Justin Marozzi on Slavery in the Islamic World

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Good Fight – “Justin Marozzi on Slavery in the Islamic World”
Host: Yascha Mounk
Guest: Justin Marozzi, historian and author of Captives: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World
Date: October 2, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the complex and often overlooked history of slavery in the Islamic world. Yascha Mounk interviews historian Justin Marozzi about his research into the origins, evolution, and persistence of slavery under Islamic rule—from its beginnings in the 7th century to modern times. The conversation covers theological, cultural, racial, and economic dimensions, drawing comparisons to the Atlantic slave trade and reflecting on why the Islamic slave trade remains under-explored in scholarship and public memory.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Comparative Neglect of Islamic Slavery

• Neglect in Scholarship:
  • Marozzi underscores that, while the Atlantic slave trade has been thoroughly studied in recent decades, the history of slavery in the Islamic world has been “massively neglected by comparison” ([00:00], [45:05]).
  • There’s a significant knowledge gap, and only recently are more scholars turning serious attention to the subject.

2. Universality and Distinctiveness of Slavery

• Historical Context:

  • Slavery is a broad human phenomenon present in “ancient Egypt, Rome, China,” and isn’t unique to Islam or the West ([00:37], [04:29]).
  • When Islam emerged in the 7th century, it “inherited” extant slavery practices from pagan Arabia, Christian Byzantium, and Jewish neighbors ([04:55]).

• Islamic Nuance:

  • Islam did not invent slavery but adopted, regulated, and perpetuated it through religious texts and Sharia (“There is nothing instantly peculiarly Muslim about slavery as it just arrives on the cusp of Islam in the seventh century” [04:55]).

3. Categories and Practices of Enslavement

• Concubinage:

  • “Concubines exist at the very birth of Islam with the Prophet Muhammad. He was gifted concubines” ([06:53]).
  • The tradition lasts from the earliest conquests through to recent times, including 20th-century Morocco and even ISIS ([06:53], [08:56]).
  • “Ottoman sultans… had a strong sort of predilection for Caucasian women” ([08:56]).

• War, Raids, and Booty:

  • Early Islamic conquests explicitly incentivized the capture of slaves as war booty ([08:56]).

• Concise Definition:

  • “A concubine from, say, the seventh or eighth century, is quite likely that they would have been captured and they become the property of the conquerors” ([08:56]).

4. Theological Foundations and Regulations

• Quranic Legitimacy:

  • The Quran references slaves as “those whom your right hands possess,” legitimizing slavery rather than abolishing it ([12:26]).
  • Regulations exist regarding “compassionate treatment,” sexual relations, and manumission (freeing slaves). The freeing of a slave is an “unqualified good,” but not an obligation ([12:26]).

• No Abolition:

  • “There is no sense that the Quran is proposing to abolish the institution of slavery” ([12:26]).

5. Rules and Realities of Manumission

• Eligibility and Process:

  • “Islam is extremely clear that co-religionists, i.e., fellow Muslims, cannot be enslaved” ([16:22]).
  • Conversion to Islam by a slave does not guarantee freedom; it might affect treatment but not legal status ([16:22]).
  • Manumission could occur through acts of mercy, redemption, and paternal acknowledgment of children born to concubines ([16:22]).

• Cases of Social Mobility:

  • Some slaves, such as Bilal (the first muezzin), or the Ottoman Grand Vizier of enslaved origin, attained significant status but were rare exceptions ([23:12]).

6. Religious, Racial, and Economic Logics

• Distinctions:

  • Unlike the race-based distinctions of the Atlantic slave trade, in the Islamic context, the primary logic was religious—Muslims could not enslave other Muslims (in principle) ([21:53], [23:12]).
  • Race still played a role; sub-Saharan Africans often faced “racially inferior status,” with enduring color hierarchies—in language and practice, e.g., “the term 'Abd' meaning slave becoming a racial epithet for people of African origin” ([27:29], [29:00]).
  • “Africa bore the brunt of the Islamic world's enduring, you could say, or sustained, perhaps even insatiable appetite for enslaved humans” ([23:12]).

• Market Hierarchy:

  • “Arab slave woman would be worth considerably less than a woman from the Caucasus… destined for concubinage… with staggering sums,” while black women were more likely to serve in domestic labor ([29:00]).

7. Slave Routes, Capture, and Treatment

• Slave Raiding ("Razia"):

  • Harrowing raids on African communities entailed violence, abduction, and sexual assault ([33:59]).
  • Accounts from slave traders tried to gloss over the violence; African survivor accounts detail brutality, including mass killings and castration ([33:59]).

• Eunuchs:

  • Eunuchs were elite slaves— often castrated as young boys in grisly operations with 2/3 to 3/4 mortality ([36:37]). This practice continued despite religious prohibitions (outsourced to non-Muslims to skirt Sharia) ([33:59]).
  • Some eunuchs attained great wealth and power (e.g., Bashir Agha, died one of the richest men in the Ottoman Empire) but were outliers ([37:45]).

8. The Challenge of Writing and Reckoning with Islamic Slavery

• Documentation Gap:

  • The overwhelming majority of enslaved individuals left no records. Historians struggle to excavate even indirect traces of their stories, often only finding them through mediated legal or police documents ([41:42]).
  • Memorable Quote:
    • “For every one person like that, there are unknown numbers, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of unheralded concubines, eunuchs, domestic slaves who just are never recorded. You know, we, we, we know nothing about them.” – Justin Marozzi ([37:45])

• Statistical Comparisons:

  • Atlantic slave trade: 11–14 million enslaved across five centuries ([45:05]).
  • Islamic slave trade (North Africa, Middle East): 12–15 million (possibly more when including Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), across a broader period ([45:05]).

• Research Disparity:

  • “While the last 50 years have resulted in huge sort of strides in understanding more and more about the Atlantic slave trade, the slave trade in the Islamic world has been massively neglected by comparison.” – Justin Marozzi ([45:05])

9. Contemporary Legacies & Historical Reckoning

• Western Parochialism and Taboo:

  • The Western academy has largely focused on “the West and the Rest,” sidelining non-Western histories ([48:07]).

