Loading summary
Transcript89 lines
- [00:00]
Advertiser/Host
Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent.
- [00:02]
Justin Marozzi
Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card.
- [00:08]
Thomas Small
Say more.
- [00:09]
Justin Marozzi
More. Exactly. Because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get. Like earning up to 5% cash. Back with Venmo Stash on a bundle of brands.
- [00:17]
Thomas Small
So order more pizza.
- [00:18]
Justin Marozzi
The math demands it.
- [00:20]
Thomas Small
Get the Venmo debit card Venmo Stash
- [00:22]
Justin Marozzi
Bundle Terms and exclusions apply. See Terms of Venmo Me Stashterm Venmo Checkout not available at all merchants Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A.
- [00:30]
Advertiser/Host
this episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was. The bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride. You this summer. Find more on Facebook.
- [01:00]
Justin Marozzi
Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts I I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm, yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24. 7 Healthcare just got less pain.
- [01:31]
Advertiser/Host
Hey, I like your new RAV4.
- [01:33]
Justin Marozzi
Thanks. Yours too.
- [01:34]
Advertiser/Host
What does RAV stand for anyway?
- [01:36]
Justin Marozzi
To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle.
- [01:39]
Advertiser/Host
Really? To me, it's the Runway approved vehicle for its amazing style.
- [01:43]
Justin Marozzi
What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space?
- [01:47]
Advertiser/Host
Or really admired vehicle?
- [01:49]
Justin Marozzi
Oh, or really awesome vehicle.
- [01:51]
Advertiser/Host
It really is the recreational activity vehicle, the stylish 2026 Toyota RAV4 Limited. What's your RAV?
- [02:06]
Thomas Small
Slavery and Islam for nearly 1400 years, slavery and Islam have coexisted. Yet Muslims and non Muslims alike have often refused to stare that fact squarely in the face. Justin Marrazi is a historian and the author of Captives and A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World. As he shows, in that world, slavery could mean backbreaking labor in the marshes of Iraq, poetry and music making in the Caliph's harem, or recruitment into an elite military caste powerful enough to make and unmake rulers. Justin explains how Islam inherited and regulated slavery, how race concubinage and military servitude shaped Muslim societies, that Muslims and Christians enslaved one another across the Mediterranean, and how abolition became entangled with Western imperialism. He reveals a persistent tension. Slavery could offer extraordinary routes to freedom, wealth, and political power. Yet none of that erases the brutal reality of capturing, selling, and owning fellow human beings. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Justin Marozi. Hello, Justin. Very nice to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on Conflicted. I am very, very pleased to have you on the show.
- [03:46]
Justin Marozzi
Really pleased to join you today, Thomas. Thank you.
- [03:48]
Thomas Small
Justin, you're here to talk about your excellent book, which was published last year, called Captives and A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World. And I encountered, just by accident, really, through mutual friends near where you live in Norfolk. And there I was at a cocktail party, and my friend, you know, elbowed me and said, that's, you know, that's the historian Justin Marozzi there. And I thought, oh, my God, I love that guy. So I went over, and it's the first time I've ever done it. I just brazenly said, would you come on my podcast? And you probably thought, who the hell is this bearded?
- [04:24]
Justin Marozzi
I said, yes, please.
- [04:27]
Thomas Small
It's so, so generous of you, especially since. And dear listeners, I promise you, I mean, if you just, if you don't know Justin Maroz, books that he has written, and he has written many excellent books. South From Barbary, Tamerlane, Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World, Baghdad, City of Peace, City of blood, Islamic empires. 15 cities that define a civilization. I'm telling you, dear listeners, Justin Marrazzi is right up your street. You need to read his books, especially the one we're gonna talk about today, Captives and Companions. Justin, first off, given how many books you've written and with such great scholarship and learning and yet written so well about Islam, Islamic history, the Islamic world, the Muslim traditions and their peoples. What first captivated you, captured you about the Islamic world and its history.
- [05:15]
Justin Marozzi
Well, before I begin, Thomas, I'd better say thank you for that incredibly generous and kind and I think above all, Californian, extravagant welcome and introduction. Thank you very much. It's totally heartfelt, Totally heartfelt pleasure to be with you. And, yeah, no, the Islamic interest definitely came from my father. He'd been born in Beirut in 1938 and then grew up in what I guess used to be called the Levant, Eastern Mediterranean, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Jerusalem, and later in life, came to England, met my mother in the 1950s, got married and had Pursued a career in export, which was kind of focused on the parts of the world he knew best, which was the Middle east and North Africa and latterly especially Libya, which again, sort of scrolling through the decades then led me to, well, a fall in love with Libya as a country and the people, the places, the magnificent ruins, especially the desert, and write my first book about 25 years ago, which was focused exclusively on Libya. So he had the business interests and the Middle Eastern background. And I've kind of pursued the Middle Eastern side of it and sadly, financially speaking, absolutely not the business side at all. More the kind of journalistic and literary and historical perspective.
- [06:39]
Thomas Small
Well, Justin, that very first book, south from Barbary, brought you face to face with the reality of Islam and slavery. So in a way, that first book 25 years ago planted some seeds in you that have now blossomed with this latest book, Captives and Companions. So talk about briefly your first exposure to the reality of the trans Saharan Islamic world. Slave routes that tended to terminate in Libya, you know, really up to the present to some extent.
- [07:09]
Justin Marozzi
Yeah, I remember very clearly. I was with my father in Tripoli and we went to one of the, the city's favorite bookshops and I came across that they do a lot of reissued books in English from, In this case, 19th century British explorers. And it was the story of an expedition in 1818-20 across the Libyan desert, deliberately investigating the slave trade across the Sahara on behalf of the British government. It was an early 19th century expedition and they came back, I suppose, with a lot of the prejudices of their time as white Englishmen, white Brits, Christians. But they were valuable from a historical perspective in coming up with eyewitness accounts of what a slave caravan looked like, how the slave drivers, the masters, the owners behaved, whipping sub Saharan Africans along northbound to the Mediterranean coast for onward sail and transport. And this sort of the abject misery, the terrible conditions, the way enslaved men, women and children would be left to die on the sides of the tracks if they couldn't keep up physically with the men on, on their camels. So it's quite a harrowing story. It's eyewitness, it's very partial, it's of its time. But I think looking back on it now, these records have an immense historical value. We may dismiss them or say, oh, they're full of Western bias, but they're not rendered useless, that they're still very important eyewitness accounts. And that will really set me on the story, as you say, 25 years ago. And then I feel with this new book. It's come full circle because what I felt was missing all these years later was a general reader history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world, which as you'll know, doesn't exist outside academia. There are select stories on concubines, on ottom and harems, on slave soldiers, et cetera, on Islam and slavery maybe, but they tend to be sort of fairly specialist academic works, not really intended for the general reader. So that's what I was trying to do here.
