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Justin Marozzi, "Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World" (Pegasus Books, 2025)
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. Slavery has been a ubiquitous practice throughout much of world history and the Muslim world was no exception. Slave soldiers, concubines and eunuchs can be found throughout Muslim writings, which, as Justin Marazi points out in his book Captives and A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World world ends up to giving us a selective and narrow view of who slaves were and what they did. Justin tries to dive into this history, sometimes very patchy history, to figure out the full extent of slavery in the Muslim world from the very start of Muslim society, through the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary Pirates, to abolition and the foundation by Mauritania to abolish slavery in 1981. Justin Barazzi is a former Financial Times and economist foreign correspondent. He is also the author of several books including Baghdad City of Peace, City of Blood and Islamic the Cities that.
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C
Shaped the Modern World. So, Justin, thanks so much for coming onto the Asian Review of Books podcast today and to talk about your book about the history of slavery in the Islamic world. You know, maybe again, big broad question to start things off, but you know, in general, kind of what role did slaves play in Muslim society? What powers did their owners have over slaves? And what right, if any, what rights, if any, did slaves have? And I'm sure it varied between different kinds of people, but kind of in general, like, what was the place of slaves in Muslim societies?
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D
Well, first of all, Nicholas, thank you very much for inviting me onto the show. It's a great pleasure to be with you and your audience today. Yeah, that is a very broad one to kick off with. And the best way I think I can put it is that the roles are extremely extraordinarily broad. When most of us in the west and possibly in Asia think about slavery, typically what comes up is the Atlantic slave trade and that model of slavery, which is much more limited in roles, particularly plantation, agricultural slavery. In Muslim civilizations, you have that certainly for hundreds of years, male and female slaves working on agricultural land, harvesting dates, coconuts, copra, cloves in East Africa and so on. There's an awful lot of domestic slavery as well. And in a way, sadly, that is probably the least well known because it's just that, you know, you don't get memoirs, you don't get accounts. It's considered to be largely female and strongly African in ethnicity. And then you have what is, I suppose, typically called elite slavery. And these in particular would be concubines. And I would emphasize that the tradition of concubinage is as old as Islam itself. It predates Islam, of course. You know, plenty of other civilizations have had concubines. Islam took up that tradition, and it was extant from the time of the Prophet Muhammad through into the 20th, possibly even the 21st century in parts of the Muslim world, along with another category, which is eunuchs. So castrated young boys who grow up and are used as slave guardians of sacred spaces. Probably the most prestigious and well known would be the mosque and tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, which for about 800 years was guarded by eunuchs, typically African eunuchs from Ethiopia. And another important category, slave soldiers. And again, although not quite as long a tradition as eunuchs and concubines, you see slave soldiers being used by the Prophet himself, by the Caliph Othman, who had a thousand slave soldiers in his early Muslim armies. And that goes through into the Pretty much the 19th century in Iraq and a little bit early in other parts of the Middle East. So you can just see from that first answer just how incredibly broad ranging slavery can look. The roles that slaves occupy is. Is incredibly broad.
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C
Right. And we're going to, and we're going to talk in detail about kind of some of those categories in our conversation. But before I get into that, I mean, again, like a broad question, you know, where did slaves in the Muslim world come from? Or I guess more accurately, where were they taken from?
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D
Yes, that's, that's another, that's another important topic to look at. And obviously, again, thinking about the Atlantic slave trade, overwhelmingly West African in, in nature as the source of the, the human chattel slaves. The Islamic world is similar, but again, it's more broad ranging. I mean, I would say that it's overwhelmingly enslaved men and women are taken from Sub Saharan Africa in different periods. That source of slaves expands. And I'm thinking particularly Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus, especially under the Ottoman Empire, which very consistently took captive men, women and children from the Caucasus for a range of different purposes. There would be Caucasian Circassian women, pale skinned women destined for the harems of the Ottoman world, particularly in Istanbul, but also beyond that in other noblemen's palaces and establishments, and young boys who would be either taken as captives or volunteered by their impoverished parents for service in Istanbul. And the best of the best would, having been educated, converted to Islam, had their names changed, could emerge as bureaucrats who then were able to rise up the Ottoman bureaucracy and in a few exceptional cases could go to the very top, including the position of grand vizier. So, you know, like a modern prime minister to a president. So Africa overwhelmingly, but also a broader remit into Europe as well. And I should also stress that, especially as we're on the Asian Review of Books podcast, that I specifically focused on what I call the geographical and historical heart of the Islamic world, meaning I didn't go as far east as probably some of your audience would be based in, you know, Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of the Philippines. I just about got to India a little bit, but really stopped around Central Asia.
