Do you remember what words the trailer of Ridley Scott’s 2000 picture “Gladiator” begins with? “The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied the emperor”. If we refer to the history, we will understand it at once that the only way to gain any power or status in Rome was through the slave rebellion of Spartacus. However, despite the colorful artistic picture on the screen, it is worth mentioning that a slave had no chance to get out of his or her position in reality. Anyway, our world went through many historical epochs, Islam spread to different countries, which had known and experienced the uprisings of enslaved peoples, who not only got rid of their shameful status, but also became heads of entire states. And today we will learn about some of those individuals, who managed to turn the tide of history and change their own life.
We would like to note that unfortunately, slavery existed (and still exists unofficially in some parts of our planet) in each society until the New Age, including the Muslim one as well, despite the fact that Islamic law is rich in quite strict rules regarding the position of a slave in society and attitude towards them. According to specialists in the field of law, Islamic approach to such phenomenon as slavery was to make it so restrictive, that it eventually would lead to its natural abolition.
According to Jonathan Braun, the author of the book “Slavery and Islam”, the very concept of “slavery” differed so much depending on time and geographical location, that it was not quite correct to use the same word for the description of such a phenomenon.
Abbasids
During the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, the practice of recruiting slaves as soldiers was a common thing. Young men (mainly of Turkic origin) were taken from their native places in Eurasian steppes in order to teach them military skills. Naturally gifted horsemen and fighters, reinforced by their natural environment away from sedentary way of life, were valued for their loyalty and strength. Since they were taken far away from their homes, they started their careers without any political connections or loyalty to any ruler, which would have been rather complicated to do if the soldiers were recruited from among local residents. Eventually, those soldiers, well known as “ghilman”, united with each other and became so independent that finally they became actual rulers of the caliphate. Their number had significantly increased and their power had become so popular, that eventually the Caliph Al-Mutasim had to establish a new capital in Samarra in order to accommodate them.
The ghilman of the Abbasid Caliphate eventually led to the rise of the Ghaznavid Empire and the reign of famous Mahmud of Ghazni, who later became the Sultan of most of modern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwest India.
Egyptian Mamluks
Over the centuries, as many empires arose and collapsed in the Muslim world, the ghilman, more famous as Mamluks now, offered their services to those, who held the reins of power over a particular state. In fact, the Mamluks themselves would have been the true rulers of the empire, as they held high positions in various states. In the Western Islamic world, they came in the fore at the end of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, when they officially had gained the control and made themselves the masters of the empire they had been ruling from behind the scenes for many years.
The zenith of their reign was during the time of Baibars. He seized the power after the Mamluks had stopped the Mongol advance at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. The Mamluks left their rich heritage in medieval Cairo, much of which can be traced in the minarets and mosques of the old city that travelers love so much.
In the Eastern Islamic world, after the Ghaznavid dynasty, the Ghurid era came and when the last Ghurid ruler died, his slave-soldier General Qutb al-Din Aibak (a Kipchak Turk, like the Egyptian Mamluks) seized the power and established another Mamluk empire in India, which over time became increasingly known as the Delhi Sultanate.
Siddi in India
Likewise the Kipchaks, in India there was another group of enslaved peoples that later influenced the history of the region. Slaves from East Africa were brought to the subcontinent over the centuries and eventually it led to the establishment of black African communities, known as Siddi (or Sheedi).
One of the first to make a name for himself was Jamal ud-Din Yaqut. Yaqut began as a soldier of the Delhi Sultanate but eventually he became a close confidant of Razia Sultana, one of the few queens of Islamic history. Fans of classical Bollywood can know (of course, romanticized) history due to the film of the year 1983 “Razia Sultana” with the cult actor Dharmendra in the role. However, the most famous Siddi appeared many years later. Malik Ambar (1548-1626) was an Ethiopian slave soldier, who eventually became the Prime Minister of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate and its actual ruler. He challenged the claims of the Mughal Greats to conquer the sultanate, established a new tax system, and commissioned numerous buildings and infrastructure.
Before Ambar, Ikhlas Khan, another slave from East Africa, who became a nabob, had been the actual ruler of the neighboring Bijapur state. The Siddi community eventually established the state of Janjira and the dynasty, which had never been conquered or captured by any opposing army, and existed until India became independent of British rule.
Ottomans
In the XVI century, another group of Turks from Eurasian steppes rose and took power from the Mamluks: the Ottomans, who continued to rule until the modern era.
If earlier slave soldiers of the Muslim empires consisted mainly of Turks (along with Circassians, Abkhazians, Mongols, etc.), the Ottomans mostly recruited their soldiers from Christian communities of the Balkans. They were known as Janissaries. Taken from their families in the framework of the devshirme system (usually translated as “blood tax”) from areas controlled by the Ottomans, they were converted to Islam and raised as soldiers loyal to the sultan, like the Mamluks. While the Janissaries never made any coups to take power away from their masters, some of them climbed the administrative ladder of the Ottoman bureaucracy to the highest levels. One of the most famous was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. A young man from a village in Herzegovina, he eventually reached the position of vizier under three different sultans and even married a princess from the royal family.
But there was another part of the royal court that also ruled behind the scenes and, perhaps, became even more powerful than the great vizier. It is worth noting that in many tribes and cultures of steppes the succession of power was not determined by primogeniture (where the eldest son won), and usually led to internecine strife (more often even to a civil war) between sons and brothers of the late sovereign on the question of who was more suitable for rule. Often in the Ottoman history it came to the point that a prince was ruthless enough to kill his brother (the most famous of them was Mehmed III, who killed all his 19 brothers). But sometimes, bloodshed could be avoided, if the sultan appointed his successor during his lifetime, and if one of his wives was loved enough, her son would be next in line. And it also could happen that a young girl, having been taken prisoner in a distant country, separated from her family, could be in power and become Valide Sultan, queen-mother, the second strongest person in the empire.
The brightest example was Roxelena, Suleiman the Magnificent’s favourite spouse. Her influence was so strong that she persuaded Suleiman to kill his son Mustafa (his mother was one of other Suleiman’s wives and Roxelena’s rival). Despite the fact that he was popular and considered to be the most obvious successor to his father as a sultan, his death led to the fact that Roxelana’s sons were the only possible heirs to the throne.
In the end
In this article we would like to draw your attention to the fact that there have been some extraordinary cases in history, when individuals were able to reach the power despite all the circumstances.
We believe that everybody who gets acquainted with this article will have a question: why did such events happen in the Islamic world more often? The most obvious answer is directly connected with the religion of Islam itself that insists on the equality of all people. One should not overlook the fact that slavery is not defined on the basis of a person’s ethnicity….
Ilmira Gafiyatullina
Photo: Public Domain