- [09:18]
Thomas Small
Well, we've had Martin Plout on the show whose recentish book, A History of African Slavery overlaps a little bit with the story you're telling, but you expand it and complement it really wonderfully and are focused on different things, although there is that Saharan overlap. And as both of you make clear in your books that, you know, slavery in the Islamic world was, you know, in scale, immense in duration. It extends from the beginning to the present, if we're honest and in form. And this is what your book particularly reveals. Slavery in the Islamic world was extremely multifaceted.
- [09:58]
Justin Marozzi
Absolutely.
- [09:59]
Thomas Small
There is no single Muslim slave trade, really. But the, you know, the question I have for you at the outset, given the topic, given the sensitivities these days, and given the fact that here on Conflicted, we do not like to be biased or we don't like to foment any sorts of ignorant hatreds, would you say that this book is an apology for Islamic slavery because there's a kind of romantic, more liberal, left leaning view of Islam which kind of sees it as only benign or, you know, are you writing it? The opposite. A kind of, you know, one of these more dismissive. Everything about Islam is wicked. I mean, newsflash, dear listeners, the answer is no. But Justin, how would you describe in general your attitude towards this thorny subject when you went in to tell its story?
- [10:50]
Justin Marozzi
You're right to say thorny. I think Thomas there as well, because I was aware all along that as you say, there are sensitivities on this subject. We live in a very polarized world these days and in a way I think that's been borne out because people see what they want in this book. They'll say, oh, this is just an apology for slavery in the Islamic world. And equally there'll be some people say this is a terrible example of Islamophobia. You're attacking Muslims and choosing to do so through the prism of slavery. I would say absolutely neither is true. And what was nice to see in a number of the reviews was generally people using the words like scrupulously fair, impartial, and so on. But yeah, it's a very difficult, sensitive subject. And I found as well, definitely in parts of the Islamic world that I was working in and writing about, interviewing in there, I would say, to generalize that there is an absence of reckoning or an absence, a lack of desire to reckon with this subject. It's frequently brushed off. And I came up against that again and again, which was just interesting culturally. I always remember the words of this young female Turkish academic who was proposing to a much older male supervisor, she said she wanted to do a PhD in Ottoman War captives, which to me would sound like an absolutely fascinating research area. And he just brushed her off dismissively and said, my dear, our ancestors treated their slaves very well. You don't need to bother yourself with this end of subject. There was nothing to see, nothing to research. I always just felt that with a historian's hat on, this is a very long history, as you've said, it encompasses the whole of Islamic history, essentially because pagan Arabs on the cusp of Islam were accustomed to slavery and the slave trade, and then it carried on through the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And you could argue that there sort of been this, a continuum of enslavement throughout Islamic history. So you've got 13, 14 centuries of it, as opposed to the Atlantic slave trade, where although the numbers are similar, that occurred over, say, five centuries, 11 to 14 million enslaved. Whereas this slavery we're looking at here would be something like 12 to 15 million, perhaps 17 million. So if anything, the numbers are higher over a much longer period. So it's like a dilution over a longer period.
- [13:17]
Thomas Small
Yeah, but then I want to say that what your book shows is that some form of slavery, I should say many forms of slavery saturated Islam, Dom. And I want everyone to kind of set aside any instinct for moralism here and just let's. Before we kind of judge anything, let's just find out about it. And it's just clear that at every level of society throughout the Caliphate and all of its successor states and societies, at every level, there was some kind of slavery informing it. And that's not. Not hugely different from anywhere else in the world. Although slavery in Islam took on its own contours and from the very, very beginning. I mean, in the introduction to the book, you mention this character, Antara Ibn Shaddad. You know, my co host, Ayman, actually mentioned Antara in a recent episode. He's an Arab, and he just mentioned him in passing, a sign of how popular this figure remains for Arabs and Muslims even. He's a kind of King Arthur or Robin Hood sort of figure in terms of the size of his legend you mention in the book, because he is a kind of symbol of the very complex way in which Islam imagined slavery and the enslaved in a way that's very difficult to be simply moralistic about.
- [14:35]
Justin Marozzi
Absolutely. And I used him almost as a bookmark as well to show that slavery didn't just suddenly originate in 7th century. On the 7th century Arabian Peninsula with Muhammad and his fledgling band of Muslims. It predated Islam, of course. So I said, you know, made important point that Muslims did not invent slavery any more than Christians did. And by the way, I don't generally call it Muslim slavery or Muslim slave trade in the same way that we talk about the Atlantic slave trade rather than the Christian slave trade. And even that terminology can be contested and fraught as well. And using the word slave as opposed to enslaved, African American and so on and so forth, it can be a minefield. But back to Antara, great character, because unlike some African origin slaves, his mother was an African slave, his father was a paler skinned Arab. He was subjected to racist taunts. Later in sort of early manhood, offered the chance to win his freedom by riding out into battle and defend his tribe from an invasion. Proved incredibly swashbuckling, brave, courageous in battle, and was duly liberated and then became not only this very distinguished and celebrated warrior, but also one of the Arabs most revered poets from the Jahiliyya, the age of ignorance, which is what Muslims refer to as the period before Islam came. So it's an example of what you find again and again in the story of slavery in the Islamic world, which I find fascinating, is the sense of social mobility that is theoretically and in many cases practically available to those who have been enslaved. There is a way out. It can be meritocratic. You may, if you are lucky as well as talented, make your way to the very top of a given society. And. And we'll probably come across some examples of that later in, in the chat, Thomas. But you know, people who go become Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire from being enslaved as a toddler.
