappears from the scene as he had merged from the scene. He’s a beam of light across the horizon from the beginning to the end. The final rebels are defeated in 883, 14 years after it had all begun. You can be analytical about it and say, “If you are going to revolt, then you need to have clear goals.” Well, I suppose we know all about that with the Middle Eastern wars in our lifetimes. To have clear goals, what is it you are intending to achieve? And then what do you do with the aftermath having achieved those goals? I mean, that is a question which is facing both Israel and the wider world today. What do we do? What do we do after victory is secured and what does victory mean? So these are difficult questions, but with slave revolts, they seem never, and that’s why Haiti, which we come to next week, was successful because they knew what they wanted, which was a free country. This is not the same thing at all. This is muddled. Now, I think if you’d asked any of them at the time, what are you hoping to achieve? I’m not sure they could have come up with a reasonable answer, basically. They’re after looting. They’re after killing those people being cruel to them. Now, those in charge were trying to organise themselves with taxation and so on, but in truth, there was no real shared goal. What were the results?

One of results are quite damaging to the Abbasid Caliphate itself. It had suffered from the abandonment of the drainage in south of Basra. It had, therefore, suffered from the lack of agricultural produce from those salt marshes. It had seen the destruction of infrastructure like canals and bridges. It had seen disruptions in food supplies, which had led, as we saw in the case of Basra, to examples awful instances of cannibalism. It didn’t really work. And as for the long-term results, well, they were very little. Some historians have argued that conditions for the slaves improved. Well, if they did, they improved only slightly. I suppose the political damage, the Abbasid Caliphate was the greatest because in order to deal with the slaves, the slave revolt, they had deployed large numbers of troops, leaving many of their provinces open to the rebellion of the provincial governors. A very good example is the whole of Egypt, which they lost control of. Historians today, both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed, Islamic scholars disagree about the consequences. It’s very difficult. The older I become, the more history I read, the more difficult I think it is to identify consequences. When we were at school, do you remember we had causes of the war? There are five causes. Tyler, what are they? One, two, three, four, five. And there were five events in the war. What are they, Tyler?

One, two, three, four, five. And there were five results of the war. One, two, three, four, five. Now, it’s nonsense. You can’t really do it like that. Consequences are difficult things. Are we through the consequences of the abolition of slavery in the United States? Well, no. Are we at the end of controversy over slavery in Britain? No. No, we’re not. And how does it influence us today? Well, in all sorts of extraordinary ways. We live with the consequences of the past, sometimes of the very far past do we live with the consequences of in the present day. Now, that’s a talk for another time. Now I’ve got time, I hope. I’ve got just a few things to say in a PS. I usually have large introductions. Today, I’ve got large number of endings. Of course, Islamic slavery did not die out after the Zanj rebellion. And indeed, as Islam spread, so did slavery spread. So, as Islam spread right across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco, so did slavery. And we here in England and in the part of England I come from, the southwest of England, we suffered from the raids of the Barbary pirates. The Barbary pirates came out of the ports of North Africa, largely Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. And they came to South West England. They also went to Southern Ireland.

They even got as far as Scotland to take English men, women, and children into slavery. In 1625, 1 of the state papers in London read, “The Turks,” we saw all Muslims as Turks. “The Turks are upon our coasts. They take ships only to take the men to make slaves of them. In August 1625, pirates raided Cornwall, capturing 60 men, women, and children, and taking them into slavery. In 1626 at St Keverne in Cornwall was repeatedly attacked and fishing boats out of the ports of Looe, Penzance, and Mousehole and other Cornish ports we are told were boarded and their crews taken capture.” I love the apocryphal story that ill-treated women of the Cornish fishermen when they saw the Barbary pirate boats came, went up onto the quayside and threw their arms open and said, “Welcome, welcome.” I think that is an apocryphal story, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. I come from Bristol. I’ve said that to you many times. There is an island in the Bristol Channel called Lundy Island, a very small island and very popular today for those watching birds and sea mammals and so on. Lundy Island was a base for the pirates from the Barbary Coast. So that they didn’t have to go home, they had somewhere which was a base actually off it, South West England itself, where they could mend the boats and sort of reorganise for further attacks in the next spring before they then finally went home.

