Justin Marozzi is a historian and journalist who has spent most of his professional life living and working in the Muslim world. His latest book is Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Justin Marozzi discuss different conceptions of slavery and manumission globally, what we can learn from enslaved people’s stories, and modern slavery.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: When we think about slavery, we normally think about the North Atlantic slave trade, particularly as manifested in the United States, but also other parts of the Americas. You’ve written a book about the history of the slave trade in the Islamic world, which itself has roots in other forms of slavery that pre-exist the Islamic world.
Tell us a little bit about slavery as a human institution, as something we see across many different cultures, religions, and geographic parts of the world.
Justin Marozzi: 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. Those pagan Arabs on the Arabian Peninsula were also surrounded by Christian Byzantines and Jews. It was, to that extent, a universal institution.
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 there is nothing instantly or peculiarly Muslim about slavery as it arrives on the cusp of Islam in the seventh century.
What has always interested me about it is that this 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.
Mounk: It has its roots in all of these pre-Islamic practices. We go back to the ancient world, and there are all kinds of different forms of slavery that existed in different parts of the world. It then gets shaped in many ways, both by precepts of religion that try to regulate slavery and by the ways in which empires, countries, and caliphates whose religion is Islam shape this practice.
Tell us a little bit about this extraordinarily long history of slavery in that part of the world.
Marozzi: Yeah, it’s interesting because there is such a wide variety, both thematically and across that long chronology, that it can often seem almost overwhelming or bewildering to know where to start. I suppose one helpful way to think about it is in terms of the different categories of enslavement. A number of those are very consistent throughout the 14 centuries.
I think the one that would be top of my list would be concubines. Concubines have existed from the very birth of Islam with the Prophet Muhammad. He was gifted concubines. Concubines were taken by his fellow Arab Muslim warriors during the great ages of the Arab conquests, which continued after the Prophet Muhammad, in the early Umayyad dynasty.
To zoom right through into our era, or very close to it, King Hassan II of Morocco in the 20th century had concubines. He had a number of slaves in his palaces, and it was considered perfectly normal and reasonable. So you have that incredibly long period, virtually coterminous with the history of Islam, in which concubines are part of the backdrop of cultural life and a key category among the enslaved.
Mounk: The word concubine is a little bit confusing here because it can mean such a variety of things in different contexts. At the lowest end, it can simply mean someone with whom you’re having an extramarital affair, perhaps someone whom you’re in some way financially supporting. What we’re talking about here is women who are forcibly enslaved and then sold into concubinage. Is that right? Where did these women come from, and what was the nature of the slave trade in concubines?
Marozzi: You’re completely right. It takes different forms as well. A concubine from the seventh or eighth century was quite likely to have been captured and become the property of the conquerors. 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. That is one of the most obvious ways a female concubine would be taken in the earliest days of Islam.
Scroll forward to the Ottoman Empire, which lasted four or five centuries until 1922. During that period, concubines were sourced from various geographies, in particular the Caucasus. The Ottoman sultans, the royal courts, had a strong predilection for Caucasian women, and they were sourced in very large numbers, along with male children who were trained, converted to Islam, indoctrinated, given military training, and the best of the best became the Janissaries, the crack fighting force of the Ottoman Empire. They won their spurs in many key battles of the time, not least in 1453, when Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople, and it became Muslim Istanbul.
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Concubines could be sourced from all over the world. The Ottomans had them. In our time, from 2014 to 2017 or 2019, depending on where you were—Iraq or Syria—the Islamic State was very explicit about enslaving and raping women they considered either infidels or apostates. They had this interminable internal debate about whether Yazidi women of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq were apostates or infidels. That would dictate how they were treated: whether they were to be slaughtered or raped and enslaved. In the end, it was a bit of both, but largely they were enslaved as modern concubines. I suspect they were treated much worse than a concubine 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 secluded refinement.
