Gulistan in Black and White: The Racial and Gendered Legacies of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Qajar Iran

Abstract

In a striking photograph taken and captioned by Nasir al-Din Shah, the Qajar monarch who ruled over Iran between 1848 and 1896, a large gathering of his high-ranking court and harem servants fill the steps leading up to the ostentatious doorway of the shah’s bedchambers (khabgah) located at the heart of his harem (andarun).

The image, likely taken in 1887, at the dawn of the last decade of his rule, is of a small cross section of the multiracial laboring class who lived and worked in the shah’s residence at Gulistan Palace and who were a significant part of the larger Qajar royal family structure. The maintenance and day-to-day function of the Gulistan court and its harem relied on this complex labor force, made up of men, women, eunuchs, and children, many of whom were brought in as slaves, linking the center of Qajar power in Tehran to geographies of Iran’s slave trade in the northern and southern regions of the country. The demographic diversity visible in the image, which also shaped the broader demographic, racial, and ethnic diversity of Tehran during this period, was in large part the result of a long-standing and multidirectional slave trade from neighboring regions of the dynasty and its porous imperial frontiers.¹

These individuals are among the most liminal figures of the Qajar court: enslaved servants who occupied central positions in the shah’s harem and were able to move between the gender-segregated interior and exterior sections of the palace, with access to its deeply private realms, as well as the highest-ranked administrative offices. They were often in charge of granting or refusing access to others who moved between the two realms. The setting on the front steps of this most exclusive building within the harem of the Gulistan Palace, the shah’s bedchamber, affirms their position as both servant custodians and intermediaries.

Centered in the front row of this composition is a young Malijak, the nephew of one of the shah’s favored concubines (sighah), Amin Aqdas, who herself entered Gulistan as a young enslaved girl from Kurdistan in 1859 and by the time of this photo had risen to great prominence in Nasir al-Din Shah’s harem.² Malijak, the son of one of the shah’s footmen, sits nestled between the legs of an African eunuch whose large figure both frames and offers protection to the young boy. In Qajar historiography, Malijak is well known as the object of Nasir al-Din Shah’s unusual infatuation, as well as a figure who rose to become a powerful courtier in the last decade of his reign, and was married to one of the shah’s daughters, solidifying his position as part of the Qajar royal family.³ The central position he occupies in this image, surrounded by high-ranking servants of the court, attests to his significant status in the shah’s harem from an early age. Yet as the nephew of a woman who only two decades earlier had been purchased for sixty rials and brought into the harem as an enslaved servant, Malijak as a focal point in both this image and Nasir al-Din Shah’s actual harem offers us some insight into the complex nature and social reality of slavery as it was practiced in Iran during this period.

As the photograph indicates, the Gulistan Palace was the location wherein a large cross section of enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals lived, negotiated their status, and left archival traces. Though the Qajar court was a very privileged space, and the experiences of enslaved individuals who lived and labored within it do not encompass the full range of experiences that made up the institution of modern slavery in Iran, the palace remains a significant site for the study of slavery in the region. This is in large part due to the vast number of court records and visual and archival sources that exist and can be used to trace the lives of its servant classes, marking it as a unique and generative site for the study of the institution of slavery during the period, as well as the ways in which hierarchies of race, gender, and sex functioned as constitutive elements in shaping the lives of enslaved people.

An examination of the history of modern slavery in Iran during the nineteenth century, including key shifts and transformations in the institution, highlights some of the fault lines in the historiography, including the overreliance on comparative frameworks centered on narratives of enslaved Africans in the Americas, and the inadequate engagement with the everyday lives of enslaved individuals as documented in historical records. By contrast, a close reading of such sources can offer more robust accounts of the history of modern slavery in Iran. The historical trajectories of two enslaved court eunuchs featured in figure 1—Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram, who were part of the servant class of Gulistan Palace during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign—offers tangible examples that give insights into the enduring racial and gendered legacies of slavery during the last decades of the Qajar dynasty, and how differences in status and social mobility among and between various enslaved bodies were produced.

Figure 1.

“Group of eunuchs on the steps of the bedchambers in Tehran,” circa 1887. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center.

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As Chouki El Hamel has argued, “no single verse in the Qur’an calls for the acceptance of slavery as a normal social practice,” and recommendations within both the Qur’an and Hadith set various restrictive guidelines that limit the practice, in terms of both who could be enslaved and how they were to be treated, while continuously promoting manumission.⁴ Despite these Islamic principles found in key textual sources, however, it is clear within the historiography that slavery was a widespread phenomenon throughout the Muslim world, and that the ownership and treatment of enslaved populations in practice rarely adhered to the full scope of religious principles.⁵ Instead, Islamic protocols for slavery were translated and reinterpreted by religious scholars, rulers, and slaveholders in various ways, and in accordance with accommodating their needs for laboring bodies. Enslaved individuals were thus regularly and frequently bought, sold, and resold throughout Islamic history.⁶

Within various Persian empires since the early Islamic period, enslaved populations were primarily made up of non-Muslims who were part of conquered territories.⁷ Until the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved people in the region were from central Asia and the steppes of eastern Europe, captured as war booty and brought to work as military and government officers as well as domestic laborers, eunuchs, and concubines in elite households. It is important to note that though war was the primary means of acquiring slaves from these regions (in fact, the acquisition of slaves was a major reason for many tribal wars among Kurds, Armenians, Georgians, Turkomans, Circassians, and several other ethnic groups that surrounded the Caspian Sea and Silk Road), there was also a concurrent, active, and thriving slave trade industry centered on the northern shores of the Black Sea and spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean.⁸ In the historiography of slavery in Iran and the Ottoman Empire, these enslaved populations are often grouped together as “white” slaves though they were from various rivaling ethnic tribes in the region.⁹

Throughout the Caucasus region, many societies were economically dependent on the Ottoman and Persian slave trades, as enslaved populations were the primary commodity that could be sold in exchange for essential products such as iron and salt.¹⁰ While the means of procurement for this trade relied in part on the Islamic right to enslave prisoners of war, in reality, this often took place through institutionalized raiding, and captured populations were then sold in slave markets and dispersed throughout the Ottoman and Qajar dynasties, often through harrowing journeys by land and sea wherein many perished.¹¹ Kurtynova-D’Herlugnan, for example, argues that despite certain local sources implying that the majority of the enslaved populations from the Caucasus region had been either prisoners of war or born into slavery and then sold by their lawful masters, in reality, it would have been all but impossible to satisfy the demand of local slave markets in this manner, and that in fact slave raids were both the main supply line for the slave market and a primary reason for war.¹²

