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- [00:01]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [00:33]
Narrator / Introduction Voice
Slavery in the Islamic world has a diverse and controversial history in this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian and journalist Justin Marozzi speaks to Emily Briffett about some of the stories at the heart of his latest book, Captives and Companions. Tracing networks of enslavement that stretched from Sub Saharan Africa to Central Asia, he reveals how those who were enslaved became soldiers, labourers, concubines and courtiers, and considers what this complex history tells us about power, faith and human experience. Across the centuries, right up to the modern day.
- [01:09]
Emily Briffett
Slavery has had a long history across a wide geographic spread. So you've chosen to speak about in your book in the context of the Islamic world. Why do you think slavery in the Islamic world hasn't had the attention that perhaps the transatlantic slave trade has had in more recent years? Why has it been perhaps overlooked?
- [01:31]
Justin Marozzi
I think there are a number of reasons for that. One, I think in if you're looking at it from a Western perspective, I think we can say there has been an element of parochialism and much greater fixation and focus on the Atlantic slave trade as you've suggested. I mean, in the last 50 years there have been enormous strides made in our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the American antebellum South, and so on. Correspondingly, there has not been so much progress in the level of historical detail that has come out on slavery in the Islamic world. I think one exception is in the academic world, but that is already by definition a much more select and elite sort of readership, much smaller and even then I think it tends to be episodic or thematic. So a look at slavery in the Ottoman world, or a look at concubines or eunuchs as a disc single subject but no real overview at a sort of the grand, epic scale of slavery in the slave trade. And I think also we should probably be frank and say that there are certain sensitivities. I lost count of the number of people who've told me over the last four or five years, oh, that's brave of you. Or That's a bit reckless, isn't it? And I also don't think it's either brave or reckless. It's just a really fascinating, compelling, rich, controversial history. And yes, that there are sensitivities about it, but I think it stands up on its own as an extraordinarily long, detailed history, not least because it lasts about 1400 years and has even continued to this day.
- [02:58]
Emily Briffett
One of those particular sensitivities that we should talk about is in your book, you're very careful to define that this is not a Muslim slave trade. This is not an Islamic slave trade. Instead, it's a history of slavery in the Islamic world. Why do you think it's important to make that distinction?
- [03:16]
Justin Marozzi
That's absolutely right. Emily and I made that distinction, I think, right early on in the introduction. I think because there is a danger that if you talk about sort of Muslim slavery or Islamic slavery, don't say Christian slavery. We never talk about the Christian slave trade. We talk about the Atlantic slave trade. So we give it a much more geographical designation. So I was always being careful to say slavery in the Islamic world. I remember there's a particular 10th century Arab character who wrote a slave manual about how to choose your slaves. Literally, he was an Arab Christian. So again, not. Not a Muslim character at all. So I have always made that distinction because I think it's. It's important to make it, while also acknowledging that Islam is, through the Quran, through the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, through tradition as well, does give the institution of slavery an Islamic character and characteristics. And there are legal aspects to this, of course, cultural and so on. So, yeah, I wanted to make that categorization quite clear from the outset to avoid falling into the trap of saying Muslim slavery.
- [04:16]
Emily Briffett
There's one particular case that I think turns this history somewhat on its head. Could you tell us about the Barbary Corsairs?
- [04:23]
Justin Marozzi
Yeah, the Barbary Corsairs are really interesting to me because on one level, it's just a very swashbuckling story of piracy on the high seas across the Mediterranean. But the traditional interpretation in the west is that the people doing all this piracy and enslavement were Muslims and the victims were Christian. And I think the historical record is much more a case of it being a free for all between Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Mediterranean. So first of all, we should note that what were considered Muslim corsair captains were very frequently Europeans who just decided to flee to either Tunis, Algiers or Tripoli and become pirates, because it was a career path, potentially to great riches. And, you know, Joe Bloggs would come to Tunis and change his name to Murad Reis. But it was really a conversion of convenience. It's all about being a pirate or a corsair. A Libyan historian said Nabi el Matar, you know, nobody should cast the first stone. Nobody comes out of the story of Barbary corsairing with their reputations intact, whether they're Christian, Jew or Muslim. And that's why I've called it really. It was a free for all across the Mediterranean galley slavery as well. It didn't matter what faith you were in, particularly if you were caught, you could end up on a galley in terrible conditions being whipped and chained to those ore, and you might stay there until you died. It was considered a death sentence, really. So again, I think for me, it was important to investigate that traditional understanding. And in this case, it was found wanting. It's much more of an even Stevens between Jews, Christians and Muslims there. It's not a simple tale, as has been told, of Muslim piracy against Christian victims.
