Background

The study of slavery in Iran has received critical attention as late; however, there is still a dire need for more engagement with race and gender theory.Footnote ⁵ As the most comprehensive study of Iranian slavery to date, Behnaz Mirzai’s book A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran 1800–1929 is deserving of significant comment. In her research, Mirzai argued that slavery in Iran was mild and that racial ideology was less relevant in understanding patterns of enslavement than Iran’s proximity to Persian Gulf trade. Her overall position in A History of Slavery, it seems, denied both the presence of racial ideology in Qajar Iran as well as the stigma of slavery through what promises to be a closer inspection of indigenous circumstances and external factors, namely the policies of the British Empire. In her literature review, Mirzai briefly alluded to the mutual imbrication of blackness and slavery: “Siyah (‘black’) was the most commonly used term by which enslaved Africans were designated in nineteenth-century manuscripts.”Footnote ⁶ The terminology section of her introduction featured a short list of Perso-Arabic terms connoting “slave,” “eunuch,” or “black.” However, as I note throughout this article, her assertion that the words for male slave, kaka and dadeh, were “respectful” contradicts the common use of epithets during this period (noted below). Nor should the words gholām (male slave) and kanīz (female slave) be understood as a kind of “domestic servitude,” without acknowledging the gender and racial inequalities encoded in such terms.Footnote ⁷

Slave nomenclatures, in fact, were invoked in the context of ownership. The historical presence of slaves was recorded in purchase agreements, marriage contracts or inheritance (mehr) documents. Each slave was assigned a price, and they were often moved from household to household based on the fortunes or misfortunes of others. Slave-owners conceived of African bodies primarily as moveable wealth. Moreover, Mirzai’s more general denial about the presence of racism in Iran, as in the claim that “Persian documents generally do not contain reference to racial provenance,”Footnote ⁸ contrast nineteenth-century writers’ regular use of ethnic typologies. Documents frequently classified East Africans as “Bombassees,” “Habeshees,” or “Nubees.”Footnote ⁹ These categories led to raiding villages in regions throughout East Africa to supply the slave market, where individual slaves were given roles according to their collective identity, i.e. if their ethnic group was perceived as intelligent, beautiful, or strong.

The contemporary belief that Iran is a race-blind society is based on the logic that, were racial categories significant in Iran, African slaves would not have risen to high positions: “The fluidity of these terms not only indicates that the identity of enslaved people could be transformed, but that they were not confined to a static position within the system and could, in fact, elevate their statuses.”Footnote ¹⁰ This assertion relies on a belief in slaves’ “social mobility”: i.e. that because some slaves could acquire new roles and degrees of limited access meant that all could do so. Zilfi, on the other hand, refuted this notion: “Slavery may have been of benefit to fortunate individuals … but the notion of systemic neutrality, much less advantage, is insupportable.”Footnote ¹¹

The study of slavery, in addition, lacks a more critical reading of gender. It requires an approach that both confronts the Orientalist tradition of presenting Eastern women as objects needing to be saved by Western modernity, and one that identifies the internal dynamics of power identified by slaves themselves. In the first instance, Mirzai is sensitive to the power imbalance in European representations of slave women when she stated that “the idea that [harem] women were voiceless victims in a misogynist world is utterly a creation of European Orientalists.”Footnote ¹² Similarly, Ehud Toledano reminds us that concubinage “should be put in the context of the generally very sorry state of women in almost all premodern societies.”Footnote ¹³ Keeping in mind the broader comparative context, first-hand reports by female slaves themselves cannot be dismissed. It therefore becomes questionable for Mirzai to replace terms like kanīz with the euphemism “domestic servitude,” or refer to “‘sayfeh’ and ‘jariyah’” as “fluid” terms indicating “the relationship of an enslaved female to her master.”Footnote ¹⁴ If we take Islamic legal discourse only as a starting point, the term “relationship” fails to capture how the master had unrestricted access to her body, since nonconsensual sex or rape was not considered forbidden (zena).Footnote ¹⁵ While we can agree that the tendency in western discourse to reduce women to “voiceless victims” is problematic, slave narratives also remind us how concubinage was a particularly dehumanizing form of “social death” where female slaves had no right to sexual refusal or the choice to have children.Footnote ¹⁶ However complex or empowering we may find their choices, the abuse slavery engendered formally and informally closes the possibility of “a positive side” even while we valorize individual stories.Footnote ¹⁷

