Followup question, how different was middle eastern slavery from American slavery?

Note: I'm from the UAE and sometimes I would see people who have very distinct african features but also a prominent arab last name. When I asked around people would just say "they were the servants".

Edit: sentence structure

Disclaimer: nearly everything I know about Islamic slavery comes from my study of eunuchs, which privileges this information heavily towards “elite slavery”, which was not the predominant form of slavery at any given time. Most newly published history-making of the Islamic slave trade is now focusing on the more common slaves, the eunuchs-’n-concubines orientalist fascination with the “sexier” forms of slavery is rather out of fashion right now, so I apologise for my unfashionableness. :/

The formal ending of Islamic slavery was absolutely a gradual process. The white slave trade had been slowed in the mid 1700s, by the 19th century it was almost entirely gone, Africa was the main source of slaves in the 19th century. Abolitionist Europeans in the 19th century largely protested the highly brutal treatment slaves got prior to their sale to their final owners, and they would sometimes make pleas to Ottoman sultans for abolition, which the sultans found mostly just confusing, from my reading. The general attitude was that slavery was just part of life, an ancient practice of many people including Jews and Christians, and it was also sunna, a practice of the Prophet, which made it explicitly not just allowed, but good. Islam also had prescriptions for how to treat slaves, and many slaves (especially elite ones) were manumitted at the end of their owner’s life, as it was a meritorious act. If a man had children with a woman he owned, if the children were acknowledged then they were free. Most slaves did not have children outside of concubinage, for various reasons. Slavery just didn’t develop the generational, permanent status as in America. I’m not trying to say it was a great place to be a slave or even better than America, but under Islam slavery had a different flavor.

However, the Ottoman empire did make some legal efforts to curb slavery towards the end of the 19th century, largely by ending the routes for human trafficking (see the Brussels Conference Act of 1890), the Ottoman empire relied on a pretty sophisticated system of human trafficking to get their slaves. Of course this was only an end to formal trafficking, naturally slavery definitely persisted both in contraband slave trade and in the existing people still alive and enslaved. After the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1922 but prior to the formal abolition laws in the countries you listed there were further softer prohibitions and “crackdowns” on the treatment of slaves in those countries. Consider in 1936 Saudi Arabia banned the importation of any more slaves, before abolition. In the 1950s and later the people still enslaved were either “legacy” slaves or obtained through illegal means we’d find more comparable to slavery today than in the 19th century.

I don’t know how many there were at the end, good numbers on slavery can be pretty hard to come by. The British Foreign Office in Saudi Arabia between 1926-1938 had record of 262 people seeking their freedom, which indicates quite a lot of people enslaved.

Now for my very particular knowledge of the bitter end of eunuch slavery, which no one asked for but you’re getting anyway. There is pretty good record of the holy tomb eunuchs of Medina continuing to buy African child castrates in the late 20s and early 30s to maintain their ranks. The last certain record of Islamic eunuchs I know about is a 1990 interview with the Saudi official in charge of the eunuchs of Mecca, which reported that at that time there were 14 eunuchs serving at Mecca and 17 at the tomb of the Prophet in Medina. There is no indication the ranks are being maintained with replacements. He places their origin as former Ethiopian captives of Mussolini’s army, who castrated them for reasons not explained. This is… well it’s a highly politically convenient origin story for the holy eunuchs, let’s say that. Why Ethiopians (who are usually Coptic Christian) independently made their way to be holy servants for Islam is not easy to imagine. The more likely story, is that these men were trafficked out of Ethiopia as children in the 30s-40s. Ethiopia (Abyssinia) was traditionally considered the “best” source of elite slaves. They might have been the very last African children castrated and trafficked to be elite slaves, a practice that predated Muhammed. I certainly would like to believe they were the last. The eunuchs themselves were not interviewed in the article.

Of course human trafficking and slavery still exists throughout the world, and this only focuses on the formal government stances on it in the region. Those with questions about modern slavery in the middle east should try /r/AskAnthropology.

Old but good: Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an historical enquiry, my information on the 1990s eunuchs is from Eunuchs and Sacred Boundries in Islamic Society.

(Here is the citation posted that was removed for being too short, some people were asking for it.)

hey this is a great article about modern day slavery in mauritania http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/freedom-fighter

Years ago I wrote a summary of a book by Bernard Lewis called Race and Slavery in the Middle East. You should check it. Great read. Basically throughout the Islamic history, slavery has been practiced, and no major movement ever emerged to abolish it. Although many people wrote extensively in defense of black slaves, for they were considered inferior, created by God to serve whites, but no one wrote against basic practice of slavery, and even about sex with slaves.