- [06:07]
Emily Briffett
And just to clarify here for our listeners, when we're talking about your book, we're talking about a vast area, we're talking about a vast time period, but could we just clarify where and when exactly do we mean?
- [06:18]
Justin Marozzi
Right. So I made the point of starting right at the cusp of Islam, even before Islam, with a famous warrior, ex slave poet, great chivalric character called Antara IBN Shaddad to really make the point that the Arab Muslims pick up where Arab pagans left off. They inherited this old, ancient tradition of slavery from their pagan ancestors. And also they were surrounded by slaving civilizations in the form of the Byzantines and the Persians. Both of them had been practicing slavery for as long as anyone could remember. That's early seventh century, the beginning of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula. And in terms of geography, I have focused on what I would call the geographical core of the Islamic world. So that means stretching right across to the shores of the Atlantic from North Africa on the Moroccan coast of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and east as far as really maybe Kabul, northern India. I haven't included Indonesia, Malaysia and most of India, because you could almost write a separate book on that. So I've gone for this, the geographical heartland of the Islamic world, and across really from, as we say, from the early 7th century through, regrettably until the 21st century. And I made the point of traveling out to both Mali and Mauritania to investigate instances of modern slavery.
- [07:34]
Emily Briffett
And I'm sure we'll be able to talk about some of these stories as we come through here. Now, as you've suggested, slavery is something that is not unique to this area. It's not unique to this time frame. You suggested that it's got a certain characteristic though. In what way is slavery in the Islamic world distinct?
- [07:53]
Justin Marozzi
I think it all starts really with that there's a kind of like a triangle or triumvirate of Quran, hadith from the Prophet and fiqh, which is Islamic law, jurisprudence. And it takes several centuries for that to sort of coalesce into a sort of systematic understanding and a body of law which gives Muslims pretty specific instructions about how to look after their slaves. What is allowed, what is not allowed. One of the things that a lot of scholars would say is different is how eager Islam is to enjoin and incentivize compassionate treatment of your slave. So there's an emphasis on humanity and a strong desirability to manumit, to liberate your slave after a certain amount of time. And that was an example personally set by the Prophet Muhammad himself in the seventh century. And you can certainly see that many Muslims over the course of the following 14 centuries seek to emulate the Prophet. It's an act of good, it stores, you know, credits, whether that is for the afterlife or just, you know, being a good Muslim to manumit your slave. And slaves also have quasi legal rights. If they are being mistreated, they have the right to go to a judge to have their case heard. And I include in the book a very heart rending story which we only have down to the bravery of a particular woman. In 19th century Cairo, she was raped by her slave owner. She was made pregnant by her master. He then denied all knowledge of it. He was behaving both illegally and unethically. And at some point she took this very courageous decision to take her case to the law and was questioned by Egyptian policemen, probably almost certainly in the entirely male world she had to navigate through, which would have been incredibly challenging and difficult for her. But you see this sort of evolution of a legal case because she's challenging the circumstances in which she has been enslaved. He didn't acknowledge the child, he got his wife to beat her up to try to bring about a miscarriage. You know, everything you can see which was unethical, cruel, inhumane comes out in this particular legal case. But it's also in a more positive sense an example of how the Islamic world would treat those sorts of instances extremely seriously. And the slave does have legal right
- [10:04]
Emily Briffett
of redress Obviously, these principles have been laid down in certain teaching, certain texts, certain understandings. How far do they align or conflict with the reality?
- [10:16]
Justin Marozzi
That's a very good point to bring up, Emily. That conflict between ideal principle and real world practice, and that sort of fundamental tension, often juxtaposition between those two, I found current really throughout the book, and there are lots of examples of it. One striking one is when you have these terrible beseeching letters from Muslim principalities in sub Saharan Africa, writing letters to more powerful overlords in the north. Just saying, we are your fellow Muslim brothers and sisters and yet we've been raided and attacked by our co religionists who have been enslaving our people. And this is not allowed. This is against the laws of Islam. And I think that that's one of the most striking examples. You see that in Central Africa and you certainly see it in Sudan as well, with sort of slaving raids coming out of Egypt and heading further south. And that is emphatically not allowed. You know, a Muslim is not allowed to enslave a fellow Muslim. But it happens. The Ottomans did it in the 16th century and beyond against their Iranian neighbours. Again, emphatically not allowed. Often justified. I think rather spuriously, you'd have a pronouncement from a chief Islamic judge in the Ottomans who would say something like, well, they're not real Muslims, they're infidels. In which case then enslaving these people is allowed. So I think that's one of the more obvious ones, that tension between principle and practice that you see from time to time as well. And I think, you know, in a way that isn't surprising, is it? There are laws, there are strict, clear guidelines on how to behave. That is not gonna mean that everyone follows that at all. But I think these tensions between principle and practice are absolutely part of the whole story.
