The Revolt of the Zanj

Zanj was the name given to the slave population of southern Iraq, most of them of East African origin. Since early Islamic times, large numbers of slaves had been used by landowners in the marshes and deserts of southern Iraq, the breadbasket of the early Caliphate, to reclaim land by irrigation. Under Islamic law, reclaimed land brought under cultivation belonged to the man who made it productive and so it was worth investing large sums in this work. Not only that, but there were tax breaks too: such reclaimed land paid much less than the state demanded from already cultivated areas. The rich and entrepreneurial members of the early Muslim elite saw these opportunities and rushed to exploit them. As in the ante-bellum American south, there was not enough local labour and work was too unpleasant, hard digging in a shadeless landscape in temperatures which regularly topped 40 degree, to be able to entice free men from other areas of the Muslim world.  As time went on the work became even harder as they were forced to dig off the large quantities of salt which accumulated on the land, backbreaking and extremely unpleasant work. This salinization threatened the whole productivity of these valuable estates. We have no knowledge of who the slave traders were or where exactly their victims came from but we can be fairly sure that the traders were Gulfi merchants and the Zanj came from the East African littoral.

This seems to have been the only area in the Islamic world where this sort of large-scale agricultural slavery was practised; elsewhere farming was conducted by free peasants while slaves were used for domestic, administrative or military purposes. Just as in the Roman world, slaves could rise to powerful positions. There were generals, queens and even rulers of slave origin. Indeed one of the Arabic words for slave, Mamluk, was used to describe the rulers of Egypt from 1260 to 1517. It could even be that selling oneself into slavery could be a shrewd career move for the young and ambitious. 

It was not like that for the Zanj. There is no doubt that many of these slaves lived in very bad conditions and there had been at least two minor rebellions before in Umayyad times. The revolt against the Abbasids was on a much larger scale and was made more formidable by the weakness of the government and the participation of other, non-slave elements. For almost twenty years, the army of slaves, used to living and operating in the swamps and water channels of southern Iraq, held the armies of the caliphate at bay. Only by a huge and continuing series of amphibious military operations was it eventually crushed. Nothing like this had happened before in the Muslim world, nor was it to recur later.

Not surprisingly this story has attracted the interested of modern historians. For those of a Marxist inclination, like Alexandre Popovic, whose work is the only book-length treatment of the upheaval, the story is straight forward, the down-trodden slaves raised the banner of revolt against their oppressors in the name of freedom and justice. Spartacus would have been proud of them. Unlike most other revolts and rebellions against the Abbasid regime, this did not appear to have a sectarian basis to it. It was, it could be argued, a clear example of a proletarian uprising against the rich and their supporters in government.

But as often in history, the reality is not quite so clear. To begin with, there is no real evidence for any demands for social justice or freedom, still less any demands for an end to the institution slavery. Instead, as far as we can tell, the ideology proclaimed by the rebels was a quasi-Shi’ite one, supporting the leadership of a descendant of the Family of Prophet whose rule would, of course, bring justice for all and riches to the exploited slaves. 

But if this religious motivation does not suit the purposes of the modern Marxist historian, it did not suit the purposes of Abbasid propaganda either. For them the revolt was a slave rebellion led by a man who is consistently described as al-khabīth,’the abominable one’, a term which has no clear religious connotations and is not used of any other rebels, at the time or later. He is, in fact, the absolute ‘other’, representing an existential challenge to the Abbasid and hence the Muslim order. To understand why this should be, we must look at the sources and the way in which they remember and present the Zanj.

The Arabic accounts of the revolt, as has been said, are very full and detailed but they all come from one source, a long account composed on the orders of the Caliph al-Mu’tadid (r. 892-902) to record the triumph of the Abbasid military. The circumstances of al-Mu’tadid’s political position explain some of the reasons why it was composed. The caliph had come to power, by effectively excluding his cousins, the children of the previous legitimate caliph al-Mu’tamid (r.870-892) from power. He was, in fact, a usurper with no legal claim to lead the Muslim community. He had been neither designated by his predecessor, nor elected by a shūra (consultation). He had been able to grab power through the support of his Turkish military following, effectively his private army. Many of these were very recent converts to Islam and many of them were, in fact slaves themselves.

This is where the Zanj came in useful for the caliphal publicity machine. The purpose of the unusually full and detailed account of the war against the rebellion was to show that it was a jihad and if it was a jihad, a holy war against non-Muslims, it provided a justification for this seizure of power and established the Islamic credentials, not just of the new caliph himself but of the army who had supported him. The Muslim community of that time would not accept the idea that a war against a pretender from the house of Ali and his supporters, who must themselves have been Muslim to accept his leadership, was a jihad that would provide a legal justification for usurping the caliphal title. Hence the systematic attempt to disguise the shi’ite character of the revolt.