  • In much of the Islamic world, there has been “less reckoning” with the subject. Denial and taboo persist among both scholars and the public ([48:07] and [54:00]).

  • Anecdotes & Quotes:

    • “My dear, you don't need to be looking at this. Our ancestors treated their slaves very well. Find yourself another subject.” (Turkish historian to a PhD student; [48:48])
    • “In Oman… I brought the subject up to [an] educated man… He said, ‘We took slaves in Africa because that was the business. We were all doing it. What else could we do? If we didn't do it, we would starve.’” ([48:48])
    • “Libyan friends, one of whom was ethnically… darker skinned… was routinely called ‘Abd’… for black people… a nickname… for slave. ” ([48:48])

• Urgency of Broader Reckoning:

  • Yascha Mounk argues that understanding slavery as a broader human phenomenon is vital, to avoid misunderstanding its causes and preventing future recurrences ([54:00]).
    • Quote:
      • “If you look at something like… the slave trade in the United States… in isolation from all other forms of slavery, you think that this is somehow a unique phenomenon. […] Humans are capable of imposing terrible cruelty… Most cultures have… great contributions… and also terrible things.” – Yascha Mounk ([54:00])

• Need for Nuance:

  • Both guest and host agree on the importance of facing the full, complex history—celebrating good while not flinching from evil, regardless of cultural context ([57:30]).

    • Quote:
      • “To say something like the history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written is an extraordinary comment.” – Justin Marozzi ([57:30])

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Notable Quotes

• On Knowledge Gaps & Research:
  • “The fact of the matter remains that… we know so much less. It's exciting… more and more scholars are looking into this, but they have a lot of ground to catch up on.” – Justin Marozzi ([00:00], [45:05])
• On Theological Position:
  • “There is no sense that the Quran is proposing to abolish the institution of slavery.” – Justin Marozzi ([12:26])
• On Racialization:
  • “…Abd… meaning slave, then came to be used as a kind of racial epithet for people of African origin.” – Yascha Mounk ([27:29])
• On Stories Lost:
  • “For every one person like that, there are unknown numbers, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of unheralded concubines, eunuchs, domestic slaves who just are never recorded… we know nothing about them.” – Justin Marozzi ([37:45])
• On Historical Reckoning:
  • “In much of the Arab world, I don’t think there has been a great reckoning with slavery and its legacy… It’s changing, but there’s a hell of a long way to go.” – Justin Marozzi ([57:30])

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Neglect of Islamic Slave Trade vs. Atlantic Slave Trade – [00:00], [45:05]
• Origins and Spread of Slavery in Islamic World – [04:55]
• Concubinage and Gendered Aspects of Slavery – [06:53] – [11:40]
• Quranic Teachings and Regulation of Slavery – [12:26]
• Rules for Enslaving Non-Muslims and Realities of Manumission – [16:22]
• Religious vs. Racial Distinctions, Market Hierarchy – [21:53], [29:00]
• Slave Raids, Eunuchs, and Their Fates – [33:59] – [37:45]
• The Challenge of Recovering Lost Stories – [41:42]
• Statistical and Historical Scope – [45:05]
• Why Research Lags Behind – [48:07]
• Contemporary Attitudes and Reckoning – [48:48], [54:00]
• Importance of Facing Difficult Histories – [54:00], [57:30]

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Memorable Moments

• Both guest and host connect their academic and personal backgrounds to the importance of historical reckoning (Mounk as a German Jew, Marozzi as a historian striving for nuance).
• Marozzi recounts field anecdotes (Libyan revolutionaries using “slave” as a nickname for black peers) to underscore the persistence of prejudices ([48:48]).
• Discussion frequently references remarkable individuals—Bilal, Bashir Agha, Grand Vizier of Ottoman Empire—contrasted with the anonymity and suffering of the majority ([23:12], [37:45]).

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Summary Tone

The conversation is rigorous, candid, and at times sobering. Both Marozzi and Mounk are committed to critical inquiry and urge listeners to confront uncomfortable facts for the sake of historical accuracy and moral clarity.

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Recommended For: Anyone interested in history, comparative slavery studies, Islamic history, race and religion, or broader questions about how cultures confront past injustices.

For further exploration and the subscriber-only segment on abolition and continuing legacies of slavery, visit Yasha Mounk’s Substack.

Transcript

[Justin Marozzi]

The fact of the matter remains that While the last 50 years have resulted in huge sort of strides in understanding more and more about the Atlantic slave trade, the slave trade in the Islamic world has been massively neglected by comparison. So the fact of the matter is we know so much less. It's exciting in the sense of historical research that more and more scholars are looking into this, but they have a lot of ground to catch up on. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

[Yasha Munk]

When we talk about slavery in the Western world, in the United States, for very good reason, we think about the horrible history of slavery in the Atlantic, the horrible history of slavery in particular in the United States. But slavery is a much broader human phenomenon, one that existed in ancient Egypt, in ancient Rome and ancient China, and one that, when you are looking at the numbers, claimed about as many but potentially slightly more victims in the Islamic world than it did in the Americas. Well, to discuss the history of slavery more broadly and particularly in the Islamic world, I invited onto the podcast Justin Marozi. Justin is a distinguished historian, a journalist who has worked for the BBC and many other outlets, and the author of many fascinating books about the Muslim world, including most recently Captives and A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade. In in the Islamic World, we talked about what the origins of slavery in that part of the world were, how Muhammad both built on pre existing practices of slavery and tried to regulate them in his religious writings. We talked about where slaves in the Islamic world were quote unquote, recruited from, where they were captured from black Africans in sub Saharan Africa who often had racially inferior status to concubines recruited from countries in the Caucasus that might today be considered white women who are often destined for baharams of influential rulers and noblemen. We talked about the ways in which slavery varied across time and across place, about some of the circumstances in which individual slaves could be freed and in some cases even rise to positions of affluence and influence, and of course, about the fates of the many anonymous people who suffered terrible hardships. We also discussed why it is, but so little is known about this history, why it is that, as one distinguished historian told Justin, the history of slavery in many of these countries yet remains to be written. What do we miss? What do we lose when we just think about slavery in one human and cultural context? And what we learn about the nature of humanity when we recognized how pervasive it was in different parts of the world as well. Finally, in the part of a conversation reserved for supporters of this podcast, for paying subscribers, we talked about how slavery was abolished in most parts of the Islamic world and in why certain forms of it actually persist until today. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support this podcast, to join this club, please go to jasamunk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamunk.substack.com. Justin Marozi, welcome to the podcast.