- [11:53]
Emily Briffett
So speaking about some of the realities of slavery at this time and in this place historically, how central was slavery to society in the Islamic world? Or was it something that was perhaps more on the fringes of society?
- [12:10]
Justin Marozzi
I think to answer that question, Emily, we'd have to be a bit careful about, you know, different periods, different times and different geographies. I mean, one of the busiest times in a way, is the 19th century, is a case of both peak slavery in the Muslim world, but also peak abolitionist pressure, both internal, from within Islamic societies, and especially from external parties. The British and the French and to some extent also the Americans. Was it ever as sort of concentrated as the Atlantic slave trade? Well, not Really? I mean, the figures, I think, are interesting. If you look at the slave trade in the Islamic world on the one hand, and then the slave trade across the Atlantic on the other, the figures are very similar. It's about 11 to 14 million over five centuries in the Atlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 19th century, and then go across to the Islamic world much longer time frame, say from the 7th to the 20th century, and that's about 12 to 15 million. So slightly more, possibly even as many as 17 million. And these are Africans enslaved. So the figures are comparable, but it's much more diluted across a much longer period in the Islamic world. So I suppose by definition, you could say it was never as central as that. But I think whatever period you're looking at in the Islamic world, slavery is a constant, is very much unremarked and unremarkable for Muslims around. I'm thinking about particularly the great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, who spent 29 years traveling 75,000 miles across the Islamic world. He had numerous concubines, he had retainers, he had different sorts of slaves. And they're just mentioned in the background to his account as though it is the most normal thing in the world, which. The point being that it absolutely was the most normal thing in the world. But these weren't slaves toiling away in huge plantations in great numbers. They were sort of retainers, so in much smaller numbers. And I think that probably reflects one of the key differences between the different slave trades.
- [14:14]
Emily Briffett
Obviously, here we're talking about a long period of time. We're talking about a wide geographic scope, and it's very tricky to talk in generics, but is it possible to say over this time period how would people enslaved and by whom?
- [14:29]
Justin Marozzi
Yeah, it's very important to have a think about how. How one became a slave in the Islamic world. I think the first thing to say the most obvious way this happened is in the earliest days of Islam, especially during what was known as the Arab conquests, which took place from more or less the years immediately after Muhammad's death in 632 until 750, which is the end of the Umayyad dynasty, headquartered in Damascus. So for those 118 years, it really is a whirlwind Arab Muslim conquest, taking Islam way out of the Arabian peninsula, up across into Egypt, and then right across to North Africa into what was either known as the Eastern Med or the Levant, what is today Lebanon, Syria, and as far east as the mountains and passes of Afghanistan, the Central Asia, the different Stans and northern India. So it's a pretty short period of time in which these great Arab Muslim warriors are thundering through out of the Arabian peninsula and enslaving men, women and children. And that would be the most obvious way in which someone would be enslaved, specifically allowed. You have caliphs giving their Arab Muslim soldiers, you know, rallying cries, motivating them to say, you know, you can become incredibly rich, you can take slaves, you can take people's horses and camels and treasures. And it's this giant booty raid, in addition to being propagating this new faith that the Prophet Muhammad had brought to the Arabian peninsula. So enslavement by conquest was an obvious one. Equally obvious as the years went by, would be born into slavery as well. A good example is a very famous early Muslim called Bilal. Bilal IBN Rabba, the son of Rabba. He was an Ethiopian slave with slave mother and slave father. But he's also really interesting because he's an example of the tremendous social mobility that is a part of the story of slavery in the Islamic world. Meaning that he starts out life as a slave, he rises to become one of the Prophet Muhammad's most trusted companions. And he's even promoted to become Islam's first muaddin, the caller to prayer. So every time anyone throughout the Muslim world today hears Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar blaring out from the minarets, that is a direct line from Bilal, a one time slave who becomes this great hero of early Islam. And I think that's really important thing to note though, is this. It might be rare, it may not be representative of slavery as a whole, but there is always this sense that opportunities exist beyond your servitude, beyond your time of enslavement. And in some instances, you could go to the very top of society, notwithstanding that you'd been enslaved as a younger person.
- [17:11]
Emily Briffett
Now, while we're talking about those who were enslaved, how easy is it to access their voices?
