Race and slavery in the Middle East : an historical enquiry
"From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions and others, examining the history of slavery in law, social thought, and practice over the last two millennia ... This fascinating study describes the Middle East's culture of slavery and the evolution of racial prejudice. Lewis demonstrates how nineteenth century Europeans mythologized the region as a racial utopia in debating American slavery. Islam, in fact, clearly teaches non-discrimination, but Lewis shows that prejudice often won out over pious sentiments, as he examines how Africans were treated, depicted, and thought of from antiquity to the twentieth century."
History
vii, 184 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations ; 25 cm
9780195062830, 9780195053265, 0195062833, 0195053265
20295856
Slavery
Race
Islam in Arabia
Prejudice and piety, literature and law
Conquest and enslavement
Ventures in ethnology
The discovery of Africa
In black and white
Slaves in arms
The nineteenth century and after
Abolition
Equality and marriage
Image and stereotype
Myth and reality
Revised edition of: Race and color in Islam. 1971