Zanj
Zanj (Arabic: زنج from Persian: زنگ; "Land of the Blacks" [1]) was a name used by medieval Arab geographers to refer to both a certain portion of Southeast Africa (primarily the Swahili Coast), and to the area's Bantu inhabitants.[2] This word is also the origin of the place name Zanzibar.
Contents
Division of Africa's coast
Geographers historically divided the eastern coast of Africa at large into several regions based on each region's respective inhabitants. In Somalia was Barbara, which was the land of the Eastern Baribah or Barbaroi (Berbers), as the ancestors of the Somalis were referred to by medieval Arab and ancient Greek geographers, respectively.[2][3][4] In modern-day Ethiopia was al-Habash or Abyssinia,[5] which was inhabited by the Habash or Abyssinians, who were the forebears of the Habesha.[6]
Arab and Chinese sources referred to the general area south of the Abyssinian highlands and Barbara as Zanj, or the "country of the blacks".[7] Also transliterated as Zenj or Zinj, this Southeast Africa area was inhabited by Bantu-speaking peoples called the Zanj.[2][8][7] The core area of Zanj occupation stretched from the territory south of present-day Ras Kamboni[9] to Pemba Island in Tanzania. South of Pemba lay Sofala in modern Mozambique, the northern boundary of which may have been Pangani. Beyond Sofala was the obscure realm of Waq-Waq, also in Mozambique.[10][11] The tenth-century Arab historian and geographer Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī describes Sofala as the furthest limit of Zanj settlement, and mentions its king's title as Mfalme, a Bantu word.[2]
Zanj territory
History
The Zanj traded extensively with Arabs, Persians and Indians, but according to some sources, only locally, since they possessed no ocean-going ships.[2] According to other sources, the heavily Bantu Swahili peoples already had seafaring vessels with sailors and merchants trading with Arabia and Persia, and as far east as India and China.[12][13][14] Through this trade, some Arabs intermarried with local Bantu women, which eventually gave rise to the Swahili culture and language—both of which are Bantu in origin, but significantly influenced by foreign elements (e.g. clothing, loan words, etc.).[15]
Prominent settlements of the Zanj coast included Malindi, Gedi, and Mombasa. By the late medieval period, the area included at least 37 substantial Swahili trading towns, many of them quite wealthy. However, these communities never consolidated into a single political entity (the "Zanj Empire" being a late nineteenth-century fiction).
The urban ruling and commercial classes of these Swahili settlements were made up of Arab and Persian immigrants. The Bantu peoples inhabited the coastal regions, and were organized only as family groups.[2] The term shenzi, used on the East African coast and derived from the Swahili word zanji, referred in a derogatory way to anything associated with rural blacks. An example of this would be the colonial term shenzi dog, referring to a native dog.
The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Arab traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696 AD, we learn of slave revolts of the Zanj against their Arab masters in Iraq (see below). Ancient Chinese texts also mention ambassadors from Java presenting the Chinese emperor with two Seng Chi (Zanji) slaves as gifts, and Seng Chi slaves reaching China from the Hindu kingdom of Sri Vijaya in Java.[16]
The term Zanj apparently fell out of use in the tenth century. However, after 1861, when the area controlled by the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar was forced by the British to split with the parent country of Oman, it was often referred to as Zanj.[citation needed] The sea off the south-eastern coast of Africa was known as the Sea of Zanj, and included the Mascarene islands and Madagascar. During the anti-apartheid struggle it was proposed that South Africa should assume the name Azania, to reflect ancient Zanj.
Contemporary descriptions
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Arab descriptions of the Zanj peoples have been inconsistent.[16][17] A negative view is exemplified in the following passage from Kitab al-Bad' wah-tarikh,[18] by the medieval Arab writer al-Muqaddasī:
As for the Zanj, they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.
The 9th-century Muslim author al-Jāḥiẓ, an Afro-Arab and the grandson of a Zanj (Bantu)[2][3][8] slave, disagreed:
They say: If a Zanji and a Zanji woman marry and their children remain after puberty in Iraq, they come to rule the roost thanks to their numbers, endurance, intelligence, and efficiency.[this quote needs a citation]
Al-Jāḥiẓ also wrote a book entitled Risalat mufakharat al-Sudan 'ala al-bidan ("Treatise on the Superiority of Blacks over Whites"), in which he stated that blacks
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... have conquered the country of the Arabs as far as Mecca and have governed them. We defeated Dhu Nowas (Jewish King of Yemen) and killed all the Himyarite princes, but you, White people, have never conquered our country. Our people, the Zenghs (Negroes) revolted forty times in the Euphrates, driving the inhabitants from their homes and making Oballah a bath of blood.[19]
... Blacks are physically stronger than no matter what other people. A single one of them can lift stones of greater weight and carry burdens such as several Whites could not lift nor carry between them. ... They are brave, strong, and generous as witness their nobility and general lack of wickedness ...
