The Forgotten History of Slavery in the Islamic World

28:52Coleman Hughes:Yeah, no, no, I agree with what you But yeah, so what was it like? What were the slave caravans like? What was the probability of survival? How cruel was it? What did it look like? What we know about the Saharan slave trade typically comes from sources that you'd have to say, from our vantage point in 2026, were almost exclusively white, Western, and in in many cases, Christian and evangelical Christian explorers. There's one in particular, I'm thinking a British explorer called James Richardson, who writes in a very emotive tone, and he talks about slavery as being the most abominable, gigantic form of wickedness the world has ever seen.

29:43And he has equally strong views about Muslims and Islam as well. So with that kind of obvious caveat in mind, that type of breed of explorer, 19th century, largely Western, are important sources of information because they happen also to be eyewitnesses of the Saharan slave trade. And they discuss what it was like and seeing slave owners, masters, dealers, whipping African men, women, and children. James Richardson specifically talks about a young girl of, I think, about nine, really struggling to keep up with the caravan. And he tries to tell the slave to, you know, just stop being so harsh towards her or she's not going to make it.

30:31And he looks around and he hears a whip. And this poor girl has been whipped again and again and again. And he says later that day she died. so these are just sort of anecdotal tiny pinpricks really of information on a trade which lasted 14 centuries but I think there are enough of them to demonstrate that the barbarity was pretty appalling whether that's 21st century standards or those of medieval Africa other people can be the judge of that but I think this is very far from being a picnic. I think it was a matter of life and death. Mortality rates were high. If you didn't keep up with the caravan and you were on foot while a slave master might have been on a camel, you were simply left to die on the side of the trail across the desert, unburied, and maybe left dying in a really pretty dreadful condition.

31:37Richardson also says, how it was almost unheard of for young girls to make that journey without being raped by the slave dealers who thought it was a completely normal behavior. These were captive African girls and women. They were literally owned by these people who thought it was completely acceptable to rape them. So, you know, I didn't really want to get into comparable levels of, you know, which was the cruelest, which was the most barbaric and those sorts of invidious comparisons. But I just think that we know enough of the Saharan slave trade to know that it was, you know, humanity at its, I think, most apocalyptic.

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32:57Coleman Hughes:I want to revisit the point you made about not seeing or not hearing any shame in with some of the interlocutors you've spoken to about slavery in the Islamic world. I remember coming across a video years ago, I think it was Muammar Gaddafi giving like a two minute apology at a meeting with the African Congress or some similar international organization, apologizing for Libya's role in the Saharan slave trade, enslaving Africans for over a thousand years. And it was a very brief moment. Like I said, it was one or two minutes. It's probably on YouTube. And it stood out to me because it was like the only example I have ever seen of an Arab leader taking a minimum amount of apology, as opposed to such statements from Western leaders or a dime a dozen.

34:02Coleman Hughes:It's not hard in America to find an authority figure expressing guilt or shame or regret or apology about slavery. And one way of framing the question is like, what's up in the Arab world, why is there no guilt? But I think a more accurate way of framing the question is really the entire world, most peoples do not really feel or display guilt about what their ancestors did. I don't think you're going to find in China or India or the Philippines or Korea, very many people, you know, hand-wringing about slavery in those places 100 or 200 years ago. Really, it's actually the exception in the world is Western Europe and offshoot societies of Western Europe.

34:57Coleman Hughes:So like America, Canada, Australia, where that sort of historical guilt seems to be a powerful force. I'm curious, do you share my view that like the Western European offshoot societies are actually the exception to the rule? And if so, where do you think that comes from? I mean, I have never thought about it precisely in those terms, Coleman, but as you are making those remarks, it strikes me that I think that is absolutely correct. And we, I mean, I think often in the West, we have these value judgments where we think we speak for the entire world. I remember this happening with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

35:39two, Western media would routinely proclaim all the world is against Russia. And that is just not the case at all. You know, huge, huge, huge portions of Africa had either no dog in the fight or felt that the West, NATO had overextended to the East and so on and so forth. So I think sometimes we do universalize Western values and attribute that to the rest of the world. Um, I think what is, um, what interests me a little bit about this in, with regard to both, uh, Turkey, um, as the successor state to the Ottoman empire, which for 500 years was, was a, you know, major slaving state, um, and, and swathes of the Arab world from Morocco through Libya and Egypt, Sudan, um, into the Levant, certainly the Arabian Hejaz.

