First slave route

The slave trade had two major routes to Hejaz. African slaves were trafficked from primarily Sudan and Ethiopia. Primarily children and young women were bought or given as tribute by their parents to Ethiopian chiefs, who sold them to slave traders.^{[7]: 76–78} The parents were told that their children were going to be given a better life as slaves in Arabia.^{[7]: 76–78} The slaves were delivered to Arabian slave traders by the coast and shipped across the Red Sea to Jeddah.^{[7]: 76–78}

Eunuchs, female concubines and male labourers were the occupations of slaves sent from Ethiopia to Jidda and other parts of Hejaz.^[8] The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia.^[9] Female and male slaves from Ethiopia made up the main supply of slaves to India and the Middle East.^[10]

Egypt and Hejaz were also the recipients of Indian women trafficked via Aden and Goa.^[11][12] Since Britain banned the slave trade in its colonies, 19th century British ruled Aden was no longer a recipient of slaves and the slaves sent from Ethiopia to Arabia were shipped to Hejaz instead.^[13]

Second slave route

The second slave route were connected to the Hajj pilgrimage. Already in the Middle ages, the Hajj played a role in the slave trade. In 1416, al-Maqrizi told how pilgrims coming from Takrur (near the Senegal River) brought 1,700 slaves with them to Mecca.

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, was biggest vehicle for enslavement.^[5] When the open Trans-Saharan slave trade died out, Muslim-African Hajj pilgrims across the Sahara were duped or given low-cost travel expenses by tribal leaders; when they arrived at the East Coast, they were trafficked over the Red Sea in the dhows of the Red Sea slave trade or on small passenger planes, and discovered upon arrival in Saudi Arabia that they were to be sold on the slave market rather than to perform the Hajj.^[5]

Slave traders trafficked primarily women and children in the guise of wives, servants and pilgrims to Hejaz, where they were sold after arrival.^{[7]: 88–90} The victims of this trafficking route were sometimes tricked, and taken on Hajj under false pretences. Slave traders trafficked women to Hejaz by marrying them and then taking them on the Hajj, were they were sold: afterwards, their families were told that their women had died during the journey.^{[7]: 88–90}

In a similar fashion, parents entrusted their children to slave traders under the impression that the slave traders were taking their children on Hajj, as servants, or as students.^[7] This category of traffic victims came from all over the Muslim world, as far away as the East Indies and China. Some travellers sold their servants or poor travel companions in the Hajj, in order to pay for their travel costs.^{[7]: 88–90}

The English traveler Charles M. Doughty, who visited Central Arabia in the 1880s, noted that African slaves were brought up to Arabia every year during the hajj, and that "there are bondsmen and bondwomen and free negro families in every tribe and town".^[14]

Similar to the defenders of slavery in the American South, slavery in Islamic societies has been described as a benevolent institution, and King Abd alAziz Ibn Saud remarked to the British legation officer Munshi Ihsanullah that West Africans:

“lived like beasts, that they were much better off as slaves, and that if he had his way he would take all (West African) pilgrims as his slaves, raising them thus out of their depraved state and turning them into happy, prosperous and civilised beings.”^[15]

Third slave route

In the 1930s and 1940s, it was reported that a third route of Baluchi slaves from Baluchistan was shipped to Saudi Arabia via Oman and the Gulf states.^{[7]: 304–306} It was reported that some Baluchis sold themselves or their children to slave traders to escape poverty.^{[7]: 304–306} In 1943, it was reported that Baluchi girls were shipped via Oman to Mecca, where they were popular as concubines since Caucasian girls were no longer available, and were sold for $350–450.^{[7]: 304–307}

Female slaves

Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic servants, or as concubines (sex slaves).