Mounk: In the geographical region that became the Islamic world before Muhammad, he, as 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 is the basic set of rules he puts in place for how to govern slavery, how to make it, in certain ways, supposedly more humane, but also how to facilitate its ongoing practice for the following centuries?
Marozzi: I think Muslims to this day take set great store by the life of the Prophet Muhammad. 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 are treated accordingly. We also have the Quran, the revealed word of Allah, as received by the Prophet Muhammad in the years after 610.
The first thing 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 the most common of which is, those whom your right hands possess. To summarize, the strong sense from the Quran is that slavery is an institution. It’s real. It’s human. It’s legitimate. There is no sense that the Quran is proposing to abolish the institution of slavery.
After that initial legitimation, the most important thing I would highlight is the Quran in particular, supported by holy law later, and the traditions of the Prophet, enjoining compassionate treatment towards one’s slaves. Within that, there are also specific categories. Is it permissible to have sexual intercourse with one’s female slave? The answer is a very strong yes. Is it permissible to have sexual intercourse with a woman you’ve just enslaved in a conquest? The answer again is yes.
There are also incentives. The Prophet Muhammad sets an example of freeing slaves. It is clearly an unqualified good to liberate one’s slave. So there’s this emerging rubric or framework governing the moral treatment of one’s slave. A lot of the time, which we haven’t discussed so much, there is manumission. In some categories, seven years might have been a ballpark figure for one’s enslavement, after which one becomes a free man or woman. There is no necessary impediment to pursuing all sorts of different careers, and, as we’ve discussed, in some instances, rising to the very top of Arab or Ottoman Muslim societies.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about manumission, both in the theological sense and in the way it ends up being applied in practice. Theologically, I understand that one of the key distinctions in who you can take as a slave originally is whether or not they are of the 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? Does that, in some way, make the slavery less theologically justifiable?
How does that then work out in practice? Obviously, there are cases of manumission. There are 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 and under what kind of circumstances over this time period?
Marozzi: First of all, Islam is extremely clear that co-religionists—fellow Muslims—cannot be enslaved. We see in Africa that this was frequently ignored. I’m thinking of the state of Kano in today’s Nigeria: Muslims enslaving fellow Muslims, both locally and exporting them north toward the Mediterranean coast and also west. It’s an interesting area where the Atlantic slave trade blurs with the slave trade in the Islamic world.
Some Muslim slaves are also exported west across the Atlantic to take their place on American plantations. A slave who is not a Muslim but is taken by a Muslim owner and then converts to Islam remains a slave. Islam is quite pragmatic about that. In no way is your conversion to Islam any guarantee of your liberation or your freedom. In practice, maybe that makes you much more amenable to your master. I think that’s quite likely. But it alone is no guarantee. You can be a Muslim convert and still a slave.
Manumission—there are examples of it from the very earliest moments in Islam. Bilal himself—who’s being tortured in the seventh century for 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 religion; most of his fellow Meccans would have considered this complete heretic behavior)—Bilal was being tortured. He gets redeemed while he’s being tortured under a rock and left out in the open sun for not renouncing Islam. 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. It is considered enlightened, good.
Bilal becomes a free man, but he’s forever attached to Muhammad in what we might call a retainer role, as opposed to a formal slave. He never leaves Muhammad’s side until his death, aged about sixty. It establishes the precept, the principle of manumission being an inherent good. That’s a constant throughout the history of Islam and the history of slavery in the Islamic world—rulers clicking their fingers and saying, you, you’re freed. You’re a free man. You’re a free woman, etc.
We touched a little earlier on concubinage in the Ottomans. That is interesting because, as you said earlier, if the father doesn’t recognize the child, that child is going to be a slave. However, if the father recognizes the child, they become free. For centuries, the Ottomans largely preferred concubines to procreate with rather than wives. This is a lineage based on formal slavery—a concubine is formally a slave. That’s what fascinated me, because you have a ruling class with slavery in the DNA. There’s no direct equivalent of that in the American case. That explains the cross purposes at which, in the nineteenth century, a British official calling for abolition speaks to an Ottoman sultan and his cabinet of ministers—they don’t understand each other at all.