- [17:17]
Justin Marozzi
I think one of the hardest things facing any historian is really getting to these voices, as you say, one word to describe them would be elusive, you know, vanishingly elusive a lot of the time. So in the Saharan slave trade, you have occasionally these fascinating exchange of correspondence, for example, between slave scribes and their owners right across the desert, and they're discussing different prices for commodities, when the next consignment is coming through, and so forth. But it's very thin on detail. You also have these very heart rending stories of slave caravans coming through the Sahara in the 19th century. And they are heart rending, but they're a problem because they're often written by British evangelical missionary explorers who are, you know, serving an abolitionist cause or organization. So, you know, it's in their interests to hype things up a little bit, make it more dramatic, make it more desperate. But nevertheless, they are still important eyewitnesses to the treatment of slaves in. In different areas. But I think trying to find these voices is one of the most challenging areas, but it's also one of the most important to get to the source itself. And I think that that holds true for the earliest days of Islam, when sources are very difficult and few and far between, right through to the present day, where I was able to interview a man and a woman in Mali and Mauritania, both of whom had been enslaved in the 21st century, and hear their own stories in their own voices.
- [18:45]
Emily Briffett
It's amazing to be able to capture actual experiences in this history. So it would be fair to say that the sources for this history pose challenges, don't they?
- [18:54]
Justin Marozzi
The sources are absolutely challenging throughout. And I think also what is interesting in certain periods, when you see the Islamic world in sort of stark confrontation with the west, and I'm thinking particularly with the British and the French on one side and the Ottomans on the other, particularly in the 19th century, when you start hearing the Europeans pushing very hard for abolition, a complete sort of culture clash really, and often a sense of sort of dumbfoundment from the Ottoman side is, you know, why are we being criticized for this? What are the French and the British saying to us? Because the slavery we have in our society bears absolutely no relation to the cruel and inhumane slave trade practiced across the Atlantic. And, you know, you hear stories of British ministers and ambassadors sitting down with the Ottoman cabinet, almost all of whom have been enslaved in their past. The Ottomans also tended to favor concubinage over marriage as a means of producing their heirs. So for that great Islamic dynasty that rules for 5, 600 years, most of the leaders literally have slavery in their DNA. And you have this sort of conflict and confrontation between west and east, with neither side particularly understanding each other. For the British, it was very clear cut. Slavery was an evil. It needed to be stopped immediately. For the Muslims, it was much more nuanced because first of all, slavery is allowed by the Holy Quran, which is the revealed word of God, something that you do not argue with. It had been practiced by the Prophet Muhammad himself, who'd set this great prophetic example of how Muslims should behave in so many aspects of their lives. And then you've had all these centuries of tradition. So it was a much more legally justified institution, sort of almost beyond reproach. So I think there's in different periods, in different times, the system of slavery varies and the cultural understanding around it can also shift.
- [20:47]
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- [22:36]
Emily Briffett
Given the different cultural approaches to slavery, attitudes towards it, and the abolition of it, how sensitive a subject is this to deal with as a historian, as a journalist, as an author?
- [22:49]
Justin Marozzi
Yeah, I think the period in which it really comes into sharp focus is in the 19th century. Prior to that, there hasn't been much external engagement on the level of slavery. There has been a lot in the Mediterranean from the Corsairs, and that has gone on for several hundred years. But at a systematic level, when we're talking about abolition, that is really when Things kick off in terms of sensitivities and cultural clashes and misunderstandings, because for the British and the French of their time, abolition was a very clear and strong imperative. But they were measuring slavery, really, from their understanding of the Atlantic slave trade. I think it's fair to say that. And I think the Ottomans, who were under consistent pressure for decades on this very issue of abolition, kept remonstrating with their European counterparts and said, look, you're talking about something completely different. The slavery we have in our Saudi bears no relation to the Atlantic slave trade. We don't employ huge numbers of Africans laboring on plantations in really inhumane traditions. You know, look at the Grand Vizier, the second most important man in the Ottoman Empire. He was a slave as a child. All of us, by definition, are slaves of the sultan. And going back a little bit further, there were slave soldiers who ended up founding whole dynasties. I'm thinking in particular the Mamluks. Then on the military side, also slave soldiers, the Janissaries, who were the crack troops of the Ottoman Empire. Again, these were slave soldiers, but they were slave soldiers who were able to amass huge amounts of riches. There was a famous eunuch, which we can talk about in a moment. Perhaps he was bought for 30 piastres in the 18th century as a young Ethiopian boy. By the time he died in the later 18th century, he had left a fortune of 30 million piastas, and he'd risen to the top of his career as the chief black eunuch of the Ottoman Empire and was a vastly wealthy man running all sorts of foundations and an extremely distinguished gentlemen with a very prestigious position. So these are very different sorts of slavery. But then I think one also has to be very careful. And rather than just saying, oh, well, everything in the Islamic world was infinitely more humane than the Atlantic slave trade. To quote one Sudanese historian I referenced, slavery is slavery. And let's not sort of try to make it look beautiful.
