“What Is Islamic About Slavery in Muslim Societies?” Cooper, Concubinage and Contemporary Legacies of ‘Islamic Slavery’ in North, West and East Africa

“What is Islamic about slavery in an Islamic society in Africa?”, historian Frederick Cooper asked in 1981. He explored the answer in terms of how Islam acted as a hegemonic ideology in nineteenth-century East Africa, drawing both masters and slaves into its legal and cultural world view. Almost forty years later, McDougall argues that Cooper’s question is still central; we have not yet fully understood the role gender played in this process. She asks: “How did the experience of being female, rather than male, shape the reality of Muslim masters’ and slaves’ lives?” Cooper had also reminded us that slavery was an institution shaped by a dynamic between owners and owned. Since, research in a variety of Muslim societies has revealed other networks of relationships between slaves and slaves, and slaves and freed slaves, for example, that are also ‘gendered’ in essence but almost invisible if viewed only through frameworks focused on dichotomies of power.McDougall’s exploration of these realities and relationships is based on oral histories of female masters, slaves and concubines from the author’s fieldwork in Morocco and Mauritania, alongside published accounts by M.G. Smith (Northern Nigeria) and Margaret Strobel (East Africa). Her focus on the household highlights the role of mistresses in managing the labour and lives of their slaves, often including intra-slave/freed slaves’ marriages, habitation, birth and other rituals, while always necessitating responsibility for ensuring early Islamic education and morality. The controversial notion of ‘constructed kin’ is invoked in this context, not only between mistresses and slaves but between slaves and freed slaves themselves. The focus on the concubine argues that the elusive element of what makes Islamic slavery Islamic may be in large part located in this core female-slave legal status—“the most detailed area of social life in Islamic texts” (Cooper). The stories reveal differences in how individual masters and mistresses treated concubines and their legitimate offspring, as well as between ‘customary practices’ that inserted themselves locally into religion. But most importantly, they illuminate a widely shared understanding that the concubine articulated a crucial intersection between Islam, slavery and society that has left a living legacy.

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