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In medieval Arabic chronicles, the ethnicity of qiyān (enslaved entertainers) is often unstated unless the woman becomes an umm walad (mother of an owner's child), at which point it still typically becomes relevant only if she has a powerful son....
...Cristina de la Puente discusses this missing information in her essay "The Ethnic Origins of Female Slaves in al-Andalus;" Elizabeth Urban's "Conquered Populations" has similar, earlier findings. Popular literature, though, has other ideas about the import of qiyān origins...
...In popular works, the diversity of a court's slaves is often a remark on the court's affluence, urbanity, and the extent of its territorial and trading jurisdictions. In Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma, for example, the treasury of 'Abd al-Malik b. Marwan is filled with luxury goods...
...and enslaved people are counted among them, so we're told that on campaign, the rulers bring along "Ethiopian and Nubian and Egyptian (Qibtiyyat) and Christian (Nasraniyyat) and Georgian" slave girls, along with slave-soldiers and servants (khadam wa-ghilmān) who are...
..."Slavic, Daylamite, Arab, and Persian ('Ajam)," the laundry list also features all the tents, palanquins, camels, horses, exotic cats, banners/standards, instruments, and other materiel with which the court appoints a favorite general before sending him on campaign...
...A satirical version of this "diverse" tableau occurs in some versions of Alf Layla wa-Layla in the tale of Ma'mun, the Yemeni and the six slave girls (jawārī), all of whom are court entertainers in a Yemeni noble's household and have a different look...
...One is white, one is dark-skinned, one fat, one skinny, one pale, and one black, and each woman vaunts her specific form of beauty over that of her peers in a tongue-in-cheek poetic salon (more about this story here: https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/ ...
...So popular literature is imagining these courts' modes of consumption as multifaceted--even to the point of absurdity--and physical and ethnic human difference plays a role in that...
...This is why I am very careful when using the word "cosmopolitan" in my work to describe Islamic courts and cities. As Muhsin al-Musawi notes of the world of Alf Layla wa-Layla, "cosmopolitanism" is a utopian way of describing societies...
...that incorporated difference in stratified ways:
"The city [of Baghdad] brought people together, accumulated merchandise from all over the globe, and made countless achievements in science, architecture, and culture. However, along with this enormous growth, ...
"The city [of Baghdad] brought people together, accumulated merchandise from all over the globe, and made countless achievements in science, architecture, and culture. However, along with this enormous growth, ...
...the assimilated communities also had to struggle for recognition. Even in the efflorescent cosmopolitan atmosphere, there remained hierarchical and racial gradations and prejudices."
Popular imaginings of elite enslaved people are just one esp. vivid example of this.
Popular imaginings of elite enslaved people are just one esp. vivid example of this.
Bibliography:
Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2017.
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Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2017.
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Urban, Elizabeth. Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves and the Sons of Slave Mothers. United Kingdom, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
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Musawi, Muhsin Jasim. The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights. Columbia University Press, 2009.
...And, for more on how to teach the "cosmopolitan" Abbasid world in popular sources, stay tuned for a forthcoming publication by @afzaque and myself in the MLA's volume on global medieval studies, titled "Teaching the Worlds of the Thousand and One Nights."