We attempted in the 17th century in England to deal with these crises, but we weren’t very successful. And we weren’t successful because we ourselves were in, 17th century, coming up to through the civil war and the Republic of Cornwall, we ourselves are in a mess. In other words, our central government is in a mess. But we set up charities, voluntary. Today, they’d be called NGOs, non-governmental organisations who went out and bought the slaves back from North Africa. Now today, I think both the British and American and other Western governments would be appalled at the idea that you could buy people. We tend not to deal with people that have taken our own people, but in the 17th century, we had NGOs that sent people out with wads of cash to buy their slaves back. But obviously, it wasn’t ever going to be entirely successful. Cromwell decreed that any slaves that were captured, sorry, any slave bers that were captured would be taken to Bristol and drowned. I’m not at all sure anyone was actually drowned. In 1673, we sent a royal naval squadron to deal with the issue. But it wasn’t until the 19th century and in fact, the Americans post the abolition of slavery who finally put an end to the Barbary pirates. But slavery didn’t cease in the 19th century, in the Arab world. It didn’t cease until modern times. I mentioned slavery in Zanzibar where the British brought pressure on the Zanzibar government and slavery was abolished in 1909.

In 1922, Morocco closed its slave markets. Turkey abolished slavery at the end of the Ottoman Empire when the new state of Turkey was formed in 1924. Iran and Jordan, under British pressure, abolished slavery in 1929. Bahrain, again, most of these are under British pressure. Bahrain abolished slavery in 1937, Kuwait in 1949, Qatar in 1952, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, Oman in 1970, and the very last Islamic State to abolish slavery was Mauritania in West Africa as late as 1981. So it’s all finished now? No, it hasn’t because we now have modern slavery or what is sometimes called neo-slavery. An estimate by international organisations say the number of people who today across the world are in slavery are something like 40 to 50 million. Again, we haven’t got precise figures. And the problem with this is there’s no agreement on what the definition of modern slavery is about. You remember all the fuss with the international football tournament in Qatar and all those who were brought there virtually as slaves to work on the construction of the stadia. The American professor Kevin Bales, who co-founded the NGO Free the Slaves has said that modern slavery occurs when a person is under the control of another person who applies violence and force to maintain that control. And the goal of that control is exploitation. That’s about as good a definition as you will get. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962. Well, so it did, but in 2005, the US State Department published the following account. “Saudi Arabia is a destination for men and women from South and East Asia and East Africa. Traffic for the purpose of labour exploitation and for children from Yemen, Afghanistan, and Africa, trafficking for forced begging.

Hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers from India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Srilanka, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Kenya migrate voluntarily to Saudi Arabia. Some fall into conditions of involuntary servitude, suffering from physical and sexual abuse, non-payment or delayed payment wages, the withholding of travel documents, restrictions on their freedom of movement, and non-consensual contract alterations. The government of Saudi Arabia does not comply with the minimum standards of the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.” And that position largely remains in 2024. That was the American State Departments. Now, I promise one last thing. Sexual relations in the Middle East from the earliest of times in the 9th century or earlier, right up to the present day between Arab masters and African slaves led to people being children being born of mixed race. They are now called, and their descendants are called Afro-Iraqis. They have integrated into Arab society in as much as they speak Arabic and have become Muslim in the main. There are some who refuse to do so. There is estimated to be half a million to one and a half million such Afro-Iraqis living today. And they claim that they are discriminated against. And as I mentioned the phrase Black Africans, these are called abeed in Arabic, A-B-E-E-D, literally slaves.

Will we ever see the end of slavery? I can’t answer that. What I do know is we will never see the end of the exploitation of human beings by other human beings for their own gratification. I’ll leave it at that. Next week, a very different story, the Haiti Rebellion, the successful rebellion, but the bloodshed was enormous and the outcome as we look at Haiti today, not good. So I may have some questions. I may hopefully have some comments. Let’s see.

Q&A and Comments:

Alfred. “I’m not completely sure,” says Alfred, “of the chronological direction of evolution, but in connection with Slavs and Italians, not for the Latin word service and its many are derivatives like servitude may have a link to Serbia and Serbs.” I don’t know who this is. It’s described as

S’s iPad. “So the British stopped saving Zanzibar but perpetuated slavery in the US and colonies.” Hang on. No. No, no, no. I’m talking about the 20th century when we stopped saving Zanzibar. Slavery existed in the 18th century, and the US government continued it. And remember that the British abolished slavery across all their colonies before Americans abolished slavery in their own country. No, no, no. Let’s be quite clear.

Q: Shelly, “Under Islam, could you have a Muslim slave?”

A: Yes, you could.