By the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire’s expansion—and conquests of the northern regions of Iran, including Caucasia, along with Russia’s aggressive abolitionist project—functioned to limit access to these slave markets and diminished the number of white enslaved populations from these region, though small-scale sales continued until well into the late nineteenth century.¹³ Throughout the century, slavery remained an entrenched part of the social structure of elite households in the Qajar dynasty, particularly within the expanding court life of the monarchy during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign.¹⁴ In fact, domestic slavery was the norm for not only the Qajar royal court but also elite families and even middle-class merchants throughout the dynasty who relied on household servants and slaves to carry out tasks both at home and in public spaces where elite women were less likely to circulate.¹⁵ As Thomas Ricks and Matthew Hopper have pointed out, slave labor was also increasingly a central component of a growing Gulf economy and labor force for the production of export commodities in much of the Middle East during the same period, which witnessed the accelerated accumulation of merchant capital.¹⁶ With the incursion of the Russian Empire and the limits it imposed on the slave trade across the northern frontier of the dynasty, Iran, much like the Ottoman Empire, increasingly relied on the African slave trade of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf region for the importing of enslaved populations to address the growing labor shortage. This trade had also existed since the early Islamic period, though in a much more limited capacity, supplying parts of the Ottoman Empire and the Arabian Peninsula with enslaved Africans who in the historiography are primarily referred to as “black slaves,” a category that included enslaved populations from various regions of East Africa, including Zanzibar, Sudan, Somalia, Mozambique, and Tanzania.¹⁷ By the nineteenth century, the global trade in enslaved Africans shifted from the Atlantic to the east, thus supplying the local markets’ demands in the wake of limits to white enslaved population supplies. Throughout the century, an increased number of enslaved Africans entered Iran, at first primarily through the port of Bushehr, and later through a number of other port cities in the south, including Bandar Lengeh and Bandar Abbas, as well as some land routes through regions such as Khorramshahr.¹⁸

This was at the height of the Great Game—a rivalry between British and Russian Empires over control of central Asia and Qajar Iran that lasted from 1813 to 1907—and thus the simultaneous projects of European imperialism and abolitionism intersected in both the northern and the southern frontiers of the Qajar territories, as well as the Ottoman Empire and Gulf States.¹⁹ Perhaps not surprisingly, given the spheres of influence during the Great Game, while the Russian Empire focused on abolition in the northern region of the Qajar Empire (the “white” trade), British abolitionist efforts were focused on the Gulf and Indian Ocean regions and, as such, on the trade of enslaved Africans (the “black” slave trade).²⁰ Ironically, during this period, the Qajar government was engaged in its own mission to end the trade of enslaved Iranians in central Asia.²¹ At the same time, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qajar government and the ulama resisted European abolitionism within their own territory and defended the right of Iranians to own slaves, often relying on Islamic principles.²² While these contemporaneous and competing abolitionist projects were in large part motivated by geopolitical aspirations, they de facto had racial implications. For example, abolitionism for the British was a universalist discourse but specifically targeted enslaved African populations, with little if any attention given to other regions that participated in the trading of other enslaved populations, such as Georgian, Circassian, Turkoman, and Slavic peoples, in spite of the larger volume of enslaved populations from these regions in the first half of the nineteenth century and the trade’s more ancient roots.²³ This is despite the regular mention of and fascination with “white slaves” within European travel accounts of the region.²⁴ In fact, the British were critical of Russian abolitionist efforts and viewed the spread of Russian abolitionism as synonymous with Russian imperial interests in the northern regions of the Qajar territories and Ottoman Empire, while they themselves were aggressively pursuing abolition in the southern regions.²⁵

On the other hand, while the African slave trade was, at least in rhetoric, increasingly stigmatized by western Europe throughout the nineteenth century, in the Ottoman Empire and Iran, the importing of enslaved Africans increased considerably. Estimates of the number of enslaved Africans brought to the Middle East in the nineteenth century vary greatly among scholars, but it is likely that the region absorbed between one quarter and half of a million enslaved people from the region, marking a massive increase from the previous century.²⁶ Initially seized from across parts of central and eastern Africa, these populations were transported in appalling conditions and sold mainly to Arab traders through a chain of dealers along established regional routes.²⁷ For example, as Patrick Manning has noted, enslaved people exported from central Sudan began their journey with a forced six-hundred-kilometer march to the edge of the desert. They then had to cross the Sahara through the caravan routes of North Africa on foot before being sent to the slave markets of the Ottoman and Qajar Empires.²⁸ Enslaved East Africans from places like Ethiopia and Somalia faced a less harrowing land journey but were shipped eastward under horrendous conditions through the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea routes before making their way to the Iranian and Arabian markets.²⁹ The passage through the Persian Gulf was particularly brutal. It was plagued by illness and death, and only an estimated 10 to 20 percent of captured Africans survived.³⁰

The second half of the nineteenth century saw significant changes in the region’s slave trade. After Muscat signed the 1848 anti-slave-trafficking treaty with the British, marking a shift away from it being the locus of the region’s slave economy, other port cities such as Sur emerged as central markets for the trade.³¹ In fact, in the immediate years that followed the signing of the Muscat treaty, the volume of enslaved Africans trafficked through the Gulf showed no sign of decline, and Iran increasingly became a focal point of the trade in enslaved Africans.³² This is despite the 1851 Anglo-Persian Slave Trade Agreement, a formal treaty signed between the British, represented by Colonel Shield, and Nasir al-Din’s government, under the leadership of Amir Kabir. The agreement granted British naval patrollers authority over the Gulf region and its ports for a period of eleven years, as well as the right to board Iranian vessels, under local supervision; search and seize any black slaves on board; and automatically place them in British custody, where they would be granted a freedom certificate.³³ Any punitive measures and fines enforced against smugglers, however, would be in the hands of the Qajar government, who delegated the authority to local sheikhs, which ensured such measures were rarely enforced.³⁴

During this period, Iran developed a booming slave economy in its southern frontier and became a vital player in the region’s trade.³⁵ Among Iran’s southern port cities, Bandar Lengeh housed the most prominent slave market and was the only port city to directly traffic enslaved Africans primarily from Zanzibar.³⁶ The large numbers of bonded people who were sold in Bandar Lengeh were then transported across the Qajar territories, as well as to other Gulf regions, such as Bahrain, Bushehr, and Kuwait, or smuggled inland to cities like Basra—regions that were impacted by the signing of antislavery treaties with the British. The increase in the slave trade contributed in no small part to Bandar Lengeh becoming one of the most economically prosperous port cities in the Gulf.³⁷ Many of the approximately five thousand merchant families who resided in the port city were slave-owning families who participated directly in the slave economy as a highly lucrative commercial venture.³⁸

Despite the important role that Iran played in the slave trade during this period, and despite the much longer history of enslaved people laboring in various capacities throughout the empire, the topic has only recently received serious scholarly attention. Moreover, the limited historiography that engages with modern Iranian slavery has been both constrained and overdetermined by the specter of modern American slavery and its racial legacy as the primary discursive point of departure and comparison.³⁹ As Stephanie Cronin has pointed out, the sheer scale of the Atlantic slave trade and the reach of American-centric narratives about the history of American slavery, through the ubiquity of both its scholarly and popular representations, has led to the universalization of Atlantic slavery, distorting our understanding of the institution in other contexts, such as the Middle East and North Africa.⁴⁰ Within Iranian historiography, this comparative impulse has led to two divergent narratives. The first, more traditional historiography has tended to argue for the incommensurability of the institution of slavery in the Islamic world and its counterpart in the New World, highlighting the latter’s more atrocious and racist legacies.⁴¹ At its best, this body of literature reads the history of modern Iranian slavery as one of the many comparative counterpoints to the historically specific template of plantation slavery in the Americas, thus providing a needed amendment to universalist claims about the condition of enslaved peoples everywhere.⁴² Unfortunately, within this line of scholarly inquiry, there is often a slippage from an insistence on difference, often citing factors such as the racial diversity of enslaved populations in Iran, the relatively protected status of slaves within Islamic law, and the range of elite social positions that were afforded to some enslaved and formerly enslaved people in the region, to a reading of the institution as “benign” compared to its Atlantic counterpart.⁴³ Thus, the inherent power relations endemic to the institution of slavery, and the abhorrent and violent conditions faced by enslaved people from the time of their capture and transportation to the various subjugated positions they occupied as enslaved laborers, tend to get ignored or downplayed. Much of this body of work, intentionally or not, makes a claim to Muslim benevolence as the cause of the less harsh conditions faced by enslaved populations in the region.⁴⁴ At their worst, such narratives are steeped in a nostalgia about slaves as cherished servants who enjoyed a good life and were “part of the family.”⁴⁵ This historiography also tends to downplay or obscure the racial implications of the institution.⁴⁶ For example, Behnaz Mirzai, who has authored the only published monograph on this subject, A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929, has argued that “Iranian society was not preoccupied with racial divisions,” and that the racial analysis of the institution of slavery in Iran from this period appears mainly in European accounts and reflects external sensibilities.⁴⁷

