Gender Stereotypes

included in the Quran, it probably replayed to the Muslims by their Christian and Jewish brethren. The children of Shem are recognized as their group the Arabs. Ham descendants are the blacks, sometimes including the Copt and Berbers. The Europeans and Turk ancestry was supposedly traced back to the brother Japhet. The Persian and Byzantines, the Arabs biggest adversaries and acquaintances, baffle historians on their ancestry according to the Arabs. One can deduct they were considered kinsmen, children of Shem, during peace. And the children of Japhet during war (Lewis44-5). Arabs declare of jihadj wasn’t discriminatory of race and ethnicity however. They enslaved “people of diverse ethnic, racial, and religious stock” says Murray Gordon.

Buyers could find an assortment of slaves at the slave markets, or ma’rid.

Price was based on factors like national origin, age, sex, health, and talent. Young pretty females were purchased for concubines. Castrated males for eunuch were higher than ordinary males that would move on to be servants and laborers. White slaves were more valuable than black (Gordon 64). Characteristics of different races and ethnicities based on stereotypes and appearances were used to classify slaves into occupation. Arabs were viewed as the most balanced and intelligent with beautiful well-formed brown features. Slavs and other Europeans were considered undercooked in the womb with light, leprous coloring and a barbaric nature do to their cold climate. Blacks were ugly with wooly hair and uneven limbs. But they were handworkers with a gift for music if not a simple minded and oversexed lot (Lewis 15-7). This reinforcement of stereotype and inferiority based on race begins to mind the pseudo-sciences and their teachings justifying slavery in the antebellum

south.
The American Civil War brought about the end of slave yet in the Middle East slavery wasn’t abolished well into the twenty-first century; Saudi Arabia ending it in 1962 and Mauritania in 1981. Murray Gordon believes slavery continued so long in the Muslim world because of its deep roots in Islamic law and the humane treatment enforced by it. Islam legitimatized slavery so well the morality of it was never questioned until the arrival of western ideologies. Only when their position in the modern world was put into question did Muslims start to see the flaw in the system, benevolent conditions or not (Gordon 44-5). Because in the case of slavery, where one human is in possession of another life, the benevolence of the treatment does not make up for the malevolence of the institution.