← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:01]
A
FOX News is now streaming live on Fox 1. When it matters most, turn to the voices you trust. We go beyond the headlines, bringing you the stories you won't hear anywhere else. Live coverage, sharp analysis, real perspective at home or on the go. Stay connected when it counts. Stream Fox News on Fox 1 download today. Okay. Justin Marazzi, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [00:42]
B
Thanks so much. Great to be here. Colman.
- [00:44]
A
So I'm a huge fan of your recent book Captive and Companions. I think in my opinion, it's the undisputed best and most comprehensive book that exists on the topic of the the history of slavery in the Islamic world. And I've read several other such books. I mean, the first thing that strikes me as interesting is that it's still so clearly possible to write the comprehensive account of this topic because there are so few books on it relative to, say, slavery in the Atlantic world, anywhere in the Americas. Right. No one could publish a book on American slavery tomorrow that that would that was leaps and bounds more comprehensive than any other book on the subject because there's just been too many books on it. Right.
- [01:40]
B
Yeah.
- [01:41]
A
So my first question I'm curious what your background is that you are so deeply studied on this topic that is so relatively untouched in our Western mind.
- [01:57]
B
Yeah. Okay, Carmen, thanks. I think the way I got into this subject dates back about a quarter of a century because my first book, when I traveled in the Libyan Sahara, it was a two and a half thousand kilometer journey by Kamil. And the subtitle of that book was along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara. And in the course of that book, which was a mixture of travel and history, I came across a lot of accounts, invariably by Western, Western, mostly British explorers who came into contact with the Saharan slave trade and were often eyewitnesses to these long, pretty appalling conditions in which the slave caravans were going from the sub Saharan part of Africa up to the North African coast for onward transportation and sale to different courts around the Islamic world, especially to Istanbul. So I was aware of of the subject back then and then in subsequent works I've Slavery in the Islamic world has always featured to a greater or lesser extent. And then over time, I realized what, what you've I think you've nailed it a moment ago, that there really didn't seem to be a single volume comprehensive treatment of this subject, which was I found increasingly absolutely not a niche concern, you know, not a fringe affair, but an absolutely central story within the global history of slave. I still think that it's pretty Shocking. It's fairly extraordinary that something that lasted so long involves so many people over such a wide geography has not received more critical analysis.
- [03:46]
A
Okay, so two questions. One, from 10,000ft, can you give someone a summary of the scale of slavery in the Islamic world from the conquests of Muhammad up to the present day? And then secondly, can you explain why it is that this is such an under researched topic in the West?
- [04:11]
B
I think the first of those questions, Coleman, is a little easier than the second. But so the first, in terms of numbers generally, when the two systems are compared, the slave trade in the Islamic world to the Atlantic slave trade. Atlantic slave trade, as you say, much better known, something like five centuries and an estimated number of, I think between 11 to 14 million people enslaved. Slave trade in the Islamic world. I think the figures are also much more debatable, much less certain, because it goes back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. So, you know, there's no such thing as statistics in those days. There's no data kept. And in fact, as I found repeatedly throughout this project until you get as late as the 19th century, statistics are pretty uncertain and there are a lot of estimates. But the comparable figures to the 11 to 14 million of the Atlantic slave trade within the Islamic world, you're looking between 12 to 15 million and possibly as many as 17 million. But even those figures don't tell the whole story because a lot of that might involve the trade with the Indian subcontinent and much further east to countries like Indonesia and Malaysia today. So if anything, that the numbers involved were greater but over a much longer period, so that the annual figures are correspondingly more diluted. Now onto the second part of your question. Why hasn't there been a more. Why aren't there more books on this subject in a sort of comprehensive general reader format? I think one of the reasons, going back to the Anglo American scholar Bernard Lewis, who I mentioned in the book, going back to the 80s and 90s, so things have moved on. But he said in his words, it was professionally hazardous for a young scholar to enter into this field, meaning in his view at least, it was controversial. You're not going to win much friends, possibly not get funding to do it. I don't think that's the case anymore. And I had a quote about, you know, for every gallon of ink spilt on the Atlantic slave trade, the corresponding amount is a drop of ink. For the slavery in the Islamic world, that is again, it's still changing, but maybe it's a thimbleful now compared with a gallon and what I've seen, it tends to be non Western scholars, a new generation of Turkish, Tunisian, Moroccan scholars, often people with dual nationality as well, you know, Lebanese American, Moroccan American and so on, making real, really interesting scholarly strides into this subject, which I think remains very controversial.
- [06:52]
A
Yeah, I think. I do think there's been a change, though. I think it's gotten more open and it's easier to find information than it would have been 20 years ago or, you know, I remember reading Paul Lovejoy's book, Transformations of Slavery in Africa, I think it's called, and it's. Yes, yes, a very, very good book about slavery on the African continent. And in the original version, which was maybe published in the 90s or very early 2000s, he talks about how it's actually difficult for Ghanaian scholars to study African slavery and remain in Ghana because they could even be the subject of police investigations or their life could be made very difficult if they talk about that issue. And I don't think that's the case today quite as much. So I do think, obviously in America, we had some of our most classic texts about American slavery come from the 70s and were inspired by the spirit of the civil rights movement. And there was a lot of those remain classics to this day. But I think, you know, over time it's become less and less taboo to talk about slavery elsewhere in the world. And. And perhaps underlying all of that is this American in particular sense, that slavery is uniquely ours, and therefore we can't discuss slavery in other places without minimizing what slavery was here.
