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The Thousand and One Nights, Vol. I.

Note 13 — Chapter I

Edward William Lane translation

Note 13.—On Slaves. A slave, among Muslims, is either a person taken captive in war, or carried off by force, and being at the time of capture an infidel; or the offspring of a female slave by another slave, or by any man who is not her owner, or by her owner, if he does not acknowledge himself to be the father: but the offspring of a male slave by a free woman is free. A person who embraces the Mohammadan faith after having been made a slave, does not by this act become free, unless he flees from a foreign infidel master to a Muslim country, and there becomes a Mohammadan. A person cannot have as a slave one whom he acknowledges to be within the prohibited degrees of marriage.121—The slaves of the Arabs are mostly from Abyssinia and the Negro countries: a few, mostly in the houses of wealthy individuals, are from Georgia and Circassia.

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