- [25:04]
Emily Briffett
To clarify, just very briefly, we've spoken about the Transatlantic slave trade. Are there any other slave trades that we should just be aware of when we're talking this? Because we're talking about sort of the different trades and how culturally different they are.
- [25:17]
Justin Marozzi
Yes, there are absolutely a number of different trades. The Saharan slave trade, which I included in a chapter, because it's so geographically specific and rich in detail and in the historical record. That's one very particular aspect of this. I think another one would be different area completely. The Ottoman. It was called the devshirme, literally a harvest. And it was an annual Recruitment, Forced recruitment. And voluntary, it should be said. Some parents were willingly gave their young boys to Ottomans to be enslaved and recruited, converted to Islam, trained with the ambition of becoming this elite crack force, the Janissaries. Not everyone would make it. And others, some would end up in sort of more menial slavery roles. But this was an annual recruitment of young boys from the Caucasus. So these are young white Christian boys who get captured, also recruited, voluntarily, imported into the heart of the Ottoman Empire, into Istanbul. So that's a very different slave trade again, equally in the same geography. Circassian concubines. Who are these again, white women from the Caucasus who are considered very desirable as concubines to work and live in the Ottoman harems of respective sultans. And concubinage is one of the longest categories of enslavement in the Islamic world. Alongside eunuch ism, these are mutilated, castrated young boys who then go to serve as slave eunuchs for the rest of their lives.
- [26:44]
Emily Briffett
There is an extraordinary variety of enslaved work at this time in the Islamic world, from, as you've said, concubines to eunuchs. Could you walk us through a few of these in a bit more detail and perhaps bring some examples to light? You mentioned one particular example of a eunuch earlier.
- [27:03]
Justin Marozzi
Eunuchs are a very interesting aspect of the story of slavery in the Islamic world as well, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they span the entire lifespan of the Islamic world, meaning that they are there at the birth of Islam Muhammad, the Prophet himself was gifted a eunuch. Eunuchs already existed in the pagan Arab society, also among the Byzantines and the Persians themselves, and in China and in ancient Egypt. It's an old category of enslavement, but in the Islamic world, it's a constant. As late as 2015, there was an exhibition in London called the Guardians, which featured these venerable old men in their 80s and 90s who were now retired, but living lives of sort of distinguished seclusion and retirement. But they had spent their entire working lives as guardians of the Prophet's shrine, the Prophet Muhammad's shrine in Medina. And that tradition goes back possibly as far as Salahdin, the great Islamic warrior in the 12th century. So, you know, almost 800 years of tradition of eunuchs guarding the Prophet Muhammad's shrine. That's also interesting because the Prophet Muhammad himself explicitly prohibited castration. What happened in practice was the leaders of the Islamic world in different periods, in different parts of the world, would turn a blind eye to castration and in some cases, There would be Christian monks performing this operation, for example, in southern Egypt. And then these mutilated young boys, those who survived this debilitating, agonizing operation, would then be exported north to serve as guardians of the harem, meaning guarding the concubines from unholy eyes, keeping them safe and protected, and, you know, reserved for the Ottoman sultans. And that's an area where you have two forms of slavery sort of colliding, and they're almost mutually reinforcing. Concubines on the one hand, again, they date back from the time of the Prophet Muhammad through into the 20th, possibly even the 21st century. The last Moroccan king had a number of concubines in his court. So eunuchs and concubines are two categories that collide together across well over a thousand years. In terms of other categories, I think slave soldiers are fascinating because you have stories of slave soldiers who are recruited pretty early on. I mean, even in the earliest days of Islam in the seventh century. But a couple of hundred years later in Baghdad, they're brought in almost as hired muscle to buttress the military might of the Islamic caliphate. And then over time, a lot of them get too big for their boots and they start launching coups, deposing caliphs, even assassinating them. And as we said a moment ago, in Egypt and Iraq and Syria, they even have their own dynasties, slave soldiers, the Mamluks, and Mamluk being an Arabic word for a thing or person possessed. So, again, it's an example of how slavery in the Islamic world can really transcend what we in the west might understand as the definition of slavery. I mean, how can someone ruling an empire be considered a slave? I mean, the answer is they can't, really. But, you know, formally that is or was their designation. So I think I wrote about it saying it stretches the elasticity of the definition of slavery really to breaking point and beyond.
- [30:14]
Emily Briffett
I guess this brings us onto a question of almost agency. When we talk about slave trades and slavery through history, there's always that question of how much agency did those who were enslaved and the communities they came from have?