- [16:42]
Thomas Small
Just in the first chapter, you tell the story of four slaves from the first Muslim generation. And each of their stories complicates any straightforward black and white understanding of slavery. One of those four is one called Bilal IBN Rabah. And his story is really a total inversion of classical hierarchy. He's an Ethiopian slave. And at the beginning, let's say, of his story, he's tortured by his owner, a pagan Meccan, because Bilal has accepted Muhammad's message. So we start with this new believer being tortured by his owner. But you know, his, his fate kind of is different from that in the end.
- [17:25]
Justin Marozzi
Absolutely. He, I call him one of the A listers of early Islam and that quartet you mentioned, I, I would put him in, in the same category and I used it really to show that again, enslavement doesn't have have to mark you for life necessarily. Bilal was one of my favorites here because as you say, enslaved Ethiopian, both parents were enslaved. So he's, you know, heredit born into slavery. The two ways you become a slave in the Islamic world, you're either captured in battle or you're born into it. So Bilal is born into it, but goes from an enslaved African to being one of the Prophet Muhammad's most cherished companions. He fights with him in battle over, over a number of years and by the time he dies, age 60, he's been given this, the greatest honor really of being Islam's first muaddin, the caller to prayer. So I think, you know, wherever any of us hear that very evocative call to prayer, whether it's in say northern England or Jakarta or Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, wherever it is, the first man who made that call to prayer with Muhammad's permission was Bilal singing from the top of the Kaaba in Mecca. And it's this lovely image of someone who has kind of like thrown off his, the shackles of his slavery, so to speak, and occupied this incredibly distinguished position in Islam as the first caller to prayer. But also he encountered like a number of Africans did, and we'll probably come to that at some point as well, is a first hand experience of Arab racism towards, you know, darker skinned African men and women, which is like a constant feature.
- [19:08]
Thomas Small
What I liked about Bilal's story is, well, I mean as a Christian I just felt that there were so many resonances with the, with the Christian social revolution which these days one hears about a lot. Tom Holland, the historian, published that very, very popular book Dominion. And he, you know, he makes a case for the degree to which liberal moral norms have been informed by Christianity and that you can't escape it, blah, blah, blah. But part of the way in which a lot of people talk about that story is they make a really sharp distinction between Christianity and Christendom and Islam and Islam, Dom, if you like. But with Bilal's story I realized, you know, there's something very Christian here in terms of this revolutionary nature of faith, the revolutionary nature of being incorporated into a community of faith where a slave is raised to. I mean, literally in geographic terms, the heights, because there he is standing probably on some early minaret calling the faithful to prayer. There's another Christian resonance in the story you're telling, which is that in the world of early Islam and Islam in general, you know, slavery is taken for granted as a feature of the world. Muhammad did not abolish slavery, but then neither did Jesus, neither did the apostles. In both religions, slavery is taken for granted. Yet in both religions, spiritual merit, the value of a person is not linked to their social status, and the manumission of slaves is seen as a virtue. So there's something very similar about how both religions were navigating an inheritance of slavery from long antiquity and a new moral system informed by the monotheistic God and all of that. So I just liked those resonances very much.
- [20:49]
Justin Marozzi
I think that's absolutely right. And we should remember that when Islam is just making its first inroads across the Arabian peninsula in the early years of the seventh century, from 610, when Muhammad has his first encounter in the cave with the word of God, that they are surrounded by slaving civilizations, notably the Byzantines and the Persians next to them. So as you say, and themselves as pagan Arabs had been practicing this sort of phenomenon for since time immemorial. So there's nothing new about it. So I guess that we should maybe not be so surprised by those commonalities. But they are, they are inherently fascinating. And as you say, there's that spiritual reward for manumission. And the Quran is very explicit about that. What is the greatest thing a Muslim can do? It is to free a slave. And that is a constant. And you see acts of manumission in the earliest days of Islam and, you know, a thousand years later or more, in the court of the Ottoman Sultan, slaves are freed again, as an act of, you know, Muslim piety.
- [21:59]
Thomas Small
The Quran refers to slaves as, quote, those whom your right hands possess. So, you know, we shouldn't, like, romanticize the Quran as if it preached abolitionism. It does not.
- [22:12]
Justin Marozzi
No.
- [22:13]
Thomas Small
You know, some people today, more of those romantics would say that, you know, the Quran is actually an abolitionist document, but Muslim Muslims have overlooked or obscured that dimension of it. I mean, I don't think that that's true. This means that in the era of abolition that we've been living through for the last 200 years and a bit, you know, Just like slavery, supporting Christians could turn to the Bible to justify the institution of slavery, and God knows they did. Muslims have also been able to turn to the Quran in the same way. So again, both religions are implicated in a similar dynamic there. Now, one thing I thought was interesting is that despite what you said, you know, the pagan Arabs inherited a civilization of slavery and it continued the Islamic conquests, which over a hundred years gave the first two, three generations of Muslims this extraordinary wealth and power across the known world. Those conquests transformed the Arab, or let's say early Muslim understanding and practice of slavery. How would you say that worked? Obviously, if you're suddenly governing an empire, you're going to be more implicated in the morally dubious nature of buying and selling human beings, I guess.
- [23:29]
Justin Marozzi
Well, morally dubious for 21st century sensitivities, but I think much less so for seventh and eighth. So it's a great period that you brought up there, dated 632, the death of the Prophet Muhammad to 750, the arrival of the Abbasids in Baghdad, just 118 years in which the world that we was was totally transformed. And yes, enslavement was a huge part of that because although, you know, many men and women would have embraced the, the faith of Islam for either spiritual reasons or for fear of coercion or for fear of death, many equally were enslaved as well. And there are some, the numbers that were sent back to Damascus, I'm thinking specifically from the Iberian peninsula with the early conquest of Spain from 7 11. They're absolutely staggering figures. Thousands and thousands and thousands. And they're sort of that they're recorded, you know, as the, as you know, I'm your jihadist in the West. I'm sending you x thousand slaves to the caliph and I'll be retaining my share of 20 or 20 for the leader of the Arab world. So slave made a very big part of this. As the armies push north and west, and they also push north and east into Central Asia, Afghanistan, where the Arabs encounter some of their most fierce fighting. A very early, incidentally an early sort of indication of how foolish it might be to invade a country like Afghanistan. But anyway, yeah, so enslavement, I think is a key feature, but then it's so hard to generalize because you have the most benign form of slavery and the cruelest and most terrible. So you've got everything from sort of domestic servitude which people might say were these people were parts of the family, perhaps that could be romanticizing it. Then you have the eunuchs who are castrated. Specifically prohibited by the Prophet Muhammad, specifically prohibited by Islam. But for centuries, leaders look the other way within the Islamic world and import large numbers of castrated boys to serve as eunuchs. So there are always, you know, sort of moral tensions. You could call it hypocrisy or.
