“They shall recline on jeweled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris [white maidens], chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds… We created the houris [white maidens] and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand…”
Sura 56 verses 12- 39
Penguin translation by NJ Dawood
Throughout history, the white woman has been valued as at the top of the hierarchy of beauty. The painting, “The Slave Market” is an 1866 painting by the French artist Jean-Leon Gerome captures some of this reality. That painting depicts an unspecific Middle Eastern or North African setting where a Mussleman inspects the teeth of a white nude, female slave, doubtless captured as booty from some Muslim raid on a Christian caravan or city.
So desirous was white women that a key attraction for Muslims to sack and seize Constantinople was the prospect of taking white women as booty as recorded by the historian Raymond Ibrahim as he quotes historians previous. For over a thousand years it has not been uncommon for minorities to have one thing on his mind. Where can I find white women?
Indeed white women were so valued by Muslims during the Crusade era that the consequent inter-breeding found future Muslim emirs to be genetically largely white men.
Below is a quote from Sword & Scimitar making this same point.
“When Caliph Al-Walid in Damascus saw the great plunder harvested, he was delighted by ‘the resources of all the people of Spain… it’s riches and the beauty of its young girls.’ Because ‘the Umayyads’ particularly valued blond or red-haired Franc or Galician women as sexual slaves,’ which were harder to acquire from better fortified Byzantium, ‘al-Andalus became a center for the trade and distribution of slaves.’ In exchange for peace, north Christians sometimes even had to make annual tributes ‘not of money, or horses, or arms, but of a hundred damsels (all to be distinguished for beauty) to ornament the harems.’
To maintain the slave emporium reputation of Cordoba, merchants ‘would put ointment on slave girls of darker complexion to whiten their faces; brunettes were placed for hours in a solution to make them blond (‘golden’); ointments were placed on the face and body of black slave to make them ‘prettier.’ As for the sexual objectification of European infidels – which, as seen, meant portraying them as promiscuous by nature – slavers played up the fantasy in order to facilitate sales. According to a twelfth-century document: “the merchant tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish manner with the old men and with the timid men among the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire… [and] he dresses them all in transparent clothes.’
Forced or indoctrinated into being promiscuous, some of the hapless women appear to have done their job well. Due Cordoba’s status as a slave epicenter – practically every Muslim emir was born to a pale concubine – large numbers of sex slaves and forced prostitutes were always on public display trading their wares. Ibn Hazm may have had them in mind, and not the average cloistered female Muslim, when he wrote that women ‘have nothing else to fill their minds, except loving union [sex] and what brings it about, flirting and how it is done, intimacy and the various ways of achieving it. This is their sole occupation and they were created for nothing else.’
Something of this fantasy – where half-naked women lounge about in caliphal harems pining for their turn to see and please their masters – eventually passed into the West’s popular imagination. But it is more a product of fiction along the lines of the Arabian Nights than reality. Consider the life and times of Abd al-Rahman III (r. 929-961),. the Caliph most associated with al-Andalus’s ‘golden age.’ According to Muslim records, he once ‘threw himself upon’ on of his Christian concubine’s ‘face to kiss and bite her, and she got disgusted by this and turned away’; this ‘so provoked his anger that he ordered the eunuchs to seize her and put a candle to her face, burning and destroying her beauty.’ Similarly, when Abu Imran the executioner was summoned, he found his master ‘in the company of a girl, beautiful like an oryx, who was being held by his eunuchs in a corner of the room, who was asking for mercy.’ The caliph gave none: ‘Take that whore, Abu Imran, and cut her neck,’ the executioner obliged: ‘With one blow I made her head fly.’ The caliph gifted Imran with her jeweled necklace, adding, ‘May Allah bless it to you.’ When a nineteen-year-old Christian slave boy rejected his repeated sexual advances, Abd al-Rahman III had him slowly tortured and beheaded.”
Raymond Ibrahim
Sword & Scimitar – p. 172-173
