Fall Books: Centuries of Servitude

“Captives and Companions

 

By Justin Marozzi

 

Pegasus, 560 pages, $35

 

'I rode my favorite camel Asfar, a sweet-natured animal, into the Libyan oasis town of Murzuq."

 

This line, from Justin Marozzi's "Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World," reminds us that Mr. Marozzi's authority as a historian derives not only from a mastery of sources -- though, with almost 70 pages of bibliography and notes to his book, he gives ample evidence of that -- but also his deep and idiosyncratic involvement with Muslim lands.

 

As a youngish man in the late 1990s Mr. Marozzi crossed the north African desert on camelback. Later he tried to build civil society in war-torn Iraq and Libya and was briefly kidnapped by Tuareg militiamen. In 2011 he overheard a Libyan revolutionary call out to a black-skinned brother-in-arms, "hey, slave! Go and get me a coffee!" and was spurred to begin an inquiry into slavery -- its history, prejudices and afterlife -- in the Islamic world.

 

Slavery thrived there, Mr. Marozzi tells us, a millennium longer than the trans-Atlantic version did, and probably enslaved more people (17 million, according to one study, as opposed to the 12 million to 15 million who were sold into the Atlantic trade). It was finally abolished under Western pressure and after decades of resistance, foot dragging and delay; in the case of Saudi Arabia, it was legal until 1962. Even now it remains glaringly visible in the roughly one million people that Temedt, an antislavery organization, estimates are living as hereditary slaves in Mali, toiling in the fields, performing menial tasks and, in the case of women, Mr. Marozzi tells us, being "routinely raped." So why is this story so little known?

 

Until recently the reluctance of modern Muslim societies to delve into an unflattering episode of their past, along with Western historians' unswerving focus on slavery in the Americas, had generated, in the words of Middle Eastern scholars quoted by Mr. Marozzi, a "deafening silence" and a "collective amnesia" on the subject. Drawing on the work of a new generation of Turkish and north-African historians who have challenged "the default setting of denial," Mr. Marozzi tells the story in all its richness, variety and horror, from the slave concubines who used sex and poetry to bedazzle the caliphs of ninth-century Baghdad to the slave-seizing free-for-all that the western Mediterranean became in the 16th and 17th centuries -- the age of the "Barbary corsairs."

 

Most significant of all, Mr. Marozzi re-examines the comforting orthodoxy that slavery in the Islamic world was inherently benign, with kindly slave-owners the norm, manumission common after only a few years and Islam's much-vaunted color-blindness foreclosing the racism that was intrinsic to the same institution in the American South. The result is a monumental revisionist work that will alter views on slavery inside and outside the Islamic world.

 

From the Mamluk slave-soldiers, recruited from Kipchak tribes in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, to Hurrem, the powerful wife of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, who started her career as a lot in the Istanbul slave mart, the trope of the upwardly mobile slave has more than a grain of truth. Crucially, however, there is much ambiguity stemming from Islam's origins.

 

That Muhammad himself had numerous slaves, and that the Quran enjoins compassion toward slaves -- ideally with a view to their emancipation -- made it impossible even for the Islamic reformers of the 19th century, who regarded slavery as a stain on their civilization, to maintain, as Christian abolitionists did, that the ownership of one person by another was by definition offensive to God. Nor was the tendency to justify slavery on racial grounds any less widespread among elite Muslims than it became among plantation owners in the American South. It is disconcerting to read the opinion of the medieval thinker Ibn Khaldun, for instance -- whose theories about the rise and fall of civilizations are cited even now -- that African nations were, as Mr. Marozzi quotes, "submissive to slavery, because [black people] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals."

 

Mr. Marozzi writes about the myriad routes ("capillaries rather than arteries") along which enslaved sub-Saharan Africans were driven northward as far as the Mediterranean and onto ships that would transport them to Istanbul and other markets. Over the course of several hundred years the desert equivalent of the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic trade witnessed an exodus both vast and lethal -- some 1,600 slaves in a single caravan, we are told, died of thirst in 1849 somewhere between Lake Chad and Murzuq.

 

Nor does Mr. Marozzi shrink from other painful topics. Prohibited by Muhammad but perpetuated by Islamic rulers -- who believed their harem women needed supervision by men who would not threaten them sexually -- the castration of slaves was farmed out to Christian monks. So high was the mortality rate from this unspeakable procedure that in 1868 the French explorer Count Raoul du Bisson estimated that 35,000 African boys were losing their lives annually in Sudan for a harvest of 3,800 eunuchs.

 

Islamic slavery thrived beyond the Islamic world, its chief exponents sometimes converts of dubious sincerity who would pray to the Virgin Mary for a change of wind if Allah failed them, or go on drunken sprees while ashore. "Don't let the Turks ravish us again!" ran the headline in Iceland's most popular newspaper when Turkey played Iceland at soccer in 1995 -- despite the fact that the razzia it was alluding to, back in 1627, had been led by "a rich, intelligent and opportunistic Dutch renegade called Jan Janszoon," whose Muslim name was Murad Reis.

 

This absorbing book abounds in such ironies. Thus the British, who had been such enthusiastic slavers, went on to force Muslim rulers to end their own version of the practice. Of the 52 "Barbary corsairs" who were captured by the Dutch in November 1614, only four were north African Muslims, the remaining 48 being "fortune-seeking sailors from England and the Netherlands."

 

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Mr. de Bellaigue is the author of "The Lion House: The Coming of a King," about Suleyman the Magnificent.” [1]

 

1. Fall Books: Centuries of Servitude. de Bellaigue, Christopher.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 Oct 2025: R2.