- [25:57]
Thomas Small
Well, I think that's, that's what I meant when you say look the other way. I, you know, I'm thinking as well of the, of the general Islamic legal principle against enslaving fellow Muslims. So this is a principle, you know, cast iron principle. And yet, yes, across, you know, those centuries, Muslim rulers would, would, would turn the other way. You know, whether it's because often in that racially or. Yeah. Racially charged way, sometimes sadly, you know, blackness itself was sometimes seen as a, a sign of enslaveability, a natural sign that could get around those Quranic.
- [26:34]
Justin Marozzi
Yes.
- [26:34]
Thomas Small
Or those Sharia injunctions. But other ways in which the spiritual or legal principles of Islam were ignored because the priorities of worldly power and wealth, you know, came first for, For a lot of people.
- [26:48]
Justin Marozzi
Yeah, absolutely. I think you see that again and again. And while many Muslims would say, you know, that that is completely illegal, it's against the teachings of Islam, in practice you just see people flouting the law essentially, and they're, you know, you have these letters from beleaguered sub Saharan Muslim kingdoms and principalities writing to distant sultans saying, your, your, your forces are overrunning us, but we are your fellow Muslims and, and we, you know, we, we cannot, should not be enslaved. Sometimes people just simply didn't care. This was a war booty. And that I think has also passed in, in some elements to contemporary scholarship. I'm thinking of a particular Moroccan academic called Maha Marwand. And she's, she's, I quote her in the book and she said, you know, discussing slavery is taboo in Morocco because we are a Muslim country and we enslaved fellow Muslims, you know, sub Saharan Africans who are our co. Religionists. We did do it. No one wants to discuss it. And she's, I would say, one of the kind of this interesting new generation of, of pioneering historians who are shining a light on to illuminate areas that have been left in the dark and has. She's received a lot of criticism for doing that and been accused of bringing shame upon Morocco or shame upon Islam. Wor. Whereas you. And I might say she's doing the very opposite. It's more shameful to keep these things in the dark rather than discuss them openly. Whether you're a journalist or a historian or whatever it might be.
- [28:20]
Thomas Small
Well, the degree to which slavery played a role in those early centuries of Islam. I mean, one story that shines a light on that and which we've talked about a little bit on conflicted here and there because it's such a wonderful, quite romantic story, a kind of Islamic Spartacus story is the story of the Zen revolt which broke out in the Abbasid caliphate in the mid 9th century. A really, you know, I wish Hollywood would get its act together and tell this story because it is very stirring, the story.
- [28:48]
Justin Marozzi
It's a great story. So later 9th century. And in a way it's also interesting because the, you, you get a strong feeling from the sort of work that these, these enslaved Africans were doing. It was maybe the closest we would get to what the plantation slavery model that we're so familiar with in the antebellum American South. So large numbers of enslaved Africans toiling away in really horrible, steamy, hot conditions, scraping off natrun, this sort of natural fertilizer, hard, hard manual work in extreme, extreme conditions. And then this. The difference though, by the way, in the leadership of this slave revolt. It wasn't an African slave who, who, who led the revolt. It was actually an, an Arab, we would probably today call him either a shyster or a snake oil salesman. He proclaims he's had a message from
- [29:45]
Thomas Small
God or maybe just a politician, just
- [29:49]
Justin Marozzi
a contemporary politician, even better. But he kind of, he whips these men up into a furore of, of revolt and rebellion. And to cut a very long story short, it's something lasts for something like, I think it's 14, 15 years. It virtually destroys the Abbasid Caliphate who really struggled to put it down. The, the slaves take over much of southern Iraq. But what is equally interesting is that there is no sense at all that they are wanting to abolish the institution of slavery. On the contrary, they want to free themselves from slavery to be able to enslave other people. So they're quite clear cut and ruthless about that as well. And then it ends in sort of a terrible bloodshed. Basra is sacked and destroyed. The great sort of, they call it like the flower of Basran society. These theologians, poets, writers are slaughtered. But the Caliph finally overcomes them. And there was a sense that never again would enslaved Africans be used so widely in the Islamic world, which I think is not necessarily the case. But you see less of it in future centuries. I think it really shook the Islamic world.
- [31:04]
Thomas Small
I remember Eamon, my co host, saying that something Historians have kind of sussed out is as a result of that revolt, the Abbasid caliphate and its sultanates did turn their attention more to the north and began to source slaves from what we would now consider to be Ukraine and Russia, to some extent sold by Vikings. So they did sort of think these black slaves, they're not so trustworthy. Maybe we'll see how the Russians or whatever, you know, the Slavs, how they work out. So, you know, that is also fascinating and a reminder that slavery in the Islamic world, outside of the Islamic world, involved more than just black people. Of course it did, absolutely. Lots and lots of white people, caucuses people, Central Asian people, you know, all over the place.
- [31:49]
Justin Marozzi
I was about to say, yeah. That it was colorblind, but actually that that wouldn't be correct because I think there was. There tended to be a hierarchy and, and sometimes that, that, that was made explicit. I'm thinking of, there's a 10th century manual, interestingly written by an Arab Christian, so not. Not a Muslim. And it's like a sort of a modern translation would be how to buy a slave and live your best life. Or, you know, top tips for buying a slave. And it's completely blatant. It's kind of both fascinating and horrifying. He's saying, you know, whatever you do, don't rush into it. You'll be thinking with, you know, with parts of your body rather than your brain when you see a beautiful woman. The women from this country are particularly good. They're sinuous and delightful and beautiful. These ones are more argumentative. This one is better for hard manual work. I mean, it's an extraordinary document from a thousand years ago. And generally, I think a lot of the Arabs would say that these, in terms of concubines, the paler skinned women from the Caucasus, the Circassians, the Georgians, were generally more prized and therefore more expensive than enslaved African women. So there was a hierarchy and I think that built upon the, if you like, the sort of literary, historical, intellectual record in which these very distinguished Arab writers have these descriptions of Africans which you and I couldn't repeat the language used on this podcast because. Because it is so abhorrent.
