Abolition of Slavery in Iran · Laghv-e Bardeh-dari dar Iran

Culture of origin: Persian Gulf · Historical

Holiday sources: Persian Gulf Coast and Islands

The law passed by the Majlis on 7 February 1929 has a single article: no one shall be recognised as a slave in Iran, and the slave trade and any claim of ownership over a human being are outlawed. Mohammad Shah Qajar had banned the import of slaves by sea in 1848, while Britain pressed to curb the Indian Ocean slave trade; in the nineteenth century more than two thousand enslaved people a year were shipped from the northern Somali coast to the Persian Gulf. Most Afro-Iranians live in the southern provinces, Hormozgan and Bushehr among them; their presence goes back largely to the slave trade through the Persian Gulf and through the southern ports, such as Bandar Abbas, that Portuguese slave traders held from the sixteenth century.