Circassia — the country of the Circassian or Cherkess people of the north-western Caucasus — is named in Vol. I of The Achehnese as the source of one of the very few Circassian slaves to be found in Acheh in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It is mentioned by C. Snouck Hurgronje in a footnote to the chapter on slaves, in connexion with Habib Abdurrahman’s traffic in imported human property.
The footnote runs: “There still lives at Ulee Lheue (Olehleh) a freed Circassian slave, formerly the property of Habib Abdurrahman, who also imported Hindus as slaves into Acheh. Such cases are, however, rare.” The mention is brief, but it is sociologically interesting, since Circassian slaves — commonly called cherkess in Arabic and Turkish — were in the nineteenth century a luxury article of the Ottoman and Egyptian slave-markets, valued especially as concubines and as pages in the households of the great. Their appearance in Acheh, even in a single instance, testifies to the range of the sayyid’s commercial connexions and to the cosmopolitan traffic which reached the ports of the sultanate.
Habib Abdurrahman — a sayyid of the Hadrami diaspora, elsewhere characterised in Vol. I for his religious-legal activities and his wide business interests — evidently used his connexion with the wider Mohammedan world to bring to Acheh, besides the more usual Negroes and Hindus, a Circassian slave or two. The freed slave still living at Ulee Lheue in Snouck’s time was thus a rare surviving monument of a traffic which, in larger Mohammedan countries, was far more considerable.
Circassia’s appearance in Vol. I is incidental to the ethnographic description of the slave-class of Acheh, and the country itself is not further described. Its mention is, however, characteristic of Snouck’s method: the slave-class is enumerated, race by race — Niasese, Batak, Hindus, Africans, Circassians — each with its character and its function in the household economy of the Achehnese; and the rare Circassian is set down in his place at the end of the list, as the most exotic and least numerous of all.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.