- [30:28]
Justin Marozzi
It's a great question, and it's difficult to answer. Well, obviously, across 1400 years in all these different categories. But I think let's have some really nice early examples. I'm thinking of some tremendously well known because there are detailed historical records about them. Concubines in the early Abbasid Empire. So we're talking sort of 8th, 9th century Baghdad, when that great city is really the center of world civilization, with stunning achievements in sciences and the humanities, mathematics, engineering, astronomy, geography, history. You know, the world really comes to Baghdad. And concubines, the most famous among them anyway, are almost like sort of Premiership footballers that they're traded for absolutely vast sums. And we hear their voices directly in some of the sources from the great Arab historians writing at the time and a little bit later. And in terms of agency, these women, I'm thinking of three in particular. Arab, Inan and Mahbuba, meaning beloved. These are women, I think, who show tremendous agency in the stories of their lives. They're intellectually self confident, they're courageous, they're very resilient, they're witty and funny and they survive on their wits. It's not just a question of their looks at all. And they have these sort of great singing competitions, verse capping competitions with very sophisticated look, types of poetry being exchanged at court in front of the Caliph and his courtiers. And it's the sort of environment where a slip of the tongue can literally lose you your head. And you have these fantastic, strong, vibrant female characters. And I think there's absolutely no doubt about their agency. But yes, as you say, they remain in an enslaved category. However, in later life, these sorts of people would. Would often routinely have been liberated. And some might then go, I think, Arab in particular, to positions of, you know, considerable wealth and influence with her own entourage of slaves as well. So it does vary. But then if you're talking about a worker in sort of the 19th century Sahara whose job is to burrow down these really dangerous underground wells and clear them out and risk everything falling on top of you and having your legs or back broken, I mean, that obviously is someone with a lot less agency than the glittering elite of Abbasid Baghdad. So I think it varies in enormously. Also, thinking about the Zanj revolt in the late 9th century, which brought the Abbasid empire almost to its knees, these were African plantation laborers, probably an example of where the slavery in the Islamic world was closest to the Atlantic slave trade, meaning large numbers of men working in really horrible conditions in steaming malarial marshes with backbreaking agricultural work. And again, what sort of agency did they have? Not very much until they burst into revolt in an incredibly bloody rebellion that lasted four years and really shook the Caliphate to its core. But ultimately it was crushed. And a lot of those slaves, or liberated slaves, were simply killed and butchered in huge numbers.
- [33:32]
Emily Briffett
Speaking about the Zan's revolt, I need to ask you about the discrimination in terms of slavery. What factors dictated the purported desirability of a slave. And how was that justified?
- [33:46]
Justin Marozzi
This is another good example of that distinction between principle and practice. So in principle, Islam is completely colorblind and everyone is equal before God. In practice, however, African slaves were generally considered less desirable and they occupied more menial jobs, whether they're as domestics, possibly as soldiers as well, and as concubines. White Caucasian concubines would generally, I think, almost invariably more expensive and considered more desirable than their black African counterparts. So there is, I would say, to use a simple and straightforward word, racism at work in that hierarchy of slaves. And you see very strong examples of Arab racism towards Africans in a number of texts written by really important writers. And I think, as I said in the book, these are not fringe writers. These are not sort of second tier extremists. These are mainstream, distinguished writers. People like Ibn Khaldun, the great sociologist, Ibn Sinna, known in the west as Avicenna, the founder of modern medicine, Al Jahiz, the great Arab writer and prose stylist, bar none. Masoodi, another historian. These are men and they tend all to be men writing about Africans in incredibly derogatory language. So as I say, you have that disconnect between what Islam says in practice and colorblind we're all equal brothers and sisters, but then when it comes to the colour of the skin, suddenly it's not such a question of equality at all.
- [35:24]
Emily Briffett
Was this discrimination ever confronted in the sources?
- [35:27]
Justin Marozzi
There are some examples of black African slaves or former slaves, and I'm thinking particularly of a group of poets and they wrote rather emotional verses about being black and how they faced discrimination from the Arabs around them. And there's also in some cases great defiance as well. But a lot of those verses make the contrast between black and white. And in the Islamic culture, you know, white was considered a purer color than black, which had more negative connotations. And that did spill into the racial categories of slaves as well. And the Arabs also had what they referred to as the curse of Ham, sort of an ancient biblical story which was widely refuted by many writers in succeeding centuries, but did have some sort of cultural reson in strong instances of discrimination. So yeah, it challenged at times, certainly is challenged today in Turkey, where formerly people of African descent who had been enslaved in Turkey have been trying to recapture their heritage and culture and writing their histories and trying to get Turkish society to reckon with that burdensome legacy of slavery, which I think has taken a huge amount of time to really get off the ground.
- [36:40]
Emily Briffett
We should Also, talk about gender. Was there a gender dimension to this as well?
