Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Zanj Rebellion and the Transition from Plantation to Military Slavery

The Zanj Rebellion and the Transition from Plantation to Military Slavery Slavery is not a fixed condition but a spectrum of unfreedom. The term Islamic slavery has been bandied about for four decades without an adequate definition. At the birth of Islam there were a large number of captives from endemic intertribal warfare, many of them Arabs who were often exchanged or ransomed. When the original Islamic state in Medina expanded to become dynastic Muslim empires that conquered large parts of the Byzantine and Persian empires, the ethical principles in the Quran and the hadiths regarding the treatment of captives were no longer adequate to deal with the new situation. They had to be reduced to enforceable laws by the various sharia schools. The empires inherited the Mesopotamian plains, which required irrigation on a large scale based on massive slave labor. Commercially acquired slaves became the norm, and large concentrations of imported slaves from Africa and elsewhere living under harsh conditions ultimately led to the Zanj Revolution. It threatened even the survival of the Abbasid dynasty, and led to the abandonment of plantation use of slaves. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Duke University Press

The Zanj Rebellion and the Transition from Plantation to Military Slavery

Download PDF
15 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/the-zanj-rebellion-and-the-transition-from-plantation-to-military-xSr66M3RbT

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press
ISSN
1089-201X
eISSN
1548-226X
DOI
10.1215/1089201x-6982029
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Slavery is not a fixed condition but a spectrum of unfreedom. The term Islamic slavery has been bandied about for four decades without an adequate definition. At the birth of Islam there were a large number of captives from endemic intertribal warfare, many of them Arabs who were often exchanged or ransomed. When the original Islamic state in Medina expanded to become dynastic Muslim empires that conquered large parts of the Byzantine and Persian empires, the ethical principles in the Quran and the hadiths regarding the treatment of captives were no longer adequate to deal with the new situation. They had to be reduced to enforceable laws by the various sharia schools. The empires inherited the Mesopotamian plains, which required irrigation on a large scale based on massive slave labor. Commercially acquired slaves became the norm, and large concentrations of imported slaves from Africa and elsewhere living under harsh conditions ultimately led to the Zanj Revolution. It threatened even the survival of the Abbasid dynasty, and led to the abandonment of plantation use of slaves.

Journal

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East – Duke University Press

Published: Aug 1, 2018

There are no references for this article.