In the
history of slavery in the Muslim world, domestic servitude was one of the driving forces behind the slave trade. The ideal of
Islamic sex segregation made it difficult for free Muslim women to work as servants, at the same time, the sex segregation made it difficult for male servants to access the harem women's quarter of the house, resulting in difficulty in Muslim women to have access to domestic servants. This dilemma resulted in the Muslim world using slaves for domestic servants rather than free servants. By
Islamic law, slaves owned by Muslims were to be foreign non-Muslims (
kafirs) who were by definition legitimate targets for enslavement, since the Muslim world of
dar al-islam was by definition at war with the non-Muslim world of
dar al-harb. Female slaves were thus not subjected to the same Islamic customs. It also made it possible for male slaves to be made eunuchs. This solved both the dilemma of female servants being able to work in the household of a family as well as for a male servant to enter the women's quarter of a home. The slave trade to the Muslim world prioritized women and children, though men were also trafficked. In bigger households there were typically a mix of male and female house slaves.
Male house slaves Male domestic slaves were used for gardening, stable hands, carpenters, blacksmiths and for a number of craftsmanships and household repair work. Male domestic slaves were also typically used for gardening work, such as the commonly cultivated
palm trees and
date trees that was often cultivates by private households in the gardens. Male domestic slaves served the male members of the family in the
Majlis in the male quarters of the house, made and served coffee to male guests in the Majlis, accompanied their masters outside of the house as bodyguards. Male domestic slaves were typically used as messengers and errands to the outside world for both men and women of the family, and referred to as
Mtareesh (
Mitrash) eller
Merassil (
Mersal), "messengers"; they acted as links between households, families and tribes, bringing messengers of weddings, birth, sickness, death and invitations between families, gifts and trade goods between households. Male domestic slaves in the Muslim world were often eunuchs. Being eunuchs, they could move freely between both the male and women's quarter of the house and could be used for a number of different tasks, which made them very valuable slaves in the Muslim world. The custom of using eunuchs as servants for women inside the Islamic harems had a preceding example in the life of
Muhammad himself, who used the eunuch Mabur as a servant in the house of his own
slave concubine Maria al-Qibtiyya; both of them slaves from Egypt.
Female house slaves In the Islamic world, female slaves were normally purchased for one of two reasons: for the purpose of
sexual slavery as
concubines or as domestic servants, and used for service in the
harems. Female slaves used for sexual services, concubines, were referred to by a number of different terms such as
surriya or
jariya. In Islamic custom, the principle that legitimized the right to sexual intercourse was the term of the man's ownership of the woman's sexual organs: which within marriage was represented by a marriage contract, and outside of marriage by the ownership of a slave girl. Female slaves could be bought by a man for sex, or for his wife as a domestic servant, or they could be directly bought by a woman, which gave them different rights. A Muslim man was by Islamic law allowed to have sexual intercourse with a female slave whom he owned, though not with a slave owned by his wife. In the era of
slavery in al-Andalus, female slaves were physically examined by matrons employed by the muntashib and categorized as 'distinguished', which meant they were deemed suitable to be sold for sexual slavery or as entertainers; or as 'gross', which meant they were classified as suited only to be sold as house slaves for household work. Female domestic slaves were often slave women who had previously been used as concubines, and who, when they were no longer considered useful as concubines, were now used for domestic labor, serving the slave concubines and wives in the harem of their enslaver. Women domestic slaves were purchased to the harems to the perform chores for the sex segregated women in the harem. Women domestic slaves were used for all sort of household chores normally performed by women, and could also be sent outside of the harem to perform tasks for the harem women in the city outside of the home. Black African women were most commonly used for domestic slave labor in Egypt, the Arab world and the Ottoman Empire. In the Islamic Middle East, African women – trafficked via the
trans-Saharan slave trade, the
Red Sea slave trade and the
Indian Ocean slave trade – were primarily used as domestic house servants and not exclusively for sexual slavery, while white women, trafficked via the
Black Sea slave trade and
Circassian slave trade, where preferred for use as
concubines (sex slaves) or wives, and there was therefore a constant demand for them in the Middle East. The women of the family monitored the work of the domestic slaves, decided what to do with the leftovers of food, and made sure that the slaves performed the Islamic prayers. The household of the Royal Harems were essentially a larger version of the men of other classes. It was normal for Islamic royal dynasties to use slave concubines for procreation. By Islamic law the sexual intercourse between a Muslim man and his female slave was not defined as extramarital sex (
zina), and if the father chose to acknowledge paternity, the child was born free and its mother
umm walad and free upon his death. Because of this, Islamic dynasties often used slave concubines for procreation to avoid in-laws. Royal harems often purchased many slave girls, of which some were selected to become concubines, and the rest were used for domestic service. In the
slavery in the Ottoman Empire such domestic harem slaves were referred to as
odalisque. Female slaves were rarely manumitted unless they were arranged to be married to a Muslim man, since women could not survive on their own in a Muslim society.
