In the following article Professor Emeritus Jere L. Bacharach, a specialist in Medieval Middle Eastern history, describes the little known saga of one of the largest groups of persons of African descent in the region, military slaves.  These enslaved men, utilized for centuries in the Muslim world, had no counterpart in Europe or the Americas.  His article appears below.  

Most scholarly work on the external African slave trade has focused on the enslavement and forced migration of over ten million Africans across the Atlantic where their primary role was as plantation slave labor.  However, there was also another, less well documented forced exodus of almost as many Africans.  This one, however, was toward the north and northeast, that is, across the Sahara to the Islamic Middle East from Morocco to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and through the Persian Gulf to Iraq.   

Although the earlier Roman Empire was centered on the Mediterranean, relatively few African slaves outside of Egypt were imported into their lands.  The establishment of Islamic rule along the southern shores of the Mediterranean and in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf beginning in the 7th century created a vast new market for African slaves.  The ability and interest of Muslim merchants, military forces, and religious men to cross the Sahara and sail south along the East African coast enabled slave traders to move enslaved African into the growing markets of the Middle East.  Scholars estimate that over four million Africans were transported from sub-Saharan Africa into the Islamic Middle East Even before the trans-Atlantic slave traffic began in the 1500s.

The Saharan-Indian Ocean slave trade not only lasted significantly longer than the trans-Atlantic trade, that is, from the early 7th century well in the 20th century, but the market demand was different.   Whereas males were favored in the trans-Atlantic trade, females were a higher priority in most Middle Eastern markets where they