UNDERLYING the political and religious establishment of the Ibāḍīya was the rapid commercial development of the Arab empire, which by the mid-eighth century had begun to promote. regular trans-Saharan trade, beginning with. trade in slaves. The origins of this slave trade lie in the Arab conquest of North Africa and are closely related to the circumstances of the Khawārij rebellion that the conquest provoked.

This chapter will show how Berber slaves from North Africa came to be replaced by slaves from the Bilad al-Sūdān. From the outset this con-version was influenced strongly, if not instigated, by Ibāḍī merchants, until they made the slave trade. predominantly Ibāḍī monopoly from the mid-eighth century onwards. The slave trade along the eastern and central Saharan routes provided the community with wealth and caused its expansion as. sect among diverse Berber tribes. The trade fuelled what came to be the Ibāḍīs' far-flung network of trans-Saharan trade.

Demand for North African slaves lay primarily in the east, where they were sold for different purposes in the markets of the central Islamic lands. The best-known historically were the female singers (qiyān) who entertained the caliphs themselves. Though the majority of slaves were barely noticed by history, an eleventh-century writer, Ibn Buṭlān, writing about the singers, said that the ideal slave was a Berber woman who from the age of nine had spent three years in al- Madīna, three in Mecca, and then nine in Iraq.