Book review: Mathew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain,eds.,Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History

Concubinage and female slavery form a theme to which much attention is now being directed in view of the emphasis being increasingly placed on women’s history. In 2013 the Harvard University Press published an almost similar work to the one here reviewed focused on gender and social change in China. Another work of the same genre that focused on Africa and the Indian Ocean was Women and Slavery, edited by G. Campbell, S. Miers and J.C. Miller, published in 2007 by the Ohio University Press. And now, we have an edited volume dedicated to women’s bondage and exploitation within the Islamic civilization.

The present volume comprises fifteen chapters, besides an Introduction and an Epilogue. The tenor of the entire volume is set by the detailed and exhaustive Introduction by the first editor, Mathew S. Gordon, while there is an adequate summing up of the contents in the Epilogue by the second editor Katheryn H. Hain. In his introduction, Gordon deals with the entire theme of the role of female slaves, courtesans and concubines in private and courtly settings in the Islamic world. The subsequent chapters range in their themes from the Abbasids to the Timurids. According to the editors, the chapters aim at connecting the early, formative period (seventh to tenth centuries) to the later Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal eras (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) and regions extending from Islamic Spain and North Africa across Egypt and the Levant to Iran and Central Asia. However, the present reviewer failed to find anything much in the volume beyond the 14th century, with almost no reference to the vast and most important Timurid region, viz. the Mughal Empire. The only reference to the Indian subcontinent is made in Chapter 8, which deals with Ibn Battuta’s women slaves. But even in this otherwise admirable chapter, most of the information is limited to territories either outside India or on its periphery. What it concentrates on is Ibn Battuta’s own character as a serial slave owner and master of numerous concubines. One feels for his women slaves (including one whom he refused to return to her husband) for their travails during his journeys and shipwrecks on and off India’s western coast. At least three chapters (Chapters 2, 3 and 14) deal with the Abbasids, one with the Safavids and two with the Ottomans. Andalusia and some other regions are also covered in other chapters, but, as we have already noted, not India, where in sheer numbers enslaved women were most numerous and even, perhaps, most exploited. We have just to read Amir Khusrau or Isami (fourteenth century) to feel for them.

The complaint having been made, there is no doubt that there is much in this volume to excite interest. Chapter eleven deals with Hagar and Mariya, as early Islamic models of slave motherhood. Elizabeth Urban, the author of this chapter, traces in detail how these two women are represented in the Islamic tradition in order to understand more fully the purpose they serve (and do not serve) in the historical accounts. Both these women were slaves and bore children to the prophets, Abraham and Muhammad. The author, after listing the doubts regarding the authenticity of the stories surrounding Mariya, the mother of Prophet Muhammad’s only son, Ibrahim, emphasises her importance in the 8th century for her story could be used to bolster the view that sons born to slave women could still succeed to the office of caliphate.

Another interesting chapter is the one (Chapter 12) dealing with mothers of the Shi‘ite Imams. Michael Dann points out that the successor to the 11th Shi‘i Imam, Imam Hasan al-Askari, was born of a concubine. Even Imam Zaynul Abedin, the fourth Imam, was born to a concubine of Imam Husain, Shahr Bāno. The chapter also discusses the position of concubines under Umayyids and early Abbasids. He concludes that the position of the concubine as mother to an Imam was much superior to her position as a mother of an Imam-to-be, which was of abject dependence.

From these essays, one learns of various roles which female slaves and concubines could aspire to. Talented women amongst them could be educated. In fact, we find Ibn Battuta hankering after an educated slave girl who was also being coveted by some others. These concubines and slave girls could be accomplished in fine arts like music, art and literary performance. But their primary role remained that of sexual partners dependent on the whims of their masters. This, of course, does not mean that the vast majority of women slaves were not put to harsh tasks of labour, besides being sexually exploited.

The Epilogue by Katheryn A. Hain sums up the information given in the various chapters and lays emphasis on avenues of social mobility that were yet available to women slaves. A stream of foreign slave women of various ethnicities seemed to flood Muslim cities. One of the obvious conclusions drawn is that the demand of these slave girls and concubines came not only from the rulers and the rich but also from such men as could not afford marriage.

The volume helps us understand many of the issues related to slavery among women. One of the drawbacks of the work is, perhaps, its non-thematic and non-chronological approach to the topic. Instead of the way that chapters have been visualised, a chronological order would have brought out the changing attitudes and social mores in a much better fashion. In the present set-up, one just jumps from one geographical location to another. Any perception of changing values and mores is somewhere lost in the way the narrative is organised.

One last comment: Slavery and concubinage were evil, oppressive institutions; and some exceptional positions secured by individual women cannot accord these institutions any legitimacy, under any circumstances. This learned volume, by the exceptions it examines, merely proves the rule.