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C
Oh, we define Asia very broadly on this show. So it's. No, the focus on the Middle east is not a problem. But, you know, was there, you know, kind of reading some of the primary sources or the writing in your book, it seems like there really was kind of a racial dynamic to Muslim slavery. I mean, a lot of them are like, a lot of writers are very, are very, I mean, very rude, and that's putting it mildly, very rude about slaves from sub Saharan Africa while they also, other writers talk about kind of like, oh, the slaves from Greece are good for this. The slaves from the Caucuses are good for this. I mean, was there like, clearly There was a racial dynamic to Muslim slavery. But if you could kind of talk a bit more about. About that.
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D
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I'd begin my answer to that question by saying formally, Islam is colorblind. And the Prophet Muhammad likewise, who stressed that, you know, men and women are equal and the color of their skins is neither here nor there. However, in practice, things look very different in real life. And I think again and again I came up against this in the book, notably on things like the difference between law and real world, between principle and practice. The law may say one thing, A slave dealer may completely ignore that law. But in terms of the racial dynamic, I found this really interesting. You said they were quite rude. I would probably go further that and say in a number of instances, Arab writers of the medieval period were downright racist in what they wrote about Africans. And the reason I found that interesting is because these aren't just kind of fringe marginal voices. They are the absolute, a list, top tier of Arab and Persian writers. So just to give us some names, Al Jahiz, the great Arab writer of the 9th century. Masoodi, a little bit later into the 10th, known as the Herodotus of the Arabs. Ibn Sina, one of the most famous men of his time. 11th century, founder of modern medicine. Going a bit further again, Ibn Khaldun, 14th and 15th century sociologist, you know, a really sort of pioneer, pioneering academic. And all these men wrote in some fairly extraordinary terms, which we don't need to go into now. But talking about Africans, they may have said, talked about their physical appearance, their looks, their behavior, and in some cases, they said, you know, they are natural slaves. So, yes, there is a racial dynamic to slavery in the Islamic world, but it should be probably borne in mind that Islam, you know, regulated against that. It was just that in practice, people behave very differently.
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C
I mean, another example where it does seem like there's this divergence between.
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D
At.
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C
Least what Islam, a strict reading of Islam would say, and what happened in practice is that is the phenomenon of eunuchs.
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D
Yeah, quite right. And again, that goes right to the founder, the man who received the revealed word of God. In his cave above Mecca. The Prophet Muhammad was very clear, he who mutilates a man shall be mutilated also or castrated. And he was very emphatic on that, that this was not something that should be tolerated or allowed. And yet, for centuries to come, the Islamic world made free and extensive use of eunuchs in the range of occupations we talked about a moment ago. Now, these would primarily be as guardians of sacred spaces. We mentioned the Prophet's Mosque in Medina a moment ago. But also policing the harems in which the concubines were living their lives of, of gilded captivity, you could say. So they have important roles. They frequently become highly respected individuals. They can be kind of influential powers behind the throne in some cases. And we had one fascinating example of a 17th century eunuch in the Ottoman court, a man called Bashir Aga, who was castrated as a young boy, as they tended to be. He was bought for 30 piastres and by the time he died, he left a legacy of 30 million piastas, had become one of the richest men in his age. So there are frequently these instances in the story of slavery in the Islamic world where our sort of conventional understanding of slavery is simply turned on its head. You have people who are, who have managed to transcend their slave origins and go right to the top of society. But I think equally I would, I would note that these people can't be seen as representative of the white, wider slavery, but it does show that there is an opportunity to go to the very top of society, depending on, you know, your talent, your, and your obviously your good fortune.
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C
And you mentioned kind of the, that eunuchs were put in charge of kind of looking after the harem and the concubines. I mean, how does concubinage, you note it's, it's not a uniquely Middle Eastern phenomenon. You see it kind of all over the world, but, and all throughout history, but kind of how does concubine, how does that phenomenon get expressed in, in these Islamic societies?