[Justin Marozzi]

Thank you very much and great to be with you today.

[Yasha Munk]

So, you know, when we think about slavery, the slave trade, people who are enslaved, we normally think about the North Atlantic slave trade, particularly as manifested in the United States, but also other parts of the Americas. Tell us a little bit about slavery as a human institution, as something that we see, you know, across many different cultures, religions, and geographic parts of the world.

[Justin Marozzi]

So when Islam first originated in the seventh century on the Arabian Peninsula, the Arab Muslims of the time were essentially inheriting the systems of slavery that their pagan ancestors had used since time immemorial. And those pagan Arabs on the Arabian peninsula were also surrounded by Christian Byzantines and also Jews. And it was, you know, to that extent, a universal institution. Um, what, what became Islamic about it was the arrival of the Quran, the arrival of the Prophet Muhammad, and over the succeeding centuries, that accretion of Islamic holy law, Sharia law, and the Sunnah, the traditions of the Prophet. But yes, there, there is nothing instantly peculiarly Muslim about slavery as it just arrives on the cusp of Islam in the seventh century. And then I think what has always interested me about it was that that is the very beginning of what proves to be a long, extraordinarily rich, and ultimately pretty controversial history, because it doesn't just wither out and die. It continues through the next 14 centuries and sadly, even into the 21st century.

[Yasha Munk]

And so, you know, it has its roots in all of these pre Islamic practices. You know, we go back to the ancient world and there's all kinds of different forms of slavery that persist in different parts of the world. But it then gets shaped in many ways, both by precepts of religion that are trying to regulate slavery, and just by the ways in which empires and countries and caliphates, whose religion is Muslim, sort of shape this practice. So tell us a little bit about this extraordinary long history of slavery in that part of the world.

[Justin Marozzi]

Yeah, it's interesting because there is such a wide variety, both thematically and then against that long chronology, it can often seem almost overwhelming or bewildering. You know, where to start? I suppose that one helpful way to think about it is in Terms of the different categories of enslavement, and a number of those are very consistent throughout the 14th centuries. I think the one that would be top of my list would be concubines. Concubines exist at the very birth of Islam with the Prophet Muhammad. He was gifted concubines. Concubines are taken by his fellow Arab Muslim warriors during the great ages of the Arab conquests, which last after the Prophet Muhammad as well, of course, in the early Umayyad dynasty. And just to zoom right through into our era, or very close to it, King Hassan II of Morocco in the 20th century had had concubines. He had a number of slaves in his palaces, and he was considered perfectly normal and reasonable. So you have that incredibly long period, virtually the coterminous with the history of Islam, in which concubines are part of the backdrop of cultural life and a key point or a key category among the enslaved.

[Yasha Munk]

And the word concubine is a little bit confusing here because it can mean such a variety of things in different contexts. Obviously, at the lowest end, it can simply mean, you know, and somebody who may have an extramarital affair, perhaps somebody who in some way financially supporting. But what we're talking about here is women who were forcibly enslaved and then sold into concubinage. Is that right? Where did these women come from? And what was the nature of that slave trade in concubines?

[Justin Marozzi]

Yeah, you're completely right, Yasha. Again, it takes different forms, though, as well. So a concubine from, say, the seventh or eighth century is quite likely that they would have been captured and they become the property of the conquerors. And indeed, when you see some of the earliest exhortations to jihad and holy war, even from some of the earliest caliphs, they rally the Muslim troops with the incentives of taking booty, taking human chattel, taking women and children. So that is one of the most obvious ways a female concubine would be taken in the earliest days of Islam. Then let's scroll forward to the Ottoman Empire, last sort of four or five centuries, until 1922. And during that period, concubines would be sourced from various geographies and in particular, the Caucasus. So the Ottoman sultans, the royal courts, had a strong sort of predilection for Caucasian women, and they were sourced in very large numbers along also with male child boys who were then trained up, converted to Islam, indoctrinated, given military training. And the best of the best would become the Janissaries, the sort of crack fighting force of the of the Ottoman empire, who won their spurs in many key battles of the time, not least 1453, when Sultan Mehmet II took Constantinople, and it becomes Muslim Istanbul. So concubines can be sourced from all over the world. The Ottomans had them. And in our time, sadly, from 2014 to 2017 or 19, depending where we were, Iraq or Syria, Mada Islamic State were very explicit about enslaving, raping women that they considered either infidels or apostates. And they had this very sort of long, interminable, really sort of internal debate about whether Yazidi women of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, apostates or infidels. And that would dictate how they treated them, were they there to be slaughtered or raped and enslaved. And in the end, it was a bit of both, but largely they were enslaved as sort of modern concubines, but I suspect treated much worse than a concubine, say, in a royal palace in the harem in Istanbul, where life was maybe more like a gilded cage. They weren't free to leave, but they led lives of sort of secluded refinement.

[Yasha Munk]

So you talked about the fact that obviously forms of slavery pre existed in the geographical region that became the Islamic world before Muhammad. And he, like with many other social customs and norms of his time, then tries to regulate them in accordance with his theology. What are the basic theological categories here? What are the basic set of rules that he puts in place for how to govern slavery, how to make it in certain ways, supposedly more humane, but also, of course, then how to facilitate its ongoing practice for the following centuries?