Black African women were primarily used as domestic house slaves rather than exclusively for sexual services, while white Caucasian women (normally Circassian or Georgian) were preferred as concubines (sex slaves); when the main slave route of white slave girls became harder to access after Russia's conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia in the mid 19th-century, after which Baluchi and "Red" Ethiopian (Oromo and Sidamo) women became the preferred targets for sexual slavery.^[16]

Writing about the Arabia he visited in 1862, the English traveler W. G. Palgrave met large numbers of slaves. The effects of slave concubinage were apparent in the number of persons of mixed race and in the emancipation of slaves he found to be common.^[17] Charles Doughty, writing about 25 years later, made similar reports.^[18]

Egypt and Hejaz were also the recipients of Indian women trafficked via Aden and Goa.^[11][19]

Since Britain banned the slave trade in its colonies, 19th century British ruled Aden was no longer a recipient of slaves and the slaves sent from Ethiopia to Arabia were shipped to Hejaz instead.^[13] Eunuchs, female concubines and male labourers were the occupations of slaves sent from Ethiopia to Jidda and other parts of Hejaz.^[8] The southwest and southern parts of Ethiopia supplied most of the girls being exported by Ethiopian slave traders to India and Arabia.^[9] Female and male slaves from Ethiopia made up the main supply of slaves to India and the Middle East.^[10]

After the Armenian genocide, Armenian girls flooded the Syrian slave market and many ended up in the harems of central Arabia.^[20]

In the 20th-century, women and girls for the harem market were kidnapped not only from Africa and Baluchistan, but also from the Trucial States, the Nusayriyah Mountains in Syria, and the Aden Protectorate.^[5]

Syrian girls were trafficked from Syria to Saudi Arabia right before World War II and married to legally bring them across the border but then divorced and given to other men. A Syrian Dr. Midhat and Shaikh Yusuf were accused of engaging in this traffic of Syrian girls to supply them to Saudis.^[21][22]

In Jeddah, Kingdom of Hejaz on the Arabian peninsula, the Arab king Ali bin Hussein, King of Hejaz had in his palace 20 young pretty Javanese girls from Java (modern day Indonesia).^[23]

Female slaves were also given as gifts between rulers: in November 1948, for example, the ruler of Dubai gifted a number of female slaves to King Ibn Saud and his sons for a car and 10,000 ryals.^[24]

Syrian girls were trafficked from Syria to Saudi Arabia right before World War II and married to legally bring them across the border but then divorced and given to other men. A Syrian Dr. Midhat and Shaikh Yusuf were accused of engaging in this traffic of Syrian girls to supply them to Saudis.^[21][22]

Male slaves

Slave labor is described in the territory of modern Saudi Arabia for centuries. In the 8th-century, slave labor was used in the mines of Asir,^[2] and in the 11th-century, slaves performed manual labor in the oasis of Al-Ahsa.^[2] During the Middle Ages, eunuchs of Indian, Byzantine (Greek) and African heritage are noted as the guards of the grave of Prophet Muhammed in Medina.^[1]

The Kingdom of Hejaz had many slaves, since free wage laborers were rare: in 1930, ten percent of the population of Mecca were estimated to have been slaves.^{[7]: 88–90} Many slaves were used as domestic servants and harem eunuchs, but they could also be used as craftsmen, seamen, pearl divers, fishermen, agricultural laborers, herdsmen, camel drivers, water carriers, porters, washer women, cooks, shop assistants, business managers, retainers and officials of Emirs.^{[7]: 88–90} Slaves were seen as a good investment and were popular as servants, because they lacked loyalty ties to other clans in the strict clan system.^{[7]: 88–90}

Raoul du Bisson was traveling down the Red Sea in the 1860s when he saw the chief black eunuch of the Sharif of Mecca being brought to Constantinople for trial for impregnating a Circassian concubine of the Sharif and having sex with his entire harem of Circassian and Georgian women. The chief black eunuch was not castrated correctly so he was still able to impregnate and the women were drowned as punishment.^{[25][26][27][28][29][30][lower-alpha 1]} 12 Georgian women were shipped to replace the drowned concubines.^[31]