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D
I guess, you know, again, it will vary in terms of hierarchy and typically you could say, unfortunately, because it's more elite and therefore less representative. But the positive side is that there's more information available on concubines in various imperial courts. I'm thinking, particularly the Abbasids, for example, who ruled the Islamic world for half a millennium from 750 to 1258, almost exclusively in Baghdad, although we might get onto that a bit later. There was a moment when they left Baghdad due to pressure from slave soldiers who were becoming more and more powerful. But during that period, I think it's something like, there are something like 37 Abbasid caliphs and it's something like, I can't remember the exact figure, but it's about three who were born to free mothers as opposed to slave concubine mothers. So both the Abbasids and much later the Ottomans used the institution of concubinage. Concubinage as the primary form for reproduction and producing heirs. So yes, it's slavery, but it's a very particular format used by the elite to reproduce as opposed to the institution of marriage, obviously. And as we said a moment earlier, I think that one of the interesting things about concubines is how long they last. Of course they predate Islam, as you said a moment ago, but they go right through to the court of King Hassan II, who ruled Morocco until 1999. He inherited concubines from his father. He married a young teenager. They were slaves making hashish jam, carrying incense, running his bath, dressing him, punishing other slaves, and so on and so forth. And so that's, that's late 20th century. You have the monarch of Morocco making pretty extensive use of slaves in a variety of categories, especially including concubines.
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C
Before we kind of talk about kind of another category of slaves, I mean, you've noted that there's a lot more kind of sources available for elite slaves, whether those are eunuchs or concubines. And I mean, how much do we know about kind of everyone else? I mean, the slaves that were, say, like seized in quite violent slave raids in sub Saharan Africa, or like the slaves that didn't end up as the Grand Vizier or as the, or in the, or as a concubine, like, do we know much about their lives at all?
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D
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think to be, I would say to be, to be really candid on this, we'd have to say vanishingly little. I'm reminded of the title of an excellent book on slavery in the Ottoman Empire by the Israeli histor Ehud Toledano. And the title is as if silent and absent. And it's a very powerful title because it just pinpoints really this great difficulty that historians have in this field because we're not talking about say, you know, Barbary captivity or the Atlantic slave trade in which, you know, memoirs are pretty widespread. We have them in various parts of slavery in the Islamic world. But for the sort of the day to day domestic drudgery, non elite slavery, plantation workers, there's just very, very, very little. There are passing references in medieval Arab chronicles. So I'm thinking, for example here of Tabari, the great Arab historian who covered the the 9th century Zanj Revolt of black African slaves in the southern plantations of Iraq in great detail and also with great prejudice. This was an Arab who felt that these African enslaved men were getting above themselves. They succeeded in turning the Caliphate on its head. They came Very close to overthrowing a Caliph. They turned much of southern Iraq into a sort of a no go zone for the Abbasid machinery of government. And it was one of the world's largest, most devastating slave revolts, which I think lasted something like 14 years. How representative of it was it, was it pretty unrepresentative? But it gives us a little window into slavery in the, the ninth century in Iraq. But you, you know, you don't hear about what the conditions were. Like you, it's more like battle reports, skirmishes, how many men were lost in various engagements. Some things that might have been said, but it's written from an Arab perspective of, you know, utter disdain towards these African slaves who, who dared to rise up against their masters in the Sahara. There are very little traces of it. We dwell on, for example, correspondence between trading slave owners and their slaves in different oases. So I have some examples of that from the 19th century, so pretty late where there's correspondence and you can see how like a sort of really an enslaved clerk or administrator is helping his master run a trading business across the Sahara. But I went to great lengths to try to get these voices out because we want to hear from the voices of the enslaved themselves. And that's probably the hardest thing about this. Another example would be a medieval stone inscription which is a very moving epitaph really to this. An unknown woman, we don't even know her name. She was Umm Mohammed, the mother of Muhammad, who died at some point on her way to Jerusalem. And the lines that are chiseled into this stone suggest that she was always, she was terrified of being without her family and dying alone. And it seems that she did die without her family. She was a concubine of a minor royal. And you just have this little small insight into the sort of suffering that this woman may have endured. Sometimes legal records can help us as well. There was an extraordinary story in 19th century Cairo when a Caucasian Circassian concubine called Shem Segul stood up very bravely to her unscrupulous, corrupt and venal owner, slave dealer, a man called Deli Mamet. And we only know about that story because she took him to court. He'd raped her, made her pregnant, denied it was denied he'd done so. His wife beat, beat the woman to make sure she had a miscarriage. That didn't work. And eventually she, she took him to court, took refuge with some neighbors. And you hear about the case because she has given evidence to the police. But, but you know, I'm trying To really make the point that these are kind of isolated instances. And I think our understanding in some respects is in its infancy, and it'll be very difficult to recover sources and evidence because they are vanishingly elusive. Once you get to the 19th century, obviously sources and statistics start proliferating and you get a much clearer picture of things in the Ottoman Empire. And you have a lot of Western perspectives, but of course, you have to understand those as very partial, largely Christian, often evangelical, and often exclusively abolitionist in. In their perspectives. But. But they, they will help us flesh out the picture of, you know, the institution of slavery and how the slave trade looks in the. The later 19th century. Well, I was gonna say, I mean.