- [08:16]
B
Yes, yes, I think that's right. And I think probably being British and less well attuned to certainly writing and even reading the histories of the Atlantic slave trade, I felt in a way that perhaps gave me greater leeway to look at this without having that almost accusation hovering over me. You know, are you making light of the Atlantic slave trade? Is this an effort to minimize the Atlantic slave trade? And so on. I just felt it was more a question of maybe parochial is too strong a word, but the way that this story hasn't been told. And as you say, that has changed, but what I found had changed. It was more a case of you can find histories of concubines, you can find histories of the Mamluks, of slave soldiers, histories of eunuchs, chapters, or books on specifically Ottoman slavery. But there didn't seem to be a single comprehensive treatment going from the very birth of Islam, when early Muslim Arabs inherited these traditions of slavery from their pagan forebears plus their neighbors, the Byzantines and the ancient Persians through to the 21st century, which is where I deliberately ended the book with first hand experiences of travels to Nuwakchot in Mauritania and in Bamako in Mali, two countries where hereditary racialized slavery, although illegal, still continues to this day. And I also mentioned the Isis Daesh enslavement of the Yazidi women, which we perhaps will come onto later.
- [10:02]
A
Yeah, I'm definitely going to get to modern day slavery. But sticking with historical slavery for, for the moment, what does the Quran say about slavery and you know, who can be enslaved? What are the rules? Is enslavement considered ethical? What's recommended versus required? And how important have those textual beliefs been in practice throughout the history of slavery in the Islamic world?
- [10:31]
B
Yeah, that's an enormously important question or series of questions. And I think the first thing I would say to that is there are a number of verses about slavery and slaves in the Quran. The language used can be oblique and elusive. It's something like, I think it's 29 instances of the word slave appears. The euphemism used. The translation of the Arabic expression is those whom your right hands possess. So it's very sort of florid or oblique language. But the first thing to say is that the Quran justifies authorizes slavery. It talks about how men are not born equal and some people are enslaved, some are the masters and that this is almost like a natural state of affairs. It's not something to be abolished. It's an institution which is legitimate. And I think if you see what you were saying earlier, like a sort of 20,000ft view down, when you're looking at a new religion among men and women for whom slavery is completely normal institution, the idea of seeking abolition from the outset would have really been a non starter for a new faith seeking converts and new adherents equally. However, I think it's important to say that the Quran enjoins compassion and humanity. And there are a number of verses which talk about the need to behave well towards your slaves and what is the greatest good for a Muslim? The Quran asks at one point it is to free a slave. So on top of the verses in the Quran which talk in fairly general terms, but it's also authorizing taking female captives in war, sexual intercourse with enslaved women and so on. So it can be quite specific in those terms. And then on top of all the Quranic material, you have more detailed material from the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. And in addition to that, fairly arcane, sometimes bodies of Islamic jurisprudence, what's called fiqh in Arabic, which show all sorts of scenarios. You know, a woman who's enslaved, her master dies, is she free? Is she not free? She's pregnant, she's not pregnant. What are the various scenarios? So you feel that the jurisprudence are going into this in fantastically copious detail. So it's an important institution, it's a legal institution. Emancipation is considered one of the greater goods freeing your enslaved men and women. But equally, this is not something that anyone is talking about, abolition.
- [13:18]
A
So I guess there's two ways of looking at it. I think the default way modern people tend to look at slavery in the ancient world is to compare it to the present and think of how barbaric it is and how unthinkable it is that people just thought slavery was okay. And that's one lens, but another lens is to look at what world was this particular religion intervening on. What world was it entering? And the pre Islamic Arabic peninsula, as you describe in the book, is a world where slavery is completely normal, where tribes are pretty much constantly slave raiding neighboring tribes and trying to avoid being raided themselves. And so to enter that world, relatively speaking, and then say, okay, well you can't, you're not supposed to enslave someone that's already Muslim. Right. This is one of the, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the sort of regulations around slavery. But converting into Islam doesn't free you instantly. Right. So it's kind of mixed. But compared to the world that enters, that's sort of a progressive intervention, to use a modern word. Or it could be seen that way.