Upper class Arab children, such as the royal princes, were gifted their own personal child slaves who grew up with them and became their bodyguards or servants as adults.^[5] One case was that of Said el Feisal, who was enslaved at the age of eight and given to the young Crown Prince Faisal, and at the age of 20, he became Faisal’s executioner. In 1963, Said el Feisal was interviewed by the British journalist John Osman and related about his first execution: “I cut through the man’s torso by mistake and went mad when I saw the blood, and I could not get the sword out”, and that after having severed 150 heads, he was consumed by “bad dreams.”^[5]

Royal slaves, in the form of bodyguards and servants were present during official meetings between the Saudi monarch and foreign dignitaries, such as the meeting between the Saudi King and the American President Roosevelt at U.S.S. Murphy in February 1945.^[32]

Before WWII

The British fought the slave trade by patrolling the Red Sea. However, these controls were not effective, since the slave traders would inform the European Colonial authorities that the slaves were their wives, children, servants or fellow Hajj pilgrims, and the victims themselves were convinced of the same, unaware that they were being shipped as slaves.^{[7]: 88–90}

Since the British Consulate had opened in Jeddah in the 1870s, the British had used their diplomatic privileges to manumit the slaves escaping to the British Consulate to ask for asylum.^{[7]: 93–96} Royal slaves were exempted from this right. The French, Italian and Dutch Consulate also used their right to manumit the slaves who reached their consulate to ask for asylum. However, the activity of France and Italy was very limited, and only the Dutch were as willing to use this right as much as Britain. The right for manumission by seeking asylum could be used by any slave who managed to reach the consul office or a ship belonging to a foreign power. Most slaves who used this right were citizens of these nations' colonies, who had travelled to Arabia without being aware that they would be sold as slaves upon arrival. The manumission activity of the foreign consuls was met with formal cooperation by the Arabian authorities but greatly disliked by the local population, and it was common for slaves seeking asylum to disappear between seeking asylum and the moment the consul could arrange a place for them on a boat.^{[7]: 93–96}

The slavery and slave trade in the Arabian Peninsula, and particular in Saudi Arabia (Kingdom of Hejaz), attracted attention by the League of Nations and contributed to the creation of the 1926 Slavery Convention, obliging the British to combat the slave trade in the area.^[7]

Between 1928 and 1931, the British consulate in Jeddah helped 81 people to be manumitted, 46 of whom were repatriated to Sudan and 25 to Massawa in Ethiopia.^{[7]: 179–183} The vast majority of slaves originated from Africa, but the fact that the majority of them had been trafficked as children posed a problem for the authorities. They could not remember exactly where they had come from or where their family lived, could no longer speak any language other than Arabic, and thus had difficulty supporting themselves after repatriation, all of which in the 1930s had caused a reluctance from the authorities to receive them.^{[7]: 179–193}

In 1936, Saudi Arabia formally banned the import of slaves who were not already slaves prior to entering the kingdom, a reform which was however on paper only. King Ibn Saud officially expressed his willing cooperation with the anti slavery policy of the British, but in 1940, the British were well aware that the king imported concubines from Syria, had received a gift of twenty slaves from Qatar and that British subjects from Baluchistan where trafficked to Saudi Arabia via Oman.^[33]

After WWII

After World War II, there was growing international pressure from the United Nations to end the slave trade. In 1948, the United Nations declared slavery to be a crime against humanity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after which the Anti-Slavery Society pointed out that there was about one million slaves in the Arabian Peninsula, which was a crime against the 1926 Slavery Convention, and demanded that the UN form a committee to handle the issue.^[7]: 310

The British Anti Slavery Society actively campaigned against the slavery and slave trade in the Arabian Peninsula from the conclusion of World War II until the 1970s, and particularly publicized Saudi Arabia's central role in 20th-century chattel Slavery within the United Nations, but their efforts was long opposed by the lack of support from London and Washington.^[34] The British Foreign Office's internal reports noted an upswing in the slave trade to Saudi Arabia after WWII, but preferred to turn a blind eye to it to avoid international exposure of their own Gulf Sheikh allies’ complicity in the slave trade.^[34]