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C
Speaking of Western perspectives, I mean, your book talks about kind of the. The Barbary pirates on the. On the north coast of Africa and their. And how their p. Well, how their piracy race kind of then also like, brought European slaves kind of into their societies, but as part of some larger, like, I guess, ransom piracy phenomenon. One that also Europe partook it, but kind of like could just talk more about, about. About. About that, like the, like the phenomena of, of the Barbary pirates and how they fit into this story.
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D
Yeah, the Barbary pirates is probably for, I mean, for Brits, certainly, possibly for other Europeans and maybe North Americans. This would be one of the better known instances of slavery in the Muslim world. I think, for several centuries into the 19th century, a range of corsairs or pirates operating from North Africa, specifically from the three ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. And then there's a fourth on Morocco's Atlantic coast called Saleh. And these are kind of sovereign or semi independent regencies from the Ottoman Empire. They're lawless to an extent, but they're really practicing kind of regulated in a way, piracy. This is, this is part of the. These regencies, you know, economic model really. And essentially what it consists of is a protection racket. You North Americans, you Europeans, you need to pay us a tribute payment in return. We will not attack your ships and enslave your crews. That was the basic model. They had fleets of very fast vessels which would launch these pretty devastating attacks on larger cargo ships coming across the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. Enslave and kill, keep people hostages in North Africa and make a living through that particular model. What I think is very interesting about this one as well is that traditionally the understanding in the west has been that these Barbary corsairs and pirates were virtually exclusively Muslim and the people they enslaved were almost exclusively North American and European. The, the, the facts of the matter are much more interesting and complicated than that. And it's. I really described it as a kind of multi faith, free for all, with Jews against Christians, Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Christians and so on.
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C
It certainly seems like everyone was kind of changing sides a bunch of times.
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D
Absolutely. And changing religion as well. And I think this is what this for me was one of the most fascinating aspects of it. You have lots of Europeans who kind of relocate to North Africa, change their names. So one of the most infamous Barbary courses was a Dutchman called Jan Jansson. He changed his name to Murad Reis. And so on paper he looks like a Muslim, but I would suspect he's a convert of convenience who's relocated there so that he can become a rich man. And it's sort of like a king of the pirate fleet in Algiers. So Muslim formally. Realistically, I don't think it's much to do with religion at all. It's about making a living and, you know, terrorizing the Mediterranean and becoming extremely rich. A very dangerous occupation.
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C
So we're now getting kind of into the. Closer to the modern day as kind of abolition starts to basically as there's a lot more pressure on these places to abolish the slave trade. How does abolition kind of spread throughout the Muslim world?
