Zanj
The Zanj (often Zanj or Zenj written Arabic زنج, DMG Zanǧ ), were the black slaves who worked in the salt marshes in the south of what is now Iraq in the 9th century . The name is derived from a geographical designation: Until the 19th century , Arab seafarers referred to the coastal region of East Africa as Zanj - "Land of the Blacks" . Zandschi also simply means “ negro ” in Arabic , with connotations similar to the German word. The term may be related to the word " Azania ", which was already mentioned by Ptolemy and in the travel description Periplus Maris Erythraei .
In the 9th century, the salt marshes in the lower Mesopotamia were developed according to plan and a plantation economy was built with slaves from East Africa , which were used to grow luxury fruits for long-distance trade and made up an important part of the income of the Islamic metropolises: sugar cane , cloves , cotton , dates . The sugar obtained was, for example, an important commodity with Christian Europe, which for centuries had no other sugar than that from Islamic countries.
The work of the development and the plantation cultivation was a matter of the Zanj, so that it can be established that the economy achieved through the Atlantic slave trade in the overseas colonies of the Europeans had a similarly structured forerunner.
Under the direction of Ali ibn Muhammad , an Arab who claimed to be a relative of Muhammad , was a poet and teacher and who had proclaimed himself Mahdi (“Messiah”), the Zanj revolt took place in 869 , which was quickly put down two hundred years earlier This was preceded by revolts in 689, 690 and 694. In 871 Basra was conquered by the rebellious black slaves, and an independent Zanj state emerged with a newly built capital al-Muchtara near Basra . Muhammad declared himself an Aliden , a descendant of Ali , and sought an alliance with Hamdan Qarmat , the founder of the sectarian Qarmatians . On August 11, 883, Ali ibn Muhammad was fatally struck by an arrow and the Zanj gave up the fight. If not executed, they were accepted into the opposing army for bravery, but were enslaved again. In any case, one goal was achieved: The drainage and desalination of the swamps were stopped and the cultivation of sugar cane restricted. However, other Zanj already made a name for themselves two years later in 885 with an uprising in al-Wasit on the Tigris . Left to their own devices without Muslim leaders, they were quickly wiped out and punished accordingly.
All uprisings had no effect on the slave trade with Africa, and the blacks remained, if not more than "Zanj", under other names until the 20th century, an important import into Islamic countries. English estimates, for example, assume that between 1830 and 1873 600,000 prisoners were sold and shipped in Zanzibar alone . According to the American historian Ralph A. Austen (1979), around 17 million Africans were deported to Islamic countries on various routes through the Sahara , across the Red Sea and along the Indian Ocean between the 7th and the beginning of the 20th century be.
literature
- Jacques Heers , Les négriers en terres d'islam. La première traite des Noirs VII e –XVI e siècle , Paris (Perrin) 2007; ISBN 978-2-262-02764-3 .
- Gudrun Krämer : History of Islam . (Pp. 88-89), Munich 2005.
- Tidiane N'Diaye, Le génocide voilé. Enquête historique , Paris (Gallimard) 2008; ISBN 978-2-07-011958-5 . English: The Veiled Genocide. The history of the Muslim slave trade in Africa , Rowohlt, Reinbek 2010; ISBN 978-3-498-04690-3 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Tidiane N'Diaye: Le génocide voilé. Inquiry historique . Gallimard, Paris 2008, p. 244.
- ↑ Jacques Heers: Les négriers de terres d'Islam. La première traite des Noirs VII e -XVI e siècle . Perrin, Paris 2007, p. 227 f.
- ↑ Jacques Heers (2007), p. 234 f.
- ↑ Jonathan P. Berkey: The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, p. 141
- ↑ Jacques Heers (2007), p. 239 f.
- ↑ Tidiane N'Diaye (2008), p. 221.