- [14:39]
B
Yeah, no, I think you're right. And as is often the case when we write history books and that they then, you know, reviewed and analyzed in our present day, people tend to make those comparisons and they say everything was barbaric. Look at the Muslims. How could they think this was an acceptable way of life? But then, as you say, look at the context of 7th century Arabian Peninsula, full of raiding and enslaving. And it was one of the things that the Prophet Muhammad sought to end by uniting these endlessly feuding Arab tribes, raiding and capturing other tribes, women, camels, property, horses, you name it. But with the women and children often being enslaved and the men thrown into slavery as well. As you say, being Muslim was no, sorry, you weren't allowed to enslave your fellow Muslims. But what I felt became more and more obvious as I pursued my research and across the centuries is that there is often a huge difference between what is either prescribed or allowed in principle and in the Holy Book and in the hadith and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and so on. And what happens in real life. And you have these. I remember one of the very. A very poignant letter from a sub Saharan king in medieval Africa to a much higher authority saying, please, can you protect us from these invading forces. We are your fellow co religionists, we're fellow Muslims, brothers and sisters, and this is against the Holy Book. Your men cannot be doing this in any legal way whatsoever. But often that was just something which was just not always observed in practice. And the temptations to enslave, to raid and to enrich themselves often just proved more compelling.
- [16:39]
A
I recall from Bernard Lewis's book that he argued that the fact that Islam encouraged manumission and not enslaving Muslims within the conquest the lands that had already been conquered, it by the same token, created a demand from outside the empire which led to a great increase in the enslavement of Africans. Is that a thesis that holds up?
- [17:06]
B
I'm not sure if that's completely true. In the earliest period, I mean, there's this very interesting period of about 120 years from the time of the Prophet's death in 632 to the arrival of the Abbasids in Baghdad in 750. So it's about 118 years. And those are traditionally known as the Arab conquests, where you get these surging horsemen coming out of the Arabian peninsula up into the Levant, east into Central Asia, Afghanistan and west right across the North African littoral to the shores of the Atlantic. I think what I would say about that period is it is left, right and center enslavement of North Africans, of tribesmen in Central Asia as well. And I think that if anything, I think there was a movement to slow down on the conversion to Islam, because once people converted to Islam, they're not going to be paying the tax of the unbelievers, the dhimmi, which was an important form of revenue for the emerging Islamic empire headquartered in Damascus for these 118 years. So I think, I mean, it's difficult to know in terms of statistics and data how many people were enslaved at this time. But in some of the. In the 8th century, especially when Muslim forces moved into the Iberian peninsula, the numbers of enslaved men and women sent back to Damascus was, you know, tens of thousands. And I think in some cases, 100,000 in a year or something, huge numbers. So I'm not sure if that is particularly borne out. Just go Back a second, Coleman, because I realized I hadn't mentioned something else when we were talking about how progressive was Islam with this? It is seen by a number of scholars that in the early years at least, and in the principle, the doctrine of slavery in the Islamic world, that the system in the Islamic world was more humane than the Christians, the pagans and the Romans system, sorry, the Jewish systems as well. So it's a mixed picture, as you pointed out a little bit earlier. But there's plenty of material which shows that the humanity, such as it was in, in an institution like slavery was, was, you know, fairly prevalent within the Islamic system.
- [19:38]
A
So let's see. So this is a, this is another question that I've, I've heard debated and there are, you know, partisans of each side that I think have various emotional and psychological stakes in the question. But from an empirical point of view, was Islam spread more by the sword or more by voluntary conversion and missionaries?
- [20:03]
B
Yeah, I think this is a classic question and I'm not sure if there is a simple, straightforward answer to that. I mean, the word conquest implies that everything was military. I think in practice you're going to get a lot of people who were perhaps persuaded by the rhetorical arguments of these marauding horsemen from the Arabian peninsula as to why they've strayed from their true religion. And this is actually just a return to the original religion. Don't you want to be Muslim? Yes, please. I think that's quite sensible. But when you consider that these are warriors with swords in their hand and spears and are incredibly brilliant militarily, I think it's regarded as one of the greatest feats of arms in military history. Those Arab conquests, if you just look at it on a map, what's happened in those 118 years turning a swathes of the world Muslim? I think we'd have to say that it is a combination of the two. And the exact balance I think varies according to the telling, as you say, especially with people with a dog in the fight for various ideological reasons. I think it's extremely difficult to form a clear cut balance on this. And I think a lot of Muslim scholars would say, well, you know, you in the west have exaggerated the element of coercion in your histories. And equally people will say, you know, Muslim historians perhaps have over egged the spiritual appeal of Islam to these subject populations.
- [21:40]
A
Okay, how ubiquitous was castration of slaves in the Islamic world?