More recently, motivated by discourses that have demanded the recognition of the prevalence and ubiquity of antiblack racism within much of the Middle East, a few scholars have turned their attention to the history of modern slavery in Iran in part as a way to historicize race thinking and racist practices that have thus far been understudied and undertheorized in Iranian studies.⁴⁸ While this is a welcome move in a field that has often ignored the legacy of racism, and in particular antiblack racism within the region, it also risks applying ahistorical and universal assumptions, based on presentist concerns, to the history of a deeply complex and localized institution. A limitation within this body of literature is its reliance on theories developed from the history of the American slave trade and its racial legacies, which offer a paradigm that is used to link slavery and antiblackness universally.⁴⁹ As such, the focus falls almost exclusively on racially subjugated African enslaved people in Iran, who despite being a minority of the enslaved population for much of the institution’s modern history are read as part of a transhistorical cultural phenomenon, and thus posited as solely the victims of antiblack racist ideology and often afforded little to no agency. Within this body of literature, the overwhelming presence of “white” slaves during the same period is largely ignored or undertheorized. Much of this scholarship also lacks a deep engagement with Iranian historical and archival sources, instead relying on a surface application of theories and terminology developed from external contexts—namely, the Atlantic paradigm and the legacy of antiblack racism in the Americas—to make (legitimate) claims to an antiblack racist legacy in modern Iran.

While the limited and divergent literature on modern slavery and antiblack racism in Iran makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history and conceptualization of these categories, some specific assumptions within both bodies need to be challenged. For example, although slavery in nineteenth-century Iran was not solely a raced-based institution which targeted African bodies, race mattered and antiblack sentiments were common. In other words, while the institution of slavery in Iran encompassed a diverse cast of racialized bodies from the various ethnic backgrounds previously mentioned, the categorization of enslaved people within local sources, which classified them as “black” or “white,” points us to the proliferation of a local form of race thinking and an accompanying racial logic that had material impact on the lives of variously categorized enslaved populations in late Qajar Iran. At the same time, a historical account that recognizes the racist and gendered implications of modern slavery in Iran must contextualize the institution within its specific geopolitical setting and its complexities, including, for example, the contemporaneous presence of a diverse cast of “black” and “white” enslaved populations with different levels of access to power and means of navigating their social positions.⁵⁰ Doing so brings to light both the vulnerabilities and the potentialities that marked the lives of enslaved people in the region, while allowing us to pivot away from arguments prevalent in the earlier historiography of Islamic slavery about the better conditions of slavery in the Islamic world and the benevolence of Islam and Muslims toward enslaved populations. The next section offers a history of modern slavery that relies on local primary and archival sources to show how a specific segment of enslaved individuals, situated at the center of the empire and within its most esteemed institution, navigated their circumstances and sought better life prospects despite the degrading status imposed by the institution of modern Iranian slavery.

While the institution of slavery was in decline in much of the world, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Qajar elites, and most notably the Qajar royal family itself, continued to accumulate and rely on slave labor for the day-to-day functioning of the palace and its harem. The laboring class of Gulistan during this period included a significant number of Caucasian people from regions such as Georgia, Armenia, and Circassia; Kurdish people from the various Kurdish tribal regions who had entered Iran from the northwest; a smaller number of Turkic people from north and northeast central Asia; and an increasing number of East Africans who originated from places like Ethiopia, Nubia, Tanzania, and Zanzibar and entered through the Gulf trade in the south. The expansion of the Gulistan Palace and its harem in the second half of the nineteenth century increased the number of servants in the court, so that it was perhaps the only domestic space within nineteenth-century Iran inhabited by all the preceding categories of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations, linking the center of Qajar rule to the different geographies and slave markets in the northern and southern parts of the region and housing a diverse population labeled as black and white slaves.

As noted, this racial diversity of enslaved populations within nineteenth-century Iran, and the range of elite social positions that both black and white servants occupied, has been read as an important marker of difference between slavery in the region and its Atlantic counterpart, most often represented through the model of plantation slavery in the Americas.⁵¹ Modern American slavery, it is argued, was a racialized system where the lowest social position in society and the degrading and stigmatized conditions faced by the enslaved were inherently and exclusively linked to blackness.⁵² Behnaz Mirzai has argued that in the specific context of slavery in Iran, the “heterogenous nature of Iranian society tended to undermine a commitment to rigorous racial profiling.”⁵³ She argues that enslaved people and their status, particularly as one moved inland and away from the coastal areas, were differentiated not by racial categories but by geography and the maritime distribution networks that determined the ease by which different enslaved populations could be transported.⁵⁴ She goes on to suggest that any descriptive accounts of a racial hierarchy within the institution of slavery in Iran appear primarily within European writings and were overwhelmingly motivated by the authors’ own “idiosyncratic tendencies to dwell on racial considerations.”⁵⁵

Indeed, race thinking, a predominate feature of European colonial ideologies in the nineteenth century, can be seen throughout the Western orientalist travel literature of the time and did in fact extend to descriptions of regional slavery. Consider the following description by George Nathaniel Curzon in what is widely considered his magnum opus, Persia and the Persian Question:

There is also throughout the country a considerable admixture of the African element, due to the large importation of slaves from Muscat and Zanzibar. Some of the faces present a thoroughly negro type. The ordinary Beluchi, of whom I have seen is not nearly so formidable a specimen of humanity as the Afghan.⁵⁶

Figure 2.

Group of court servants. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center.

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In a section discussing Iran’s tribal populations, Curzon suggests that the mixing of an “African element” within local Baluch populace marks them as less formidable within a suggested racial hierarchy. Similarly, Samuel G. W. Benjamin, the first American minister to Persia, speaking of the Aryan nature of Iranian cities noted,

Although the Iranees have intermarried with foreign slaves, they have never done so to the same degree as the Turks, and they have generally selected Circassian women: as the result, their race is comparatively genuine, what intermixture there has been having rather tended to improve than deteriorate the quality of the original stock.⁵⁷

Benjamin’s words reflect a colonial racial logic that is very much a product of Western race thinking and racism, and Mirzai is correct in pointing out in the accounts of Europeans the obsessive fascination with a structured racial hierarchy in the makeup of enslaved classes they encountered in Iran.⁵⁸ However, as Minoo Southgate has argued, racist depictions and negative stereotypes of black bodies were not unique to European colonial discourse, and have their own indigenous genealogy in Iran dating back at least to the medieval period.⁵⁹ Similarly, Sussan Babaie has noted that within eighteenth-century Safavid state manuals such as Dastur al-Muluk, high-ranking court eunuchs were differentiated based on the racialized categories of black and white (khawja sarayan-I safid va siyah).⁶⁰ Within the Safavid court, this translated to black and white servants occupying different positions specifically assigned to their race, and the presumed undesirability of black bodies was key to these divisions of labor.⁶¹ Thus, Mirzai’s assessment of racial logic as a purely external European framing of the local context is incorrect.⁶² Indeed, local sources can confirm that outside the logic of European colonial ideology, race was also a very material factor in the Qajar court and harem, and as we will see, its intersection with gender and sex made it a determinant factor in regard to social position and life chances of local enslaved populations.

