The Slave Girl's Effect on the Arab Woman

A certain physician said: “Before I learned medicine I used to wonder how man dies; and when I had learned medicine I began to wonder how this man manages to live.”

I recalled this saying while thinking of the Arab woman in that far-flung state, reaching into every quarter of the earth, over whose possessions the sun never set — the state of which Harun al-Rashid said, addressing the cloud: “Go and rain where you will; your tribute will still come to me.”

Yes, I thought of this state, so short-lived among the lifespans of states — it rose swiftly and vanished more swiftly than it rose — and I thought of the woman within it, and I said that one may well wonder how she recorded for herself no glory: not cultural, not political, not social, not even religious. Yet no sooner does one look into history than one says: the wonder is not in this result; the wonder would be if the result were other than it is. For how could woman attain glory in a state of that condition — and how could a state endure when woman within it was in that condition?

There is no doubt that Islam raised woman's condition above what it had been in the Jahiliyya: it gave her the right to own, made her an heir, and restored to her rights proportionate to her duties: “And they have rights like those over them, according to what is equitable.” But this interval of fairness did not last long; fairness melted away before it could take firm hold on souls, in the flood of victory, the intoxication of fame, and the ease of new-made wealth. Woman was struck in the dearest of her sanctities, and by that blow the Arab nation was dealt the fatal stroke.

Slavery was no Arab or Islamic innovation. All the ancient states knew the institution of slavery; it was a direct result of people's view of power in those ages — the strong had a natural right to enslave the weak. The feudal system, still standing in some parts of the earth, is but a surviving remnant of this slavery.

Islam urged the believers to manumission and made “the freeing of a neck” one of the ways by which man draws near to his Lord, as he draws near by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The Prophet gave the believers the good example: he freed his slave Bilal and treated him with a kindness that became proverbial for gentleness and equality. Yet in spite of these lofty teachings, and of the humane teachings of the Christian religion before them, slavery remained a prevailing social institution throughout the world, in all its religions and its states, down to modern times.

Slavery in the other states, however, was very different from what it was in Islam. Roman law, for instance, did not raise the slave or his offspring to the rank of free citizens until at least two generations after manumission — that is, after the grandchildren had forgotten that their grandfathers had been slaves or non-Romans, and had, in that stretch of time, been schooled in practicing the calling of the Roman citizen, so that no danger to the Roman state remained from the foreign element.

The teachings Islam derived, on the other hand, bound the manumitted slave by no restriction of this kind: it sufficed that the slave be freed for him to become free, with the same full rights as anyone else. And the view with which some Arabs regarded the mawali was relative, confined to one class of Arab circles boastful of their Arabness — a view that could deprive the mawali of no single right. If they were barred from holding judgeships in the early days of the Umayyad state, that bar was never a registered law, but a mentality that held sway for a time over the Umayyads because of the intensity of their Arab clannishness, and it soon vanished in the last days of their rule.

Yet slavery, in spite of these aspects, would not have constituted a swift danger to the Arab state, but for the danger that struck the Arab woman through concubinage, which was made a lawful institution for the man. Concubinage is the man's right of enjoyment “by what the right hand possesses” — that is, of the slave girls his hand owned; and “what the right hand possesses” made woman lawful to the man, married or unmarried. From this it followed that the Arab woman was struck by another Jahiliyya, which threatened her being in a harsher form. For the first Jahiliyya, if it did not bind the man to a single marriage, still safeguarded woman by a kind of excessive concern with lineage on both branches, the mother's branch and the father's together: the free life was reserved solely for the man nobly born on both his father's and his mother's side, and in the story of Antara we have shining proof of this truth.

In Islam, however, and above all at the state's zenith, the matter slackened, and lineage on the mother's side came to be neither heeded nor cared for. This laxity was the wrecker's pick in the fabric of the Arab state, and its downfall was hastened by way of the peoples to whom the sons of bondwomen and slave girls belonged. The influence of the Turks in the Abbasid state was nothing but the result of al-Mu'tasim's leaning toward his mother, who was a Turk. And when we know that slave girls were within any man's reach — because of their great numbers, owing to the many wars and numerous conquests (for prisoners of war fell inevitably into slavery) and owing to the slave trade, which had become a profitable commerce — yes, when we know the enormous number of slave girls, at times exceeding several thousand, that a single man could obtain, we know what absolute freedom he enjoyed in choosing his concubines. And good choosing was smooth and easy, especially as the slave dealers had become widely experienced in their trade, offering only such girls as would yield them ample profit: possessors of ravishing beauty, burning intelligence, sound taste, and a broad culture versed in the varieties of the fine arts, above all song.

The dealers and the masters grew accustomed to spending great sums upon slave girls of perfect attributes, to educate them to the highest culture of every kind, above all in the arts and polite letters. No wonder, then, that the slave girl — such being her attributes — should compete with the free woman for her position and for her husband's heart, armed with the fullest armor of culture, delicacy, refinement, coquetry, and charm for the conquest of that heart. Is it any wonder if the slave girl's scale outweighed the free woman's in this arena? Are the unarmed man and the man bristling with weapons ever equals on the field of battle?