- [21:47]
B
Castration was pretty rare, relatively speaking for a number of reasons. I think the most important one was the mortality rate. This Varies again, it's difficult to get clear figures. The 19th century, a number of Western explorers in the 19th century left us fairly grim, some would say unreadable accounts of the horrible operations. Operation. And calling it operation almost implies a level of medical care which was frankly, not there. We're talking about sort of small boys shackled to a table or a board and having their genitalia whipped off with a razor, which was either sharp or not especially sharp, and then cauterized with some really horrible material like dung, tar, oil, honey and so on. So mortality rates extremely high. And therefore, I think that limited the prevalence of this, of the act. Correspondingly, the price of eunuchs were. They were called elite. It's like an elite category of enslavement, rather like concubines. The female role especially seen it well seen throughout the Islamic world in royal and imperial courts, especially in the Ottomans, but also throughout Islamic history. I mean, the last king of Morocco, before this current king, his father inherited concubines in the 20th century, which is kind of an extraordinary thing to say. But eunuchs were smaller in number. I think they've aroused maybe a disproportionate amount of attention because of the. Almost like this sort of historical curiosity of this category, the perceived cruelty of it. And again, also how long it's lasted. I. It's extraordinary to think that in 2015 in London, there was an exhibition at Leighton House Museum called the Guardians. And these were enormous photographic portraits of the last surviving guardians of the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. And I think what I was struck particularly with that story was the irony of this case where the Prophet Muhammad had specifically prohibited castration. He said, anyone who castrates a human is like castrating the ummah, the Muslim community. He who castrates a slave shall be castrated. He who cuts the ear off, someone shall have his ear cut off. And so on. Like the Bible, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And yet for 800 years, mutilated, castrated men were guarding the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. I think all too often you have this feeling that Muslim leaders in various courts looked the other way. Although it was illegal in Islam to castrate someone, frequently what happened was Christian monks or people outside the Islamic world did the castration. And then look, oh, look, there's a whole bunch of young boys without their penises or testicles ready to be imported. Let's buy them in. And they will police our harems, they will serve our armies and our court bureaucracies and so on. And then many got those jobs, and some, the best of the best would rise through the ranks and could become extremely rich and influential.
- [25:15]
A
So what was the religious workaround there? Is it just that it's okay if we get a Christian or a Jew or someone else to do it? Or was it, was it just we're going to somehow ignore that this is illegal in the religion?
- [25:29]
B
I think that there was, it was a sort of, almost like a sort of pragmatic little bit of hypocrisy, look the other way. And because Muslims haven't performed this illegal act of castration, you know, they're slightly absolved from, from the blame. And these little children can then be imported and, and put to work because they, they've been. Someone had castrated them previously rather than being done, you know, within the Islamic world. So I think it's just a sort of like a, you know, a get out of jail free kind of play. But I think they're interested.
- [26:04]
A
We know a lot about.
- [26:06]
B
Sorry, Carmen. I was just gonna say they, they were just interesting as well as a phenomenon of slavery because they, they're there at the very beginning of Islam in the 7th century Arabian Peninsula. You hear stories of the Prophet Muhammad being gifted a concubine, gifted a eunuch. And they're there into the, I mean, they were outlawed in Saudi Arabia, I think, in the 1980s, but they lived through into the 21st century. So you have a long, controversial story of eunuch ism throughout the Islamic world's history.
- [26:38]
A
Okay, so in the west, we know quite a bit about the transatlantic slave trade. It's one of the most brutal aspects of slavery. You know, you, you know the numbers, I'm sure. But, you know, probably at least over a million people just died on the voyage. The rest were packed like sardines. And it's, it's, I think, one of the most. It's like at the emotional core of the shame and outrage that, that slavery produces in the Western mind. We know a lot less about the trans Saharan voyage and the caravans and the walking shackled across the Sahara Desert. And you treat this in your book really, really, really comprehensively. How did the slave voyage across the Sahara compare to the Middle Passage in terms of cruelty and probability of survival. What do we know about that?
- [27:40]
B
Just before going to that comment I just mentioned to pick up on the word, you talked about the shame of this trade as it was on the Atlantic slave trade. And I thought what interested me as well, in the course of my researches in this, I never really felt Coming across that word at all within the Arab world. And I was in Oman last summer talking to an elderly sheikh, and we got talking about the slave trade and he just said to me, what did you expect us to do? It was the 19th century. There was no other work. It was completely normal and there was literally no sense of shame or there was anything wrong. It was completely normal. It was Africa. We were Arabs. It was business. Next question. Really just not really interested in engaging it at all whatsoever. So I do feel that there are different reactions to the trade within the Islamic world, and maybe we'll again talk about reparations later perhaps, but, you know, that's just not a word you hear in Turkey with the legacy of the Ottoman slave trade or indeed within the Arab world, anywhere I've ever been. Now, sorry, I've just waffled on for so long, I've got waylaid from your question. Comments? Excuse me.
- [28:53]
A
Yeah, no, no, I agree with what you just said, but, yeah, so the. What was it like? What were the slave caravans like? What was the probability of survival? How cruel was it? What does it look like?