Race was one of the key factors that governed pathways to power and social status among the enslaved populations of the Gulistan Palace. For example, Circassian and Georgian enslaved women were often favored because of their white racial features and thus could readily become high-ranking concubines and significant wives—a position that was rarely afforded to their black female counterparts.⁶³ In her memoirs, published decades after the end of the Qajar dynasty, during the Pahlavi era, Munis al-Dawlah, a high-ranking servant and confidant of Nasir al-Din Shah’s favored wife Anis al-Dawlah, describes the difference between enslaved women of the Qajar harem as follows:

In those days, white enslaved women [kanizhayi sifid], were bought and sold much like enslaved black women [kanizhayi siyah]. But since white enslaved women were for the most part very attractive, they would become intimate with the men of the household and would often bear him children, giving them access to all kinds of wealth. One of these white enslaved women whose name was Jamal Baji, married one of the high-ranking princes and had two sets of twins with him—meaning she gave birth to four royal male and female descendants! As a result, she was no longer referred to as Jamal Baji, she was given the more well-respected title “Jamal al-Hajiyih” … her children married important figures, and her well-off descendants are still around today. Many of them likely are not aware that they are descendants of an enslaved woman.⁶⁴

As the quote suggests, not only were white enslaved women able to gain access to high social positions through sexual and even conjugal relations with high-ranking Qajar men since they were not visibly marked by blackness; they could also become incorporated into elite society and within one generation become disassociated from their former slave status.⁶⁵ While white enslaved women were prized for their racialized beauty, African slaves were identified through their dark skin color and often described in derogatory terms but prized for their loyalty and child-rearing abilities. For example, Taj al-Saltanah, one of Nasir al-Din Shah’s daughters, in her memoir offers the following account of her African nanny:

This nanny specifically had to be black. This is because honor and grandeur at that time were measured by ownership of creatures who God made no different from others except for the color of their skin … These poor people were kept in captivity and abject conditions, and were a symbol of their owners’ grandeur and glory, and called “gold purchased” [zar kharid].⁶⁶ They were bought and sold like cattle.⁶⁷

Speaking about this unnamed nanny, she later states,

She was a woman between 40–45 years old. She was medium height, had large eyes and her complexation was very black. She didn’t speak much, but when she did she was harsh and crude. This dear nanny of mine had also been in charge of raising my mother and as such had risen in rank to the status of matron nanny [dadih khanumi] … She had made me so accustomed to her presence, that despite her frightening face [chihriyi muhish] and terrifying physique [haykalih mahibi], if she was ever separated from me for the day, I would weep until supper time.⁶⁸

Such a description is clearly steeped in racist understandings of blackness as “frightening” and “terrifying.” Black women were frequently described as having unfavorable physical features, were rarely openly the object of sexual desire of elite Qajar men, and could not circulate within Qajar society outside of their racial markings. In Iran, as in most Middle Eastern societies, blackness was an automatic marker of inferior slave status.⁶⁹ This racist logic, observed in local sources, prevented African women from incorporating themselves into Qajar familial or social life in ways that were afforded to enslaved white women.

For enslaved white women in the Gulistan Palace, slavery was not limited to domestic labor alone and could often also mean performing sexual labor, which could enable incorporation into the royal family or lineage.⁷⁰ Enslaved African women, on the other hand, were almost exclusively tasked with forms of domestic work with limited social mobility. Even high-status positions, such as being wet nurses, nannies, entertainers, and performers in the court and harem, did not offer them means through which they could erase their roots as enslaved bodies. Unlike their white counterparts, while African women were a significant part of the social life of the harem, they were not incorporated into the Qajar kin structure as anything other than servants, and their rise in ranks did not mean a shift in social position or the possibility of concealing their slave origins in ways that were afforded to white enslaved women.⁷¹ Instead, as Taj al-Saltanah notes of her nanny, they could rise only within their given social status, in her case to the position of “matron nanny.” Such forms of racialized differentiation were of course not unique to the Qajar court. As Ann Stoler has noted, they permeated how intimacy and sentiments were distributed across various global contexts. She states,

Students of European colonialisms understand the concept of race as a central colonial sorting technique. Like other classificatory techniques, it establishes categories and scales of comparison. . . Scientific taxonomies of race stress the “concrete” measures of racial membership, but they, like social taxonomies, depend implicitly on a belief in the different sensibilities and sensory regimes imagined to distinguish human kinds. Within these racial grammars distinct affective capacities get assigned to specific populations.⁷²

With this applied to the Qajar court, one can clearly see that the kinds of intimate relations that were potentially and exclusively available to white enslaved populations were distinctly different from those reserved for black enslaved servants. Having said that, the culture of servitude in the elite space of the Qajar harem meant that various classes of servants and members of the royal family shared what Stoler and Strassler have termed “the emotional economy of the everyday”—the various spaces, times, and people within daily life with whom sentiment was displayed, shared, withheld, and demanded.⁷³ They argue that everyday domestic life affected sensibilities and sentiments between and among various classes of people who shared relations of proximity. For example, as Anthony A. Lee has pointed out, enslaved black women who were tasked with the care of royal children such as Taj al-Saltanah had a great deal of control over the royal children’s early education and belief system.⁷⁴ As we will see in the next section, servants in the Qajar court, both black and white, who occupied such spaces of everyday life that enabled trusting affective bonds could leverage those differing relations of proximity to gain intimate knowledge of the private affairs of those they served and use them to further their status and place within the harem hierarchy. While such relationships were defined by deeply uneven structures of social status, race, entitlement, and obligation, ample evidence in the sources suggests that servants used their close bonds with their royal masters and mistresses to gain various forms of access to wealth and privilege, though this access was indeed negotiated through and limited by the materiality of their gender and racial identities. The next section offers a tangible case study of this phenomenon.

According to Nasir al-Din Shah’s grandson, approximately ninety eunuchs resided and worked in the Gulistan Palace during the shah’s reign.⁷⁵ In a unique social position, this group was composed of both black and white enslaved people who played a particularly crucial role as liminal figures in court and harem life. Like other enslaved people, these subjugated bodies were separated from family and community, trafficked, and sold in various slave markets. However, unlike other enslaved populations, eunuchs were made incapable of reproduction through the invasive and dangerous procedure of castration, preventing them from having future bloodlines.⁷⁶ Since they were usually captured at a young age, castrated, and left with little knowledge of their origins, they were considered kinless and raised, sheltered, fed, and educated inside the palace. Thus, their loyalty to their masters and mistresses was presumed to be absolute.⁷⁷