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D
Yeah, this is, this is again a very interesting period in the story and I think I probably describe it like a number of aspects of this story. It's pretty vigorously contested as well. I think I would say that the abolition movement as perceived from within the Islamic world was largely a Western and imperialist one from, from the point of view of the, the Islamic world, particularly the Ottomans, because the, the number one power by the time the abolition movement is, is making inroads, the number one Islamic power is the Ottoman Empire. It's been there for about 600 years. And it's the, it's the main force to be dealt with diplomatically. And you start seeing it in the correspondence between European powers and Istanbul, the pressure to abolish the institution of slavery. And there's kind of this air of almost incomprehension, you know, after all these hundreds of years practicing slavery, it's been legitimated and sanctioned by the Prophet Muhammad, by the Hadith, the sayings, his sayings and deeds, by the Quran itself, and by Islamic fiqh jurisprudence and Sharia law. And I think the Ottomans would say, you know, our model of slavery is nothing to do with the Atlantic slave trade. So you're coming in here with your Western ideas of abolition. But you need to understand that slavery in our world is nothing like the system you have practiced in the Western hemisphere. And this one's quite entertaining. Diplomatic exchanges with, you know, London to Istanbul, the ambassador and an ambassador saying to London. I couldn't possibly speak in those words about abolition because the people I will be speaking to are from an enslaved origin themselves. Virtually the entire cabinet of ministers in the Ottoman Empire are men who were enslaved in their youth, and they've risen through the ranks and see themselves as powerful individuals in their own right. So you have this strange kind of scenario in which both sides are speaking a different language to each other. It's almost like the dialogue of the death. The death.
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C
Sorry.
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D
Was there an abolition movement in the Islamic world? I would say there probably wasn't a movement in the same way that there was in the West. There were. There were important individuals, writers, reformers, people like Sayyid Amir Ali Ahmed Shafiq in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. But I would say they were relatively isolated voices as opposed to a more kind of organized abolitionist movement. And I think I'll just go back to that, that point again about how abolition was perceived within the Islamic world. There was a nice line from a history I used in this book, and it made the point that, you know, for. For Arabs and Ottomans, abolition was imperialism spelled differently. You know, you have the British Empire coming in in a very muscular fashion, ordaining that these Muslim powers give up slavery. And you see actions on the trucial coast in the Gulf. One minute there are very friendly relations with Oman and London. The next, London saying, you've got to give up slavery or we're going to start, you know, we'll just blow you to smithereens. And suddenly the Brits are sort of helping themselves to new dominions, really, in the. In the heart of the Islamic world, in the Gulf, under the guise of prohibiting slavery. So, yeah, it's contested territory. It's very interesting. And I think there are vestiges of this dialogue that continue today in some ways.
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C
So the next two questions are kind of on similar topics, but maybe with kind of different people at the forefront. How are people in today's Muslim societies, how are they thinking about the historical phenomenon of slavery in their own countries? Whether, like, do they think it was, you know, not as bad as other places, or they're starting to think more honestly, like. But, like, what's your impression of how people in today's Muslim countries think about how slaves might have been used in the past?
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D
Yeah, this is, this is obviously incredibly important aspect of this, you know, dealing with the legacy and how it is perceived today. Obviously, it's really difficult to generalized about a vast region with many millions of men, women and children in it. But I think I'll just give you some examples which, you know, suggest a certain attitude or attitudes, because they, because I do think they vary. I was in Oman a few weeks ago, and I was talking to a sheikh, and we were talking about the slavery and the slave trade along the East African coast, because Oman had made its fortune there for several centuries, particularly in the 19th century. And he said to me, you know, why did we do it? There was nothing else to do. It was simply business. Without it, we would have starved. And he sort of. He kind of, you know, raised his eyebrows and chuckled and really just that was it. Nothing to see here. We've done nothing wrong. It was simply business. There was nothing else going on economically for us, so we had to do it. And absolutely no sense of remorse, shame, or regret. Another example, when I was in Istanbul talking to a young female academic, and she described to me how she was looking for a PhD supervisor. She wanted to do some research on war captives in the Ottoman Empire. And this, this man from an older generation sort of just brushed her aside with the words, my dear, we treat. Our ancestors, treated their slaves very well. You don't need to worry about this. You know, it's, again, nothing to see here. That's not a proper subject of academic inquiry. And a couple more last, last examples, really, places I, I went to specifically to look at modern slavery. I bookended the book with sections, interviews with informally enslaved man and woman, one from Mali, one from Mauritania. And it depends who you ask in Mauritania about this. If you are someone who has formerly been enslaved. As you can imagine, they regard it as an unbelievable injustice. And the woman I interviewed to end the book has dedicated the rest of her life to fighting slavery. She'd been raped and beaten as a child. She came from a long line of enslaved fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers. And for her, it's complete anathema. But then you will also have people in positions of power who do not want slavery to be completely abolished because they themselves maintain enslaved men and women within their households. How many is completely unknown. It's anything between a million and I can't remember how many tens of thousands, depending on which organization you listen to. But the government of Mauritania does not want people researching this. It denies it exists. But we know that there are vestiges of hereditary racialized slavery still there. So I think the overall picture is extremely mixed. I don't think there are the conversations about reparations that are more prevalent and emerging in the West. There is a museum of slavery in Doha, but the language used, I would say is rather sort of saccharine almost and praising Islam for its humane approach to slavery and abolition as opposed to really, you know, engaging head on with one of the worst, you know, trades in, in human history really. So I think it varies enormously, but I think the, the Muslim societies, there's a, there's a difference, I feel a material difference between how the subject is discussed in, in, in the west and in, in the Arab and Turkish world, Arab and Muslim.
