The slave-girls who enslaved the free-born: Slave-girls and their masters in Islamic literature

Abstract

Slave-girls, and in particular singing slave-girls, hold a prominent place in Islamic literary sources. These sources provide quite a number of stories in which the masters of slave-girls fall deeply in love with them, and then, when faced with the prospect of separation or are indeed separated from them, humble themselves and risk losing their honour, all of their wealth, and even their own lives in order to be reunited with the girl whom they love. In some stories, intelligent and learned slave-girls take the initiative to preserve their relationships with their masters who are often depicted as inept and clueless. In the end, the girl is typically given her freedom and marries her master. Although the men are the legal masters of the slave-girls, it seems that there is an inversion of the master/slave roles in the tales and that it is the slave-girl who controls the destiny of both.