Mamluks in Abbasid Society

Abstract

Slave soldiers existed in many societies, already in the ancient Mediterranean world, but also in the age of European imperialism. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that there were few places, if at all, where the enslavement of foreigners was as important for recruiting elite soldiers as in the premodern Islamic world. Nor did slave soldiers anywhere else become as influential politically. The bestknown premodern Muslim polity based primarily on an elite of slave soldiers was the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. However, the Mamluk army of Egypt was by no means the only nor the earliest slave army in the Muslim world. The aim of the present paper is to present the reader with a short survey of what we know about the origins of Muslim slave armies in the early Abbasid period and with some ideas on their impact on the societies in question.1 The history of these armies has been subject to some debate among scholars ever since the late 1960s. Among the first studies were Ayalon’s who saw the functioning of slave armies of the Abbasids very much through the eyes of an expert on the late medieval Mamluk institution in Egypt (by projecting later facts back into early Abbasid times).2 The same holds true for Töllner’s 1971 dissertation.3 In the mid-1970s, Shaban in his revisionist tour de force of early Islamic history doubted that something like slave soldiers existed at all in Abbasid times. In his view, when the sources spoke of slavery it was just a metaphor for the fidelity of high-ranking soldiers towards their master, the caliph.4 Pipes and Crone in the late 1970s did not follow Shaban’s ideas. In their opinion, the armies of the 9th-century caliphs consisted primarily of foreign slaves, be it, as Pipes argues, because the Muslims were not willing to serve in the army anymore, be it, as Crone contends, that the rulers of the Islamic world