Yet al-Jāḥiẓ also wrote:
We know that the Zanj (blacks) are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind, and the least capable of understanding the consequences of actions.[20]
and:
Like the crow among mankind are the Zanj for they are the worst of men and the most vicious of creatures in character and temperament.[21]
In 1331, the Arabic-speaking Berber explorer Ibn Battuta visited the Kilwa Sultanate in the Zanj, which was ruled by Sultan Hasan bin Sulayman's Yemeni dynasty.[22] Battuta described the kingdom's Arab ruler as often making slave and booty raids on the local Zanj inhabitants, the latter of whom Battuta characterized as "jet-black in color, and with tattoo marks on their faces."[22]
Kilwa is one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world. The whole of it is elegantly built. The roofs are built with mangrove pole. There is very much rain. The people are engaged in a holy war, for their country lies beside the pagan Zanj. Their chief qualities are devotion and piety: they follow the Shafi'i sect. When I arrived, the Sultan was Abu al-Muzaffar Hasan surnamed Abu al-Mawahib [loosely translated, "The Giver of Gifts"] ... on account of his numerous charitable gifts. He frequently makes raids into the Zanj country [neighboring mainland], attacks them and carries off booty, of which he reserves a fifth, using it in the manner prescribed by the Koran [Qur'an].[22]
Zanj Rebellion
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The Zanj Rebellion was a series of uprisings that took place between 869 and 883 AD near the city of Basra (also known as Basara), situated in present-day Iraq.
The Zanj who were taken as slaves to the Middle East were often used in strenuous agricultural work.[23] In particular, Zanj slaves were used in labor-intensive plantations, harvesting crops such as sugarcane in the lower Mesopotamia basin of what is now southern Iraq. This was a relatively unusual development in the Islamic world, which generally reserved slaves for use as domestic household workers and soldiers. Harsh circumstances apparently provoked three rebellions between the seventh and ninth centuries. What is now called the Zanj Rebellion was the largest of these.[24]
Others believe that the Zanj Rebellion was not a slave rebellion, but rather that the participants were mostly Arabs, supported by East African immigrants in Iraq. M. A. Shaban argued:
It was not a slave revolt. It was a zanj, i.e. a Negro, revolt. To equate Negro with slave is a reflection of nineteenth-century racial theories; it could only apply to the American South before the Civil War. ... All the talk about slaves rising against the wretched conditions of work in the salt marshes of Baṣra is a figment of the imagination and has no support in the sources. On the contrary, some of the people who were working in the salt marshes were among the first to fight against the revolt. Of course there were a few runaway slaves who joined the rebels, but this still does not make it a slave revolt. The vast majority of the rebels were Arabs of the Persian Gulf supported by free East Africans who had made their homes in the region.[25]
See also
References
- ↑ Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Volume 131 (Kommissionsverlag F. Steiner, 1981), p. 130.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 F. R. C. Bagley et al., The Last Great Muslim Empires (Brill: 1997), p. 174.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi, Culture and Customs of Somalia, (Greenwood Press: 2001), p. 13.
- ↑ James Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Part 12: V. 12 (Kessinger Publishing, LLC: 2003), p. 490.
- ↑ Sven Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence (Tsehai, 2003), p. 30.
- ↑ Jonah Blank, Mullahs on the mainframe: Islam and modernity among the Daudi Bohras (University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 163.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.. Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "Raunig" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ 8.0 8.1 Bethwell A. Ogot, Zamani: A Survey of East African History (East African Publishing House: 1974), p. 104. Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "Ogot" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press: 2003), p. 61.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Stefan Goodwin, Africa's Legacies of Urbanization: Unfolding Saga of a Continent (Lexington Books: 2006), p. 301.
- ↑ Hybrid urbanism: on the identity discourse and the built environment By Nezar AlSayyad
- ↑ Kilwa Kisiwani. Medieval Trade Center of Eastern Africa, By K. Kris Hirst
- ↑ Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Beacon Press: 2002), p. 8.
- ↑ David Westerlund, Ingvar Svanberg, Islam Outside the Arab World (Palgrave Macmillan: 1999), p. 11.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Roland Oliver, Africa in the Iron Age: c.500 BC-1400 AD (Cambridge University Press: 1975), p. 192.
- ↑ David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Harvard University Press: 2006), p. 12.
- ↑ from Vol. 4
- ↑ Joel Augustus Rogers, John Henrik Clarke, World's Great Men of Color (Simon & Schuster: 1996), p. 166.
- ↑ Kitab al-Bukhala (The Book of Misers)
- ↑ Kitab al-Hayawan, Vol. 2
- ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 Randall Lee Pouwels, African and Middle Eastern world, 600-1500, (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 156. Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "Pouwels" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ Islam, From Arab To Islamic Empire: The Early Abbasid Era
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "Islamic History" By M. A. Shaban