Mounk: That’s fascinating. 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 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. You’re less culpable than somebody who is an apostate, who is more guilty, and therefore the “right course of action” would be to slaughter them.
Marozzi: Yes, that’s right. Apostasy is really the ultimate crime against Islam. Someone who has had the effrontery to leave the last revealed religion merits that fate—to be slaughtered on the spot.
Mounk: 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 says that we should tolerate Jews and Muslims because they have a wrong faith—but you can kind of tolerate that. Apostates to Christianity, however, can’t be tolerated because that would really undermine the unity of the Christian faith in a way that’s too concerning and unacceptable.
Tell us a little bit about the extent to which 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 as a side-effect of battle, in a certain kind of way. You had war with certain people, and then the people you vanquish became slaves. The logic 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 twenty years ago, or until two years ago, and then you go to war with each other, and if you vanquish them, they become slaves. In the North Atlantic slave trade, the key distinction was racial. The idea was that if you’re black, you don’t have the same kinds of rights or the same kind of status as if you’re white, and that marks out that status.
My understanding here is that the key distinction was religious. One of the reasons, for example, why concubines were “recruited”—were captured—in the Caucasus is that those were lands close to countries ruled by Islamic rulers, but that were not Muslim. Therefore, it was permissible in a different kind of way to capture those women. Tell us a little bit about the logic of where these slaves were recruited and what the moral justification for that was within the system.
Marozzi: Yes, there are a number of similarities between the Atlantic slave trade and the slave trade in the Islamic world. One of the key ones, which I felt was borne out by the research I did, was that Africa bore the brunt of the Islamic world’s enduring—or sustained, perhaps even insatiable—appetite for enslaved humans: men, women, and children. To be more specific, sub-Saharan Africa, which was much less Muslim—could be Christian, might be pagan or animist. What was not allowed, under Islamic law, was the enslavement of fellow Muslims. But again, this is the classic distinction between what was formally not allowed and what actually happened in practice.
From time to time, we come across these pathetic, beseeching letters from small Muslim principalities in sub-Saharan Africa, writing to various overlords in distant capitals saying, we are fellow Muslims, and yet we’ve been overrun by marauding warriors who are enslaving our women, men, and children and committing various atrocities. This is not allowed. This happened frequently in Sudan. As late as the nineteenth century, warriors came from Egypt down south into Sudan and enslaved fellow Muslims—among Christians as well. This was frequently a great source of division. Not rivalry exactly, because these were people on the wrong end of enslavement.
The Caucasus were, as you say, again, non-Muslim countries. You could generalize by saying that, according to 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 expectation that those boys’ lives might be materially better off if they joined the great imperial headquarters in Istanbul, where, as we said a moment ago, the best of the best could rise to the very top of the Janissaries—and in some cases, even higher than that.
In Istanbul, I was speaking to a very distinguished historian, Edhem Eldem, 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 rose through the ranks. He was educated, sent to France, learned the 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—the equivalent of a prime ministerial position—the number two position in the Ottoman Empire after the Sultan. This always fascinated me in the models of enslavement in the Islamic world: that, in theory—and occasionally in practice, though we shouldn’t overstate it—you could literally rise to the top of society, from enslavement to the very top.
An example from the earliest time is Bilal. He was an Ethiopian slave. He became one of Muhammad’s devoted companions and followers, a fellow jihadist, and was given the great honor of becoming the first caller to prayer, a muezzin. Every time you hear the call to prayer, which is the same throughout the Muslim world, the first man who ever did that was Bilal, a former slave, who is remembered as a very illustrious figure in early Islam to this day.
Mounk: What about the element of race in all of this? I said earlier that 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. For example, the term abd literally means slave, and then came to be used as a kind of racial epithet for people of African origin. In what ways was the slave trade racial and racialized? And in what ways was it non-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 imagination of race, would today count as white?