36:27Slavery is not such a historical phenomenon. I mean, what I mean by that is that it wasn't long ago. Saudi Arabia, I think, was 1982, where slavery was outlawed. If you see, I think it's pictures of your American president, I think it was Roosevelt with Ibn Saud on a yacht around World War II. There are enslaved Africans in Ibn Saud's entourage. I mean, it remained a 20th century phenomenon. And I I deliberately looked at the situation in both Mali and Mauritania because, to me, it felt extraordinary that hereditary racialized slavery still exists there. And when I discussed it in both those countries with a range of people from anti-slavery activists to journalists, government officials and so on, there still seemed to be a strong sense of denial, to generalize a little bit about it, conspiracy theories.

37:25in one of the more absurd comments i had from a mauritanian official he said you you have slavery in the west you've got apple meta facebook and so on and that's a form of modern slavery and i thought you know whatever you think about these companies to comparing that with hereditary racialized slavery in uh in in mali or mauritania is just complete nonsense i felt um and i think also that the lack of reckoning one could delve deeper into that i think one of the reasons I would say it is there in the Arab world is because there is generally less

38:01critical introspection and a free press and critical inquiry. If you're a young Saudi Arabian scholar, I would be very surprised if you'd ever find funding to go and do a PhD in history of slavery in the Arabian Peninsula. Because I think that a routine or typical response to that would be you're bringing shame and dishonor onto either Islam or our national history. So I do think the West does look at this pretty differently, but I agree that more often than not, we're probably the outliers rather than the norm.

38:33Coleman Hughes:So you mentioned Mali, and at the end, I'm going to get your take on modern-day slavery and this modern-day slaves you've spoken to and what can be done about it. But before we get there, you call it hereditary racialized slavery. And in America, even people who understand that slavery was an institution pretty much everywhere on Earth throughout most of history, do view racialized slavery as uniquely Western. So to what extent was slavery in the Islamic world racialized? Yeah, this was an interesting aspect of slavery in the Islamic world as well. And I think although a number of commentators might not like Bernard Lewis's comments on Arab views towards Africans in the medieval period, I followed him and delved more deeply as well, I hope, into some of the sources in which you have very major Arab writers like Al-Jahiz, Ibn Khaldun, Masudi, known as the Herodotus of the Arabs, with their descriptions of Africans, which I was slightly surprised that my publisher didn't actually outlaw from the book, because to any modern reader, they're simply unacceptable.

40:06I thought they're important because they reflected a mainstream view of elite Arabs towards Africans. And I think that kind of ideological view also enabled the justification of slavery, not that it was especially needed, but towards the African continent, because it was the African continent that suffered most from slavery in the Islamic world for 14 centuries. And the reason I call it hereditary racialized slavery, I think because in Mali, for example, and in Mauritania, it is certain ethnicities that are typically enslaved and are the victims of enslavement. And there are different categories of it.

40:53It tends to be the, in Mauritania, at least, there's a community called the Bidan, who is named white, as in white Arabs, enslaving darker-skinned Africans. But equally, as an Arab was very keen to emphasize to me, the enslavement within Mauritania is also from some African tribes of other African tribes. In other words, it is a complicated picture, but it is very heavily based on different ethnicities in those countries. So I think you've got the wider story of Arab enslavement of Africans justified on racial grounds, which, by the way, you still see in Sudan. in the 21st century with the rhetoric as well of Arabs calling black African slaves, whether they're enslaved or not, using that word.

41:44And then within those last vestiges of slavery in Africa today, both Mali and Mauritania, different ethnicities suffering from this hereditary institution.