Furthermore, Mirzai’s denial of racism throughout her book seems to emanate from presentism, namely the assertion that Iran is a multiethnic nation: “Iranian society was not preoccupied with racial divisions: the experiences of both black and white—enslaved people and free—testifies as much to the vulnerability of as well as opportunities available to all races.”Footnote ¹⁸ She further argued that “blackness” in an Atlantic context “cannot be fit into a Middle East context,” and unlike Atlantic slavery, Iranian slavery was more subtle.Footnote ¹⁹ In no way am I arguing that we should ignore regional divergences or impose universal categories on local histories; however, I object to the way this comparison is used to both advance the claim of Iranian slavery’s “mildness” and exonerate the nation-state from its slaving past. The myth of slavery’s subtlety has been frequently cited by other historians who almost invariably rely on the authority and casual reflections of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century foreign accounts (Sykes, Polak, and Wills, to name a few), less so Qajar sources or the accounts of slaves themselves. Moreover, rarely do we find such assertions grounded in rigorous comparative work. Mirzai’s contention that Iranian slavery was categorically different or milder also rests on the nationalist assertion that racial divisions were imposed by foreigners. In one section, she stated that Arab chiefs alone were responsible “for perpetuating the centuries-long slave trade.”Footnote ²⁰ This emphasis on the “supply-side” of the slave economy emphasizes slavery’s foreign origins by displacing blame onto Arabs.Footnote ²¹ Minoo Moallem and Roshanak Kheshti similarly have shown how a “racialization strategy” in modern Iranian discourse “functioned as a handmaiden to Iran’s modernist project through a historically revisionist insistence upon Iranian origins in the Aryan race.”Footnote ²²

As I argue below, Qajar attitudes about the African Other had social consequences.Footnote ²³ Cultural attitudes produced the demand for male African eunuchs or nannies and were rooted in categories of difference based on race, gender and sex.Footnote ²⁴ Even though Mirzai advanced that “race and color were by no means the only factors influencing slave trading and owning patterns for the simple fact that there were non-black enslaved people in Iran too,” this statement is used ipso facto as a way of dismissing anti-black bias.Footnote ²⁵ While it is beyond the scope of this study to deal with this issue thoroughly here, we can acknowledge that the mere presence of non-African slaves did not preclude different or worse treatment for Africans within the social hierarchy, whether or not that difference was ascribed to skin color, perceived place of origin or religious status. For example, in Zilfi’s work there are quite a few primary sources that describe the particularly low status of sub-Saharan Africans within Middle Eastern slavery who were relegated to more menial work, and how being perceived as “darker-skinned” translated into fewer advantages and difficulties especially for black female slaves.Footnote ²⁶

To begin this analysis, revisionist historians in the past decade have turned their attention to enduring racial myths and attitudes in modernist writings.Footnote ²⁷ Reza Zia-Ebrahimi has shown that writers such as Jalāl al-Dīn Mīrzā, Mīrzā Fathʿalī Ākhūndzādeh, and Mīrzā Āqā Khān Kermānī by the late 1890s theorized an “Iranian nation pitted against its Semitic other,” which he called a “racist endeavor to identify an absentee scapegoat to be reviled.”Footnote ²⁸ Zia-Ebrahimi maintained that reformers invented the modern notion of a pre-Islamic Aryan nation by vilifying Arabs, Turks, and Mongols. However, there is little if any mention of how cultural stereotypes toward people of African descent in Iran—ubiquitous in cultural figures like Hāji Fīrūz featured in an indigenous black minstrel tradition—factors into the rise of nationalism before slavery was banned.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, one historian insisted that “popular and comical characters” like Kākā Siyāh prove that slavery was tolerable since Africans have had some “marginal influence on Iranian culture,” a view that does not take into account the fact that such figures were objects of ridicule and mockery on account of their simplicity or ignorance.Footnote ³⁰ The author also suggested that because “[African slaves] often forgot their own languages and adopted Islam” this was an example of successful “assimilation.”Footnote ³¹

In the following discussion I consider how late Qajar writings framed Africanness and blackness through the lens of domesticity. In Qajar sources we can track the emergence of a public discourse on the African body even before Aryan nationalism was solidified during the Pahlavi period (1925–79). I suggest below that Qajar perceptions of racial otherness structured the labor economy. Not only was the upper-class need for domestic labor a precondition for enslavement, it was incumbent on elites to justify whose bodies were suited for slavery.