- [29:06]
B
What we know about the Saharan slave trade typically comes from sources that you'd have to say from, from our vantage point in 2026, were almost exclusively white, Western, and in many cases, Christian and evangelical Christian explorers. There's one in particular, I'm thinking a British explorer called James Richardson, who writes in a very emotive tone, and he talks about slavery as being the most abominable, gigantic form of wickedness the world has ever seen. And he has equally strong views about Muslims and Islam as well. So with that kind of obvious caveat in mind, that type of breed of explorer, 19th century, largely Western, are important sources of information because they happen also to be eyewitnesses of the Saharan slave trade. And they discuss what it was like. And seeing slave owners, masters, dealers whipping African men, women and children. James Richardson specifically talks about a young girl of, I think about nine, really struggling to keep up with the caravan. And he tries to tell the slave to, you know, just stop, stop being so harsh towards her or she's not going to make it. And he looks around and he hears a whip, and this poor girl has been whipped again and again and again. And he says, later that day, she died. So these are just sort of anecdotal, tiny pinpricks, really, of information on a trade which lasted 14 centuries. But I think there are enough of them to demonstrate that the barbarity was pretty appalling. Whether that's 21st century standards or those of medieval Africa. Other people can be the judge of that. But I think this was very far from being a picnic. I think it was a matter of life and death. Mortality rates were high. If you didn't keep up with the caravan and you were on foot while a slave master might have been on a camel, you were simply left to die on the side of the trail across the desert, unburied, and maybe left dying in a pretty dreadful condition. Richardson also says how it was almost unheard of for young girls to make that journey without being raped by the, by the slave dealers who thought it was a completely normal behavior. These were captive African girls and women. They were literally owned by these, these people who thought it was completely acceptable to, to rape them. So, you know, I, I didn't really want to get into comparable levels of, you know, which was the cruelest, which was the most barbaric and those sorts of invidious comparisons, but I just think that we know enough of the Saharan slave trade to know that it was, you know, humanity at its, I think, most apocalyptic. It's not just something you made. It's the privilege that you get to work with your hands. It's building something that serves a purpose, proof that you have the grit to keep going. At Timberland, we understand you take your craft seriously, and we do too, which is why our products are built to the highest quality. We put in the work so you can perfect yours with purpose, in every detail, and crafted with intention. Timberland built on craft. Visit timberland.com to shop.
- [32:58]
A
I want to revisit the point you made about not seeing or not hearing any shame with some of the interlocutors you've spoken to about slavery in the Islamic world. I remember coming across a video years ago. I think it was Muammar Gaddafi giving like a two minute apology at a meeting with the African Congress or some similar international organization apologizing for Libya's role in, in the Saharan slave trade enslaving Africans for over a thousand years. And it was a very brief moment. Like I said, it was one or two minutes. It was, it's probably on YouTube. And it stood out to me because it's. It was like the only example I have ever seen of an Arab leader taking, you know, a minimum amount of apology, you know, as opposed to such statements from Western leaders or, you know, a dime a dozen. It's not hard in America to find an authority figure expressing guilt or shame or regret or apology about, about slavery. And, you know, one way of framing the question is like, what's up? What's up in the Arab world? Why is there no guilt? But I think a more accurate way of framing the question is really the entire world. Most peoples do not really feel or display guilt about what their ancestors did. I don't think you're going to find in China or India or the Philippines or Korea very many people, you know, ringing hand wringing about slavery in those places 100 or 200 years ago. Really it's actually the exception in the world is Western Europe and offshoot societies of Western Europe. So like America, Canada, Australia, where that sort of historical guilt seems to be a powerful force. I'm curious, do you share my view that like the Western European offshoot societies are actually the exception to the rule? And if so, where do you think that comes from?
- [35:19]
B
I have never thought about it precisely in those terms, Coleman, but as you are making those remarks, it strikes me that I think that is absolutely correct. I think often in the west we have these value judgments where we think we speak for the entire world. And I remember this happening with Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which Western media would routinely proclaim all the world is against Russia. And that is just not the case at all. You know, a huge, huge, huge portions of Africa had either no dog in the fight or felt that the West, NATO had overextended to the east and so on and so forth. So I think sometimes we do universalize Western values and attribute that to the rest of the world. I think what interests me a little bit about this with regard to both Turkey as the successor state to the Ottoman empire, which for 500 years was a major slaving state and swathes of the Arab world, from Morocco through Libya and Egypt, Sudan into the Levant, certainly the Arabian Hijaz slavery is not such a historical phenomenon. What I mean by that is that it wasn't long ago Saudi Arabia I think was 1982 where slavery was outlawed. If you see, I think it's pictures, you're American president. I think it was Roosevelt with Ibn Saud on a yacht in the around World War II there are enslaved Africans in Ibn Saud's entourage. I mean it remained a 20th century phenomenon. And I deliberately looked at the situation in both Mali and Mauritania because to me it felt extraordinary that hereditary racialized slavery still exists there. And when I discussed it in both those countries with a range of people from anti slavery activists to journalists, government officials and so on, there seems to be a strong sense of denial to Generalize a little bit about it. Conspiracy theories. One of the more absurd comments I had from a Mauritanian official, he said, you have slavery in the west, you've got Apple, Meta, Facebook and so on. And that's a form of modern slavery. And I thought whatever you think about these companies, comparing that with hereditary racialized slavery in Mali or Mauritania is just complete nonsense. I felt. And I think also that the lack of reckoning one could delve deeper into that. I think one of the reasons I would say it is there in the Arab world is because there is generally less critical introspection and a free press and critical inquiry. If you're a young Saudi Arabian scholar, I would be very surprised if you'd ever find funding to go and do a PhD in the history of slavery in the Arabian Peninsula. Because I think that a routine or typical response to that would be you're bringing shame and dishonor onto either Islam or our national history. So I do think the west does look at this pretty differently, but I agree that more often than not we're probably the outliers rather than the norm.
