The Bureimi Fort, and the slave trade
by Garry Craig Powell
This is the pristine fort in Bureimi, which is right across the border from Al Ain in Oman. When Wilfred Thesiger visited this area in 1950, slave-trading was still common, as this extract from Arabian Sands shows:
“I knew that many of the slaves sold in Hamasa [one of the two villages that made up the Bureimi oasis] were in fact Baluchis, Persians, or Arabs who had been kidnapped, but I also knew that the usual price slave-traders paid for one of them was 1,000 – 1,500 rupees, and for a young Negro even more. An Arab or Persian girl was however, more valuable than a Negress and would fetch as much as 3,000 rupees.”
In fact Thesiger, who was visiting Zayed in Al Ain at the time, managed to persuade the sheikh of Bureimi to release two young men from the Hadhramaut (in Yemen), whom he had bought for the absurdly low price of 230 rupees.
As far as I could find out, the slave market in Al Ain closed in the mid-fifties, but there are still black familes in the UAE (and a lot more in Oman), who are generally the descendants of slaves, and the indigenous Emiratis would refer to black students, to their faces, as “slaves”, teasingly. This was always taken good-humouredly, again, as far as I could tell. It’s something of a shock to realize how recent the slave trade was. Hassan, a young Moroccan I knew, told me that his grandfather was a slave-trader, and Ahmed, a young Mauretanian of the upper class who had been educated in Paris, told me that his parents still kept slaves in their household. 
Here is another picture of the Bureimi fort, with my younger son, William, and ex-wife, Paula, about to climb the ramparts. I heard from students this week that it is rumored that I have four ex-wives, including a mail-order bride from the Middle East (as if there were such a thing!) For the record, I’ve been married twice, and neither wife was bought from a slave market, or came from the Middle East.
I would have liked to have ridden into Bureimi on a camel with Thesiger just a few years before I was born, though, I have to admit.
Stoning the Devil 
Fascinating concept. I’d be interested to know the general care for slaves in that part of the world. There is so much documentation of the treatment of African slaves in the Americas, but I’ll admit I haven’t heard much on the topic here.
Also, I love it that your students see you as such a playboy. I tell you, you’re a wild man, Garry!
Thanks, Rowan. I haven’t read any studies and don’t even know if such studies exist. Some of the anecdotal and literary evidence is that they were often treated very well, though of course these anecdotes and stories were told by people whose families owned slaves, so it’s a bit like the members of the Old South aristocracies claiming that their slaves were “members of the family”. No doubt there were humane people who treated their slaves well, and the reverse. Those high-priced Arab and Persian slave-girls were not being purchased for acting as maids, though, that much is obvious. I suppose you could argue that concubinage wasn’t necessarily much worse than being a legitimate wife. It’s hard to imagine. I did read a story by Mohammed Al Murr, an Emirati, about an ex-slave in Dubai in (I think) the 1970s, long after the abolition of slavery anyway, who had remained with his or her masters because he or she actually wanted to remain a slave; freedom was too frightening after a lifetime of servitude. That makes sense psychologically. And Jan Morris wrote a book about the Sultan of Oman in the early 50s (which is banned there to this day), which shows that he kept slaves, though from his descriptions, they seem to have been treated well. In fact there is still de facto slavery or near slavery in the region (as there is in the US for that matter): people have maids who are expected to work all day, every day, for wages so low that can’t save anything and have no real choices. In the Emirates, people frequently beat their servants, and lots of the maids are impregnated by their masters and masters’ sons. My ex-wife used to visit an orphanage and most of the illegitimate children there were the offspring of Arabs and other nationalities: Indians, Filipinos, and so on, even some Europeans. (The mothers were sometimes prostitutes.) I should do a post on the orphanage, actually.
As for me being a wild man–not really! You once told me yourself that I’m not an alpha male, and I’m well aware that I’m not. I’m just a quiet, mild professor, and most of my wildness is in my imagination. Especially these days!
Oh dear, I was only joking. And thank you for the information. I’d be interested in looking more deeply into this.
I know, Rowan, and I shouldn’t have responded as if you were living in the irony-free zone of Arkansas. I liked your post on women fighters, by the way.