- [33:15]
C
I mean, speaking of the West, I mean, you do you are, you sometimes see kind of, to be blunt, kind of you, you do you, to be blunt, you do see commentators on, on the right wing sometimes point to the global phenomenon of slavery kind of a, everyone did it, it was, it wasn't just us. And then you have other people then say, and the British Empire took the lead in abolishing the global slave trade. And you don't have to like necessarily respond to people trying to use Muslim slavery as a way to diminish their own national culpability. You know, you don't have to respond to that phenomenon. But, but in researching this, I mean, how have you, like, how do you think about these questions of historical responsibility kind of more, more broadly you.
- [34:02]
D
I think you're absolutely right just to begin with, on, you know, addressing your, the first part of your question and comment then that, that this can be intensely political. I mean, I've had people who said to me who are definitely from the right, I'm so glad you're doing this book to, you know, to show it's not just about the Atlantic slave trade. And then I've had people from the left who are saying, I'm so pleased you're doing this book because you'll show that slavery in the Islamic world is so much more benign and humane than the Atlantic slave trade. So lots of people come to this with fairly strong political agendas. And I've always, I've obviously been been aware of that while writing and researching and didn't, did, you know, didn't and don't want to wade into 21st century culture wars when I'm really just trying to write as dispassionate and objective a history of, of this subject as possible. But I think the global aspect of this is interesting because I do think there's a kind of this either, either you could say either Western parochialism in one way and, or Western timidity in, in looking the kind of the monster in the room which is the Atlantic slave trade. And I haven't looked more globally than this particular aspect of the slave trade. I in the Islamic world. It interested me because of its longevity about 14, 15 centuries. And the numbers are comparable, if anything slightly higher. Estimates range from 12 to 15 million, possibly as high as 17 million. But they're always caveated with the expressions, you know, we really don't know because for obvious reasons statistics weren't available. So I do feel, I don't think it's a right wing or a left wing thing particularly to think about the global aspect of this. You know, there's nothing Islamic about this either in a way, you know, you've ancient China, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, these are all slaving civilizations. But yes, I'm acutely aware that people would like to make some these stories suit other wider political agendas.
- [36:16]
C
With that, I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Justin Marozi, author of Captives and A History of Slavery and Slave Trade in the Islamic World. Justin, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of.
- [36:31]
B
Your work and what's next for you?
- [36:34]
C
What do you think the next project might be?
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D
Where can I find my work? Well, I mean the usual expression is like from all good bookshops. I would hesitate to mention my website because it's horribly out of date, but I've written a number of histories mostly set in and around the Islamic world. History of Baghdad history called Islamic Empires which specifically focus on really what I suppose if this is an inglorious chapter in Islamic history. My book on Islamic empires was the opposite really. Looking at 15 cities telling the story of the Islamic world through 15 of its greatest cities in moments of its greatest brilliance. From Mecca to Constantinople, Istanbul through into the gulf of the 21st century. I've written histories of the Arab conquest as well. Next I think bit too early to discuss in detail but it's going to be another history set in the the heart of the Middle East.
- [37:31]
C
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon that's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to Asia reviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter at Book Reviews Asia that's reviews plural and you can find many more authors at the New Books network and new booksnetwork.com we are on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends, support us interviewing those writing in, around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news and who's coming up on the show. But before then, Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [38:04]
D
Great pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. Nicholas.
- [38:19]
E
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