Castration was a brutal act, typically performed on male children before they were trafficked and sold, with the goal of desexualizing enslaved male bodies. It also served to give eunuchs privileged access to the most private sphere of the palace—its harem—where they were entrusted with the special duty of protecting and serving the women and educating the children.⁷⁸ As such, eunuchs often became powerful and significant figures who were assimilated into the cultural and social codes of the palace and hence intimately connected to the center of power through access to elite male and female homosocial worlds. They were tasked with guarding the moral and physical borders among the court, its harem, and the outside world.⁷⁹ At the same time, they were trained and educated in a variety of realms, from reading and writing to horsemanship and music.⁸⁰ They in turn transmitted their knowledge and skills to a new generation of the household, both royal women and their descendants and other enslaved children placed under their tutelage.⁸¹ As mentors, they were able to forge strong and intimate bonds with royal children, and these relationships, nurtured through trust, loyalty, and mutual dependence, endured well into adulthood, making them confidants of key court and harem figures. Such forms of affective intimacy meant that court eunuchs were deeply connected to the core of state power in Qajar Iran. This proximity to power not only allowed elite eunuchs of the court and harem access to certain privileges but also enabled them to leave traces within the Qajar archives—traces that I argue have been largely ignored and understudied within the historiography of the period.⁸²

Court eunuchs offer us an interesting vantage point from which to examine the complex and contradictory nature of the everyday life of slavery within late Qajar court life.⁸³ As servants of the royal court who mediated great levels of access and intimacy within the highest echelons of power, they were able to develop and navigate multiple forms of social and political opportunities and sometimes emerge as powerful central figures within the institution. Yet forced castration not only marked their bodies permanently with the violent trace of their enslavement and denied them specific forms of sexual pleasure; it also prevented them from being able to escape its bonds through reproducing heirs who could inherit the privileges they accumulated throughout their lives. Thus, they embody the highest level of power and possibility enabled within the institution of late Qajar slavery as well as its most violent and severe restrictions.

An account of two of the high-ranking eunuchs in Nasir al-Din Shah’s court offers insight into the daily lives of enslaved people as revealed in sources from the period, with a particular focus on the material impact of race on opportunities for, and limits to, social mobility within this class of servants. These examples offer a good case study of how enslaved populations were able to navigate their positions within the court and harem hierarchy to gain access to power, further their status, and protect their personal interests. They also further reveal the ways in which race, and its intersections with gender and sexuality, impacted enslaved people’s life chances and opportunities in material ways. Finally, this is an attempt at reconstructing the story of enslaved individuals who despite systemic violence and concerted efforts toward historical erasure were able to access better life chances for themselves and leave their traces within both the archives and the urban landscape of Tehran. Such slave narratives are rare within the historiography of modern Iran, but as my research attests, the sources that enable their telling linger within the archives and deserve further scholarly attention and scrutiny.

Aziz Kahn and Agha Bahram are two of the high-ranking eunuchs featured in the opening photograph of this essay (Fig. 1) who resided in Nasir al-Din Shah’s palace during the last decades of his reign. Seated in the front row, Aziz Khan is the white eunuch third from the right, and Agha Bahram is the black eunuch directly behind him. These two individuals were contemporaries who often appear together in both court photographs and Nasir al-Din Shah’s writing.⁸⁴

While we have little information about their childhoods, or how they entered the Qajar palace, during the course of Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign, they both rose to powerful positions, primarily through their close affiliations with significant Qajar figures, and left archival traces and afterlife legacies that offer us historical insight into the possibilities for social mobility open to this class of court constituents. It is important to note at the outset that such prospects were not readily open to most enslaved people in nineteenth-century Iran, the majority of whom led lives far from power and the luxuries associated with highest-ranked servants of the court.⁸⁵ Yet even despite the archival traces both these individuals have left behind as significant court figures, their lives are part of the forgotten and untold histories of enslaved people within the historiography of Qajar Iran, and reveal what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has described as “archival power at its strongest, the power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and, therefore, of mention.”⁸⁶ This section, then, is also an attempt to address the silences about, and absence of, enslaved and formerly enslaved Qajar servants in the historiography of modern Iran.

Figure 3.

Close-up of figure 1 featuring Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram among a group of eunuchs on the steps of the bedchambers in Tehran. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center.

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Figure 4.

Aziz Khan the eunuch. File 1952/2134, University of Tehran Digital Library.

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In many ways, both Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram were exceptional figures, as they were able to navigate their liminal position as court eunuchs residing in the imperial harem, a critical site of consolidating power; rise to highly elite positions both during and after their tenure in the court; and accumulate and maintain an unusual amount of wealth and social status in the aftermath of the disbanding of Nasir al-Din Shah’s harem, marking their lives as more easily traceable within the sources from the period. And yet despite the parallels in their historical situation that led to their exceptional and elite status, race, gender, and sex played central and defining roles in their differing routes and levels of access to power and ultimate life chances.

I will begin with the story of Aziz Khan, the nineteenth-century court eunuch who perhaps experienced the greatest assent to wealth and power, and was one of the most visible eunuchs within both visual and textual accounts and documents of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court and harem.

A white eunuch, Aziz Khan was renowned and admired for his physical appearance and beauty and belonged to Ayisha Khanum, one of the shah’s temporary wives (sighah).⁸⁷ While we know little about his early life, he most likely entered Nasir al-Din Shah’s court as an enslaved and castrated young boy from the Caucasus region sometime during the first half of the shah’s reign, though he mainly appears in the sources during its last decade. He makes his first appearance in I’timad al-Saltanah’s court chronicles on February 5, 1888. I’timad al-Saltanah writes,

Amin al-Sultan wishes to visit the house of Aziz Khan, one of the Shah’s young and beautiful [khush ru] eunuchs. Since this eunuch is the object of love [eshgh] of the Prime Minister, he is using the excuse that he is visiting Mirza Hassan, whose house is attached to Aziz Khan’s house. Mirza Hassan is deeply confused.⁸⁸

In fact, as we will see, Aziz Khan’s ascent to power can be attributed to his close and intimate relationship with Amin al-Sultan, Nasir al-Din Shah’s last prime minister, who was himself the grandson of a Georgian slave and whose fondness for the young eunuch is the subject of much court gossip.⁸⁹ Both local and European sources generally link Aziz Khan to the prime minister, with a specific focus on his alluring physical appearance. Amin al-Sultan’s chief rival, the high-ranking court official and pro-Western reformist Amin al-Dawlah, for example, offers a colorful account of the prime minister’s “love for one of the eunuchs of the harem” in his political diaries. He writes,

The Prime Minister was found with one of the harem eunuchs, whose face was beautiful like the moon, whose hair locks grew like hyacinths, whose cheeks were bright like flowers, and whose chin bore soft and defined lines, he lacked kindness and was salty to his core, though his delicate figure made the conditions ripe for intrigue … the poor soul [Amin al-Sultan] was captivated and charmed. He could not hide his affections or maintain discretion, since there is no patience in an eager heart. He went from looking to touching.⁹⁰

The suggestion here is that the prime minister was in fact engaging in an illicit affair with the young eunuch servant, captivated by his physical appearance. In keeping with the descriptions of white enslaved women and concubines, Aziz Khan’s features adhered to racialized and gendered beauty standards and were revered, his light skin complexion and delicate figure serving as key markers. The French court physician Feuvrier gives the following account of him:

He is tall and slender, with dainty fingers, a pale complexation and a white face. Though he is 30 years old, he gives the appearance of a young girl. I have encountered many, especially in Russia, who have paid him the kind of attention that is usually reserved for the fair sex. It was very awkward for the shy Aziz Khan. He was often mistaken for a woman wearing men’s clothing, but he is in reality a eunuch in the royal andarun lent out by his mistress to Amin al-Sultan.⁹¹

As Feuvrier notes, Aziz Khan’s slave status meant that he was considered the property of one of the shah’s wives (Ayisha Khanum) but was on loan to the prime minister. It was not unusual for enslaved servants of the court to be lent out, gifted, or sold by their masters and mistresses to powerful court figures in order to gain favor.⁹² The practice of gifting enslaved young women who were deemed beautiful as concubines to powerful courtly men was a particularly common one. As noted previously, being objects of sexual desire of elite men allowed white enslaved women access to powerful positions within the court, with some becoming significant wives of the shah and mothers to royal descendants.⁹³ In this case, both desirability and access crossed the gender line and were extended to Aziz Khan, who transcends the characterization of eunuchs as asexual bodies—a characterization that enabled their access to the harem—situating him as an object of sexual desire, primarily as a result of his physical appearance, which was often described through white and feminized markers.