In texts written mainly by slave-owners and government officials we can glean elite cultural attitudes pertaining to race and slavery. Qajar writers promoted a general position on the suitability of black bodies to protect and maintain the elite household, which perpetuated the dangerous and lethal practice of castration.Footnote ³² My analysis employs H. Alexander Welcome’s insights on slavery, namely how white society’s “identity-thinking” led to the alienation, oppression and appropriation of the African body.Footnote ³³ Transcending a white–black binary, Welcome’s theory captures how dominant groups produced discourses on racialized bodies. From the vantage point of slavemasters, African slaves were valued according to the usefulness of their bodies to perform work, and in terms of their collective identity.Footnote ³⁴ Not only was African labor available for domestic import, Qajar elites continued the longstanding practice of African eunuchism and concubinage until the twentieth century based on the belief that they were a necessary part of the domestic household.

Narratives of African Corporeality

Various stories and anecdotes highlight how racialized thinking led to the restriction of and control over black bodies. In a report written in 1912, Mahdī Qolī HedāyatFootnote ³⁵ recalled the following story about two rebellious slaves:

The author makes it clear that in leaving the master’s house and joining the army, two former slaves fell into a path of violence and destruction. Hedāyat also demonstrates his ambivalence about the social status of slaves once they lose connection to the domestic sphere, the family, and the master.

Other reports drew similar conclusions about so-called “rebellious” slaves. In one example, Nāser al-Dīn Shāh’s chief court eunuch, Hājī Mobārak, committed murder during an encampment en route to Tehran:

According to the king’s travelogue Safarʹhā-ye Nāser al-Dīn Shāh beh Qom, Hājī Mobārak grew progressively angrier and fatally stabbed Yahyā Khān in the forehead, and threatened anyone who went for a doctor or medicine that they would meet the same fate. Pāshā Khān reportedly had no other choice than to call upon the king resting in his tent in order to stop the violence of someone he cursed as “this black Zanzibarian.”Footnote ³⁹ It should be noted that the Deh Khodā lexicographical dictionary defined barzangī as a pejorative term referring to Africans—“Zanzibarian: of very tall stature, long-mustache, ill-mannered, ignorant, and inclined towards lowly desires [lust].” Nāser al-Dīn Shāh ordered Hājī Mobārak to be executed. Despite having achieved such a high position as a slave at the royal court, he was not spared.

Ḥājī Mobārak’s story epitomized larger concerns over the stability of male slaves, even if the king’s scribe invoked this anecdote to illustrate the shah’s ability to deliver justice. Often when eunuchs are mentioned outside of the domestic context they are typically described as perpetrators, fugitives, or victims of violence. In an account involving an allegedly drunk and violent black slave written in 1889, the author claimed that a slave waiting in an alleyway attacked the chief physician of a local notable and stabbed him in the chest. The author provided no reason for the murder.Footnote ⁴⁰ One Qajar writer also described a harrowing account of a fifteen-year-old black slave who was accused of sodomizing a four-year-old boy. Relatives of the boy petitioned the chamberlain to punish him, and so he decided that the authorities should beat him, cut off his ear, tie him up and parade his mutilated body throughout the bazaar. This story of a black slave transgressing sexual norms seems to have been included for its shock value rather than its commonness.Footnote ⁴¹

Qajar grandees also recounted stories of slave women, breaking norms by escaping captivity. According to ʿAyn al-Salṭaneh, it was too common for blacks to escape, and he stated that they had “no shame.”Footnote ⁴² He recounted how the black female slave of Golīn Khānūm fled her home during the month of Ramadan. After days of investigation they discovered that she had found refuge at the dwelling of a local mujtahid, Sayyed ʿAbd Allāh, who refused to return the slave and her four-year-old son, Bashīr. Since homes of the ʿulamā were legal sanctuaries, he refused to answer their repeated demands. When the family threatened to petition the shah he eventually complied and returned her to the authorities, though he gave up her son reluctantly after the boy was discovered.Footnote ⁴³ In addition, other stories of people fleeing slavery show how the ʿulamā provided cover for fugitives. In 1901 a eunuch who was highly coveted by a local notable due to his work ethic fled his attempted abduction, and together with the master and family, sought sanctuary at a local religious shrine.Footnote ⁴⁴

