Military Slavery in MENA

>>1778205

>Are there examples of this kind of behaviour outside the islamic middle east? In the same scale?

Ancient Egypt

>>1778205
You'd have to understand that as the imperial infrastructure of the early caliphate crumbled, power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of families that divided power among its leading members according to appanage. If there wasn't good relations between family members, which was often, that left these increasingly granular dynasties isolated among a sea of local tribes.

Rather than wade into those murky waters it became preferable for the ruler and the bureaucracy around his household to monopolize power and wealth for themselves by employing a private army rather than hand it off to one or more local magnates who could organize very dangerous revolts if given free reign.

As to why military slaves specifically (as opposed to mercenaries and foreign guards), that's because of how the household worked in Arabic-Persian cultures at the time. Any males who weren't family, adopted, or slaves were verboten, so if you were looking to bring in as many men as possible under your roof you had just one option unless you were patient enough to fuck 1,000 women and wait to raise 1,000 children into soldiers.

Incidentally, this is also why many Middle Eastern rulers began to favor slave concubines over noblewomen as wives and eunuchs as courtiers. A local wife and courtier brought in their family's politics, but a concubine or eunuch is more loyal to the ruler's personal household.

>>1778258
Care to develop this statement?

>>1778297
I know this is probably a naive question, but why didn't they try to erase or at least reduce this extreme tribalism?

>>1778344
Islam is a tribalistic, barbarian religion itself, thats why...

>>1778344
Partly because they themselves exacerbated it, establishing their own power in the land through their family tribal networking in the first place. It was culturally institutionalized by that point.

>>1778371
The opposite actually. Religion was the exception to the tribalism and almost every state that wasn't a tribal confederation led by a powerful family was a theocracy of some kind. Ibn Khaldun mentions this when he discusses the political instability of the Arabs. But even these eventually succumbed to tribal politics after two or three generations once the religious fervor died down.

Europe had this problem as well for a long time. What solved it was urbanization which dissolved the tribal allegiances between people and replaced it with a civic identity based on charters and territory. It didn't happen for the Middle East because, around the same time military slaves began taking power everywhere, mass migrations of desert and steppe nomad tribes moved into regions which had been drying up for centuries.