History of concubinage in the Muslim world


 * For Islamic views on the practice, see Islamic views on concubinage

Concubinage in the Muslim world was the practice of Muslim men entering into intimate relationships without marriage, with enslaved women, though in rare, exceptional cases, sometimes with free women. If the concubine gave birth to a child, she attained a higher status known as umm al-walad.

B

 * First of all, daughters of Kafir (Hindu) Rajas captured during the course of the year, come and sing and dance. Thereafter they are bestowed upon Amirs and important foreigners. After this daughters of other Kafirs dance and sing… the Sultan gives them to his brothers, relatives, sons of Maliks etc. On the second day the durbar is held in a similar fashion after Asr. Female singers are brought out… the Sultan distributes them among the Mameluke Amirs. On the third day relatives of the Sultan are married and they are given rewards.
 * [Ibn Battuta’s eyewitness account of the Sultan’s arranging the enslaved girls’ marriages with Muslims on a large scale on the occasion of the two Ids]    Ibn Battuta     Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1990). Indian muslims: Who are they.
 * Different translation: Then enter the musicians, the first batch being the daughters of the infidel rajas — Hindus — captured in war that year. They sing and dance, and the sultan gives them away to the amirs and a'izza. Then come the other daughters of the infidels who sing and dance; and the Sultan gives them away to his brothers, his relations, his brothers-in-law and the maliks' sons. This court is usually held in the afternoon ; and on the following day also it is held at the same time and in the same order when female singers are brought in. They sing and dance and the sultan gives them away to the chief slaves. And on the third day the sultan gets his relatives married, and gifts are made to them. And on the fourth day the male slaves are manumitted ; on the fifth day the female slaves are manumitted and on the sixth day he makes the male slaves marry the female slaves. On the seventh day he gives away alms on a very large scale.

H

 * They take the wife away from her husband and slay him like a sheep. They throw the babe from her mother and drive her into slavery; the child calls out from the ground and the mother hears, yet what is she to do?...They separate the children from the mother like the soul from within the body, and she watches as they divide her loved ones from off her lap, two of them go to two masters, herself to another[...] Her children cry out in lament, their eyes hot with tears. She turns to her loved ones, milk pouring forth from her breast: "Go in peace, my darlings, and may God accompany you."
 * Hoyland 1997, p. 262. — Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Robert G. Hoyland

L

 * When the armies of Islãm entered that city, the women of the Brahmans, dressed in costly robes, wearing necklaces, covering their heads with colourful scarves and beautifying themselves in every way, took shelter at the back of the temple of Jagannãth. They were told again and again that a Muslim army that had entered the city would capture and take them away, and that those people would desecrate the temple after laying it waste. But the women did not believe it at all. They kept on saying. 'How could it happen? How could the soldiers of the Muslim army cause any injury to the idols? When the army of Islãm arrived near the temple, it made prisoners of those Hindû women. That is what surprised them most.''
 * About Sultãn Sulaimãn Karrãnî of Bengal in Puri: Tãrîkh-i-Khãn Jahãn Lodî, in Elliot and Dowson,History of India as told by its own Historians, Vol. V, p. 305-6


 * Akbar had prohibited enslavement and sale of women and children of peasants who had defaulted in payment of revenue. He knew, as Abul Fazl says, that many evil hearted and vicious men either because of ill-founded suspicion or sheer greed, used to proceed to villages and mahals and sack them.
 * Lal, K. S. (2012). Indian muslims: Who are they.


 * In this background, it would be an unremitting task both in volume and repetition to give all anecdotes, facts and figures of enslavement and concubinage of captive women in the central and provincial kingdoms and independent Muslim states found mentioned in the chronicles. This would only lead to repetition resulting in the book becoming bulky.
 * K.S.Lal. Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994)


 * The special interest of Muslims in sex slavery was universal and widespread.
 * K.S.Lai, The Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakasha, New Delhi, 1994. Quoted in Easy Meat, Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal  by Peter McLoughlin.


 * It is not so much in the matter of wives as in that of concubines that Moḥammad made an irretrievable mistake. The condition of the female slave in the East is indeed deplorable. She is at the entire mercy of her master, who can do what he pleases with her and her companions; for the Muslim is not restricted in the number of his concubines, as he is in that of his wives. … The female white slave is kept solely for the master’s sensual gratification, and is sold when he is tired of her, and so she passes from master to master, a very wreck of womanhood. Her condition is a little improved if she bear a son to her tyrant; but even then he is at liberty to refuse to acknowledge the child as his own, though it must be owned he seldom does this. Kind as the Prophet was himself towards bondswomen, one cannot forget the unutterable brutalities which he suffered his followers to inflict upon conquered nations in the taking of slaves. The Muslim soldier was allowed to do as he pleased with any ‘infidel’ woman he might meet with on his victorious march. When one thinks of the thousands of women, mothers and daughters, who must have suffered untold shame and dishonour by this license, he cannot find words to express his horror. And this cruel indulgence has left its mark on the Muslim character, nay, on the whole character of Eastern life.
 * Stanley Lane-Poole, Selections from the Ḳur-án, 2nd ed., Preface. Quoted by, The Reproach of Islam (1909), pp. 192-3

M

 * Female slavery, being a condition necessary to the legality of this coveted indulgence [concubinage], will never be put down, with a willing or hearty co-operation by any Mussalman community.
 * William Muir, Life of Mahomet.[quoted in Avril A. Powell (12 October 2006). "Indian Muslim modernists and the issue of slavery in Islam". In Richard M. Eaton (ed.). Slavery and South Asian History. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-11671-6. Powell 2006, p. 277-278.

S

 * We read how a local faujdar named Murshid Quli Khan Turkman (who died in 1638) took advantage of his campaigns against refractory tenants to gratify his lust. When the villagers were defeated he seized all their most beautiful women and placed them in his harem. Another practice of this licentious officer is thus described in the Masir- ul-umara (iii. 422): ‘On the birthday of Krishna, a vast gathering of Hindu men and women takes place at Govardhan on the Jamuna opposite Mathura. The Khan, paint- ing his forehead and wearing a dhoti like a Hindu, used to walk up and down in the crowd. Whenever he saw a woman whose beauty filled even the Moon with envy, he snatched her away like a wolf pouncing upon a flock, and placing her in the boat which his men had kept ready on the bank, he sped to Agra. The Hindu [for shame] never divulged what had happened to his daughter.”’
 * History of Aurangzib, vol III, Jadunath Sarkar