These stories suggest how Qajar narratives tend to present runaway slaves as shirking their “rightful” place, and fleeing slavery as a breach of the rule of law or custom. Within the framework of domesticity, eunuchs were tender caregivers and loyal servants, but when they fled, they were criticized for being troublesome and angry men who disrupted a legitimate system. In addition, seemingly benign physical descriptions of slaves underscored their potential threat. Slaves were presented in foreboding, masculine terms; writers used adjectives such as “thick-necked,” “brutish,” “oafish,” and “ferocious-looking” (mahīb) to describe black slaves.Footnote ⁴⁵ In terms of dress, slaves were described wearing “masculine clothes” (lebās-i mardāneh). Sometimes descriptions of dress had a neutral connotation, however, the particular language reflected a normative way of describing slave corporeality where black bodies were essentialized (i.e. the figure of the “Zanzibarian”).

Qajar-era writers often assigned masculine attributes to slaves, in contrast to European sources that invariably feminized eunuchs. Furthermore, in the context of entertainment, elite views of black performers were more gender-fluid. In one account, a famous black female entertainer named Hājī Qadam Shād was celebrated for wearing “unconventionally” masculine attire (kot va shalvār-e mardāneh) under a chador. She was said to brilliantly imitate regional accentsFootnote ⁴⁶ and don a wide variety of ethnic attire—Kurdish, Arab, Shirazi, Afghani, Kabuli and the like. Not only were gender and ethnic identities open in the context of theater and performance, black slaves were said to have mingled socially with greater ease. In one recollection, a man travelling in Russian Samarqand reported seeing a black slave and a white woman dancing: “this black and white couple were very beautiful and danced well.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Though the realm of entertainment featured multiple gender performativities, outside of this realm there were concerns over racial transgression. One report discussed how a woman sitting on a bench at a pharmacy warned a dapper young man—a dandy dressed head to toe in white—not to sit next to her to avoid being arrested by police. She chides him saying, “Look, I am black. This is not Europe. A stylish man shouldn’t be sitting next to a black woman.”Footnote ⁴⁸ When a man consorted with a black woman freely in public it stirred anxieties, especially since “the enslaved Black female body was a location of both chaos and desire.”Footnote ⁴⁹As this story suggests, though patterns of enslavement differed from an apartheid or Jim Crow notion of a “color line,” the freedom of movement of black women was curtailed due to what may be interpreted as their sexual power.

In sum, whereas racial constructions in Atlantic slavery differed from a geographical/religious designation of difference, Qajar slavery held similar conceptions of “blackness” as “otherness” that functioned to preserve and maintain social hierarchies. Qajar writers were regularly compelled to identify African slaves according to their blackness: as “black” (siyāh), “black-skinned,” or explicitly as black slaves (kākā siyāh), which points to how racial identification was an important marker of social position. Moreover, racial epithets signifying a slave’s Africanness—i.e. as a “Zanzibarian” or barzangi—perpetuated the belief about their exogenous origins and lower social status of slaves.

Qajar reports and memoirs frequently employed prejudicial language as minor and major justifications for African enslavement, pointing to a cultural milieu where African slaves were regarded as outsiders brought to Iran. Perhaps an interesting exception lies in a religious text written by ʿAbd Allāh Mostowfī. In a memoir entitled Sharh-e Zendagānī-ye Man Mostowfī recounted a story he read about man who questioned his wife’s faithfulness based on the skin color and hair “tangled like wool” of their newborn child:

This religious text credits the Prophet Muhammad with acknowledging African ancestry, where a husband was persuaded to give his wife the benefit of the doubt. In lieu of the analysis I have provided, this story is remarkable for the way it encouraged the reader to subvert racial categories.

As a whole, African slavery was justified based on material and religious rationales. A text written in 1901 by the Iranian foreign minister, in response to a British letter, suggested that African slavery was a civilizing project:

Government officials also justified slavery on the grounds that it was beneficial for slaves to convert to Islam. In a letter sent by the Iranian embassy in Istanbul to the Iranian foreign ministry on 22 April 1882, an official had accused the British of trying to stop the spread of Islam through abolition.Footnote ⁵³

Labor and Slave Identity

The narrow framing of slave identity undercuts claims about slaves’ free “mobility.” In premodern Central Asia and Iran, however, a number of exceptional slaves achieved prominent positions in the military, in the royal court of Mamluk Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, or Safavid Iran. According to one scholar, premodern slavery fell into two broad categories: military slavery (such as in the case of the Ottoman janissaries) and non-military slavery (domestic servants, merchants and artisans, plantation slaves), a testament to the wide-ranging definition of slavery in the premodern world.Footnote ⁵⁴