- [33:23]
Thomas Small
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Justin Marozzi
And I, in the book, I made the point that these were not fringe writers. These are people like Ibn Khaldun, the father of sociology, Ibn Sinna, the father of modern medicine, Masoodi, the Herodotus of the Arabs, Tabari, who was scathing about the, the Zand Rebellion as well. And there are sort of remarks that, you know, Africans are natural slaves.
- [33:44]
Thomas Small
Well, I just want to be fair, you know, that in my readings of the Byzantine Christian tradition, even its spiritual tradition, you know, demons almost always look like Ethiopians according to the church fathers. So this kind of racial hierarchy and this unthinking racism as we would understand it today is not unique to the world of Islam. Not at all. Not at all. That's not what we're saying. But it was present in the world of Islam. Now I'm glad you brought up up Muslim concubines because to kind of move away from plantation slavery or kind of the drudgery of manual slavery, the Muslim concubine opens up a whole new vista of the imagination. And your book really shows, I think very powerfully not to again, not as an apology of the institution of concubinage, but that for the very wealthy at least, these concubines were a sort of geisha of Islam. They were highly cultivated, highly cultured ladies who were valuable not just for what sexual pleasure they could bring their owner, but also intellectual pleasures. They were great poetry reciters or poets. They could dance, they could play musical instruments. And so suddenly we're in a completely different world of the harem, of the, you know, silk tapestries and cushions and that beautiful, you can imagine the, the tinkling sound of the fountain and the tiles and you know, a different imaginarium here of the Muslim concubine, the qiyan. You know, what role did these Abbasid geishas, the Qiyan, what role did they play in Abbasid life?
- [35:30]
Advertiser/Host
Starting or growing your own business can be intimidating and lonely at times. Your to do list may feel endless with new tasks and lists can easily begin to overrun your life. So finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything as a built in business partner can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Gymshark, Rare Beauty and Heinz to brands just getting started. Shopify has hundreds of ready to use templates that can help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. And you can tackle all the important tasks in one place. From inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. And if people haven't heard about your brand, you can get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you with easy to run email and social Media campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com realm. Go to shopify.com realm that's shopify.com realm.
- [37:00]
Justin Marozzi
This is a, and I, I love this area because it's such a rich and very well documented part of the story of slavery in the Islamic world. I, I tended, I think, to focus on that period you're talking about as well, the Abbasid period, so early 8th 9th century Baghdad, where these kian, as you, as you mentioned, there's like the singing slave girl become kind of superstars, or the best become like the superstars of their age. And they are famed for their repartee, their ability to best another rival in what we would today call a poetry slam. So you, you have these two leading kians, singing slave girl concubine musicians, standing up in front of the Caliph and having this poetry slam with the very, you know, one of the world's most complex, complicated, beautiful, rich langu, where they're having to improvise in rhyming verse and so on and so forth. So they become complete superstars and celebrities. And it's a slightly different version, but I, I always think of sort of Premiership footballers who are traded for these staggering sums of money. And you see it in Abbasid Baghdad, the sums of money, whether the caliph Harun al Rashid, for example, hears about this very beautiful woman and he wants to buy her, but there's someone else who wants to buy him and he knows he's got to be careful because you don't want to be bidding against the caliph, the leader of the Islamic world. You might lose your head. And it's all very well recorded, some of it in the Thousand and One Nights. So some of it we can probably aim off a little bit in terms of historical accuracy, but there's enough in the documentation in the records to show that some of these women were astonishingly strong, vibrant characters, you know, with full agency and the, the anecdotes about how they handle these sort of pesky men chasing them or the demands being being made upon them. And one of my favorite women was a woman called Arib. She was called Arab al Mamunya, which literally means, you know, of, of Mamun, the case that she belonged to the Caliph Mamun. And amazingly, I think she said she slept with about eight or nine caliphs in her life. So she lived a long time into her 90s and then she. These young men who'd heard of her went to talk to her in her old age and said, you know, do you still want to have sex? And she says, my dear boys, the mind is willing, but the body is hopeless and frail. Now I'm just an old lady.
- [39:31]
Thomas Small
For some reason, I have Madonna in my head, Jess. And I don't know why
- [39:37]
Justin Marozzi
she was asked what she looked for in a man. And she had this fantastic comment which was hard, pricked and sweet breath. And you think, what an amazing lady speaking to us across the centuries from, you know, 9th century Baghdad. Absolutely, that was a great period. But again, I think I made the point that you touched on earlier, that there is a danger that we end up romanticizing these stories. And I suppose you would say perhaps the polar opposite of that would be the 21st century kidnapping of Chibok women in northern Nigeria area by Islamists and that. And they would be. They would say, we are allowed to enslave women according to Islamic law and tradition and history. And they are. There are concubines. And we. You know, you saw that language again quite clearly with Daesh in the invasion of northern Iraq in 2014. And they were very explicit about it, that this was allowed. They're like chattel for our. For our sexual use. Most people today would call that gang rape and mass rape. But it was, in a way, the continuation of this tradition of concubinage.
- [40:45]
Thomas Small
Yes, very bracing, very bracing. Reading the chapter on concubinage, I did look up, I kind of took out my copy of Thousand and One Nights because I was immediately reminded of it. And everyone, I think, knows about Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, who tells a story each night to avoid being killed by this murderous sultan. But what kind of. Of I was surprised or I was reminded of when I started reading it, is that A Thousand and One Nights, you know, begins before the Scheherazade story starts. Begins with an absolute orgy of slavery. You know, quite literally, the king of Samarkand walks in on his wife sleeping with their palace cook, a black slave. He's extremely cuckolded by this, of course. He kills them both. Then when he visits his brother, the sultan, he discovers that the sultan's wife, along with all his concubines, are having regular secret orgies with black men. So it's very funny, all of this stuff, the racial stuff, the concubinage stuff, it's all mixed up in there. So the king and the sultan abandoned the kingdom. They go wandering and eventually meet a genie carrying a box in which is an enslaved concubine. So slavery, sex slavery, this racial dimension of being cuckolded by virile, strong black men, it's just everywhere in that medieval culture.
