Unlike prostitutes, who are mostly marginalised in the source material, concubine-mothers (umm walads) are ubiquitous; they lurk behind the scenes as nameless mothers and take centre stage as queens. The sources had to acknowledge concubines because they were contributing so much to Islamic society – in this case, they were contributing children, and particularly sons. Concubine-mothers and their sons must be viewed together, for questions regarding the son's position in society are tied to the mother's identity, and the mother herself gains a special status by bearing children. Mothers and sons are also connected in terms of changing political ideologies: the rise of the concubine-born caliph in the mid-second/eighth century is soon accompanied by the rise of the powerful concubine-queen. Thus, in this chapter, I analyse enslaved mothers and their sons together in order to elucidate how social identities and political ideologies were changing in the Umayyad period. First, I trace changing rates of concubinage and concubines’ birthrates across a large data set, in order to reveal the underlying demographic trends that were impelling social and political change. Second, I closely read historical narratives that first highlight the liminality or questionable status of ‘mixed-breed’ children born to enslaved mothers, and then resolve this tension by championing such children as true Muslims and full Arabs.

Based on these two forms of analysis, I argue that questions about the identity of concubine-born men only arose in the Marwanid period (64–132/684–749), not earlier. Muslim men had used concubines from the first decades of Islam and showed no concern to keep their bloodlines ‘pure’. It was not until the Marwanid period that large numbers of these children began to attain adulthood and to make a marked impact on early Islamic society. Scholars have long noted that the Marwanid caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705) instituted many centralising, empire-building reforms that strongly defined the caliphate as Arab and Muslim. Scholars have viewed these reforms as ʿAbd al-Malik's attempt to gain control after the Great Fitna (60–72/680–692), to bolster the religious legitimacy of the Umayyad caliphs, and to distinguish the conqueror-elites from the conquered populations (especially Christians). However, it is also during this time of contraction, of more strictly defining and controlling the boundaries of the Islamic polity, that some people seemed to have questioned the place of concubines’ children.