[Justin Marozzi]

I think the, you know, Muslims to this day obviously take or set great store by the life of the Prophet Muhammad. And we often hear about the Sunnah, the traditions of the Prophet and the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, some of which are more or less authentic, and they're rated accordingly. We also have the Quran, the revealed word of Allah as received by the Prophet Muhammad in the years after 6, 10. Some of the most important things, I think the first thing I think I would begin with is the acceptance within the Quran. There are all sorts of expressions for slaves and slavery in the Quran, one of which is the most common, one of which is those whom your right hands possess. And to summarize it, really, the strong sense from the Quran is that slavery is an institution. It's real, it's human, it's legitimate. And as we said a little bit earlier or a little bit later in our conversation, sorry, there's no sense that the Quran is proposing to abolish the institution of slavery. I think after that initial legitimation, I think the most important thing I think I would highlight would be the Quran in particular, supported by holy law later and the traditions of the Prophet in enjoining compassionate treatment towards one's slaves. Within that, there are also specific categories, of course. Is it permissible to. To have sexual intercourse with one's female slave? Answer very strong. Yes, it is. Is it permissible to have sexual intercourse with a woman you've just enslaved in a conquest? It might be the 7th century or it might be in the 19th century Ottoman conquests of other Christian lands, for example. Answer again, yes, it is. There are also incentives, you know, it is. The Prophet Muhammad sets an example of freeing slaves. It is clearly an unqualified good to redeem or to, sorry, to liberate one slave. So there's this sort of emerging rubric framework governing the moral treatment of one slave. And of course, a lot of the time which we haven't discussed so much is manumission in some categories. Seven years might have been a sort of ballpark figure for one's enslavement, after which one becomes a sort of free man or woman. And then there is no necessarily impediment to you pursuing all sorts of different careers. And as we've discussed, some of, in some instances, rising to the very top of Arab or Ottoman Muslim societies.

[Yasha Munk]

Tell us a little bit about manumission, both in the theological sense and then in the way in which it actually ends up being applied in practice. Philologically. I understand that one of the key distinctions certainly in who you can take as a slave originally is whether or not of Muslim faith. What difference does it make whether a slave then converts to Islam, whether out of genuine conviction or under considerable duress, or whether they don't? What does it mean when a slave converts to Islam? Is that in some kind of way make the slavery less theologically justifiable? And how does that then work out in practice? Obviously there are cases of manumission, but there's also many cases, as you were saying earlier, where slavery becomes effectively a hereditary status. So how should we think about which slaves get freed under what kind of circumstances over this time period?

[Justin Marozzi]

First of all, Islam is extremely clear that co religionists, I. E. Fellow Muslims cannot be enslaved. We see in Africa that this was frequently ignored. I'm thinking of the state of the Kano in today's Nigeria. Muslims enslaving fellow Muslims both and exporting them north towards the Mediterranean coast. And also West. It's an interesting area where both the Atlantic slave trade sort of blurs with the slave trade in the Islamic world. And so some Muslim slaves are also exported west across the Atlantic to take their place in American plantations. A slave who is not a Muslim but is taken by Muslim owner and then converts to Islam, remains a slave. So Islam is quite pragmatic about that. In no way is your conversion to Islam any guarantee of your liberation or your freedom in any way whatsoever. In practice, maybe that makes you much more amenable to your master. I think that's quite likely, but it alone is no guarantee. So you can be a Muslim convert and a slave. The redemption, manumission. I mean, there are examples of it from the very earliest, earliest moments in Islam. Bilal himself, who's being tortured in the 7th century for basically adhering to what to most Arabs around him in Mecca would have appeared as a cult. The Prophet Muhammad wandering around Mecca, inventing a new. A new religion. Most of his fellow Meccans would have considered this, you know, heretic behavior. Anyway, Bilal was being tortured. He gets. He gets redeemed while he's being tortured under a rock and left in the open sun for not renouncing Islam. And he becomes, you know, he's on the cusp of becoming Islam's first martyr. Instead, he's redeemed. It's a very early instance of a slave being redeemed in the sources, and it is considered, you know, an enlightened good. And then Bilal becomes a free man. But he's. He's forever attached to Muhammad as well, in what we might call some sort of like a retainer role as opposed to a formal slave. But he never leaves Muhammad's side until his death, aged about 60. But it establishes this, the precept, the principle of manumission being an inherent good. And I think that is always. I think that's a constant throughout the history of Islam and the history of slavery in the Islamic world. Rulers just sort of clicking their fingers and saying, you know, you're freed, you're a free man, you're a free woman, et cetera, et cetera. We touched a little bit earlier on concubinage in the Ottomans. And that is interesting because the recognition of those babies, as you said earlier, if the father doesn't recognize the child, that child's gonna be a slave. However, if the father recognizes this child, they become free. So for centuries, the Ottomans are largely preferring concubines to procreate with rather than wives. And so, you know, this is a lineage based on formal slavery. A concubine is formally a slave. And I think that's. That fascinated me because you have a ruling class with slavery in the DNA, so there's no direct equivalent of that in the American experience. And I think that explains the cross purposes of which in the 19th century, a British official calling for abolition to an Ottoman sultan and his. And his cabinet of ministers, that they don't understand each other at all.

[Yasha Munk]

That's fascinating. And what is the importance of a religious distinction here? I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, that if you're an infidel, that means that you don't have the moral rights of somebody who's Muslim. You don't have to be treated with the same kind of respect, that you're less culpable than somebody who is an apostate, who is sort of more guilty. And therefore, you know, the right course of action, quote, unquote, would be. Would be to slaughter them.

[Justin Marozzi]

Yes, that's right. Apostate. Apostasy. Is this the. The ultimate crime, really, against Islam? You know, someone who has had the. The effrontery to leave the last revealed religion merits that fate to be. To be slaughtered on the spot.

[Yasha Munk]

And of course, that has a certain internal logic to many religions. I may be misremembering the details here, but I believe that in John Locke's letter on toleration, he's saying that we should tolerate Jews and Muslims because they have a wrong faith, that you can kind of tolerate that. But of course, apostates to Christianity can't be tolerated because that would really undermine the unity of a Christian faith in a way that's too concerning and unacceptable. Tell us a little bit about to what extent this is an industry and how that evolves. My understanding is that in the ancient world, in ancient Greece and Rome, you often have slaves that are taken sort of as a side effect of battle in a certain kind of way.

[Justin Marozzi]

Right.