Marozzi: Yes, that’s right. There is a clear distinction between formal principle and pragmatic real-world practice. Islam would say formally it is completely colorblind or that humans are equal. The Quran contains the line, Allah has favored some of you over others in provision. This is one of the key verses that suggests some level of acceptance of inequality between humans. There is no sense at all in the Quran of anything pro-abolition.
On the one hand, Islam is meant to be colorblind. In practice, Africa was the great pool of slave labor for successive Muslim dynasties from the Middle East, from the earliest times through the Ottomans and into much later periods, into the nineteenth century and beyond. There are writings from key Arab figures over many centuries. Think of Ibn Sina—better known in the West as Avicenna—Jahiz, Ibn Khaldun, Masudi, and other historians. These are not fringe figures in the Arab intellectual firmament. Their writings on Africans contain very strong stereotypes: male and female physical characteristics, intellectual aptitude, interest in music and dance. These passages are extraordinary. It is irrefutable that there are racialized tendencies in the classical Arab view toward Africa.
If you look into the actual slave trade, especially in Ottoman times and earlier, the data is limited. Market rates and figures are scarce. Typically, an Arab slave woman would be worth less than a woman from the Caucasus. A black African woman was more likely to be employed as a domestic slave in various households. A Caucasian woman was more likely destined for concubinage in an imperial or noble harem, a much more rarified world involving staggering sums.
There are examples from the Ottomans and earlier Abbasids, headquartered in Baghdad, where concubines were traded like modern-day footballers, sold and traded for astronomical sums. There was conspicuous consumption among caliphs and courtiers bidding for famously beautiful and accomplished women in slave markets. These women were more likely to be Arab, with distinctions even between Yemenis and Saudis. There are also slave manuals. A famous example from the tenth century is by an Arab Christian who describes the various attributes—physical and otherwise—of women. It is essentially a guide on how to buy your best slave. This was written over a thousand years ago.
Mounk: We talked a little about the recruitment of concubines in places like the Caucasus. What was the capture of these slaves—many of whom were more likely destined for domestic labor and other forms of forced labor in sub-Saharan Africa—like?
Tell us how that worked and the gruesome journeys they had to take to go from non-Muslim sub-Saharan African countries and regions to their destinations in the Islamic world.
Marozzi: The Arabs had a word for it, razzia, which translates roughly as raid. There are accounts of these raids on unsuspecting small African communities by well-armed and well-prepared Arab slave raiding parties. The scenes were apocalyptic. I have a line in the book about how the hunter takes a different view of the hunt than the quarry.
There was a man called Tippu Tip who was direct in his conversations with British colonial powers. He said white Europeans had ridiculous ideas about their traditions of slavery. He claimed he treated his slaves well, that they didn’t want to leave, and that abolition efforts were a waste of time. He painted a benevolent picture of the enslavement of Africans, in which he was closely involved as an ivory trader.
Accounts by African writers describe it as a scorched earth policy of killing and maiming, amputating, and terrible scenes of rape and brutalization—especially on the East African coast.
There are harrowing descriptions. Some involve young boys who were captured and emasculated, meaning castrated. The rationale was that a eunuch who survived the operation became a very valuable slave. Eunuchs were elite slaves. Mortality rates were high.
That affected what they cost and how they were traded. The practice happened in sub-Saharan Africa. According to holy law, it is against Islamic law to castrate someone. The pragmatic workaround was to have Christian monks, especially in certain places, perform the operation. Then, a surviving eunuch could be imported into North Africa and onward to the Ottoman world.
Mounk: Let’s talk about eunuchs. Then we’ll go back to the nature of the slave trade. Eunuchs were prized in part because they could fulfill certain functions that other enslaved people couldn’t. One obvious example is serving as guards and servants in harems or other contexts where you want to be sure they can’t have sexual contact with the women they encounter. I believe you said up to two thirds or even three quarters of young boys who were castrated in that way died from the effects of the operation.
