While Muslim jurists, unlike their Christian counterparts, continually upheld the idea of racial equality in theory, in reality most of the enslaved in the empires of the Islamic world came to be black, and though lighter-skinned and even ‘white’ people were enslaved by the Ottoman, Abbasid, Fatamid and Moroccan empires, black slaves were particularly devalued, costing less, given the lowest jobs and in general prevented from attaining more sought-after roles as ‘easily’ as their lighter skinned counterparts.