In 1951 the British informed the US State Department that there were at least 50,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia, a number increasing because of oil wealth, and that the US should participate in ending the slavery in Saudi, which at the time were used in Soviet propaganda, who pointed out that slavery was still practiced in reactionary Arab puppet states of the West.^[35]

In the 1950s there were diplomatic difficulties due to slaves fleeing across the borders from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and the Trucial States, since there was uncertainty in how runaway slaves were to be handled diplomatically without upsetting the Saudis, who wished to retrieve them.^[35] Saudi Arabia normally denied any involvement in such affairs when they were questioned by the British, but one British report in the Foreign Office noted that twelve Baluchi slaves who had been returned to Ibn Saud had been executed, three of whom where beheaded in front of the Royal Palace.^[36] The Red Sea slave trade to Saudi Arabia were still very much active in the 1950s; the contact of the Foreign Office in Djibouti reported of a shipment of ninety Africans sold to Mecca in 1952, an investigation of the French Assembly performed by Pastor La Graviere issued a report to that effect in 1955, and the British agent in Jeddah confirmed the report and noted that the prices of humans where high in the Saudi slave market and that a young pregnant woman could be sold for five hundred gold sovereigns or twenty thousand riyals.^[36]

The US Eisenhower administration sought to undermine the Bricker Amendment by a retreat from the UN, and made Saudi Arabia a cornerstone of the Eisenhower Doctrine, and therefore abstained from the United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery.^[37] The British Anti Slavery Society failed to pass stricter enforcements at the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on Slavery, but the issue started to attract international attention.^[38]

During the 1957 US state visit of King Saud, Eisenhower conditioned the construction of an American military base in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia in exchange for an alliance against communism; abolition of slavery was never part of the discussion. During the Saudi King's US state visit in the winter of 1957 as “gigantic Nubian slaves toting jeweled daggers and machine guns” protected Saud.^[37] The open display of slavery during the state visit caused a highwater mark for domestic protests against the US–Saudi partnership, including condemnations from both the African-American press and the American Jewish Congress.^[37] King Saud’s “toleration of slavery” caused city-wide protests during his visit to New York in 1957.^[39]

The Eisenhower Administration did not wish to acknowledge the ongoing slavery in Saudi Arabia, but domestic American criticism came not only from the African-American press but from the national press, the American Jewish Congress, average citizens, and the United States Senate, who denounced the US partnership with the “Slave King.”^[6]

The biggest domestic protests came from the African American press, who cited the report of the Anti-Slavery Society's report at the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery in Geneva in 1956, that there were 500,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia. Louis Lautier, described King Saud as “the world's foremost patron of slavery”, and the Chicago Defender denounced the US-Saudi partnership:

“We deplore sorrowfully the circumstances that made it necessary to coddle in our bosom a heartless, unsympathetic, unjust [sic], the immoral monarch who is the antithesis of every single ideal for which American blood has been copiously spilled.”^[40]

Abolition

When President Kennedy took office, the issue of slavery within the US ally Saudi Arabia had caused growing domestic and international attention and caused damage to the Kennedy administration's liberal world-order rhetoric and the US-Saudi partnership, and Kennedy pressed Saudi leaders to “modernize and reform” if they wished for US military assistance during the Yemeni Civil War.^[38] President Kennedy wished to strengthen the UN, which in turn also strengthened the long going abolition campaign of the British Anti Slavery Society within the UN and gave it gravitas.^[38] The Kennedy administration also experienced international pressure from influential secular Middle East regional leaders like Gamal Abdul Nasser, as well as from the newly decolonized African states, whose own citizens were the most common victims of the slave trade to the Arabian Peninsula,^[38] and whose good will was necessary Kennedy's anti Soviet New Frontier agenda in the Global South.^[41] The Kennedy administration therefore put pressure on Saudi Arabia to introduce "modernization reforms", a request which was heavily directed against slavery.^[41]