Variability in the types of work urban slaves performed before the mid-nineteenth century was a feature of the pre-industrial economy. Textual sources attest to the number of trades slaves contributed to as entertainers and dancers, chefs, food preparers and servers, police and army officers, carriage drivers, coppersmiths, tailors, butchers, and hunters. Some slaves were well-versed in Persian and even tutored elite women in all-female taʿziyeh performances.Footnote ⁵⁵ Unlike the antebellum South, in theory it was possible for black slaves to occupy most professions though by and large it appears that the majority were low in rank or social prestige, and certainly in financial compensation. They shared these professions with slaves from different points of origin, primarily Turkic slaves, not to mention domestic servants. By the mid-nineteenth century loss of Qajar territories in the north led to a greater dependence on African labor. There are also reports of people trafficked from Iran to other places by Afghan traders, and eunuchs brought to Iran from India, as well as many Kurdish slaves at the court of Nāser al-Dīn Shāh.Footnote ⁵⁶ British officers warned their officials not to think of slavery in Persia in terms of skin color, since it included “negroes, enslaved Mekranis [Baluchis], indigenous persons.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Even though male slaves held different professions, their intrinsic worth was presented in terms of their labor. In ʿAyn al-Saltaneh’s memoirs, he wrote affectionately about the black female slave Tāzeh Gol (Rosebud) who attended school with him as a young child. According to his memoir, among her praiseworthy attributes was her command of Persian, willingness to take the brunt of punishment in his place for his poor behavior, and cooking well in spite of having very little experience. Incidentally, he noted that she took offense to anyone calling her a slave (“kanīz”). In direct contrast, Tāzeh Gol is compared with her husband, Changīz Khān, whom ‘Ayn al-Salṭanah referred to as a “dirty, lazy drunk”Footnote ⁵⁸ and a “six rib.”Footnote ⁵⁹ ʿAli Akbar Dehkhodā, in his lexicography of Persian (Loghatnāmeh-ye Dehkhodā), defined “six rib” as an epithet meaning “stubborn” and applied exclusively to people of African descent.

In addition to memoirs, Qajar photography presented slave identity in terms of race and labor. Black slaves were prominent in photographs depicting affluent family life. In the British Library’s archive, “Faces and Places in Iran: Iranian Photography at the Turn of the 19th Century,” late Qajar-era portraits of African slaves show them posing with young boys, infants, or children, in front of homes, manicured gardens, or studio backdrops. In one collection of photographs from Arāk, a sitting black servant holds a small infant boy dressed stiffly in a suit and fez in his lap, with another servant sitting to his right and an older white servant boy to his left. The photograph contained the inscription “ʿAbbās Mīrzā ʿAzod in the arms of his own laleh.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The scene shows the laleh as a child’s benevolent protector, and per the inscription, “his own laleh” denotes belonging and ownership.

The common trope of the dutiful black servant, discussed in Pedram Khosronejad’s collection entitled Qajar African Nannies, referenced a devoted slave figure similar to the Uncle Tom of the antebellum South.Footnote ⁶¹ Slaves were bound to a dominant visual discourse that “[reified] multiple types of bodies in particular types of bodies,” in this case, bodies that were supposed to nurture and protect the elite household.Footnote ⁶² In “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula theorized that photography introduced an “entire social terrain” where “every portrait implicitly took its place within a social and moral hierarchy.”Footnote ⁶³ The staging of black kākās in Qajar photography thus determined their place as caregivers or providers within the social hierarchy. At the same time, Staci Gem Scheiwiller reminds us how Naseri slave portraiture also revealed agency since “the sitter also exhibited some control … outside the photograph.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Concubinage and the Myth of “Mobility”