- [38:35]
A
So you, you mentioned Mali and I'm going to, at the end, I'm going to get your take on, on modern day slavery and this modern day slaves you've spoken to and what can be done about it. But before we get there, you call it hereditary racialized slavery. And in, in America, you know, even people who think, who understand that slavery was an institution pretty much everywhere on earth throughout most of history do view racialized slavery as uniquely Western. So to what extent was, was slavery in the Islamic world racialized?
- [39:14]
B
Yeah, this was an interesting aspect of slavery in the Islamic world as well. And I think although a number of, of commentators might not like Bernard Lewis's comments on Arab views towards Africans in the medieval period, I followed him and delved more deeply as well, I hope into some of the sources in which you have very major Arab writers like Al Jahiz IBN Khaldun Massoudi, known as the Herodotus of the Arabs, with descriptions of Africans which I was slightly surprised that my publisher didn't actually outlaw from the book, because to any modern reader they're simply unacceptable. I thought they're important because they reflected a mainstream view of elite Arabs towards Africans. And I think that kind of ideological view also enabled the justification of slavery, not that it was especially needed, but towards the African continent, because it was the African continent that suffered most from slavery in the Islamic world for 14 centuries. And the reason I call it hereditary racialized slavery, I think, because in Mali, for example, and in Mauritania, it is certain ethnicities that are typically enslaved and are the victims of enslavement. And there are different categories of it. It tends to be the. In Mauritania, at least, there's a community called the Bidan, who is named white, as in white Arabs enslaving darker skinned Africans. But equally as an Arab was very keen to emphasize to me the enslavement within Mauritania is also from some African tribes of other African tribes. In other words, it is a complicated picture, but it is very heavily based on different ethnicities in those countries. So I think you've got the wider story of Arab enslavement of Africans justified on racial grounds, which, by the way, you still see in sudan in the 21st century with the rhetoric as well of Arabs calling black African slaves, whether they're enslaved or not, using that word. And then within those lost vestiges of slavery in Africa today, both Mali and Mauritania, different ethnicities suffering from this hereditary institution.
- [41:58]
A
Yeah, an Iraqi friend of mine who was probably born in the 80s in Iraq or maybe the early 90s, said that when he was growing up at that time the word abed was meaning slave was still used casually to refer to black people. And I've, I think I forget who it is that said this, but they said, you know, if you think we have too much wokeness and sort of language policing in the west, maybe some places in the world have a too little, you know, wokeness or language policing, if, if you're still actually calling an ethnic group that was historically enslaved slaves. You know,
- [42:42]
B
Carmen, I can attest to that myself because I was in Libya in 2011 reporting on the revolution against the Gaddafi regime. That's the picture of him above us as we speak. And you're right, by the way, just going back a few moments ago, you're absolutely right. He was one of the few and possibly the only Arab leader ever I've heard or come across apologizing for this institution. And it's strange it should be a man like him as well, who's a fairly grotesque dictator and B, also highly idiosyncratic and eccentric. One minute he was leader of the Arabs, then he said, I've given up with the Arabs. I'm an African now. I'm going to be a leader of the Africans. And I think it was in that context, when he was positioning himself as a leader of Arabs, sorry, of Africans rather than Arabs, that he issued those comments. But but yeah, going back to the Libyan revolution, I was sitting with a group of young revolutionaries and they used absolutely that word abd Arabic for slave towards one of their African friends, Libyan African friends. So he was only different and he was darker skinned. And I said, did I hear that right? I thought I must have misheard because you just can't imagine that kind of language being used. And they just said, oh, that's just his nickname. It doesn't mean anything. It's not serious. I mean, that was their idea of a joke. What was equally clear to me was that he didn't see anything funny about it at all. But it was that extraordinary casual use of that insult to someone in the 21st century.
- [44:19]
A
Yeah. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about the Barbary slave trade because this is. I had read the, the book by the Ohio, I think Ohio State professor that came out 20 years ago. I think it's Muslim masters, Christian slaves or Christian slaves, Muslim masters. And this was a very interesting book about these. The enslaving by North African pirates, the slave raiding up the European coast, and the use of Christian slaves in, in Muslim galleys in the Mediterranean. And your book was a really interesting corrective to that narrative because you point out that this has been talked about in the world of Christendom as a kind of one way victimization by Mediterranean Muslims of Christians, when in fact it was a two way. It was just a two way situation. So tell me about that.
