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Slavery was a major part of society, culture and economy in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), which during its history included most of the Middle East. While slavery was an important part also of the preceding Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), it was during the Abbasid Caliphate that the slave trade to the Muslim world reached a permanent industrial scale.

The Caliphate was a major slave trade destination, and slaves were imported from several destinations. Since Islamic law prohibited enslavement of Muslims, slaves were imported from non-Muslim lands around the Muslim world. These included Pagan Africa in the South; Christian and Pagan Europa in the North; and Pagan Central Asia and India in the East.

They slaves came from the North along the Balkan slave trade and the Volga trade route; from the East via the Bukhara slave trade; from the West via the Andalusian slave trade, the Trans-Saharan slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade; and from the South from the Indian Ocean slave trade. The slave trade to and slavery in the area continued during subsequent rulerships, and continued in the Ottoman Empire until the 20th-century.

Slave trade

The slave trade had been big also during the Umayyad Caliphate, but then, it had been fueled by war captives and people enslaved as tax levy; during the Abbasid Caliphate, the slave trade in war captives was supplanted by people bought through commercial slave trade provided for the slave markets in Basra, Baghdad and Samarra.^[1]

African slave trade

In the Abbasid Empire, African slaves were referred to as Zanj.

African slaves were transported in the 9th-century via the Red Sea slave trade from Africa across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and from there by caravan over the desert to the slave market of Baghdad.^[2][3]

The Indian Ocean slave trade established, in which slaves were trafficked from East Africa across the Indian Ocean by dhow through the Persian Gulf to Ras al Khymah, Dubai, Bandrar Abbas, Bushine and Basra.^[4][3]

European slave trade

One slave trade route was the Volga trade route, in which Europeans captured by vikings were sold in Russia and shipped down to Baghdad via Persia and the Samanid slave trade and the Khazar slave trade route. European slaves were also provided via the al-Andalus slave trade.

The Vikings sold both Christian and Pagan European captives to the Muslims, who referred to them as saqaliba; these slaves were likely both Pagan Slavic, Finnic and Baltic Eastern Europeans ^[5] as well as Christian Western Europeans.^[6] These slaves were trafficked to the Caliphate from Europe via Russia and the Bukhara slave trade, a slave trade known to have functioned from at least between 786 and 1009, as big quantities of silver coins from the Samanid Empire has been found in Scandinavia from these years, and people taken captive by the Vikings during their raids in Western Europe were likely sold in Islamic Central Asia, a slave trade which was so lucrative that it may have contributed to the Viking raids in Western Europe, used by the Vikings as a slave supply source for their slave trade with Islamic world.^[7]

The Samanid slave trade in Bukhara constituted one of the two great furnishers of slaves to the Muslim market in the Abbasid Caliphate; the other being the Khazar slave trade, who supplied it with captured Slavs and tribesmen from the Eurasian northlands.^[8]

Turkish people

From the early 9th-century, military slavery played a major military role in the Abbasid Caliphate, and Turkish male slaves were particularly favored for the role of slave soldiers.^[1] Turkish people from the Central Asian Steppe, were a major supply source for slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate during the entire Middle Ages. They were Pagans, adherents of Tengrism, and thereby viewed as legitimate targets of slavery. In the Middle East, they were referred to as "white" and used for miliary slavery for centuries during the Middle Ages. Turkish slaves were trafficked to the Abbasid Caliphate via the Bukhara slave trade.

Slave market

The slave market and use of slaves in the Abbasid Caliphate divided slaves into male, female and eunuchs. The slaves were also divided in skin color. Eunuchs were used for domestic and administrative purpuse; male slaves were used for labor and military slavery; and females were used for domestic service and sexual slavery (concubinage).

Female slaves

Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic servants, or as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of tasks. The sex slave-concubines of rich Urban men who had given birth to the son of their enslaver were counted as the most privileged, since they became an Umm Walad and became free upon the death of their enslaver; the concubine of a Beduoin mainly lived the same life as the rest of the tribal members and the women of the family.^[9] Female domestic slaves lived a hard life and reproduction among slaves was low; it was noted that the infant mortality was high among slaves, and that female slaves were often raped in their childhood and rarely lived in their forties, and that poorer slave owners often prostituted them.^[9]

The slave trade in the Muslim world focused on women for used of domestic servants and sex slaves.^[10] Women were trafficked to the royal Abbasid harem from Europe via the Volga trade route, as well as from Africa and Asia.^[11] The royal harem was used as a role model for the harems of other wealthy men. Women from Europe, Central Asia, Asia and Africa was used as sex slaves and domestic servants within the royal and the lesser harems.

Male slaves

The use of male slaves were far more varied. Since eunuchs lacked family of their own and was unable to have children, they were considered highly thrustworthy, and used as harem guards, as guards at mosques and holy sites, as administrators and family stewards.^[3]

Slave labourers were used in cash-crop production, in the silk textile industry, in salt production and land reclamation, in cotton and sugar production especially in the area of the big slave market center of Basra. Slave labourers were kept in big work camps, and often had to be replaced by new slaves through the slave trade, since the marshlands in Mesopotamia caused slaves to die in large numbers from malaria, and slaves were not allowed to marry or have children.^[1] Around 15,000 slaves were estimated to be kept in the Basra area at any given time, and that a quarter of the labor force consisted of slave labor.^[1] Contemporary writers in the late 9th-century estimated that there were around 300,000 slaves in Iraq.^[1] The harsh condition resulted in a big slave rebellion known as the Zanj Rebellion, which lasted between 869 and 883.

From the early 9th-century, slaves, specifically Turkish slaves, were also employed as slave soldiers.^[1]

Thousands and possibly millions of Africans, Berbers, Turks, and Europeans from Northeastern Europe (saqaliba) are estimated to have been enslaved in this time period.^[1]