I’timad al-Saltanah increasingly expresses his disapproval of the illicit relationship between the two over the coming months. For example, on the evening of September 12, 1888, during Ramadan, he attends an annual religious ceremony at Amin al-Sultan’s private residence. He is displeased that the prime minister arrives to the ceremony two hours late. I’timad al-Saltanah describes him “with a turban around his neck, being playful and flirting with Aziz khan in front of the five thousand guests. I was in shock and grieved the state of our government.”⁹⁴ Here, Amin al-Sultan’s intimate relationship with Aziz Khan begins to be identified as a threat to the state and its governance.⁹⁵

Much like other high-ranking eunuchs, Aziz Khan was well educated in the court during his youth, even studying photography with Nasir al-Din himself.⁹⁶ Like most court eunuchs, he was also able to leverage his role as intermediary between the harem and its outside world to gain favor. Sources suggest that Amin al-Sultan used Aziz Khan as an informant to gain knowledge of the shah’s personal life and private affairs.⁹⁷ In fact, Aziz Khan was eventually caught for spying in the harem and as a result was ejected from Gulistan by Nasir al-Din Shah in 1889, losing his position within the court and its harem. His intimate relationship with the prime minster, however, led to his relocating to Amin al-Sultan’s private residence in the aftermath of his eviction, where his power and influence only grew.⁹⁸ In fact, much to I’timad al-Saltanah’s dismay, and despite having been evicted from the court, Aziz Khan accompanies the prime minister on Nasir al-Din Shah’s third and final tour of Europe in the same year.⁹⁹

Throughout the trip, I’timad al-Saltanah is consistently irritated by the nature of the prime minister’s relationship with Aziz Khan. On one occasion, he describes the two taking a three-hour-long bath together.¹⁰⁰ At another point, he notes that during the trip, the two sleep in the same room each night, confusing their Russian hosts.¹⁰¹ I’timad al-Saltanah describes the behavior of the prime minister and Aziz Khan as having brought disgrace to Nasir al-Din Shah and his entourage among their European hosts.¹⁰²

It is important to note that Aziz Kham’s primary point of access to power was his close bond with Amin al-Sultan, motivated by what seems to be a romantic and sexual relationship rather than loyalty to his mistress, Ayisha Khanum. As noted previously, this particular form of intimacy tended to be deeply connected to a racial logic, where white enslaved bodies were fetishized and made to be objects of romantic and sexual desire in ways that were rarely afforded to black bodies. Outside of the court and its harem, and as the prime minister’s right-hand man, Aziz Khan was able to consolidate a great deal more power than any high-ranking court eunuch. By 1895, I’timad al-Saltanah describes him as a merciless tyrant when, as a result of a conflict with the eunuch, he is beaten and forced to sell one of his properties to Aziz Khan at a fraction of the cost.¹⁰³

Figure 5.

Aziz Khan standing behind Amin al-Sultan, who is accompanied by Sahib Ikhtiar, Dr. Tholozan, and Muhandas al-Mamalik, Paris, 1889. Document 8779608, National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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By the time of Nasir al-Din Shah’s assassination the following year, Aziz Khan had transformed into a powerful figure with considerable influence and wealth. Although Amin al-Sultan was briefly dismissed as prime minister in the wake of the assassination and exiled to Qom, he returned to the post in 1898 and served under the title during the reigns of the next two Qajar monarchs. Sources continue to center the intimate relationship between Amin al-Sultan and Aziz Khan, suggesting their companionship lasted throughout the duration of this period and until the prime minister’s own assassination in 1907. For example, Mirza Hussain Khan, a midlevel clerical officer who kept a personal diary, writes of a trip to Qom Amin al-Sultan takes accompanied by Aziz Khan during Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s reign (1896–1907). The entry is undated but was most likely written during the exile years.¹⁰⁴ In it, Mirza Hussain Khan describes Aziz Khan as the prime minister’s “object of desire” (taraf-i mayl) in charge of all his affairs (hami karash).¹⁰⁵

Even after Amin al-Sultan’s own passing in 1907, Aziz Khan continued to accumulate wealth and live a lavish life, becoming one of Tehran’s most prosperous landowners through the reigns of the last two Qajar monarchs. Among his most fascinating archival traces from this period is a reference to him in a 1909 letter from the Ministry of Finance addressed to the Foreign Affairs Office. Aziz Khan is named as one of several individuals who have refused to pay taxes due to their foreign status. The letter states that Aziz Khan seeks exemption from paying taxes to the government based on claims of Russian citizenship.¹⁰⁶ As noted previously, throughout the nineteenth century, Russia had consolidated its power over central Asia and annexed much of the region from the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar dynasty. Thus, the Caucasus was indeed Russian territory by this point, and Aziz Khan’s self-identification as a Russian subject, rather than a formerly enslaved Caucasian eunuch, allowed him to claim his background as a source of tax relief, particularly in the aftermath of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which placed northern Iran, including Tehran and its surrounding areas, under the Russian sphere of influence.¹⁰⁷ Consequently, rather than his former slave status being a marker of subjugation, Aziz Khan’s cunning diplomacy vis-à-vis the current geopolitical situation allowed him to make claims about his slave origin as a site of privilege, through Russian citizenship.

By the end of his life, Aziz Khan had accumulated a formidable amount of wealth. Court records suggest that his claims to both land and tolls he collected on his properties—many of which were located in the northwestern part of the country, in places such as Zanjan, Esmail Abad, Varamin, and Irajabad—were often contested, with several complaint letters against him corroborating descriptions of him as a tyrant landlord.¹⁰⁸ A detailed outline of his holdings can be found in his will, written in October 1923, during the last years of Ahmad Shah’s reign and right before the fall of the Qajar dynasty.¹⁰⁹ Aside from huge landholdings, the document also lists a large sum of silver and gold coins, jewelry, weapons, equipment such as telescopes purchased during his European tours, musical instruments including four pianos, important painting and calligraphy works, and much more.¹¹⁰

Since eunuchs had no offspring, it was common practice for all the wealth they accumulated during life to return back to the sovereign at the time of their passing or to be left as religious endowments. Much of Aziz Khan’s assets did in fact eventually end up in the coffer of Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi monarch who seized power from the Qajars around the time of Aziz Khan’s passing. However, in Aziz Khan’s will, he named Sikinih Khanum, whom he referred to as his aunt (khanum agha ‘amih), and his sister Dirakhshandih Khanum as heirs, suggesting that he did in fact have some familial relations in Tehran by the end of his life.¹¹¹ It is unclear whether the women were in fact blood relations, as the practice of servant classes who were stripped of their familial ties to form intimate, nurturing relationships and kinship bonds outside of blood relations was common during the late Qajar period, and it is possible that this was the case with the two women named in Aziz Khan’s will.¹¹² But the naming of relatives as heirs was in and of itself a departure from what was expected of court eunuchs, whose ability to accumulate assets during their lives was in part the result of the belief that it would all return to the royal treasure upon their deaths.