Textual and visual sources demonstrate how the desire for black slave labor was cultivated among the aristocratic classes. For African female slaves, even if their status could, in principle, change, it did not mean that higher status was easily attainable or permanent. According to Janet Afary, in written law permanent wives (‘aqdī wives) had better status because they could inherit money, and receive mehr and other financial allowances, while a female kanīz was barely provided a living. Concubines were not entitled to the same rights of sexual refusal, sexual satisfaction, or children as held by other women under Islamic law.Footnote ⁶⁵ Their role within the family could change; she might become a temporary wife for a specific period of time and be given some financial compensation along with her children if the master acknowledged paternity. Some women who became temporary wives reverted to household servants. There are also rare cases where female slaves married their masters and became permanent legal wives, or married other slaves. Legal jurists intended to establish paternity, and thus the children of slavemasters were free and in theory could inherit property.Footnote ⁶⁶ This released the child as property of the father.Footnote ⁶⁷

Since women could own property under Islamic law, wealthy women also owned slaves and complicated static notions of family and slavery. Slaves could be part of a woman’s mahr or debt that the groom owed to his wife even in the event of divorce. In an 1891 marriage contract between Gowhar Malek Khānūm and Mīrzā Bāqer Khān, the total amount of her wedding package was stipulated at 1,000 tomans—200 earmarked for the bride, and 100 for the gift of a Qur‘an and a male and female slave. The remaining 700 was a promissory debt to the bride.Footnote ⁶⁸ Incidentally, in other Qajar marriage contracts, the price of a female slave ranged from 40 to 70 toman.Footnote ⁶⁹ It should be noted that unlike slave documents in the American colonies, which only listed slaves by their age and gender, Qajar slave documents sometimes included slaves’ given names.

Slave women, and in some cases young boys, were tied to a sexual labor system. According to one male slave-owner, African slave women were preferable because of their perceived unspoiled “innocence” compared with slaves of other backgrounds.Footnote ⁷⁰ Female slaves assumed nearly all household responsibilities as well as many of the duties of childrearing. In the memoirs of Tāj al-Saltaneh, daughter of Nāser al-Dīn Shāh, she describes the many jobs performed by female slaves, such as “the cradle-rocker,” “room attendant,” “purse attendant,” and “clothes washer.”Footnote ⁷¹ As head of household management, Qajar women with considerable means regarded their slaves and servants not only signs of their wealth, social standing, or leisure, but also considered them part of an extended family they could rely on for companionship and protection. Conversely, Tāj al-Saltaneh wrote about the poor treatment of slaves by their mistresses:

Tāj al-Saltaneh’s account captures early modernist reflections on the daily abuse that defined domestic slavery. Behnaz Mirzai acknowledged that female concubines “were subject to the vagaries of their masters”;Footnote ⁷³ however, she insisted on the overall good treatment of female slaves by citing a book published in 1891 by C.J. Wills. Wills had once written that “the slaves in Persia have what Americans call a good time; well fed, well clothed, treated as spoiled children, given the lightest work, and often given in marriage to a favorite son, or taken as a ‘segah,’ or concubine, by her master himself.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Wills implied that a concubine, described in his own words as an object passed from father to son, was part of some elite selection process rather that what we now identify as sexual violence.Footnote ⁷⁵ Without questioning this account, Mirzai uses it as evidence for how “some [slaves] enjoyed high status”; “enslaved females could even enjoy freedom in public”; “masters were required to treat their enslaved people humanely.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Her position relies heavily on Wills’ nineteenth-century account, and the assumption that because Islamic legal texts provided limited rights to slaves, this translated into legal and social freedoms.

The “construction of the native” in accounts like Wills’ are overwhelming written by privileged white men who regarded the lives of enslaved women as a “good time.” Colonial accounts are notorious for describing the deviant sexual lives of Persians, which invariably included casual observations about concubinage. Contemporary scholars, moreover, have also unwittingly reproduced such ideas. B.D. Hopkins, while carefully discussing concepts of slavery in Central Asia and Afghanistan and attempting to recover agency for female slaves, still fell into this trap in minimizing the impact of sexual assault: “Yet the status of enslaved women varied widely, ranging from domestic servants occasionally raped by their masters to pampered concubines.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hopkins created a distorted picture of sexual slavery where he suggested a life of luxury was an easily attainable reality. He restated this position in his later analysis:

