Slave women and free men : gender, sexuality and culture in early Abbasid times

Abstract

This thesis investigates the masculine conceptual framework defining the sexual and cultural roles of slave women in a selection of Abbasid legal, literary and historical male-authored foundational texts. It argues that the main Abbasid intellectual protagonists, namely the 'alim, the faqih, the adib and the mu'arrikh, perceived the licit and potentially uninhibited sexual access to concubines in urban and caliphal households as well as in majalis of poetry and song as an ethical, social and cultural threat which called for a delineation of the values and beliefs that governed sexual relations between free men and slave women. At stake was not only the demarcation of what constituted an ideal Muslim gendering of sexual roles but also the regulation of slave (and free) women’s cultural roles. The three genres of textual discourse, namely, legal, literary and historical, are studied in three chapters respectively. Each chapter presents an overview of a genre’s relevance for the history of slave women and asks the following questions: What are the categories and vocabulary used to designate the sexual and cultural roles of slave women? How do gender, slavery, and cultural legitimacy intervene in defining these roles? How are they related to the roles of free women? The first chapter shows that the legal regulation of sexual relations between free men and slave women was primarily aimed at preserving social hierarchy, protecting the honor and dignity of free women, honor forming a distinctive feature of freedom, while granting slave women a margin of social mobility. The second chapter contends that adab discourse perceived the sexuality of both slave and free women as a source of conflict and favored a conception of both slave and free women as mainly producers of offspring rather than objects of desire. It encouraged the adoption of a similar ethical code of conduct with both slave and free women to ensure men’s well-being and reduce tension within the household. The third chapter proposes that c