Aziz Khan’s afterlife legacy can in part be traced to sites of knowledge production in modern Tehran. This includes his extensive collection of manuscripts, printed books, and maps, which were donated to the royal library and went on to become one of the initial seed collections of the National Library of Iran when it opened in 1937.¹¹³ Income generated from Aziz Khan’s vast properties also became part of an endowment that funded one of the largest orphanages in Tehran, Dar-al-Yatam Shahpur, housed in his former residence, as well as an art high school for orphaned girls, which is still present in downtown Tehran’s Enghelab district.¹¹⁴

The afterlife of Aziz Khan also includes over two decades of debates and conflict over his vast assets among various actors, including named heirs, landowners, members of parliament, and even Reza Shah and his successor, Mohammad Reza Shah.¹¹⁵ Yet few of these records reference Aziz Khan’s origin as a young enslaved eunuch and servant of the court. As Beeta Baghoolizadeh argues, unlike black enslaved and formerly enslaved people, white slaves were able to transcend their slave status and blend into the urban landscape of Tehran in the first decades of the twentieth century, making use of their privileged status to create better opportunities and conditions for themselves in freedom.¹¹⁶ This is one of the many ways in which the materiality of race affected the life chances of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations in Qajar Iran. Looking at the story of an elite black enslaved eunuch who was Aziz Khan’s contemporary allows us to tease out how racial difference impacted such life chances.

Figure 6.

Agha Bahram, the eunuch of Amin Aqdas. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center.

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Agha Bahram entered Nasir al-Din Shah’s court as an enslaved African eunuch and was eventually given to one of the shah’s favored temporary wives (sighah), Amin Aqdas, herself a formerly enslaved woman, whom we encountered earlier in the introduction of this essay.¹¹⁷ As with Aziz Khan, archival traces of Agha Bahram, though more limited, can be found because of his high-ranking status within the harem, where at the height of his tenure he was granted the title Amir-i Divankhanih (chief court eunuch).¹¹⁸ However, in contrast to portrayals of Aziz Kahn, which tended to emphasize his physical beauty, in descriptive accounts of Agha Bahram, racialized features were a primary focus and often exaggerated in a disparaging manner (not unlike depictions of Taj al-Saltanah’s black nanny). Consider the following account by the shah’s grandson:

Agha Baharm. . . was amongst the most well-respected eunuchs of the Shah. He had a strange and unusual figure [haybati shigift] and a terrifying face [surati muhib], large red eyes, hanging cheeks, and large lips which sagged, so that when he smiled, his boar-like teeth were visible. He had the attention of the Shah and had the respect of ministers. They all sent their most important requests to the Shah through him, and were never disappointed.¹¹⁹

As seen with descriptions of black female servants, a derogatory emphasis on physical features, and an insistence on comparisons with animals and beasts, was naturalized even when imparting positive characteristics of black eunuchs. The shah’s favored page boy and Amin Aqdas’s nephew, Malijak, offers a similar description of Agha Bahram:

Agha Bahram was one of the clever and intelligent eunuchs of the court. He was black and emaciated, with sunken cheeks and a wide nose, and he was unparalleled in his pride and arrogance. . . when he entered the Shah’s home, he first stayed with Juhar Agha Bashi . . . the Shah kept him for a period of time, as part of the harem eunuchs. When Amin Aqdas rose in rank, she requested him from the Shah, and he became her personal eunuch. When she gained more power in the harem, he was named her chief eunuch and took charge of all her affairs. He was trusted, loyal, and lived a respectable life.¹²⁰

Another common feature of descriptive accounts of enslaved Africans, and particularly enslaved African eunuchs in the Gulistan harem, was an emphasis on their loyalty, as noted in the quote. As mentioned, the belief stemmed from the idea that since eunuchs were slaves who were purchased at a young age, stripped of all familial ties and cultural allegiances through having been removed from their blood kin, raised and trained in the harem (in Agha Bahram’s case, by another high-ranking eunuch, Agha Bashi), and castrated, they had no choice but to form intimate bonds with their masters and mistresses, ensuring their loyalty.¹²¹ However, while the quote conveys the loyalty and respectability of Agha Bahram, and Amin Aqdas’s trust in him, sources from the period also reveal him as smart, calculating, and in pursuit of power and better life chances for himself. Malijak, for example, accuses Agha Bahram of causing a rift between Amin Aqdas and her brother Aqa Mirza Muhamad (Malijak’s father), convincing her to dismiss her brother as her trusted confidant and confiscate all his belongings.¹²² Her alienation from Mirza Muhamad, whom she had previously been deeply close, heightened the eunuch’s influence over Amin Aqdas. Malijak argues that because Amin Aqdas was uneducated, she trusted Agha Bahram completely, was increasingly dependent on him, and was susceptible to his manipulations. Since African eunuchs were often in charge of the education of royal descendants, many were themselves well educated in the court when they were young children. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, the education of most royal descendants, including Nasir al-Din Shah and his heir, was primarily at the hands of various African eunuchs and often a source of their privilege and power.¹²³

Perhaps one outcome of Agha Bahram’s power and influence over Amin Aqdas can be seen in the fact that when she officially became a temporary wife of Nasir al-Din Shah in 1877, solidifying her role in the harem hierarchy that she herself had entered as a low-ranking slave woman nearly twenty years earlier, one of her first acts was to request the manumission of the enslaved eunuch, though he continued to work for her as a freed servant well after this date. In a request letter addressed to the cleric Hajji Hajj al-Islam, Amin Aqdas asserts that since she is now officially a sighah and thus the mistress of Agha Bahram, she asks that the cleric grant her wish of offering him his freedoms.¹²⁴ On August 5, 1877, Hajji Hajj al-Islam grants him manumission and wishes her well.¹²⁵ Though within Islamic doctrine manumitting one’s slave is seen as an act of piety, it is perhaps strange that such an act would be among Amin Aqdas’s earliest assertions of her more formal status in the harem hierarchy. One could read this gesture as signaling Agha Bahram’s power and influence over his mistress.

Agha Bahram’s authority in the harem also extended beyond Amin Aqdas. In an 1879 booklet from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, which recorded the names, occupations, and titles of court and harem servants, Agha Bahram’s name appears with the title Muqarab al-Khaghann (companion of the sovereign), followed by a long list of the subordinates whom he is in charge of.¹²⁶ Some sources suggest he even wielded power and sway over Nasir al-Din himself, as well as many important ministers, which he used to convince the shah and government officials to appoint his allies to high-powered positions in the Qajar bureaucracy.¹²⁷ The court chronicler I’timad al-Saltanah confirms this characterization of Agha Bahram. For example, on January 13, 1883, I’timad al-Saltanah wrote, “Agha Bahram, the eunuch, who has been working for Amin Aqdas for a short time, and who she has trusted completely, has suspiciously managed to accumulate four thousand tomans of wealth. He was discharged, and his account has been closed.”¹²⁸ However, only two days later, on January 15, I’timad al-Saltanah wrote, “I saw Agha Bahram, who had been removed, back at the house. A group of ministers and royal decedents were summoned. Apparently, they had come to vouch for Agha Bahram. The shah has accepted him back.”¹²⁹ Clearly, he held sway over these important figures, and they, in return, maintained his position of power within the harem, much to the dismay of I’timad al-Saltanah.¹³⁰