- [36:45]
Justin Marozzi
What tended to be the case in the gender balance among enslavement? The biggest categories really for female slaves would be concubines, although because that is an elite form of concubinage, you know, your average Muslim is obviously not going to have a concubine. Rulers, governors, provincial, regional notables, and so on across the Islamic world, yes, much more likely. But in the numbers, even at their most astronomical, you know, an Abbasid caliph, for example, who might even have have 4,000 concubines in his harem, huge number. But if you compare that with the scale of domestic female enslaved women, that would be dwarfed by, by that category. But sadly, that is also a category about which we know the least. They hardly intrude on the sources. There's a very interesting 19th century account by a Turkish woman called Leila Haneem, who had grown up in the harem of the Ottoman sultans. And she talks about being gifted a female black African slave. The tone is almost as though she's been given a, you know, an exciting new toy. And they talk about how, you know, her bright eyes and her playfulness and sense of mischief. It's a strange text to read in the 21st century, but I think it also encapsulates how the Ottomans looked at a female African at that time as someone who's coming into their household to work in. Almost certainly a very menial category, probably, you know, cleaning, feeding the children, keeping the house spick and span and that sort of thing. But the reason I'm hesitating about this is because there's so little information on that type of person, you know, right across the centuries. In the 21st century, I think we could see examples of, in the Gulf, for example, where a BBC investigation revealed that only a few years ago people were being traded through an app for domestic service. And again, most of these people were women. Many of them were from Africa as well. So you might hear slightly more of the voices there. But generally, I think this is a category that is extremely difficult to research and hear from the women themselves.
- [38:43]
Emily Briffett
We'll be coming up more to modern day in a moment, but before we do, I just want to broaden the scope a little bit. What factors have driven the demand for slaves historically and coming up to modern day as well?
- [38:57]
Justin Marozzi
This, again is an area where there are so many different strands. I'm just thinking in some cases the 19th century, when you have industrial development and large scale production and in early globalization, so, you know, commodities being traded around the world. That brings with it a demand for enslaved labor in parts of the Islamic world. So, for example, you would have cotton plantations in Egypt requiring pretty menial, really tough back breaking work in soaring temperatures, incredibly hard work. A little bit further to the east, in the Gulf, you had pearl divers whose world collapsed with the arrival of cultured pearls in the early 20th century. But again, really challenging, physically demanding work, terribly horrible conditions. And you'd also have people picking cloves on clove plantations, people cultivating dates on date plantations in places like Zanzibar off the east coast of Africa, and in Oman in the Gulf. So there's that type of category a little bit more agricultural, perhaps less so in the industrial space. And then other things we touched upon a little earlier, the demand for military power, how to reinforce your military strength as quickly as possible. If you have the money, you simply buy in the muscle. And the Turks or the Turkic tribes of Central Asia were in continual demand in the earliest days of the Islamic caliphate because they were acknowledged as the most proficient fighters. Jahiz, the Arab writer we mentioned a moment ago, has got this tremendous passage on the superiority of the Turks over all other nations in terms of their military prowess. And he describes how when an army is on the move, the Turk, who's been in the saddle all day, when the others can hardly walk, and they reach camp incredibly exhausted at dusk, the Turk will hop straight back onto his horse and go hunting and just zip across the mountains and come back with various animals for dinner and look fresh as a daisy. So they were considered the great fighters, and they were used repeatedly by the Arabs as military slaves. And I think we touched upon earlier the demand for eunuchs and concubines being a constant really, throughout the life of the Islamic world.
- [41:09]
Emily Briffett
To flip that on its head, then to look at the other side of it. What factors precipitated the abolition of slavery and did that differ across the Islamic world?
