ABSTRACT
Turkish Military Slaves and Bedouin Chiefs Muslim military slavery is a well-known institution. However, the people who experienced it, Turks and Africans, are known only if they attained a position of significance in the lands of Islam. The vast majority of them were regarded as a nameless and faceless mass by Muslim medieval society and have remained as such for us. The background of these people, even of those who earned fame in the lands of Islam, was in most cases utterly obliterated. Very rarely do the sources provide any information that reflects an interest among the Muslim civilian elite, a class composed of administrators and men of religion, in the background of the foreign emirs of the military class who came to dominate the political life of Islam after the second half of the ninth century. For example, the historian Ibn Zafir (1 171-1226) says that Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn 'Ali of the renowned Madhara'i family of Egyptian administrators of the tenth century, once asked Kafur about his African past and how he was brought as a slave to Egypt. Kafur answered that he was brought at the age of fourteen and the historian adds that it was in the year 322 A.H.1934 A.D. One can doubt that such a question was ever asked, but it
I would like to thank Yehoshua Frenkel of Haifa University for his valuable suggestions and comments.