In this section, Hopkins explains the dire social realities that led to forced enslavement. His conclusion, however, rests on a generalization about how concubinage for African women represented a “step up in the world.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Part of the problem lies with his reliance on English sources (and few Persian sources in translation). In addition, Hopkins’ occlusion of African slavery in Iran, in which slaves were acquired by raiding and forced abduction, and his misjudgment about the physical and psychological toll incurred by sexual slavery, makes it doubtful whether or not women and boys would have preferred this life to hunger. Quite the contrary, testimonials by runaway female slaves speak to the brutalities of the system and why they risked escape. They yield insight into the unbelievable ways that women resisted their abuse and imprisonment. Janet Afary has written about an African slave girl sold in Mecca who suffered years of rape and abuse at the hands of an Iranian merchant.Footnote ⁸⁰ Matt Hopper has also written a moving portrait of the slave girl “Salama,” who fled and was rescued on a boat en route to Zanzibar where she was about to be sold to slave traders in the Persian Gulf.Footnote ⁸¹

In addition, a series of exchanges involving a woman named Saʿīdeh, a slave-owner, Abol Qāsem, a government official in Shiraz, the Iranian foreign minister, and the British consul general, provides a rare glimpse into the journey of one woman to claim her freedom. After Saʿīdeh fled her captivity in 1904, Abol Qāsem wrote to the Iranian foreign ministry in Tehran and demanded that they return her. He claimed that she had fled to the British consul after he punished her. He provided testimonials from witnesses verifying that she was his legal “wife” and “Nūbī.”Footnote ⁸² The merchant reported that he had gone to the imam and the secretary of the British consul, who had investigated his claim, told him that the kanīz was not his wife. The British consul then petitioned the Iranian foreign minister, Moshīr al-Dowleh, to issue manumission papers for Saʿīdeh and another escaped slave named Jamīleh.Footnote ⁸³ The merchant cited injury to his personal honor in a subsequent letter: “All the people of the region, namely great men, the nobility, and the great ʿulamā, are aware of this matter, and so this is the cause of my embarassment.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In another letter, he asked the government to issue a ruling so that “the British Consul might return the kanīz to me so that my honor may not be further destroyed.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Advocating on the merchant’s behalf, a government agent in Shiraz asked the foreign office in Tehran to issue a ruling so that most “kanīz and khājehsarā gholāms will not get to a state in which they would take the property of their owners and [seek refuge] at the consulate. The majority consider the kanīzes to be their wives, and according to the law of the sacred sharīʿat, they are molk-e yamīn and count as wives.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In a later document, this official warned the British consul general: “They might [the kanīzes] take refuge with the ʿulamā.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Saʿīdeh’s story reveals how the British challenged the legality of slave marriage on the grounds that since slavery was illegal, the merchant broke the law for keeping slaves and should therefore be punished. The Iranian foreign ministry requested after 26 September 1904 provisions for a fatvā (Islamic decree) that would negate a marriage if a slave was purchased before this date. It stipulated that if the owner of a female slave wanted to marry her, he had to free her first. Moshīr al-Dowleh told the Shirazi official that if Abol Qāsem has followed the law, and performed the marriage in this manner, then he should inform them so that they could negotiate on his behalf with the British embassy. Otherwise, in accordance with the abolition of slavery, he wrote that a manumission document must be issued. In a later document, Moshīr al-Dowleh wrote that he thought Saʿīdeh had the legal right to freedom.

The British consul general included Saʿīdeh’s own claim that she was not Abol Qāsem’s wife. As Anthony Lee has argued, such inclusions are a precious reminder of slaves’ humanity.Footnote ⁸⁸ The British officer went on to say that the merchant probably slept with her and called that marriage, but how could a slave legally choose a husband for herself when she was not free? In response the merchant claimed that temporary marriage rites were performed by Saʿīdeh’s former owner.Footnote ⁸⁹ And as a way of staking his legal rights further, Abol Qāsem compared his treatment under British laws to the status of Jews under Islam:

While Saʿīdeh’s story is truncated by British and Iranian legal discourses, we also have other testimonials of slaves and their appeals for emancipation. In a sworn affidavit dated 26 May 1927 and signed by J. W. Woodley, attorney of the British consulate, Nasībeh, the daughter of Mabrūk, listed as approximately thirty years old, recorded her request for manumission:

In a coeval affidavit, an escaped slave of Muhammad Ahmad Yūhī named “Fīrūz, son of Almās” stated “We were serving [Muhammad Ahmad Yūhī] in Kangh, but because he was abusing us, last night we escaped his house in order to enter this consulate and gain our freedom.”Footnote ⁹² At forty-five years of age, Fīrūz’es story is a microhistory of enslavement, manumission, and re-enslavement following the master’s death:

Among the party seeking asylum, Zīvar, son of Mabrūk, who was recorded as approximately twenty years old, included a vital discovery. He stated that though his present master, Ebrāhīm ebn Yūsef, “was not abusing me … since I see that my father is free, I want to be free too. Therefore I have come here.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This statement reveals the strength of family ties, as some of the petitions included former slaves’ demands that their children and spouses be returned and issued manumission papers. More importantly, slaves invoked their right to freedom, which is no small proof of their aspirations beyond the confines of slavery, even if the wider world provided little help or betterment.