- [42:05]
Justin Marozzi
Culture.
- [42:06]
Thomas Small
It was fascinating.
- [42:07]
Justin Marozzi
Yes. And you've reminded us of what, what an absolute treasure trove of storytelling that is the Thousand and One Nights, you know, and possibly how much less prudish the writers were in those times, you know, discussing these, these sort of fantastic, possibly mythical, but highly imagined detailed scenes of orgy and, and wine drinking. But I think some of that would also be. Be. Be supported by the Abbasid sources where we know that the, sometimes the caliphs would be in their cars, cups, drinking with their boon companions, large silver goblets or golden goblets of wine from Shiraz, listening to these kian, the singing slave girls, playing music and providing other services.
- [42:48]
Thomas Small
A very appealing, a very appealing image, I must say.
- [42:51]
Justin Marozzi
But again, I suppose also the other caveat about that, Thomas, would be that this is kind of what we call maybe elite slavery. So this was like the very top of a given society. First of all, you've got to be, generally be a ruler of some description to have a harem of concubines. And then if you do have a harem of concubines, you're going to definitely need another form of slave to, to guard the women. And that would be the eunuch. And that, that is in a way is like the sort of the partner institution of slavery. Where you see a concubine, you're going to see a eunuch, more or less.
- [43:26]
Thomas Small
Another kind of genre, another species of elite slavery is the, the Mamluk. Now we know of an empire by that name, the Mamluk Empire. But the word Mamluk is simply an Arabic word meaning owned or possessed, the plural mamalik. So this is a whole class of slave soldiers who. And this is one of the things that makes the history of Islam, at least most of its history, kind of unique because slave soldiers end up just really dominating most of the history of Islamic politics and statecraft from, you know, the late 9th century onwards in, in waves. And. But, but it's like incredible how this institution of the slave soldier. Of the Mamluk soldier.
- [44:20]
Justin Marozzi
Yes.
- [44:20]
Thomas Small
How long lived it was and how influential it was. And yet these are slaves. Slaves at the absolute top of the hierarchy.
- [44:28]
Justin Marozzi
Yes. Yeah, it's, it's one of the best examples, I think, of where the word slave doesn't encompass what we understand in the west because it makes A complete mockery of, of the institution of slavery. And I think that the great Turkish historian Halil Inalcik made this point as well to virtually everyone outside the Ottoman. Any one of the Ottoman Sultan's officials, from Grand Vizier down to the low lowliest sort of provincial official, was technically a slave, a slave of the Sultan. So you could be one of the richest men in the empire with your own slaves by the way, and harem and eunuchs and possibly your own detachment of slave soldiers to as guards and escorts, but you would technically be a slave. So, so again it bears no relation at all to what we are much more familiar with, which is the American again come back to America, the plantation south model, nothing at all. And I think there are so many interesting things about slave soldiers in Islam, again like concubines and again like eunuchs. They span the entire history of Islam. I think you have the Prophet Muhammad riding into battle with slave soldiers by his side. Some will be later manumitted, liberated and become fellow warriors, jihadists and distinguished early Muslims. And then you have them as you say, through the, into the Mamluk period. So you have a dynasty under the name Mamluk, a thing or person possessed. So that they're running, they're running the entire Islamic empire more or less while having come from this slave past. So it kind of begs beggars belief. And you, you see them in later 1811, the massacre of the Mamluks in Cairo in 1811.
- [46:17]
Thomas Small
There's kind of a metaphysic almost involved in this. There's certainly a theology that, and there are overlaps again with Christianity. So I don't want to draw the distinction too broadly. You know, this idea that St. Paul says of like we know being, being a slave to Christ, certainly that kind of rhetoric is dominant in Islam, that every believer is a slave of Allah. So you can imagine then on the level of empire, if the Caliph is like the vicegerent of Allah on earth, then his officials are owned by him or enslaved to him in the way that every believer is enslaved to God. So it's a whole metaphysic, a whole way of understanding what it means to be a created being, dependent entirely for one's existence on God, dependent on God for everything. So you're really his slave and you must obey him like a slave obeys his master. So this is part of what, what's allowing for this continuation of these relationships of these institutions. I would say, as you say, all the way up until just towards the end of the Ottoman Empire?
- [47:22]
Justin Marozzi
Yeah, it's like in a way, a divinely ordained hierarchy. And for me, what I found interesting, there's so many different aspects of it. But for example, one of the key moments we could say in Islamic history is 1453, when a 21 year old, impetuous, young, highly ambitious Sultan Mehmet II determines to do what 800 years of other earlier Muslim invasions had palpably failed to do, which is to take Constantinople. And they described it, it was described as a bone in the throat of Allah. It had to be removed. This sort. It was like this sort of insulting little bastion of Christendom in the middle of the Islamic world. And he set out to do it. How did he do it? To cut a long story short, that his last throw of the dice, when his generals were. Were borderline mutinous, was to throw in the janissaries, the slave soldiers. And they were the key crack force which enabled him to take a city which had generally been seen as impregnable. So they kind of surface at these important moments in Islamic history. Equally, they could. I remember I tried to write a few words about a scene from Blade Runner, which my publisher probably very wisely said, we're going to cut all that. But I was trying to draw a parallel between early 9th century caliphs and their use of Turkish or Turkic slave soldiers who became so powerful that again and again they start ousting the caliph and even killing him. And as fascinating, there are a number of caliphs in it. I think it's called the year or the decade of Anarchy at Samarra. I mean, the headquarters of the Islamic world world is moved from Baghdad a number of miles up the river Tigris to Samara because these Turkish slave soldiers are just getting too unruly. They're getting above themselves. And as, as we know from those of us who watch Blade Runner, the replicants, Rutger Hauer comes in and. And kills the man who made him. So I just thought there was that kind of. No, no.
- [49:28]
Thomas Small
I think that's really interesting.
- [49:31]
Justin Marozzi
The inherent dangers of creating a slave soldier is that they might be coming after your job. And in a number of cases, these caliphs in medieval Iraq lost their lives to the slave soldiers that they had employed to protect them. A nice little irony there, Justin.