How did the slave traders decide which boys were destined to become eunuchs? What were the ways in which they were castrated? How were they trained, if they survived, to fulfill these responsibilities—some of which involved real influence and authority?
Marozzi: I think that varies in different periods, Yascha. To talk about eunuchs in the Islamic world is one of those categories that goes from the seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad. He was gifted a eunuch or two. Certainly hehad eunuchs around him. It was normal for Arabs at the time to have that. They were in the Persian courts. They were among the Byzantines, the Chinese before that, and the Egyptians. It is part of the universal aspect of slavery. We know more about them generally from the Ottomans onwards, with flashes of biographical detail coming out of historical accounts at different periods. I’m thinking of the tenth century in Egypt, where a eunuch almost founded a dynasty or became a de facto ruler, against all odds. This occasionally happens. It is counterintuitive, highly unusual, and in no way representative of the experience of enslavement. There are stories where eunuchs rise to the top of society.
One of the best examples would be a man called Beshir Agha, an eighteenth-century Ethiopian slave, bought in a slave market for something like thirty piastas. An extremely intelligent man, industrious, conscientious, worked his way up to become the chief black eunuch at the Ottoman court. In charge of Islamic foundations, a very influential man, extremely powerful. At the time of his death in the later eighteenth century, he left a fortune of thirty million piastas. He was one of the richest men in the Ottoman Empire, which is an extraordinary story. Was he representative? No. He was very well-schooled, incredibly well-educated. There is a survey of the books in his house at the time of his death—learned treatises on Islamic jurisprudence, histories, biographies, etc. He was highly educated. The danger with those stories is that we romanticize the rags-to-riches element.
As Turkish historian Edhem Eldem reminded me, for every one person like that, there are unknown numbers—thousands, maybe tens of thousands—of unheralded concubines, eunuchs, domestic slaves who are never recorded. We know nothing about them. There are no voices. There are no traces left.
Mounk: It is tempting in history to focus on the remarkable individuals about whom we know a lot. The very rare slave who is a eunuch and somehow amasses huge influence, or is a concubine and amasses huge influence.
You talk about some of those fascinating characters in the book as well. It makes for a more interesting and “inspiring” story. It is easier to say something about, because by virtue of their influence, by virtue of how unusual their story is, there are historical sources to draw from.
There are untold numbers, untold millions of individuals who are exploited in horrific ways and about whom it is very difficult to write, because they are one of many anonymous victims of history about whom we don’t know much.
Marozzi: I think that’s exactly right. There have been a number of historians who, in recent years, have focused specifically on exhuming or excavating—digging out—these very elusive voices. There is an Israeli historian called Ehud Toledano, whose work I used to tell one particular story in the nineteenth century of an incredibly badly used and abused Circassian concubine called Shemsigul.
We only know about her, apart from Ehud Toledano’s extremely meticulous research, because she decided to stand up for herself and take legal action against an unscrupulous, amoral slave dealer-owner who had raped her, made her pregnant, then denied all knowledge of it. His wife beat her to try to induce a miscarriage. This story comes out in the legal case.
While it is full of deeply disturbing and unsettling material, that story also serves as a reminder that we know so little about those untold individuals. For historians who have looked at this immense subject, one of the greatest challenges is trying to get to the voices.
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 has taken this woman’s account. As mediated as it is, it is as close as we can get to that very human original source. It is a constant challenge.
Mounk: One way of getting closer to this subject is to look at the individual and try to reconstruct not just the extraordinary stories of people who somehow amassed influence and relatively affluent lives despite that status, but to try to get to a more typical experience of those who suffered tremendously under it.
Another is through the 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?
More broadly—this is a question that perhaps historians haven’t been able to answer, perhaps you don’t have it at the tip of your tongue—when we think about the phenomenon of slavery in the world in general, what kind of share would the North Atlantic slave trade take up? What kind of share would the slave trade in the Islamic world take up? What kind of share would other forms of slavery take up?