In the 1960s, the institution of slavery had become an international embarrassment for Saudi Arabia. It was used as a platform of Egyptian propaganda, as an issue of complaint from the United Nations, as well as by progressive internal opposition.^[42] In June 1962, the king issued a decree prohibiting the sale and purchase of humans.^[42] This did not abolish slavery itself however, as was evident when the king's son Prince Talal stated in August 1962 that he had decided to free his 32 slaves and fifty slave concubines.^[42] In November 1962, Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who himself personally did not own slaves, finally prohibited the owning of slaves in Saudi Arabia.^[42] Some of those freed slaves continued working for their former slave-owners, particularly those whose former owners were members of the royal family.

Many members of the Afro-Saudi minority are descendants of the former slaves.

Kafala system in Saudi Arabia

From 1991 to 2019, 300,000 Bangladeshi women went to Saudi Arabia under the kafala system.^[48] In early November 2019, protests took place in Dhaka in response to the case of Sumi Akter, who claimed "merciless sexual assaults", being locked up for 15 days, and having her hands burnt by hot oil by her Saudi employers.

The case of another Bangladeshi, Nazma Begum, who claimed being tortured, also attracted media attention. Both had been promised jobs as hospital cleaning staff but were tricked into becoming household servants. Begum died in Saudi Arabia of an untreated illness.^[48]

According to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report,^[49] under the kafala system in Saudi Arabia, "an employer assumes responsibility for a hired migrant worker and must grant explicit permission before the worker can enter Saudi Arabia, transfer employment, or leave the country. The kafala system gives the employer immense control over the worker."^[50] HRW stated that "some abusive employers exploit the kafala system and force domestic workers to continue working against their will and forbid them from returning to their countries of origin" and that this is "incompatible with Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights".^[50]

HRW stated that "the combination of the high recruitment fees paid by Saudi employers and the power granted them by the kafala system to control whether a worker can change employers or exit the country made some employers feel entitled to exert 'ownership' over a domestic worker" and that the "sense of ownership ... creates slavery-like conditions".^[50] In 2018, France 24 and ALQST reported on the use of Twitter and other online social networks by kafala system employers, "kafils", to "sell" domestic workers to other kafils, in violation of Saudi law. ALQST described the online trading as "slavery 2.0".^[51]

On 4 November 2020, as part of its 2030 vision, Saudi Arabia announced a reformation plan for its labor law. Effective on 14 March 2021, the new measures are meant to curb the kafala system through:^[52]

1. Mandatory digital documentation of labor contracts.
2. Dropping the stipulation of sponsor consent for exit visas, final exit visas, re-entry visas, and change of sponsor, so long as they are to be applied for after the end of a contractual term or an appropriate notice period previously specified in the contract. Other requirements may still apply in case of applying within a contractual term.

The changes are to be implemented in the Absher and Qiwa portals, both being part of the e-government in Saudi Arabia.^[52]

In March 2021, Saudi Arabia introduced new labour reforms, allowing some migrant workers to change jobs without their employer's consent. HRW claimed that the reforms did not dismantle the abuses of the kafala system, "leaving migrant workers at high risk of abuse".^[53] Many domestic workers and farmers who are not covered by the labour law are still vulnerable to multifold abuses, including passport confiscation, delayed wages and even forced labour. Although migrant workers are allowed to request an exit permit without their employer's permission, the need to have an exit permit in order to leave the country is a human rights violation.^[53]

An investigation by France 24 in April 2021 documented abuses of female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. A 22-year-old woman migrant worker from Madagascar was murdered by the underground prostitution mafia she used to work for after running away from her employer's home and buried without a coffin in al-Jubail. Due to the practice of some sponsors who confiscate the passports of migrant workers, young women from East Africa find it difficult to return home after perceived mistreatment by their employers. The women often end up falling into prostitution.^[54]