American Mamlukes
By: M. Shahid Alam
It is a fact little known in the West, outside the circle of
historians of Islamicate societies, that Islamicate states often employed
soldiers and bureaucrats who were slaves of the king or emperor.
Commonly, these slaves were recruited as young boys: they were levied from
the ranks of the rulers Christian subjects or bought as slaves from areas
outside the Islamicate world. These slaves were converted to Islam, tested,
sorted by aptitude, and given an education that prepared them for employment in
the service of the sovereign. The smartest slaves could became generals or
rise to the highest ranks in the civilian bureaucracy.
Slaves we call these members of the emperors household because they were the
property of the emperor: in Arabic, mamlukes. But how appropriate is this
description? Aside from the manner in which they were recruited, however, these
mamlukes had little in common with the slaves who worked the plantations in the
Americas. More appropriately, they were life-time employees in the service of
the emperor. Ernest Gellner has drawn attention to the parallels between these
slaves and todays wage workers.
These slave soldiers were first employed by the Abbasids, but with time their
use spread to other states. In Egypt, these slaves captured power in 1250,
but continued their reliance on other mamlukes. This institution was put to its
best use by the Ottomans, the longest enduring empire in Islamic history.
How did the institution of mamlukes come to form the mainstay of several states
in Islamic history?
Our explanation will strike most Westerners as improbable. The Islamicate
rulers had hit upon the idea of employing slaves as a solution to the
difficulties of governance in egalitarian societies. This egalitarianism was
the gift of ecology. The Bedouin who lived off the deserts of the Middle East
could not be tied to a master or a piece of land; his camels and the vast
deserts did not allow this. Over time, through migrations and conquests, the
Bedouins imprinted their egalitarian ethos on the settled societies of the
Middle East.
Once the Bedouins - and, later, horse nomads - created their own states or
empires in the Middle East and Europe, the ruling dynasty found it difficult to
retain the loyalty of the tribesmen in their army and administration.
Challenges to the ruling dynasty were all too frequent since there were few
barriers of hierarchy to restrain the ambitious members of their own or related
tribes. Raised in an egalitarian ethos, ambitious and gifted tribesmen were
easily persuaded that they had an equal right to kingship.
In time, some rulers learned to circumvent these challenges by replacing their
tribesmen - their equals - with slaves trained for service in the army and
bureaucracy. The slaves were hired when they were young; they were recruited
from alien populations to ensure their status as outsiders, without a local
constituency; they were trained in loyalty to the emperor; and the most
talented slaves had unlimited opportunities for advancement. In short, the
mamluke system ensured that the slaves had few resources or incentives to
challenge their master. The state had solved its loyalty problem: it had
manufactured a class of loyal, life-time slave employees.
Is the mamluke system specific to the ecology of arid and semi-arid lands and
the nomadic life they support? The evidence indicates that this system was a
solution primarily to the problems of disloyalty that had their roots in an
egalitarian ethos: its connections to the sources of this ethos in nomadic life
are more tenuous. Arguably, then, whenever rulers confront an egalitarian
society, giving rise to frequent challenges to their power from below, they
will seek to circumvent these challenges by creating institutions that serve
the same functions as the mamluke system.
Can we discern any parallels to this mamluke system in the modern Western
societies as they moved from the hierarchy of feudalism to more open,
egalitarian societies created by the growing dominance of capitalist
institutions? In the decentralized polities of feudal Europe, with power vested
in the hands of thousands of large landowners, the primary problems of
governance were keeping down the serfs and checking the ambition of rival
landowners. However, as feudal Europe moved towards the formation of stronger
states - facilitated by the greater use of gunpowder - and they needed larger
standing armies, it became too risky to hire serfs to do the fighting. Serfs
with training in guns could raise rebellions. They preferred to rely upon
foreign mercenaries: they were more dependable because they were outsiders, and
when disbanded they would return to their homes beyond the territory of the
king.
Citizen armies appeared in Europes emerging nation states when techniques of
the military drill were slowly perfected during the seventeenth century. The
drill helped to mould the serfs into malleable tools, disciplined, obedient,
and trained in loyalty to the king and the nation. Over time, as nationalist
indoctrination was joined to the drill, the risks of rebellions from citizen
armies diminished. They became the norm over much of Europe. Modern Europe
acquired its slave armies with help from the drill and nationalist ideologies.
When industrial capitalism produced democratizing forces in society, a variety
of mechanisms came into play to minimize the risk of challenges from below as
the vote was extended downwards. On the one hand, the drill was refined and
expanded: to its existing tools were added schooling, wage work and rising
consumption. Schooling indoctrinated the electorate in the benefits of
citizenship. Wage work added threats of joblessness and privation. Addiction to
consumerism blocked out the anger over inequities. It also kept the consumer
toiling as hard or harder than before to pay for new consumer goods.
Neutralizing the newly empowered citizens was not enough: the representatives
they voted into government would have to be neutered. It is far easier to
cover election expenses by taking money from those with deep pockets the
corporations and lobbies than raising money from the voters. As election
expenses rose, the discipline that corporations and lobbies exercised over the
elected representatives deepened; they began to pick and put them into office.
Unlike the mamlukes, the senators and representatives in the US Congress are
not captured as slaves from neighboring countries. In practice, however, their
interests are so closely tied to those of their owners - the corporations and
lobbies - that they retain precious little interest in the concerns of the
people who vote them into office. Indeed, when we examine the loyalty with
which they render their services to their true owners, the dead Ottoman
emperors might well envy the system of representation that produces these
American mamlukes.
Thus, two egalitarian systems - the Islamicate and American - had produced
similar responses to the challenge of power from below: they instituted two
close variants of the mamluke system.
* M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is
author of Challenging the New Orientalism (IPI: 2007). He may be contacted at
alqalam02760@ neu.edu. His website: http://aslama. org. © M. Shahid Alam.
saiyed shahbazi
www.shahbazcenter.org
