Moors, Jureidini, Özbay, Sabban 173trafficking. As a result, Lebanon was upgraded in 2003 from a tier three to
a tier two country, making it once again eligible for U.S. aid.
28.aritas has financially supported improvements at the Detention Center C
for undocumented aliens (mainly migrant domestic workers) and, in
exchange, has been allowed to have a social worker present there around
the clock. More recently, with the support of General Security (the forces
responsible for all foreigners in Lebanon), the Caritas Migrant Center has
employed four full-time lawyers and has formally established a “safe house”
for victims of trafficking that include abused domestic workers who have
“illegally” absconded from their employers. Along with the International
Organization for Migration (IOM), the Caritas Center was instrumental
in assisting with the evacuation of many thousands of domestic workers to
escape the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July/August 2006. See Jureidini
and Moukarbel, “Female Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Lebanon,” 71.
29.lavery in Muslim societies was a relatively open system, with Islamic law S
recommending the manumission of slaves after they had served a particu-
lar period of time, often seven or nine years. In the case of female slaves,
slave owners were legally entitled to have sexual relations with their slaves
as concubines, but they could only marry them after manumission. As soon
as these slave concubines were pregnant (and if paternity was acknowl-
edged by their master), they could no longer be sold, and after the death of
their owner, they would automatically become free women; their children,
belonging to the father’s lineage, were born free. In the case of Ottoman
palace slavery—sultans did not marry and had children only from slave
concubines—the mother of the sultan, the highest position for a woman in
the Empire, was a slave woman, often born neither a Turk nor a Muslim.
See Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the
Ottoman Empire (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
30.hud R. Toledano, E The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression 1840–1890
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
31.akan Erdem, H Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise (London:
Macmillan, 1996).
32.the basis of a sample of Muslim households in the Ottoman censuses of On
1885 and 1907, Özbay calculated that while the percentage of households
with some form of domestic servants remained roughly the same (18%),
the majority of which (85%) were female, there were major changes in labor