- [41:18]
Justin Marozzi
Abolition really, I think, is one of the most possibly sensitive and certainly contested areas of this history, because some scholars would say you need to focus much more on the internal debate happening in the Islamic world over abolition. For example, the young Turks were really keen to get rid of concubines and eunuchs. They saw them as a decadent form of enslavement around the Ottoman sultan. But the fact remains that slavery was never abolished in the Ottoman Empire. By 1922, when the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed under the weight of all its internal contradictions and external pressures, especially from the British and the French, Slavery had not been abolished. And there's this very interesting couple of quotes from the same sultan, Sultan Abdul Majid, the first, as late as 1849, said, Our holy law permits slavery. So statement of fact, uncontroversial slavery is allowed by our holy Islamic law. Two years later, he described the slave trade as shameful and barbarous. So again, you have that juxtaposition really, on the one hand, saying there's nothing to see here. Slavery is completely allowed, legitimate. But the slave trade becoming increasingly controversial and I think also, you know, shocking both Western and Ottoman and Arab leaders with stories of cruelty and increasingly it being seen as something that had no place in the modern world. Having said all this, I think it would be historically inaccurate to minimize or downplay the British involvement, because whatever the British motives were, and they themselves were varied, that you had Christian evangelicals and missionaries at the part of the debate, you had sort of sensationalist newspapers and British media calling for abolition. And you had a much more cautious diplomatic core. If you look at what the British diplomats were saying to the Ottomans, they had a much more nuanced understanding of what slavery really was in the Ottoman Empire and the unlikelihood of abolition. And, you know, given, as we said earlier, that almost all of the Ottoman rulers themselves had come from, you know, slave backgrounds or certainly slave mothers as concubines. It was just an absolute normality. So I think to generalize, and although it's dangerous to generalize one might in this area, some Muslims would find it difficult to deny slavery because it is explicitly allowed by the holy book of the Quran. And the Quran is incredibly important for Muslims. And it doesn't talk about abolition because no one was talking about abolition in the seventh century when the Prophet Muhammad, you know, had the revealed word of God appearing to him I in a cave above Mecca. So I think it is a balance between internal voices calling for reform and abolition, and I include a number of those in the book. Was there ever an abolitionist movement as we understand it in the west, operating at the time within the Islamic world? I would say no, there wasn't. There were some really important, powerful, sometimes influential voices calling for this, but it wasn't a sort of sustained movement as we saw in 19th century Britain. Now, was Britain hypocritical in some aspects of this? Absolutely, it was. A lot of it was also about expanding an empire, as Omanis and Zanzibaris found to their cost. Under the guise of abolition, Britain expanded its imperial footprint across the globe. So all I would say to that is that that does not mean that Britain did not play an enormously oversized role in abolition, but that one can look at its motives and subject to them to the usual historical scrutiny, lingering
- [44:55]
Emily Briffett
issues of slavery still exist in certain countries worldwide today. Now, you've spoken to some of those who have been enslaved and have escaped, have been rescued or been freed. How far would you say that attitudes towards slavery have changed in what we've been calling the Islamic world? And does it continue to cast a dark shadow?
- [45:16]
Justin Marozzi
When I interviewed a man and woman, both of whom had been enslaved in Mali and Mauritania, I did make the point that these countries are outliers. So I'm not saying, and I never have and wouldn't because it's not true that they are representative of the Islamic world as a whole, but they interested me because, you know, you have this long historical line institution of slavery in the Islamic world. And in Mali and Mauritania, one could say it has been unbroken because it still exists in those two countries. Is it on its way out? Yes, it is. It's dwindling, it's less noticeable, it's less common, but it still exists. And I think when I spoke to one gentleman in Mali, Hami, it was. It was a terrible eve. Difficult interview, was the most harrowing interview I've ever conducted with anyone in years of being a historian and journalist. Because this was a man at rock bottom. You might think he would have been enthused or overjoyed by his liberation and his escape. But he spoke to me really as though his whole life had ended. He was really struggling to be able to keep his family, two wives and 12 children, fed. He was physically broken by his time as an enslaved man. He was illiterate, so he couldn't do office work. And it was worth remembering that Mali is one of the impoverished countries in the world and unemployment is staggeringly high. Anyway, what he had achieved was freedom for his children, so they would never be enslaved. But I think it was just important to investigate this subject, to see does modern slavery exist? And he told me that the view among those who owned slaves in Mali was that of stop interfering. We don't want to hear about abolition. Our ancestors have been doing this for hundreds of years. This is the way of the world. Stop complaining and get on with it. And ultimately, he just snapped and just said he couldn't go on anymore. At which point he was savagely beaten and publicly whipped, filmed. And either the local mayor or the governor, the local official in charge of that community, later said to the men who'd beaten him, you shouldn't have filmed him, you should have just killed him and be done with it. Now you've caused a scandal. And so those reflected or reflect some attitudes among the authorities in a country like Mali, in certain regions in Mauritania, it's slightly different, but again, it's considered the elite, the commercial elite, the political elite are the ones who do least about slavery. So the law still on the surface prohibits slavery, but people who are caught with slaves are typically not punished. And it's a real problem. And so yes, I do think that Mauritania in particular does still cast a dark shadow. It is known as the last outlier or the last stronghold of slavery. That might be overstating it because I do think it is on the decline and numbers are very hard to come by and no one really knows because the government doesn't keep figures and certainly doesn't want people looking at it. Of all those Arab countries I've visited, Mauritania was one of the most difficult to enter. It's not a country that welcomes any investigation of what is really a taboo topic.
- [48:14]
Narrator / Introduction Voice
That was Justin Marozi speaking to Emily Briffet. Justin is a historian and journalist and the author of Captives and Companions, a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world.
- [48:36]
Justin Marozzi
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- [49:17]
Emily Briffett
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