Sexual reproduction and "breeding" The customary Islamic sex segregation was, albeit in a lower degree, observed also for the slaves when possible. Female slaves were normally kept away from contact with (non-eunuch) male slaves, unless their enslavers arranged for two slaves to marry each other in order to produce more slaves for their masters. Enslavers sometimes bought women slaves in order to marry them to male slaves to produce slave children; the slave children would commonly be selected to be playmates to the children of the enslaver's family, and then became the personal slave servant of the child when they became adult.
Legacy Most of the Middle East were included in the Ottoman Empire. When the
slavery in the Ottoman Empire were nominally abolished by the
Kanunname of 1889, the former house slaves normally continued to work as nominally free maidservants; their employers could however now fire them instead of selling them on the slave market, creating a class of free servants. After the closure of the slave market
Avret Pazarları in Constantinople by the
Disestablishment of the Istanbul Slave Market, the
Young Turks founded the
Hizmetçi İdaresi as a Servant Institution to assist former female slaves to find employment as domestic workers and maidservants in order to escape prostitution to survive, though the institution is reported to have functioned, in practice, as a slave market. House slaves were used in the Muslim Middle East until the mid 20th-century. Despite the Ottoman anti slavery reforms introduced in the 19th-century, chattel slavery continued to exist in the former Ottoman provinces in the Middle East after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1917–1920: while
slavery in Egypt was phased out after the
ban of the slave trade in 1877–1884, existing slaves were noted as late as 1931;
slavery in Iraq was banned after British pressure in 1924;
slavery in Jordan was ended by the British in 1929;
slavery in Lebanon as well as
slavery in Syria was banned by the French in 1931;
slavery in Palestine still existed under the guise of clientage in 1934;
slavery in Libya still existed in 1930s; and
slavery in Saudi Arabia lasted until it was abolished after pressure from the US in 1962, with
slavery in Yemen being banned between 1962 and 1967. After the abolition of slavery in the Middle East, chattel slavery was succeeded by the
kafala system. In the 21st-century, foreign women are employed in
Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait,
Qatar,
Lebanon,
Singapore,
Hong Kong,
Japan and
United Arab Emirates in large numbers to work as maids or other roles of domestic service, and are often vulnerable to multiple forms of abuse. In Qatar, Asian workers employed via the kafala system were employed as mostly as housemaids and low-skilled workers and in the United Arab Emirates, the labor previously performed by slaves were now performed by poor migrant workers employed under the
Kafala system, which has been compared to slavery. The
Afro-Arabs of the Middle East are sometimes referred to by the term
abeed, which is a pejorative term for slave. Many members of the
Black Palestinian minority are descendants of the former slaves. The African Palestinians who now live in the two compounds near al-Aqsa mosque have called the area home since 1930. They have experienced prejudice, with some Palestinian Arabs referring to them as "slaves" (
abeed) and to their neighbourhood as the "slaves' prison" (
habs al-abeed). ==See also==