[Yasha Munk]

You're at war for certain people, and then the people you vanquish become slaves. So the logic really is that of a military inferior. And they can often be people who share the same religion and in our sense at least the same ethnicity. They can be residents of a city with which you were allied until 20 years ago, until two years ago. And then you go to war with each other. And if you vanquish them, then they become slaves. Obviously, in the North Atlantic slave trade, the key distinction was racial. The idea was that, you know, if you're black, you don't have the Same kinds of rights, the same kind of status than if you're white. And that's really what marks out that status. My understanding here is that the key distinction was religious, that one of the reasons, for example, why concubines were quote, unquote, recruited, were captured, and the Caucasus is that those were lands which were

[Justin Marozzi]

close to

[Yasha Munk]

countries ruled by Islamic rulers, but that were not Muslim and were. Therefore, it was permissible in a different kind of way to capture those women. Tell us a little bit about sort of the logic of where these slaves were recruited and, and, and, and what the moral justification for that was within the system.

[Justin Marozzi]

Yes, I mean, there are a number of similarities, obviously, between the, the Atlantic slave trade and the, the slavery in the slave trade in the Islamic world. I think one of the key ones, probably, which I felt was borne out by the research I did and the reading and some of the traveling itself, was that Africa bore the brunt of the Islamic world's enduring, you could say, or sustained, perhaps even insatiable appetite for enslaved humans, men, women and children. To be more specific, sub Saharan Africa, which was a lot less Muslim. It could be Christian, it might be pagan, animist. What was not allowed? But again, this is the classic distinction between, you know, what was formally not allowed and what actually then happened in practice. What was not allowed under Islamic law was the enslavement of fellow Muslims. And from time to time, you, you see, come across these sort of pathetic, beseeching letters from small Muslim principalities in, in sub Saharan Africa, writing to various overlords in distant capital, saying, you know, we are fellow Muslims and yet, you know, we've been overrun by marauding warriors who are enslaving our women and men and children and committing various atrocities, and that this is not allowed. So this, this was, this happened frequently, I think, in, you know, Sudan as late as the 19th century, warriors coming in from Egypt down south into Sudan and enslaving fellow Muslims among other. Among Christians as well. So this was obviously, this was frequently a great boner of division and not rivalry. Exactly, because these were people who were on the wrong end of enslavement in the caucuses, as you say. Yes, again, so non Muslim countries. And you could possibly generalize by saying, in other words, according to the classical Islamic doctrine, they were ripe for enslavement. We can come there and enslave your people equally, because this is not always black and white. There were plenty of impoverished families in the Caucasus who would routinely offer their young boys to go and be enslaved in the Ottoman court in the hope and an expectation that those young boys lives might be materially much better off if they go and sort of join the great imperial headquarters in Istanbul, where, as we said a moment ago, the best of the best could rise to the very. The very top of the janissaries, and in some cases even higher than that in Istanbul. I was speaking to a very distinguished historian, Edemeldam, whose great, great grandfather was enslaved as a toddler on the Greek island of Chios when the Ottomans took that island in 1822. That same relative then rose through the ranks. He was educated, sent to France, learned French language, became an engineer, returned to Istanbul, worked his way up the imperial bureaucracy, and in the late 1880s he became the Grand Vizier, you know, the equivalent of sort of a prime ministerial position, the number two position in the Ottoman Empire after the Sultan. So this, I think, always fascinated me in the. The models of enslavement in the Islamic world that in theory and occasionally in practice, but we shouldn't overstate it, you could literally rise to the top of society from enslavement to the very top. An example in the earliest time, Bilal, he was an Ethiopian slave. He then became one of Muhammad's devoted companions and followers, fellow jihadists, and then was given this great honour of becoming the first caller to prayer, a muaddin. So every time you hear the call to prayer, which is obviously the same throughout the Muslim world, the first man who ever did that was Bilal, who was a former slave and is remembered, you know, as a very illustrious figure in early Islam to this date.

[Yasha Munk]

What about the sort of element of race in all of this? So I said earlier that obviously one of the distinguishing features between the North Atlantic slave trade and the slave trade in the Islamic world was that the former was explicitly along racial lines and the latter was not. I understand, for example, that sometimes the children of concubines and Muslim men could be acknowledged as free if the father acknowledged them as his children. So the hereditary status was perhaps also somewhat less pronounced than in the United States. At the same time, my understanding is that there was a clear racial element here as well. But, for example, Bertrand Abbott, I may be mispronouncing this, which literally means slave, then came to be used as a kind of racial epithet for people of African origin. So in what ways was the slave trade racial and racialized, and in what ways was it racial, non racialized? When you're thinking, for example, about the fact that it involved a lot of concubines from places like Modern day Georgia and other parts of the Caucasus, which at least in the strange American sort of imaginary of race, would today count as white.

[Justin Marozzi]

Yeah, that's right. I think again there's this great distinction between formal principle and pragmatic real world practice. So Islam would say formally it's completely colorblind, all humans are equal. Although in the Quran there is this line, Allah has favored some of you over others in provision. And this is one of the key verses in the Quran which seems to be some level of acceptance of inequality between humans, that there is no sense at all in the Quran as one would expect of anything pro, abolition adore. So on the one hand, yes, Islam is meant to be colorblind, but I think in practice, as we say, Africa was the great pool of slave labor for successive Muslim dynasties from the Middle east from the earliest times and then through the Ottomans and into much later times as well into the 19th century and beyond. There are extraordinary writings from some really key Arab writers over, over many centuries. And I'm thinking about people like Ibn Sina, better known in the west as Avicenna, seen as a founder of modern medicine. The great writer Jahiz Ibn Khaldun, the sort of a pioneering sociologist, Masoudi, another historian. So these are not fringe figures in the Arab sort of intellectual firmament. And you, you could say when you see their writings on Africans, there's, there's no other word for it other than racism. You know, very strong stereotypes of the, of Africans, male and female, physical characteristics, intellectual aptitude, interest in music, dance. I mean these, these are fairly extraordinary passages. So I would say that, yes, irrefutable that there are racialized tendencies in the, the classical Arab view towards Africa. And then if you look into the actual slave trade itself, especially in the Ottoman times and before that, again statistically, it's very hard to look at things like prices and market rates and things because they just aren't really the figures. But typically an Arab slave woman would be worth considerably less than a woman from the Caucasus. The black African woman would likely more likely to be employed as a domestic slave in various households, royal downwards, whereas the Caucasian woman would almost certainly be destined for concubinage in either an imperial or noble harem and in a much more rarefied world with, with, with, with sort of staggering sums. And there were, there were some interesting examples going back from the Ottomans again to the early Arabs, the Abbasids, headquartered in Baghdad, where concubines were traded almost like sort of Premiership footballers today, sold and traded for astronomical sons. And there's almost this sort of conspicuous consumption between either caliphs or, or some of their courtiers bidding for these famously beautiful and accomplished women in slave markets. They were more likely to be Arab women as well. And there was, there's sort of distinctions between Yemenis and Saudis and you even have sort of slave manuals. There's a famous slave manual from the 10th century in which an Arab Christian describes the various attributes, physical and otherwise, about women. And it's like a sort of a guy how to buy your best slave almost would be a sort of modern translation of that book. But this is over a thousand years ago.

