This chapter treats enslaved prostitutes, who are mostly marginal in the historical sources and have received little scholarly attention.1 Upon closer analysis, enslaved prostitutes reveal many deep-seated thematic connections to the other people studied in this monograph. First, both Abū Bakra and early Islamic prostitutes reveal tensions about the more egalitarian/inclusive and the more hierarchical/exclusive interpretations of the Quran. Just as Abū Bakra reportedly invoked Q 33:5 to articulate his place in the early Islamic umma, so did two first-/seventh-century prostitutes apparently invoke Q 24:33 to seek inclusion in the earliest umma. The references to these women are as obscure and suggestive as Abū Bakra's identity as a taliq allāh, and likewise they are only recoverable through a careful combing of the sources. By the third/ninth century, Arabic-Islamic authors had downplayed or even plain forgotten the stories of these two prostitutes and had replaced them with narratives that made more sense in their own contexts. Like the saga of the heroic Abū Bakra versus the villainous Ziyād, these authors created archetypes of the ‘good’ slave prostitute saved by Islam versus the ‘bad’ prostitute revelling in her debauchery. Thus, early Islamic slave prostitutes are illuminating case studies of liminal believers who navigated their belonging in the earliest umma, and whose identities were flattened by later authors who were not concerned with the inclusion of such outsiders.

Prostitutes are also connected to the coming chapters through their gender and status, that is, as enslaved women. The coming chapters will analyse two prominent types of enslaved women from Umayyad and early Abbasid society – the concubine-mother (umm walad) and the courtesan (qayna). Both of these types of enslaved women play important roles in early Islamic history and literature, and, by contrast, they allow us to interrogate the near absence of the more mundane prostitute. On the one hand, most of our source authors are urban elites (often associated with or at least paid by a royal court), and they accordingly pay more attention to high-class literary soirées than to the local bar-and-brothel scene. On the other hand, I suggest that the sources can afford to ignore prostitutes because they are so easily dismissed as ‘other’ – as foreign non-Muslims at the fringes of Islamic society, or as vestiges of pre-Islamic sexual ethics. As we shall see in later chapters, because courtesans and concbubines were ‘producing songs and sons’ their liminality could not be so easily resolved, and they continued to exercise the pens and the imaginations of scholars well into the Abbasid period.