- [45:17]
B
Yeah, this is another interesting phenomenon. I think like so many of these kind of sub stories or strands within the wider chronology of slavery in the Islamic world, it can become a political football as well, with blame and Western scholars playing up the Muslim on Christian dimension to this trade and practice and corresponding narratives from other sides. So I think increasingly the literature stresses that. I think in the words of Nabil Mata, Lebanese American historian, no one should cast the first stone. I think those words are really important to remember. There were Jews on Christians, Christians on Jews, Christians on Muslims, Muslims on Christians. So if anything, I think I described it as the Mediterranean world of Barbary corsairing, almost as a free for all, almost faith blind, almost colorblind. Everyone was fair game on the high seas. And if you look, I think one of the most fascinating to me aspects of this was if you looked closely at the demographics of who were these supposedly barbarian North African Muslim pirates and corsairs, more often than not they turn out to be European renegades in the expression of the time, meaning converts to Islam. I would say converts of convenience. Because if you judge by the way they behaved on the high seas, slaughtering and enslaving. I don't think their conversion to Islam was so much about the spiritual appeal of the religion and wanting to be good God fearing Muslims as it was to make a fortune on the high seas enslaving willy nilly. And so it really does. The narrative suggests that everyone was praying against everyone. But the difficulty I think for historians in this field is that the preponderance of narratives come from North Americans and Europeans more often than not hyping up their experiences and writing up the obligatory my 10 years as a slave narrative, many of which became great bestsellers both in North America and in Europe. And what is strange, and this could be the basis of an interesting cultural study for the future perhaps, is that Muslim captives tended not to write about their enslavement. It was something maybe they attributed to the will of God or they didn't see themselves, you know, front and center in a first person narrative. They tended not to write these tell all memoirs and autobiographies.
- [47:58]
A
Was there like a big book buying, was there a book buying public in the Arab world the way there would have been in like the Protestant West?
- [48:07]
B
I mean most of these, the memoirs, I'm thinking of the late 18th century and into the 90s, so I suppose the nada, the awakening within the Muslim world was later 19th century. So perhaps it was a case of lower, a smaller publishing market as well. But I think part of it does seem to be reading Nabil Mattar again, a very important historian in this period. He just makes the point that there aren't, much as the historian would love to fall upon piles of manuscripts and memoirs, they're not there. And we don't really know the answer to that. But yeah, I suspect publishing is, is part of it and, but maybe also a cultural difference in how people respond to that traumatic experience or adventure. Call it what you like, but yeah, we don't have the sort of corresponding narrative for the, for the enslaved Muslims.
- [49:07]
A
There's a famous clip by Christopher Hitchens on the Bill Mar show, probably from the 2000s or maybe 2009 or something like that, where he's talking about the psychology of jihadism and he makes the point that the Barbary pirates who took some American sailors captive justified it by reference to Islam. And the punchline of this was that jihadism has nothing to do with American foreign policy and everything to do with kind of a religious mandate to wage jihad. That point aside, which I think in Cases like ISIS and Al Qaeda I would argue is clearly true. I thought the more I read about the actual Barbary piracy world, I thought this was a very bad example of the point because it seemed to me clear not only from reading your book, but from reading the Ohio State professor's book that these were basically businessmen who happened to be Muslim. And so they were primarily focused on profit. And Islam was the legal structure of their world, it was the regulatory structure of their world. So they had to do it in an Islamic way so as not to rankle society. But it's not like they were motivated to self sacrifice and do this as a kind of jihad in the way that an ISIS fighter may actually give his life for jihad. Right. These were businessmen first. I'm curious if that is an accurate reading of the situation.
- [50:48]
B
Yeah, I'd agree with that. Specifically in the Barbary case, it was a business. These are people who want to make a fortune and from time to time there are memoirs from these corsairs in later life or people go and meet them in, in their dotage in North Africa and talk about the luxury they're living in as a result of the plunder, the decades of, of, you know, raiding and enslaving in the Mediterranean. Although I think There was a 17th century historian who talked about jihad on the high seas. But that was, I don't know, that's, that's an expression. There will always be Muslim writers in various historical periods who will, you know, talk about j, or justify attacks against non Muslims in those terms. But I think, yeah, I agree with that analysis that you've suggested that this was primarily business looking towards Al Qaeda and is ISIS and Islamic State. I think some people can, you know, get caught up in almost wanting to apologize on behalf of Muslims or Islam for what's happening. And I think it was President Obama who said there was nothing Islamic about Islamic State. I, I, I don't think I do agree with that. I think that's a category error. And it's important to look at the words of the people who are, who are doing what they say. And I think for example, in the magazine called Dabik, which is the, the house magazine of ISIS at the time of the enslavement of Yazidi women in northern Iraq, they make very explicit the, the Quranic justification, the traditions of the Prophet. It's perverted, but it's almost banal. In these, what can be almost tedious theological justifications of enslavement, of rape. You're allowed to do Virtually whatever you like. Are you allowed to hit a woman when you've enslaved her? Yes, but not in the face. I mean, I think I describe it as a mixture of perversion and banality and abominable cruelty. But, but to say that is not Islamic, I think is a very curiously Western, a form of Western apology that I don't think is always appropriate.