[Yasha Munk]

So we talked a little bit about the recruitment of this concubines in places like the Caucasus. What was the capture of these slaves, many of whom perhaps were more destined towards domestic labor and other forms of forced labor in sub Saharan Africa. Like, tell us a little bit about how that worked and the really gruesome journeys that they then had to take in order to go from those most non Muslim sub Saharan African countries and regions to their destinations in the Islamic world.

[Justin Marozzi]

The Arabs had a word for it, which is razia, which I suppose more or less easily translated as raid. And there are accounts of these raids on possibly unsuspecting small African communities by, you know, ferociously well armed, well prepared Arab slave raiding parties. And the scenes were pretty apocalyptic. I mean, I have a line in the book somewhere about, you know, the hunter takes a different view of the hunt than the quarry. So there was a man called Tippu Tip who was very direct in his conversations with British colonial powers, saying, you know, you white Europeans have ridiculous ideas about our traditions of slavery. I treat my slaves well. They don't want to leave. You're wasting your time trying to abolish slavery. And he paints a very sort of benevolent picture of the enslavement of Africans in which he was closely involved himself as an ivory trader. But then if you read some of the accounts by African writers, they describe it as a sort of scorched earth policy of killing and maiming, amputating and terrible scenes of killing and raping and brutalizing these, these communities, especially on the East African coast as well. And there are some really harrowing descriptions, I'm thinking now specifically of young boys who are captured and emasculated, that is castrated. And the, the rationale behind that was that a, a eunuch who survived that operation is a very valuable slave. Eunuchs are elite slaves, high mortality rates. So that, that, that has a sort of direct bearing on, on what they, what they cost and how they're traded. But again that would happen in sub Saharan Africa according to holy law. It is, it's against Islamic law to castrate someone. So the workaround, the sort of pragmatic workaround was to get Christian monks, especially among other places, perform the operation themselves. Then hey presto, you have a ready made unit if they've survived the operation and guess what, they could be imported into the North Africa and on onwards to the Ottoman world. So let's talk a little bit about

[Yasha Munk]

Unix and then perhaps we'll go back to the nature of the slave trade a little bit. Eunuchs were prized, I guess in part because they could fulfill certain kinds of functions that other enslaved people couldn't. One of the obvious ones is to be sort of guards and servants in harems and in other contexts where you wanted to be sure that they weren't able to have sexual contact with women with whom they would get into contact. You said sort of if they survive the operation, I believe you say that was it up to 2/3 or perhaps even 3/4 of young boys who orchestrated in that way died from the effects of that operation. How did the slave traders decide which boys were destined to become eunuchs? What were the way in which they were castrated and how were they then trained if they did survive to fulfill these responsibilities, some of which ended up being, you know, quite involved, some of which end up having quite a lot of influence and authority.

[Justin Marozzi]

I think again that that varies in different periods. Yasha. So to talk about eunuchs in the Islamic world is again one of those categories that goes right the way from the seventh century. The Prophet Muhammad again he was I think gifted a eunuch or two, certainly had eunuchs around him, was perfectly normal for, you know, for Arabs of the time to have that. They were in the Persian courts. They were also among the Byzantines and the Chinese before that and the Egyptians. And again it's that part of sort of the universal aspect of slavery. We know more about them generally from the Ottomans onwards with sort of, I mean with sort of flashes of, of, of biographical detail coming out of historical accounts at different periods. I'm thinking again now of, I think it's about the 10th century in Egypt where a eunuch, I think found it almost founded a dynasty or became a de facto ruler against all the odds. And this occasionally happens and it's counterintuitive, it's highly unusual, it's in no way representative of the, the experience of enslavement. But you do have these extraordinary stories where eunuchs rise to the top of society. One of the best examples probably of that would be a man called bashir Aga, an 18th century Ethiopian slave bought in a slave market for something like 30 piastas. Extremely intelligent man, very industrious, conscientious, worked his way up to become the chief black eunuch at the Ottoman court, in charge of all sorts of Islamic foundations. Very influential man. Extremely powerful actually as well. And at the time of his death in the later 18th century, he left a fortune of 30 million piastas. He was one of the richest men in the Ottoman Empire, which is, you know, an extraordinary story. Was he representative? No, he wasn't. But we know that he was very well schooled, incredibly well educated. There's an interesting sort of survey of the books in his house at the time of his death, and all these learned treatises on Islamic jurisprudence, histories, biographies, et cetera, et cetera. So we know that he was highly educated. But I think the danger often with some of those stories is that we romanticize the rags to riches element of someone like that. Whereas, as that Turkish historian Adam Eldon reminded me, for every one person like that, there are unknown numbers, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of unheralded concubines, eunuchs, domestic slaves who just are never recorded. You know, we, we, we know nothing about them. There are, there are no voices, there are no traces left. Yeah.