The rebellion was not a spontaneous explosion but was the work of one rather unusual man. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad had been born of Arab parents in a village near Rayy in central Iran. He had first tried to make his career as a poet in Sāmarrā but it would seem that his talents were not as great as his ambition and, seeing the chaos in the government, he decided to enter politics. He first went to Yamāma in eastern Arabia. Here, it seems that claimed to be a prophet and attracted some following among the tribes of the area, but his supporters were soon routed and with a small number of loyal companions he went to Baṣra, then as now the biggest town in southern Iraq in 868. There he made a few more converts to his cause but he soon came to realize the potential of the slaves as a source of support. Quite what his religious position was is not clear; he seems to have abandoned the idea of prophethood for himself and reinvented himself by claiming to be a member of the ‘Alid family, or rather, according to his detractors, different members of the ‘Alid family on different occasions. What is more clear is the strong social content of his message; the slaves were going to be rich and free and their masters were going to suffer.

The rebellion broke out in September 869. It spread very quickly and for ten years enjoyed an almost unchallenged success. The first attempts to subdue the ex-slaves were made by the citizens of Basra, their former masters, but these were beaten off with ease and the bitterness of the rebels was demonstrated by their policy of executing all prisoners without distinction. The enfeebled and preoccupied Abbasid government in Samarra was able to offer little support to the people. The rebels were aided by the difficult marshy terrain, ideal for guerrilla warfare conducted by men who knew the area well but almost impenetrable to a strange, largely cavalry army like the Turks. In 871 they succeeded in taking Baṣra itself. The destruction was horrendous. The city, a great commercial centre and one of the cultural capitals of early Islam, was destroyed by the rebels, the mosques were burned, the inhabitants massacred; once more the ferocity of the war is conspicuous. Their control spread to Wāsiṭ and beyond, and over much of the province of Ahwāz. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad ruled from a new capital he founded, Mukhtāra, on a canal to the east of Baṣra; he minted his own coins and took the title of Mahdī. How much power the Zanj themselves enjoyed is not entirely clear. All the known leaders seem to have been Arabs, mostly men who had joined ‘Alī in Yamāma or in Baṣra before the rebellion started and it may be the slaves, though now slave-owners themselves, had little say in the direction of policy.

When the ‘Abbasid response did come, it was methodical, systematic and effective. From 879 government armies began a slow advance, concentrating on destroying the ships which gave the Zanj such mobility in the marshes. The army was large, perhaps 50,000, but the terrain meant that progress was slow. ‘Alī ordered the evacuation of threatened areas and a retreat to the stronghold at Mukhtāra. There the rebels were eventually besieged before ‘Abbasid forces entered the city, which had to be taken street by street in August 883. ‘Alī b. Muḥammad was killed in the fighting. The rebellion was finally crushed but the damage caused had been enormous. Slave farming and large-scale reclamation of land were never begun again and it seems unlikely that the city of Baṣra ever fully recovered. Trade routes with the Indian Ocean area which had brought so much wealth to the city had been disrupted for too long. Merchants had found other ways of communicating with the east, via Sīrāf in southern Iran for example, and Baṣra and southern Iraq in general entered a long period of decline. Once again the social antagonisms in the area had led to large-scale popular movements which threatened the order and prosperity of society. As for the Zanj themselves, they seem to have scattered or melted into the local population. Some found work in the Abbasid administration or army. We never hear from them again as an organised group. But the trade in slaves between the Gulf and East Africa was to continue, albeit on a much smaller scale down to the twentieth century.

There is one interesting postscript to this. In 1961, an American archaeologist called H.S. Nelson was flying over the Basra region of southern Iraq when he noticed a pattern of parallel lines covering a wide area of what is now desert between the site of Old Basra and the Shatt al-Arab. On landing in the area, he found that the lines were long heaps of salt which had been lifted from the land and piled up in rows. It was evidence of, and in a way, a monument to, the huge amount of labour that the Zanj had contributed in trying to maintain the fertility of this area of Southern Iraq and turn back the progress of salinization. And, if you are curious, you can still see this pattern on Google Earth, more than eleven centuries after the Zanj revolt. 

Citations

Alexandre Popovic’s The Revolt of the African Slaves in the 3rd/9th Century , with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr, is published by Markus Wiener Publishing, London, 1998. For the pattern of parallel lines, see H. S. Nelson, ‘Abandoned irrigation system in southern Iraq” Sumer 18 (1962), 67-72.