Q: “Did a Muslim slave get better treatment?”

A: Actually, no. Interestingly, they did not.

Q: “Did Islam forcibly convert their slaves?”

A: I don’t think forcibly. No. In the same way that maybe you can say that in the southern states, slaves weren’t forcibly converted to Christianity.

Simon Freeman, “I knew a lawyer in the seventies who’d been in the British Navy before he became a lawyer. He spent time on anti-slavery patrols off the African coast in the 1960s. Several times, they were aware that a suspicious ship had thrown their cargo of slaves overboard, still chained together as the Navy couldn’t arrest the slavers.” A

nd as Rita says, “Horror.” And Simon adds, “This happened more than once.” That’s exactly why we don’t know the number of slaves taken from Africa to be transported to the Americas because a number of them were simply thrown overboard en route. Many of them dying, of course, on the ships through disease, lack of food, lack of air, and were just simply thrown overboard. We had no idea.

Sheila, “I’m so looking forward to the talk. In 1987, I visited family in Jerusalem in the summer. My mother was visiting from Cape Town. My new Israeli nephew had been born. The Society Protection Nature organised right walks in,” sorry, “The Society for the Protection of Nature organised night walks,” sorry, my eyesight was giving out. “Night walks in Mordechai and climb up the Mount of Temptation.” I think it means mount. “Then came the downhill trek. My mother and other older people were lagging behind. I stayed with them, not really knowing where to go, but reassuring them we’d just go down to a road, wait. On the way down, we came across a group of people, children on platforms outside, cooler, and tents. They were definitely of African appearance, spoke Arabic and Hebrew. I was able to ask if a group had gone past, which direction they had gone in, and they pointed to a path. This led to a spring. When we arrived, I asked the guide if he knew he had, I asked the guide if he knew about the people we had passed and he said there were many groups descended from African slaves brought by the Saudi royal family.

Carrie says, "You say we shouldn’t judge attitudes, actions to the past by today’s standards. And how in the 18th/19th century, we’ll not always have been in saving people in the same way as we do now, but there were always people at the time, in the 18th/19th century who knew it was evil and said so.” And it was that view, absolute right, Carrie. It was that view of such people that had gradually, I can only refer, well, we can refer to the States as well as to Britain. It’s those people whose views eventually succeed in changing society’s attitudes as a whole. In Britain, the Quakers were a major part of that argument, but in a very important part of the story of Britain is that women played a huge part in the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade. Rita, thanks.

Q: “Last week,” say Shelly, “you said the states might have been able to escape to go and be free if they went over the elk. Was there any way of placing the Zanj rebellion that the stage could have gone?”

A: No. No, there wasn’t. I don’t think, excuse me. I don’t think there was ever any attempt to get back to Africa. That’s a very good point. But it underlines my point that they didn’t really have an end game. Thank you, Sharon. And thanks, S.

Sheila, “Arab slave traders took Islam to the Far East. Indonesia is the most populist Muslim country in the world. The Dutch took slaves from Sumatra in the late 17th century. 19th century took slaves to Cape Town after the freeing of the slaves in 1834. The community, being Muslim, largely maintained their identity. And today’s Cape Malay community are their descendants.

Monty, "On the wine farms in the Cape in South Africa, there were salt bells.” I’m not sure what that, I don’t know what that means. Slave, oh, sorry, Monty. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it’s the redhead thing, putting in a word you didn’t mean. There were slave bells. Bells because they wore bells so that if they escaped, you could hear the bell. Thank you, Rita.

Carrie, “9,000 Nepalese, Indian, Palestinian, Indonesian, other workers died while building infrastructure to the World Cup.” Yes, exactly.

Alfred said, “I would point lockdown as to numerous articles published in the Washington Post regarding quasi-slaves employed at residences of Arabic world diplomats in the Washington area.” Same here, Alfred in Britain. Exactly the same in London. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Susan. And I nearly read that. Thank you very much for your kind comment.

Thank you those of you who joined me. I guess from some of the replies that you did enjoy it and found it different. Next week’s history is Haiti, which a lot of you will know more about. And the final week is about American slavery in the Turner Rebellion, which I guess a huge number of you will know about. But I thought it was interesting to do something that wasn’t European, that wasn’t American and made us focus on a different issue, which brings us up to modern slavery. So thank you ever so much listening, and I look forward to seeing you. Now I can confidently say same time, same place next week. Monday at 5:00. 5:00 my time. Thanks very much for listening.