[Yasha Munk]

And it is, of course, tempting in history to focus on the remarkable individuals also about whom we know a lot. Obviously the very, very rare slave who, you know, is a eunuch and somehow amasses huge influence or is a concubine and amasses huge influence. And you talk about some of those fascinating characters in the book as well. Both makes for a more interesting and quote, unquote inspiring story. And it's just easier to say something about, because by virtue of their influence, by virtue of how unusual their story is, there's historical sources to draw from, and then there's the, you know, untold numbers, untold millions of individuals who are just exploited in the most horrific ways and about whom it is very difficult to write because they are just one of the many anonymous victims of history about which we don't know very much.

[Justin Marozzi]

I think that's exactly right. And the, I mean, there have been a number of historians who in, in recent years have, have focused specifically on almost we sort of exhuming or excavating, digging out these very elusive voices. And there's an Israeli historical Ehud Toledana Whose, Whose work? I used to tell one particular story in the 19th century of an incredibly badly used and abused Circassian concubine called Shemsegol, who. And, and we only know about her apart from Ehud Toledano's, you know, extremely meticulous research, because she decided to take, to stand up for herself and to take legal action against incredibly unscrupulous, amoral slave dealer owner who had raped her, made her pregnant, then denied all knowledge of it. His wife beat her up to try to induce a miscarriage. You know, and this story comes out in the legal case. And while it's full of, you know, deeply disturbing and unsettling material, but that story, it also serves as a reminder that we know so little about those, those untold individuals. So I think the historians who have looked at this immense subject, one of the greatest challenges is to try to, to get to the voices. And even when you do, they are frequently or almost always mediated by other parties. In this case, they might be mediated by Egyptian policemen or a lawyer, someone who's taken this woman's account, but it's as often it is, it's as close as we can get to that, to that very human original source, but it's a constant challenge.

[Yasha Munk]

So one way of getting closer to this subject is to look at the individual and to try to reconstruct not just the extraordinary stories of people who have somehow amassed influence and relatively affluent lives despite that status, but to try to get to a much more typical experience of those who have suffered tremendously under it. Another is proven numbers. Over the course of these many centuries of slavery, roughly how many human beings are we talking about? How does that compare to other forms of slavery like the North Atlantic slave trade or more broadly? This is a question that perhaps historians haven't been able to answer. Or perhaps they have on top of your tongue. When we think about the phenomenon of slavery in the world in general, what kind of a share of that would the North Atlantic slave trade take up? What kind of a share of that would slave trade in the Islamic world take up? And what kind of a share would other forms of slavery take up? You know, on the one hand, slavery seems to have been virtually a human universal something that existed in so many different times and places. On the other hand, of course, you know, a lot of those societies where it existed were on a much smaller scale. Certainly per capita, the ancient Athenians or the ancient Romans may have had as many slaves or more slaves, but there were just much, much smaller settlements. And so I'm guessing that they made up a much smaller share of the overall number of people on whom these kind of injustices were imposed.

[Justin Marozzi]

There's a lot to unpack there, Yasha, but I think I'm going to try to concentrate in my answer on the two main ones we have covered a little bit or brought into play. So Atlantic slave trade, five centuries between the 15th and 9th, 19th centuries. And the numbers are some. The window is between 11 and 14 million people enslaved. So that's that. Those are, I don't know, 99.9% Africans say the slave trade in the Islamic world. I've concentrated on the, what we would call in today's language, North Africa, slavery, Sub Saharan Africa as the pool of labor, the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, maybe as far east as Afghanistan, but not really India. And in that period, let's say 7th to the 20th century, the figures are around 12 to 15 million enslaved, possibly as many as 17. So very comparable figures to the Atlantic slave trade over a much longer period. But one obvious caveat to that is that that in my book, I haven't added as well or studied even the slave trade to the Indian subcontinent, and nor have I looked at Malaysia, Indonesia and the Far East. So you can, in other words, add many more to that, to that figure. For me, one of the obvious comparison really was in the historical treatment of these, these different models of enslavement. And there are a number of comments from sort of scholars over the years. Bernard Lewis several decades ago said he used the words it was professionally hazardous for a young scholar to embark on this sort of work. I don't think that's the case all these decades later. He probably wrote that, I think in the late 80s or thereabouts. I wouldn't say it's professionally hazardous to study this now, but the fact of the matter remains that While the last 50 years have resulted in huge sort of strides in understanding more and more about the Atlantic slave trade, the slave trade in the Islamic world has been massively neglected by comparison. So the fact of the matter is we know so much less. It's exciting in the sense of historical research that more and more scholars are looking into this, but they have a lot of ground to catch up on in terms of the work from, I suppose, largely North American, European and Western scholars, who really have been focused overwhelmingly on the Atlantic slave trade.

[Yasha Munk]

And why do you think that is? What are the roots for the fact that this huge phenomenon that shaped the history of these countries in important ways, and it's just an important part of the human story has been neglected in these ways.

[Justin Marozzi]

I think there are a number of reasons for that. I think the first one thing I'm going to say is possibly a little bit of Western parochialism. When I studied history at university in the early 90s, I remember there was one paper you had to study British and American and European history. And if you wanted to look beyond that, there was one paper at the time and it was called the west and the Rest.

[Yasha Munk]

Justin, I believe we must have gone to the same university. Did you go to Cambridge?

[Justin Marozzi]

Yes, I did. Ah.

[Yasha Munk]

So I did history at Cambridge as an undergraduate. So I know about the west and the Rest. I don't think that was the official title of the paper, but it was what everybody referred to it as.