Like Aziz Khan, Agha Bahram lived a comfortable life in Tehran even after the disbanding of Nasir al-Din Shah’s harem upon his assassination in 1896. While archival traces of him from this period are scarce, he does make a few appearances in the following decades, including as an active participant in the Constitutional Revolution, which took place between 1905 and 1911. In his memoirs, Yahya Dowlatabadi, a leading constitutionalist, names Agha Bahram as one of a list of “people who fought in Mozafari and Hamiyat Societies or helped the fighters.”¹³¹ These are constitutionalist groups who fought against the Cossack Brigade assault on the parliament during Mohammad Ali Shah’s 1908 coup d’état.¹³² While no specific accounts of Agha Bahram’s role and contributions to these organizations have yet to be located, his appearance in Dowlatabadi’s list is significant. Marzieh Mortazavi Ghasabsarayi has argued that since many court eunuchs like Agha Bahram were well educated and aware of the political affairs of the dynasty because of their proximity to the center of power, they were politically mobilized and active during the constitutionalist period, and Dowlatabadi’s list attests to this fact.¹³³ Yet the historiography of the constitutional period has yet to account for the role of formerly enslaved people in Iran’s reformist modernization project.

The last traceable record of Agha Bahram’s life in public archives before his passing is a lawsuit filed by him on March 23, 1911, against the Qajar court at the Department of Justice, claiming a two-year delay on salary owed to him.¹³⁴ The document suggests that Agha Bahram was receiving a salary from the court long after his tenure there. By this time, he was residing in a house in Sarcheshmeh quarter, a commercial district in Tehran, to the northeast of Gulistan Palace. He also owned several small villages mostly on outskirts of Tehran, including Bahramabad and Musabad, indicating he was an affluent figure for the time period.¹³⁵

Like Aziz Khan, Agha Bahram was able to accumulate a significant level of wealth throughout his life and maintain it even after Nasir al-Din’s assassination and the disbanding of his harem. A list of his endowments produced after his death includes a number of assets located in the Pamenar Grand Bazaar, not far from the eastern gates of the Gulistan Palace. The list includes thirteen stores as well as a cistern responsible for storing water for the district.¹³⁶ In fact, toward the end of his life, Agha Bahram spent a large sum of money to erect a building in the area that housed a school and mosque, named after him.¹³⁷ The building, which still stands in the old part of the city, is a physical testimony to the life of this once enslaved African, who, despite his subjugated position, insisted on leaving a trace of his legacy at the heart of the old city.

And yet despite his affluence and the traces he left behind, Agha Bahram was unable to ever fully escape his former slave identity. While we have little knowledge of his daily life during his last years in Tehran, we can be certain that it was impacted by his racial visibility, which marked him as a product of the institution of slavery in Iran until his death.¹³⁸ As Beeta Baghoolizadeh has effectively argued, by the late nineteenth century, blackness was a potent racial marker in Iran and read as the prime characteristic indicating enslaveability. She argues that this racist logic was further aggravated at the turn of the century as blackface theater proliferated in Iran.¹³⁹

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the legacies left behind by both Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram included sites of knowledge production. As mentioned, being well educated was a central part of elite court eunuchs’ identity, and one in which they took pride. The traces of these two individuals, still present in Tehran today, can be read as an assertion of the legacy of formerly enslaved eunuchs as both educated and educators. They are a part of the urban afterlife of enslaved populations in Iran who are rarely examined in the historiography of modern slavery in the region, and deserve far more scholarly attention.

High-ranking slaves like Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram who served in Nasir al-Din’s court and harem were rarely born into their rank. More often, they entered the court after being captured and sold into the Qajar slave trade. This process included being torn away from families, tribes, and indigenous cultures; enduring bondage and, in the case of eunuchs, bodily mutilation; often suffering a long harrowing journey, where they would also bear witness to many other enslaved individuals who perished en route; bearing the brunt of a dehumanizing economy; and more.

Despite some global parallels in the legacy of modern slavery (most notably in the capture, transportation, and selling of enslaved peoples from Africa), there were significant regional differences in the institution across various local contexts, rendering the kinds of comparative framing that have dominated the historiography of slavery in Iran both limited and limiting. The long and complex history of slavery in Iran, and the central role it increasingly played in the region’s trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, begs for a more robust historiography—one that has begun to emerge in recent years. This essay is part of this emerging field of study and offers a historically specific case study of slavery in the court and harem of Nasir al-Din Shah, a significant patron of the institution in late nineteenth-century Iran, as revealed through a close reading of archival traces left behind by the enslaved and formerly enslaved.

Attending to these traces reveals some of the ways in which enslaved populations in the late Qajar court and its harem navigated their circumstances individually, through fostering complicated and savvy relationships, in order to access power and improve their life chances. Those who were able to improve their social status and gain access to power in the Qajar court and its intricate harem hierarchy rarely relied on the benevolence of their masters and mistresses or Islamic doctrine. Instead, they ascended through complex negotiations of race, gender, sexuality, and various forms of intimacy that were part of the norms and social structures of such institutions, as well as their own determination, ambition, and cunning means of influencing their circumstances.

Furthermore, although slavery in nineteenth-century Iran was not exclusively a raced-based institution, race mattered, and racial hierarchies, and more specifically antiblack sentiments, were prevalent. In fact, as the case studies in this essay show, race was one of several material factors that determined pathways to power and social status among enslaved populations. So, for example, while blackness was not an inherent obstacle to wealth accumulation, as the case of Agha Bahram shows, it was often a key determining factor in the kinds of intimate bonds that enslaved populations could develop with their masters and mistresses. Being the object of powerful men’s sexual desire was normalized for Caucasian enslaved women, as well as white eunuchs such as Aziz Khan, and was a common route to powerful positions such as favored wife, concubine, and lover. However, such desires and the forms of intimacy that accompanied them rarely appeared to be directed toward enslaved Africans in the court because of antiblack ideologies that deemed them undesirable. Thus, while Agha Bahram had to rely on his liminal status, his relationship with his mistress, and his other harem connections to develop and maintain his social position, Aziz Khan’s access to power was due to not only his liminal status in terms of admission to both andarun and birun spaces but also his claim to Caucasian ancestry, as well as his castrated and feminized white body and its desirability and potential for sexual labor, which allowed him to transcend his position as a servant in the harem and court. The specific circumstances of these two elite eunuchs were thus determined by social, cultural, and material factors, including race, gender, and sexuality, and the various forms of intimacy that were attainable within the boundaries of their identities. And yet, regardless of their degrees of assent to power, both Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram were a product of Iran’s entanglements with a shifting and complex institution of slavery in the nineteenth century, which cannot and must not be divorced from their life stories. Finally, while the legacy of antiblack racism in Iran can certainly find part of its genealogy within the history of slavery in the region, a critical history of slavery in nineteenth-century Iran cannot be told exclusively through the prism of antiblack racism.

Author Biography

Leila Pourtavaf is an assistant professor in the Department of History at York University. She holds a PhD from the Department of History at the University of Toronto and was a visiting assistant professor at NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Her research stands at the intersection of gender, modernity, and Middle Eastern history, with a focus on Qajar Iran. Her upcoming book project, The Cosmopolis Harem, looks at the social, cultural, and spatial dimensions of the women’s quarter of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court in the second half of the nineteenth century.