Excellent article

Submitted by Vijay (United Kingdom), Aug 30, 2006 at 10:12

Pipes says "In the substantial and varied corpus of premodern Muslim literature, only a handful of writers-most notably Nizam al-Mulk and Ibn Khaldun - recognized this system and described it."

The reason why the info about military slaves is meager is that perhaps most Muslims (and non-Muslims) were vitual slaves to the autocratic Muslim rulers - which was the (and is) the default mode of Muslim rulership. Hence, the military slaves were not seen as specially different with respect to political rights compared to the rest of the pipulation and consequently , they did not draw more attention or investigation

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