- [49:48]
Thomas Small
One thing that I really appreciate about this book, and I have to hold up my hand here and say, you corrected me and you corrected something I've said many times on conflicted unknowingly. I swear ignorance here, dear listeners, but in your chapter about the so called white slavery or the slavery that was carried out by what are known as the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean is not the story that we often hear and which people have heard on Conflicted, which usually talks about Muslim slavers associated with what is now Algeria and Tunisia and, and bits of Morocco stealing people from Europe in great numbers and enslaving them the white slavery situation. And that's true. You know, there were slave raids in Britain, Ireland, even Iceland. So you know, there were Muslim slavers from North Africa who went and enslaved Europeans, white Europeans. But I didn't realize that actually that it worked the other way as well. Almost possibly to the same degree, the same kind of numbers involved that Mediterranean Christians on the north shore were also raiding or buying slaves from, from Islam and sending the North. So that was. You corrected me that, thank you very much for that.
- [51:05]
Justin Marozzi
That, that was a really kind of. Yeah, extremely revealing aspect of this story which, which like you, I haven't come across before as well because I generally in the West, I think we've learned there's a more binary narrative of white European Christians get enslaved, captured by darker skinned Muslim North African. So the, the obvious corrective to that, as you say, is that the Europeans were doing it big time. If, if anything the numbers were slightly greater. It was something like 2 million. But in between 1530 and the 19th century, something like that, during which time is one to one and a half million Europeans were captured. So if anything the Christians are, the Europeans are doing more of the enslavement than North African Muslims. But the other complicating factor which I think makes it virtually impossible to kind of come to a settled conclusion is that a lot of the people that we have routinely understood as Muslims doing this piracy and corsairing were in fact, you can either use the word renegade, which was an early term for a European convert to Islam. So you get these Irish, British, Dutch, whoever relocating to North Africa. So you know, John Smith becomes Murad Rice and becomes a Muslim. Is he doing that for spiritual reasons? I suspect not. But he's doing it so that he can pursue this, this kind of potentially high risk, high reward career of piracy in which enslavement is his way to riches. And in a survey of some of the leading corsair captains of Algeria, Al. Sorry, this, the city of Alers, a significant majority of them were ex European Christians who'd come across to North Africa kind of rebranded themselves as Muslim converts, but. But really were just these sort of fairly unscrupulous brigands. And pirates and corsairs. So it's a really interesting, complicated narrative. And I think I ended that chapter with words from a Lebanese American historian, Nabil Mata, who just says no one should throw the first stone. No one comes out of that story looking good. And I end up describing it really as a bit of a free for all, almost like a colorblind faith blind. Free for all, everyone, enslaving everyone, Jews, Christians, Muslims.
- [53:25]
Thomas Small
And yet, you know, as you say, it has largely been remembered in the west in a more one sided way, to the extent that, you know, the slave memoir becomes almost like a genre of early modern European literature. And it has a huge, huge effect on things like the Barbary wars, the first wars that the United States ever were in with the Barbary pirates, the Corsairs of North Africa. And it is involved in the movement towards abolitionism. Somehow there's this way in which, as some Westerners are considering the institution of slavery both in the antebellum south, in the case of America and elsewhere, and in the case of this white slavery, like they're beginning to generate in themselves a universal morality in which slavery in itself is a condemnable offense against God and man and should be stamped out. And in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was forced to deal, as you know, as it was forced to deal in general with growing Western power, with this new morality that kind of really became global very fast, that slavery should be stopped. And that put the Ottoman Empire in particular in a very tricky situation. In general, the Ottomans were schizophrenic about modernity, trying to modernize in order to defend themselves, but also maybe because they did themselves undergo kind of a shift, a spiritual shift or a moral shift. But abolitionism was part of that for sure.
- [55:00]
Justin Marozzi
This is, I think, one of the most interesting and challenging aspects of the entire story. Abolition, abolition, abolitionists and the, and the whole story of abolition. Because you have this, you have inherent tension within the Islamic world and you certainly have tension between the, the largely Christian west and the largely Muslim east on, on this very vexed issue. I love some of the, the records looking at this. When you have these quite pompous, overweening British diplomats, diplomats and a sort of pompous foreign secretary in London who himself will be under pressure from the British press saying something must be done. This is inhuman, these terrible Muslims enslaving people. It's got to be stopped. Firing off the missives to much generally more pragmatic, sensible ambassadors in Istanbul who write back to London saying, do you have Any idea what you're dealing with here? I can't go into the cabinet of ministers and talk to them about abolition. And do you know why? Because everyone around the table has been enslaved in his past. Every single minister around that table as a young boy was an enslaved person. So you have literally. And slavery in the DNA of the Ottomans themselves, because the Ottomans favored concubinage over marriage as a way of producing their offspring. So I end up calling, almost like a dialogue of the deaf, these sort of pompous, high minded, evangelical Christian, a lot of the time abolitionists trying to impose their way on an entirely different culture.
- [56:39]
Thomas Small
If I could just interrupt you because it brings to mind a conversation I once had with a very high ranking, I won't name him or specify him, a Gulf high ranking Gulf official, let us say, who was talking about what it was like dealing with, with the State Department during the Biden administration, that the State Department would routinely send groups of very young staffers, you know, straight out of Princeton, straight out of Yale, and they would come and just sort of lecture the low level bureaucrats in various Muslim countries, you know, Gulf countries, about various things, LGBT rights, you know, whatever. And, and I think there was a similar thing going on there. Like the Gulf officials were just like, we can't implement these policies. It doesn't, like what are you. But also the sense of resentment, like who are you to tell us what we should believe about, you know, the abolition story is part of this larger story of a Western liberal modernity encountering, dominating, domineering over, over, yes, part. Other parts of the world. It's, it is fascinating.
