Read about the Zanj Rebellion (869–883). The treatment of Black slaves under Abbasid Arab rule was so violently inhumane that a Persian man from near present-day Tehran, Iran, was reportedly horrified when he witnessed it firsthand in southern Iraq. What he saw, mass enslavement, abuse, and systematic dehumanization was so intolerable that he helped ignite a full-scale rebellion. He united enslaved Black people from plantations and labor camps across the region, and for 14 years they waged a desperate war against the Abbasid state. In the end, they were crushed by overwhelming force.
The Arab slave trade was extraordinarily brutal. Countless enslaved Black men were castrated and worked to exhaustion in the scorching heat of southern Iraq’s fields and marshes, treated as disposable labor rather than human beings. Enslaved Black women were routinely exploited, forced into harems or condemned to lives of servitude. This was a deliberate, sustained practice of exploitation and cruelty.