The exorbitant sums that were spent on the slave girl's education are decisive proof that man desires woman only when she is cultured, understanding him and keeping pace with him in his life; that he needs to feel her near him in society, sharing his joys and his sorrows, his play and his earnest; and that without her, life holds no savor for him. Had the institution of slave girls not been, matters standing thus, within his reach, necessity — the mother of invention — would have shown him the duty of teaching and educating the free woman to fit her for this role; but since the slave girls and concubines existed, this feeling remained faint.

And when we know that these slave girls were of different races, we know that the concubines represented the most perfect traits and qualities of each of those races. In their company, taken all together, the man found the dearest bodily pleasure he yearned for and the loftiest intellectual delight he longed after. He found, for instance, in the Indian girl, meekness, gentleness of manner, calm, and skill in tending the child; in the Sindi, the slender waist and the long hair; in the Berber girl, the blind obedience that tickled his pride, together with sweetness of character and pliancy of temper. He delighted in the whiteness of the Turkish girl's skin, in the softness of hair and blueness of eyes of the Greek girl, and he took comfort in the Sudanese girl's gleaming teeth. Thus the man hurried forward what he had been promised in the hereafter: he wanted a paradise on earth whose houris he might enjoy — and so came the institution of the slave girls.

Poor Arab woman, such being her state! She felt her standing sink in the man's heart, and she rose up to fight the slave girls to regain that standing; and when she lacked the weapons with which those women were armed, she resorted to other weapons — intrigue, dissembling, conspiracy, and hypocrisy — until, with the generations, these vices became a token by which the Arab woman was known. If in Arab society one said “woman,” they answered: she is the devil and temptation; she is lying and hypocrisy; she is dissimulation and cunning.

Nor did the danger of concubinage stop at this limit; it passed beyond it to the condition of the state. For concubines multiplied of another sort — a dangerous sort — the sort of the “umm al-walad”: that is, if the master got a child by his concubine and attached the child to his lineage, the child acquired the same rights as his brothers by the lawful wife. Likewise the current of marrying bondwomen instead of free women swelled, for many reasons: among them the ease of the dowry, and the abundance, variety, and strangeness of beauty compared with what the Arab was used to in his surroundings; and among them the primary reason to which al-Jahiz pointed when he said: “Some of those who have argued the cause why most slave girls stand higher in a man's favor than most high-dowered free women have said: before a man owns the slave girl he has examined everything about her, and he proceeds to buy her only after she has met with his approval; whereas about the free woman's beauty only women are consulted — and women see nothing, little or much, of women's beauty, of men's needs, or of what suits them; and men are the better judges of women...”

Among the Arabs' traditional sayings on this subject: “The slave girl is bought by the eye and returned for a defect, while the free woman is a shackle on the neck of him to whom she passes,” and “Strange, that a man who has known slave girls should venture upon free women!”

The harm of this second danger was not confined to the Arab woman; it passed beyond her, as I have said, to the state. For the state — in which the half-breeds multiplied (the hajin being he whose father is Arab and whose mother is foreign) and which teemed with many sons of bondwomen — became exposed to disintegration and division; for it was natural that these should band together, whatever the races of their mothers, to form a strong front against the sons of free women. The books of history and of literature are full of this struggle, which occupied the last days of Umayyad rule and was an essential cause of the fall of the Umayyad state, and which kept pace with the Abbasid state throughout its life: at one moment raging until it produced violent upheavals and brought down disasters, at another calming down and taking peaceful forms built upon intrigue and conspiracies — making the state a stage for affairs that did it no honor, either much or little.

And what is truly regrettable is that strength was mostly on the side of the half-breeds. The hajin, being the son of parents of two different races, was stronger of body, keener of intelligence, and more luminous of insight than the son of two Arabs, whose parents were so often the children of a paternal uncle or a maternal uncle, a paternal aunt or a maternal aunt. Their success in life helped to swell the Arab mother's rancor against them, and her scheming and her spite grew fiercer; and if she was a woman of enterprise, she turned the world upside down and organized parties to back her against the other current — as was the case with Zubayda, mother of al-Amin. She felt always that her husband, al-Rashid, preferred al-Ma'mun — the son of a Persian bondwoman — to her own son, and she reproached him for it. Despite the multitude of his concubines she held a high place with him, and he wished to answer her with shining proof: he seated her at his side, soothed her feelings, and sent that very hour a slave to each of al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, to say to each privately: “What will you give me when you become caliph?” The slave came back with the answers while al-Rashid and Zubayda were still in her sitting room. Al-Amin's answer was: “When I become caliph I shall grant you fiefs” (that is, bestow lands on you) “and give to you” (bestow money on you). But al-Ma'mun answered by striking the slave with a brass inkstand that lay before him, saying: “You ask me what I shall give you on the day the Commander of the Faithful, the caliph of the Lord of the Worlds, dies — may we all be made his ransom!....”

★

This brief glimpse shows us woman's evil condition in a state that reached the summit of civilization in its age, just as it shows us that state's inability to preserve what it had attained — so that its life, as the lives of states go, was shorter than the life of a shadow.
Will this truth, then, be a lesson to the Arabs in their modern renaissance, so that they hold sacred woman's important role within it, and restore to her her confidence in herself — so that she understands that she is to be cultured and educated, and the field of progress is opened before her, in her capacity as mother of the new generation upon whom their renaissance rests, and not in her capacity as an instrument of amusement, song, and merriment, like that slave girl, the umm al-walad?