Slavery seems to have been virtually a human universal, something that existed in many different times and places. A lot of those societies where it existed were on a much smaller scale. Per capita, the ancient Athenians or the ancient Romans may have had as many slaves or more slaves, but they were much smaller settlements. I’m guessing they made up a much smaller share of the overall number of people on whom these kinds of injustices were imposed.
Marozzi: I’m going to try to concentrate in my answer on the two main ones we have brought into play. So, the Atlantic slave trade—five centuries between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries—and the numbers are something in the window of about eleven to fourteen million people enslaved. Those are 99.9% Africans. I’ve concentrated on what we would call in today’s language North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa as the pool of labor, the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, maybe as far east as Afghanistan, but not really India.
In that period—let’s say seventh to the twentieth century—the figures for slavery in the Islamic world are around twelve to fifteen million enslaved, possibly as many as seventeen. So very comparable figures to the Atlantic slave trade over a much longer period. One obvious caveat to that is that in my book I haven’t added or studied the slave trade to the Indian subcontinent, nor have I looked at Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Far East. You can, in other words, add many more to that figure.
For me, one of the obvious comparisons was in the historical treatment of these different models of enslavement. There are a number of comments from scholars over the years. Bernard Lewis, several decades ago, said 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 in the late eighties or thereabouts. I wouldn’t say it’s professionally hazardous to study this now, but the fact remains that, while the last fifty years have resulted in huge strides in understanding more about the Atlantic slave trade, the slave trade in the Islamic world has been massively neglected by comparison.
The fact is we know so much less. It’s exciting, in the sense of historical research, that more scholars are looking into this, but they have a lot of ground to catch up on in terms of the work from largely North American, European, and Western scholars who have been focused overwhelmingly on the Atlantic slave trade.
Mounk: Why do you think that is? What are the roots of the fact that this huge phenomenon, which shaped the history of these countries in important ways and is an important part of the human story, has been neglected in these ways?
Marozzi: I think there are a number of reasons for that. The first thing I’m going to say is possibly a little bit of Western parochialism.
When I studied history at university in the early nineties, you had to study British, American and European history. If you wanted to look beyond that, there was one paper at the time. It was called The West and the Rest. That was it.
Mounk: 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.
Marozzi: That was fairly extraordinary, considering there are some of the world’s great historians looking at, you’d hope, all parts of the world. That wasn’t long after Hugh Trevor-Roper dismissed the history of Africa as endlessly gyrating barbarous tribes.
So in the West, there has been less interest in looking beyond the West. There are other reasons, more recent perhaps. As Bernard Lewis said, professionally hazardous. A sense that this is an uncomfortable topic. Over the last five years of research, people would say, that’s brave, or that’s a bit reckless. 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?
I thought that was complete nonsense. It’s an important historical subject. For a historian, it’s a compelling story—not least because, as I said earlier, the history of slavery in the Islamic world is coterminous with the history of Islam. It lasts as long as Islam has lasted. It is a perennial backdrop to societies in North Africa and the Middle East today. That is fascinating. It is a historically legitimate source of inquiry—of course I’d say that.
Another thing is, in much of the Arab world, there hasn’t been a great reckoning with slavery and its legacy. We are at the very earliest stages of this. There is a museum in Doha called the Bin Jelmood House. The gloss it provides on slavery in the Islamic world is PR. A sort of PR guff, pointing to the benevolent role that Islam played in the abolition of slavery, rather than acknowledging the trauma, cruelty, and realities of what that slavery looked like. I remember a young Turkish woman—historian—embarking on a career in Ottoman slavery. She was trying to find a PhD supervisor. She said she had approached a fairly distinguished older historian, and he said, 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 professional historian, saying the equivalent of, there’s nothing to see here.
