ALEXANDRE POPOVIC, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, is one of the leading scholars in Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including Les Voies d'Allah: Les ordres mystiques dans le monde musulman des origines à aujour d'hui. Henry Louis Gates, introduction is a professor of African American Studies at Harvard University and author of numerous books and articles, including Colored People: A Memoir and The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century.
"... an extremely important book."- David Brion Davis, Yale University; author of Slavery and Human Progress"The Zanj revolt, centering around an uprising of East African slaves in the Tigris-Euphrates delta, lasted from 869 to 883 in and around Basra, and was one of the events that contributed to the late-ninth-century crisis of the Abbasid caliphate. Its leader, Ali b. Muhammad, known as Sahib-I zanj ('Master of the Zanj'), claimed to be an Arab Alid from Rayy, but it is surmised that he was probably a Persian mawla (i.e., client) with a spurious genealogy reminiscent of that most celebrated clandestine agent, Abu Muslim. But why did the revolt drag on for so long? The government in Baghdad was caught unaware, at a time when the Tulunids in Egypt and the Saffarids in the east were virtually independent, the Shiite Carmathians were threatening Iraq itself, and al-Mutamid, the caliph when the revolt broke out, was a poltroon. Fortunately for Baghdad, his brother al-Muwaffaq and the latter's son, al-Mutadid, worked tirelessly and successfully to crush the uprising. Ali Muhammad was killed in the final battle; his head preceded al-Muwaffaq's triumphal entry into Baghdad. Basra, however, never recovered its former prosperity. First published in Paris in 1976, this is a monograph in the best tradition of French Islamic scholarship. [Recommended for] graduate, faculty."- G. R. G. Hambly, University of Texas at Dallas, Choice magazine
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