- [57:50]
Justin Marozzi
And there's a line I, I quoted from one historian, I think I was an interesting Muslim commentator. You know, for many, for many Arabs, for many Ottomans, for many Muslims, abolition was imperialism spelled differently. And you see that in East Africa and you see that on what were then known as the trucial states. Today's Gulf, where the Brits move in, in and under the guise of wanting to abolish slavery, are suddenly masters of the entire coastline and, and then, and the new colonial power. So abolition is happening at this interesting period of sort of early colonialism as well. And the 19th century itself is also interesting because you've got both peak abolition and on the other hand you've got peak slavery and peak slave trade. And I think when you use the word schizophrenia, Thomas, I, if I may, I'm just gonna, I've got a lovely example of this. So Sultan Abdul Majid, the first in 1849. So the Ottoman sultan, leader of the Islamic world, quote, our holy law permits slavery. Nothing controversial about it, A simple statement of fact. Sharia law permits slavery. Two years later, 1851, the same sultan. It is a shameful and barbarous practice to buy and sell our fellow creatures. So you've got that, that tension within the Islamic world. You know, this is 19th century March of civilization progress, maybe early human rights, if you like, probably too early to use that expression. But that on the other hand, and on the other 1300 years of Islamic law, the Quran and the prophetic example, and, and there is that tension. Why should we abolish something which is explicitly allowed.
- [59:37]
Thomas Small
Well, to bring this fascinating conversation really to a close. And thank you, Justin, for giving us so much of your time. I loved the book. I've loved the conversation. I was reminded as I reached the end of the book about a story I heard once from a Saudi woman over dinner. She told me, this is like 10 years ago. She told me the story of her grandmother who was born a Syrian Christian girl in a village and was kidnapped from her village. So this is like the 1940s, kidnapped by Bedouin slave raiders who raided the village, kidnapped some women and girls and took them into the desert and eventually down to a town in northern Saudi Arabia where she was sold. And then she was sold into marriage at a young age and she converted to Islam and then she was sold to someone else. I mean, it was all very confusing. And she ended up eventually marrying an Egyptian and having a family and was a woman telling her granddaughter this story of how she ended up living in Saudi Arabia. And this is a story that you might think comes from like the 9th century, but it came from the 20th century. It's a sign of how this just continued and indeed continues in some parts of the Islamic world to this very day, despite the fact that often people don't really want to notice that fact or talk about it. I would like you maybe to tell the listeners about a remarkable woman, Habib Rabah, who is also a contemporary woman of great bravery, who was born into slavery in Mauritania in the last century. At the end of the last century.
- [61:23]
Justin Marozzi
Century, yeah, that and, and the key word there, I think is born into. She came from a long line of hereditary enslaved men and women. So, you know, on both sides of her family there was hereditary enslavement. It's as simple as that. For as long as anyone could remember. What was remarkable about this lady, I met her through anti slavery organization in Mauritania, which was one of the Hardest countries I've ever had to report in. There was, you know, that the authorities do not want anyone looking at the, at this. They're, they're embarrassed about it. They know it's there and they've consistently dragged their feet on, on real genuine abolition. I asked a number of people in Mauritania why that was and they said, well, it's because these are the people who have slaves. They, they don't want this to go away and they certainly don't want it to be investigated and looked at. But anyway, I've got to this remarkable woman, Habi Rabba, and she was rescued by her brother, an anti slavery activist and a policeman in 2008. So, you know, 18 years ago. And what is even more remarkable, I didn't know this at the time when I met her. I subsequently found out later it had been, it had been very sort of amateurishly or inexpertly filmed her, her moment of liberation and she's completely distraught. This pickup arrives in this desert settlement in a really sort of dusty, sandy, really pretty basic conditions. The brother gets out and they try to take her. He tried to get his sister back and she's screaming at him, get out of here. What are you talking about? I'm not a slave. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm part of this family. And she's completely denying to the police officer that, that she's an enslaved person. It's like, you know, you've completely got the wrong person. This is my family. And the brother just keeps pushing and pushing and pushing and eventually they are virtually dragging her away with them. And, and when I had the interview with her, her brother was sitting next to her and he was very gentle with her and he just said, you are, you know, you were, you were completely traumatized. You didn't know what was happening. And she was terrified of the reprisals that would come from her master, from her owner, who by the way had raped her repeatedly in her youth, had treated her like an animal. And she was, she was, she was, she told me she was told she had the soul of an animal. Animal, which was why she was never allowed to learn to read or write. So she, she's illiterate to this day, but I wanted to end the book on a positive note. So a, I wanted to find someone who had been able to leave this world of slavery behind. So she had been rescued. And what was remarkable about her, I thought, and, and very noble was that she had said she devoted the rest of her life to fighting slavery. And she had stood for parliament twice. I think rather sadly, in a country like Mauritania, where political corruption is endemic, she would be an unsuccessful of all people said to me she would never have a chance to be elected. But she was. She has become a campaigner against slavery. And as you say, this is, this is an institution which still exists. It's against Mauritanian law, obviously it's against international law, but it still exists in, in corners of Mauritania and, and indeed Mali as well. But I ended up with the book on that positive note, where she, she had dedicated her life to fighting slavery and how she described how for the first time in her life, when she got back to Noakchot, she said I'd never really existed as a human being before, but now, thank God, I'm free.
- [64:40]
Thomas Small
Well, it is a wonderful book, Justin. Captives and Companions, A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World by Justin Marozi. Dear listeners, buy the book, read the book. It's great. Justin, I'm so glad I encountered you at that cocktail party and I'm glad. I'm grateful to you for your friendship now and for coming on the show. It's been great. Thank you.
- [65:02]
Justin Marozzi
Been a huge pleasure. Thomas, thanks so much. Really, really enjoyed it.
- [65:06]
Thomas Small
That was Justin Marozi. His book Captives and Companions is available from all good booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message heard Production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
- [65:49]
Justin Marozzi
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [66:11]
Advertiser/Host
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months. Plan required 15 per month, equivalent to taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy, see terms.
- [66:20]
Thomas Small
Summer's full of reasons to look your best to Kovis has everything you need to show up in style. Their Western boots are handcrafted in over 200 steps by hand with premium cowhide and exotic leathers. Stop by your local to Kova store for the full experience, free drinks, boot shines and complimentary boot branding to make your pair truly yours. Their team is there to help you find exactly what fits your summer. And of course, you can always stop by toqovis.com tokovas forever west.
- [66:50]
Justin Marozzi
Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot.
- [66:55]
Advertiser/Host
The good news?
- [66:56]
Justin Marozzi
The Vanta Agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16,000 fast moving companies like Rank, Ramp, Cursor and Harvey who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at vanta. Com.