- [53:12]
A
Yeah, it's a kind of wishful thinking because we would like it to be true that you couldn't justify these things by reference to the text. But unfortunately you can. And as you point out, that is not unique to the Quran. The Old Testament is no walk in the park either. But we're not the evolution of Judaism. You know, there's no slavery in the Jewish world, so we're not having to talk about that or think about that. So I want to talk about modern day slavery. This is a, you know, this is a topic that's really conceptually hard for me to categorize because in the west, one of the greatest achievements that we have secured is the abolition of slavery. It was, it used to be legal in almost every country you could name. And then one by one, this incredible thing happened where, you know, consciousness is awakened and people marched and protested and petitioned and sometimes went to war, sometimes died. And we now live in a world where you literally cannot meet a person in, in the west that thinks slavery is anything but, but an abomination. It's one of the great victories for human rights. And yet we live in a world where you have literally met slaves, right? You've met slaves, you've talked to people who are formerly enslaved in very recent history. And it's no longer a matter, I fear, of writing a letter to some congressman or of marching somewhere. How is that going to help the guy that's enslaved in Mali or Mauritania? What is the first of all, can you give a sense of the scale of modern slavery? Where are there still modern day slaves and roughly how many are there, if we even know? And then I want to get to what, if at all, if anything can be done about it
- [55:25]
B
in terms of the prevalence. Coleman. Because I was specifically looking at the Islamic world and wanted to produce this narrative going from the earliest times of Islam to the present day. All roads, therefore inevitably led me to Mali and Mauritania specifically, because that is where those are the two outliers, I suppose you'd say, nowadays, where it still exists. I would stress that it is formally illegal in both countries. But what tends to be the case is that it's People from that elite political and economic class, the leaders, the governors, the mayors, who tend to be the people who either justify the practice of slavery or who indeed keep slaves themselves. Which is an extraordinary thing to say. But that's what I came up against again and again when discussing this phenomenon in both countries, that there are conversations like who are you as a campaigner, whether you're Western or Malian or Mauritanian, to tell us, the governors, the hereditary bosses of this particular region, not to have slaves? We've done that for 300 years, 400 years, whatever, from time immemorial. Who are you to tell us how to change our culture? And that tended to be a very strong view I came across in both Mali and Mauritania. The numbers are really difficult to know because Mauritania is one of the hardest countries I've ever found to work in. It was difficult just to get through the airport. When I said I was a historian, I deliberately said I wasn't a journalist, because if you can use the word journalist there, you're not going to get into the country. We were followed throughout the visit by security officials. So hard data is really difficult. This is not a subject the government of Mauritania wants us to know about. And the estimates vary from, I think a million is the high end, and the smaller figure is many levels, many multiples below that. But the real figure is simply unknown, and the government would prefer it to be kept that way. In Mali, it's more regional phenomenon. It's Western Mali, particularly the region of Kais. Again, I think figures are hard to come by. It's not an area where research is welcomed at all. And I think both things, I think, to generalize the view when questioned about it, both governments, I think, have a sort of fallback position of denial. Nothing to see here. These are sort of Western agitators or it's a conspiracy against us. And even you'll hear people talking about the hidden hand of Israel or Zionists or Jews trying to bring our country down and discredit Islam and so on and so forth. Is. It's not a great picture. So those are the numbers and the geographies. And could you just. There was one. One last aspect you. You wanted me to comment on.
- [58:28]
A
Yeah. So, like, what can be done about this? I mean, because it's, you know, the path to abolition in our history is a lot clearer. It's like we need to change the law, and then the reality will soon follow here the laws have already been changed. It seems like these are scenarios where you have deeply embedded cultural decision, cultural traditions, and you have a government that probably doesn't really have the state capacity for a crackdown that's really effective. So what can a person who cares about this issue do here?
- [59:05]
B
I think reporting on it, I mean, the old expression about the oxygen of publicity, I do think it still has a role to play in this area. And there are respected, both international American and local African and Mauritanian, Malian human rights activists and anti slavery campaigners who I think do very important and brave and remarkable work in bringing these stories to our attention. And in both countries, I was hosted by such organizations who also face enormous pressure as well. I mean, in Mauritania, when you hear stories about the people who have sort of brought up almost like whistleblowers and cases of enslaved girls and women then being prosecuted for having complained or about their rape or their enslavement, you just think, you know what? This, this, there's so much more that needs to be done. But I do think powerful foreign voices, I mean, not least the American government do have an ongoing role to play and to try to keep accountable governments that are not accountable to their own citizens. But I don't think that's. It's certainly no magic bullet either, because I think it is extremely difficult. The capacity to eliminate it isn't there either.
- [60:27]
A
Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much, Justin. I once again want to recommend your book, Captives and Companions. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's the best book on the subject. It's a great example about. It's a great example of how to do history and weave individual anecdotes and stories into a wider historical analysis. So it's really an amazing accomplishment. I highly recommend that people read it. And thank you so much for coming on my show.
- [60:57]
B
That's incredibly kind, Coleman. And just wanted to say what a great pleasure it was to join you and I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much.