The Arabian Peninsula remains a blind spot in recent scholarship on slavery in medieval
Islamic contexts. Given the limited secondary literature on the subject, this chapter will rely
largely on primary sources to provide a case study from Yemen during the eleventh to
fifteenth centuries CE. Medieval texts offer rare insights into the lives of enslaved persons
during that era, revealing a remarkable breadth of occupations and tasks assigned to them in
Yemeni societies. They also provide evidence of slave trading practices from East Africa
across the Red Sea to Yemen. Taken together, primary sources sketch a vivid picture of
what it meant to be a slave in medieval South Arabia.