[Justin Marozzi]

Yeah. Which was kind of fairly extraordinary considering that some of the world's great historians, looking at, you'd hope, all parts of the world. But that wasn't long after. Who am I thinking of? The great Peter House, historian who dismissed the history of Africa as sort of endlessly gyrating, barbarous tribes. Hugh Travaropa. So I think that in the west there has been less interest in looking beyond the West. But I think also there are other reasons more recently, perhaps. I think, as Bernard Lewis said, professionally hazardous. You know, a sense that this is an uncomfortable topic. Over the last five years of researching this, people would. Would sort of say, oh, that's brave, or, oh, that's a bit reckless, you know. Are you sure? Is that a good idea to look into, to write a book about slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world? And I thought that was complete nonsense. It's an important historical subject and for a historian, it's a really compelling story, not least because it's. I said, a little bit earlier, the history of slavery in the Islamic world is coterminous with the history of Islam. It lasts as long as Islam has lasted. So it's this endless or, you know, perennial backdrop to all these societies in North Africa and the Middle east today. So I think that is fascinating. I think historically legitimate source of inquiry. Of course I'd say that. But I also think a third thing I think is, in much of the Arab world, I don't think there has been a great reckoning with slavery and its legacy. We're at the very earliest stages of this. There's a museum in Doha called the Bin Jalmud House, and the gloss it provides on slavery in the Islamic world is a sort of pr. A PR. Guff, really, pointing to the. The sort of benevolent role that Islam played in the abolition of slavery as opposed to acknowledging the trauma and cruelty and the realities of what that slavery looked like. And I remember a young Turkish woman who's a historian embarking on a career in looking at Ottoman slavery and she was trying to find a PhD supervisor and she said she'd approach, you know, fairly distinguished older man, historian. And he said, you know, my dear, you don't need to be looking at this. Our ancestors treated their slaves very well. Find yourself another subject that was from a sort of professional historian saying that is the equivalent of what we would say. There's nothing to see here. And I was in Oman a couple of weeks ago and I brought the subject up to educated man in his 70s and he said, you know, I don't know all the fuss is about. We took slaves in Africa because that was the business. We were all doing it. What else could we do? If we didn't do it, we would starve. And it's just very direct, pretty complacent, pretty entitled, but I think probably, or you know, no one has done surveys on this particularly, I suspect, but a fairly representative view about slaving Africans in much of the Arab world. And it takes me back to Libya when I was there during the Libyan revolution and I was with a group of young revolutionaries, one of whom was ethnically from. From further south. So a darker skinned, darker skinned Libyan Arab. And he was routinely called Abd by his Libyan friends, which means slave. And at first I just thought I hadn't heard it properly. And I said, what are you, what are you talking about? You calling him that? Is that his name or what do you mean? They say, oh, that's just a joke, it's just a name. We don't mean anything by it. Anyway, again, they all sort of laughed about it. Everyone, everyone apart from the man who questioned, thought he was rather funny calling him a slave. And it was a nickname, as it is in Olivia today, for black, for black people. You call them slaves. Abid Ab. Singular, Abid Girl. So I think, you know, there are these legacies of racism towards black Africans in the Arab world and in Tunisia. There's one particular community I wrote about where a village or community is completely divided, that those who are the descendants of enslaved Africans and those who were the masters, and one side of the village is very rich and the other or relatively prosperous and the other is fairly impoverished. So I think, without wanting to generalize too much, but my experience would be that there has been less reckoning intellectually with this subject in much of the Arab world. And just to add a final thought on something in Iran, and looking at some time ago at an academic article on a 19th century female slave in Iran, and it begins with the words, the history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written. So I think that's a very Sorry, it's a very long answer to your question, but I think those are a number of reasons why I think we don't know as much about it as we perhaps should.

[Yasha Munk]

I mean, to put on the philosopher's hat rather than the historian's hat, One of the reasons why I think this matters is that if we want to understand how horrible practices like slavery can perpetuate themselves, it's really important to have an accurate read of what their causes are. And as somebody who is trained to some extent in history as an undergrad, and then in political theory, but also in comparative politics, my instinct as well is to say, well, what is specific about this society and how does it compared to other societies? And if you look at something like the horrible, brutal, terrible history of the slave trade in the United States and the Atlantic world and you think of it in isolation from all other forms of slavery, you think that this is somehow a unique phenomenon in human history. Even if perhaps you know, in some abstract way, but it existed in other places, but that effectively is how you treat it, then you go into misunderstanding what the historical roots of it are, and therefore the kind of circumstances under which slavery might recur in the human species. And so to understand that this is something that took a distinctive form in different times and places, but has unfortunately been nearly a quote, unquote normal aspect of how humans wage war, how humans perpetuate material inequality, how they demarcate some as equals and others as inferior. It significantly changes your understanding of it in ways that I think are important and urgent. The other thing I would say is that I'm a German Jew. I believe that it's very important to reckon with history and to look at the negative elements of your own history. But I do worry about a tendency to both measure with two different kind of measures and to sort of define countries by the bad without looking at other elements of their history. You know, humans are capable of imposing terrible cruelty. And you can't think of the history of Germany without the Holocaust. I don't think you can think of the history of the United States without slavery. But it is a little bit strange when some people have a sort of self flagellating attitude towards their own countries, but then insist on pretending that other countries are supposedly virtuous in ways where we simply ignore that the terrible things in their histories didn't happen, when in fact most cultures have the good moments, the great contributions they'd made to humanity, the great forms of culture and other things that they've produced, and also terrible things. But doesn't mean that each historic evil weighs as heavily as the other. It doesn't mean that we can't make distinctions between different forms of injustices, but we need to be able to look into the face both of the injustices and of the good things that cultures have produced. And it doesn't serve either to just look at the bad in one place or to just look at the good in the other place.

[Justin Marozzi]

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, Yasha. And I think it's. Yeah, as you say, in some aspects there is a sort of self flagellating tendency, which is weird as well. And I think for me it's a form of decadence in sort of late Western democracies to see the west as the unique source of some sort of evil. But I also think it's profoundly ahistorical and inaccurate and wrong. I think there is a, it feels to me that there is something of a blind spot on this, on this particular subject within much of the Muslim world. I also think it's changing. And I think what is interesting, when you look at some of those new scholars, I'm thinking about particular scholars in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco, their experiences, they use words like taboo, you know, when they look at, want to start researching this area, they're told this is not something, this is either not worthy of study or not appropriate to study or shameful to study. You're bringing disrepute onto our town, community, nation, religion, Islam, whatever it may be. And I think those sorts of sorts, either, you know, desires to either cover up or not engage with this strong historical fact for me are regrettable, but I do, I do, as I said, I do think it's on the change, but there's a hell of a long way to go because, you know, to say something like the history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written is an extraordinary comment. It's unfathomable if we, if you put that in North American context, you know, the history of slavery in America has yet to be written. Well, you know, great strides have been made in that area, but we're not seeing so much within the Islamic world. So I completely agree with you on that point.