I was in Oman a couple of weeks ago and brought the subject up to an educated man in his seventies. He said, I don’t know what 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. It was direct, complacent, entitled. No one has done surveys on this, but that is probably a fairly representative view about slaving Africans in much of the Arab world.
It takes me back to Libya, during the Libyan revolution. I was with a group of young revolutionaries, one of whom was ethnically from further south—a darker-skinned Libyan Arab. He was routinely called abed by his Libyan friends, which means slave. At first, I thought I hadn’t heard it properly. I said, what are you talking about? Why are you calling him that? Is that his name? What do you mean? They said, oh, it’s just a joke. It’s just a name. We don’t mean anything by it. They all laughed about it. Everyone apart from the man in question thought it was funny calling him a slave. It was a nickname—as it is in Libya today—for black people. You call them slaves. Abed singular, abeed plural.
There are these legacies of racism toward black Africans in the Arab world. In Tunisia, there is one community I wrote about where a village is completely divided—those who are the descendants of enslaved Africans and those who were the masters. One side of the village is very rich, or relatively prosperous. The other is impoverished.
Without wanting to generalize too much, my experience is that there has been less reckoning intellectually with this subject in much of the Arab world.
One final thought—something in Iran. I was looking some time ago at an academic article on a nineteenth-century female slave in Iran. It begins with the words: the history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written.
That is a very long answer to your question, but those are a number of reasons why I think we don’t know as much about it as we should.
Mounk: To put on the philosopher’s hat rather than the historian’s hat, one of the reasons why this matters is that if we want to understand how horrible practices like slavery can perpetuate themselves, it’s important to have an accurate read of what the causes are. 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 is always to say: what is specific about this society, and how does it compare to other societies?
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 other forms of slavery, you think this is somehow a unique phenomenon in human history—even if perhaps you know in an abstract way that it existed in other places. That is effectively how you treat it. You’re going to misunderstand what the historical roots of it are, and the circumstances under which slavery might recur in the human species. To understand that this is something that took a distinctive form in different times and places—but has unfortunately been nearly a “normal” aspect of how humans wage war, how humans perpetuate material inequality, how they demarcate some as equals and others as inferior—significantly changes your understanding of it in ways that are important and urgent.
The other thing I would say is that I’m a German Jew. I believe it’s important to reckon with history and to look at the negative elements of your own history. I do worry about a tendency to measure with two different kinds of measures—to define countries by the bad without looking at other elements of their history. Humans are capable of imposing terrible cruelty. 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 strange when some people have a self-flagellating attitude toward their own countries and insist on pretending that other countries are supposedly virtuous—ignoring the terrible things in their histories. In fact, most cultures have good moments, great contributions to humanity, great forms of culture, and also terrible things. That doesn’t mean each historical evil weighs equally. That doesn’t mean we can’t make distinctions between different forms of injustice. We need to be able to look into the face of both the injustices and the good things that cultures have produced. It doesn’t serve either to just look at the bad in one place or to just look at the good in another.
Marozzi: I couldn’t agree with you more, Yascha. As you say, in some aspects, there is a self-flagellating tendency, which is strange. For me, it’s a form of decadence in late Western democracies to see the West as the unique source of evil. I also think it’s profoundly ahistorical, inaccurate, and wrong. It feels to me that there is a blind spot on this subject within much of the Muslim world. I also think it’s changing.
What is interesting, when you look at some of those new scholars—I’m thinking in particular about scholars in Tunisia, Turkey, and Morocco—their experiences involve words like taboo. When they want to research this area, they’re told this is not something 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. Those desires to cover up or not engage with this strong historical fact are regrettable. I do think it’s changing, but there’s a long way to go. To say something like “the history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written” is an extraordinary comment.
It’s unfathomable to imagine someone saying that in a North American context—“the history of slavery in America has yet to be written.” Great strides have been made in that area. We’re not seeing the same within the Islamic world, so I completely agree with you on that point.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Justin discuss abolition of slavery, and how it persists today. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