Though the British did not consistently document the testimonies of escaped slaves, colonial administrators through the India Office recorded the number of slaves seeking manumission throughout the Persian Gulf region. Some reports simply described “A boy and a girl rescued in Bushire,” or in the following manner:

These brief accounts raise more questions than answers. As is often the case, we may never know the ultimate fate of this “female inhabitant of Makhlif.” What we can glean from the colonial archives typically relates to other issues, for example, many officials frequently mention the difficulty in securing the passage to freedom for runaway slaves from the Persian Coast because of “the reluctance of the Persians to agree to the surrender of slaves that have once reached terra firma in Persian territory.”Footnote ⁹⁶

With the increasing pressure to end formal slavery in the Indian Ocean, there were also individual moral incentives to free slaves. In one testimonial, for example, it was reported that every ‘eid a grandee by the name of Amīr ʿAlam Khān Heshmat al-Molk would go to Kerman and buy either two concubines or two “black slaves” and free them. This story featured in Safarnāmeh-ye Khānlarkhān Eʿtesām al-Molk shows how manumitting slaves on special occasions reflected well on the reputation of grandees, but by no means was it considered part of an organized effort to end slavery.Footnote ⁹⁷

Female slaves were the primary agents of negotiating degrees of freedom. Anthony Lee writes that “the distinction between slave and ‘free’ was more permeable for a female slave than for a male slave, since she might hope to be accepted as a valuable worker within a household, become her master's concubine, give birth to some of his heirs, and in unusual cases become the wife of a powerful and wealthy patriarch.”Footnote ⁹⁸ While not disagreeing with Lee’s important observation, we must acknowledge that young slave girls, unlike most of their male counterparts, held the additional burden of being routinely violated and often from a very young age. It is impossible, therefore, to speak of freedom or reward without sexual consent or bodily autonomy. As H. Alexander Welcome has argued, while negotiating one’s status was a slave’s prerogative, female slaves risked their lives to escape because the master–slave relationship was defined by physical violence. Violence was a “foremost mode of engagement”:

From another vantage point, women may have found pathways of survival within the domestic household not because it was tolerable, rather, according to Hideaki Suzuki, because it was harder for them to escape. In the region of Baluchistan with a large population of slaves, Suzuki argued that escaped male slaves had more access to British officials because their professions allowed them greater mobility to go on errands or travel and this gave them more opportunities for escape.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In contrast to the case of Saʿīdeh, many female slaves who escaped were returned to their masters who claimed them as legal wives.Footnote ¹⁰¹ British “Manumission Procedures” tilted in favor of slavemasters, since it required a slave to provide proof of abuse and included the provision to return a slave upon the master’s promise of satisfactory treatment. Moreover, in places like Kuwait the British failed to implement manumission procedures and allowed smaller-scale slave trading.Footnote ¹⁰² Slaves fleeing to Kuwait were sent to the sheikh, and the female slaves to the wife of the sheikh. To be considered for emancipation meant that you also had to prove you were enslaved after the March 1882 Slave Trade Agreement. In addition, a slave had to be from a territory where the British were able to grant this request, and there were disincentives in taking on the burden of housing and feeding former slaves. Even under so-called British protection, unfree persons faced a labyrinth of red tape and perilous uncertainty.Footnote ¹⁰³ Though someone may be granted manumission, in their new status as “British protected persons” they were exploited as laborers on plantations in other British colonies and territories. In one Qajar chronicle, the writer claimed that a British treaty was merely a cheaper and easier form of “new slavery.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ After ending the formal slave trade, the British government continued to exploit African labor by keeping ex-slaves in quasi-slave status on agricultural plantations throughout the colonies. In some cases they completely ignored the practice of slavery in order to curry favor with local elites.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even in places where the British supported abolition, the slave trade continued in independent states like Baluchistan.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While the restriction of movement and mobility convinced many slaves to flee, they faced new challenges under so-called British “protection.”