This book traces the journey of new Muslims in the first and second centuries AH (seventh and eighth centuries CE), as they joined the nascent Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses particularly on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the Islamic religious community but whose slave backgrounds linked them to the outside world and rendered them somehow alien. By analysing how these liminal Muslims resolved the tension between belonging and otherness, this book reveals the shifting boundaries of the early Islamic community. Particularly, it illuminates how Islam transformed from a small and relatively egalitarian piety movement in Western Arabia into the official doctrine of a Near Eastern empire that tried to uphold a hierarchical distinction between the conquerors and the conquered.

This monograph concentrates on three groups that inhabited a grey area between insider and outsider in early Islamic history: 1) the mawālī (singular: mawlā) – freed slaves, captives and other conquered people who became subordinate members of conquerors’ households, often glossed as ‘non-Arab Muslims’; 2) enslaved women ( jawārī) who acted as prostitutes, concubines and courtesans in the Islamic community; and 3) ‘mixed-breed’ or ‘half-blood’ (hajīn) children born to enslaved mothers and free Arab-Muslim fathers. Each of these groups is worthy of its own individual study, but taken together as three different types of unfree or liminal Muslims, they intersect in illuminating ways. For example, it appears that enslaved men and women played an active role in negotiating the boundaries of the earliest community under Muhammad (c. 610–632 CE). However, later rulers such as ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705) instituted a stronger socio-political hierarchy that rendered enslaved and freed persons subalterns whose ties to the non-Arab, non-Muslim world needed to be controlled. In this hierarchical, imperial setting, enslaved people could gain power by mastering Arabic, but they had to use their linguistic expertise in ways that pleased their masters. Additionally, it appears that the children of enslaved mothers resolved their liminal position by re-defining themselves as full ‘Arabs’ by the mid-second/ eighth century; they were only able to do so by excluding the mawālī as ‘non- Arabs’. Moreover, one can only understand how these children of enslaved mothers transformed from liminal ‘half-breeds’ into full ‘Arabs’ by analysing the position of the enslaved mothers themselves.