41:56Coleman Hughes:Yeah, an Iraqi friend of mine who was probably born in the 80s in Iraq, or maybe the early 90s, said that when he was growing up at that time, the word Abed, meaning slave, was still used casually to refer to black people. And I forget who it is that said this, but they said, you know, if you think we have too much wokeness and sort of language policing in the West, maybe some places in the world have too little, you know, wokeness or language policing if you're still actually calling an ethnic group that was historically enslaved slaves. And, Coleman, I can attest to that myself because I was in Libya in 2011 reporting on the revolution against the Gaddafi regime.

42:49That's the picture of him above us as we speak. And you're right, by the way, just going back a few moments ago, you're absolutely right. He was one of the few and possibly the only Arab leader ever I've heard or come across apologizing for this institution. And it's strange it should be a man like him as well, who's a fairly grotesque dictator, and B, also highly idiosyncratic and eccentric. One minute he was leader of the Arabs, then he said, I've given up with the Arabs, I'm an African now, I'm going to be a leader of the Africans. And I think it was in that context when he was positioning himself as a leader of Arabs, sorry, of Africans rather than Arabs, that he issued those comments.

43:32But yeah, going back to the Libyan revolution, I was sitting with a group of young revolutionaries and they used absolutely that word, abd, Arabic for slave, towards one of their African friends, Libyan African friends. So he was only different than he was darker skinned. And I said, did I hear that right? I thought I must have misheard because you just can't imagine that kind of language being used. And they just said, oh, that's just his nickname. It doesn't mean anything. it's not serious i mean that that was their idea of a joke uh what was equally clear to me was that he didn't see anything funny about it at all but it was that that extraordinary casual um use of that um that insult to to someone you know in the 21st century yeah okay so i want to talk a little

44:21Coleman Hughes:bit about the uh the the barbary slave trade because this is um i had read uh the the book by the Ohio, I think Ohio State professor that came out 20 years ago. I think it's Muslim Masters, Christian Slaves, or Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. And this was a very interesting book about the enslaving by North African pirates, the slave raiding up the European coast, and the use of Christian slaves in Muslim galleys in the Mediterranean. And your book was a really interesting, corrective to that narrative because you point out that this has been talked about in the world of Christendom as a kind of one-way victimization by Mediterranean Muslims of Christians when in fact it was a two-way, it was just a two-way situation.

45:14Coleman Hughes:So tell me about that. Yeah, this is another interesting phenomenon. I think like so many of these kind of sub-stories or strands within the wider chronology of slavery in the Islamic world, it can become a political football as well, with blame and Western scholars playing up the Muslim or Christian dimension to this trade and practice and corresponding narratives from other sides. So I think increasingly the literature stresses that, I think in the words of Nabil Mata, uh lebanese american um historian um you know no one no one should cast the first stone i think those words are really important to remember uh there were jews on christians christians on jews christians on muslims muslims on christians so um if anything i think i described it as a the mediterranean world of of barbary corsairing almost as a free-for-all um almost faith blind almost colorblind um everyone was fair game on the high seas and if you look um i think one of the most fascinating to me aspects of this was if you looked closely at the demographics of who were these supposedly barbarian North African Muslim pirates and corsairs, more often than not, they turn out to be European renegades in the expression of the time, meaning converts to Islam.

46:42I would say converts of convenience, because if you judge by the way they behaved on the high seas, slaughtering and enslaving, I don't think their conversion to Islam was so much about the spiritual appeal of the religion and wanting to be good, God-fearing Muslims as it was to make a fortune on the high seas enslaving willy-nilly. And so it really does, the narrative suggests that everyone was praying against everyone. But the difficulty, I think, for historians in this field is that the preponderance of narratives come from North Americans and Europeans, more often than not hyping up their experiences and writing up the obligatory My Ten Years as a Slave narrative, many of which became great bestsellers both in North America and in Europe.

47:32And what is strange, and this could be the basis of an interesting cultural study for the future perhaps, is that Muslim captives tended not to write about their enslavement. It was something maybe they attributed to the will of God, or they didn't see themselves front and center in a first-person narrative. They tended not to write these tell-all memoirs and autobiographies after their statement.

47:57Coleman Hughes:Was there a book-buying public in the Arab world the way there would have been in the Protestant West? I mean, most of these, the memoirs I'm thinking of, they're late 18th century and into the 19th. So I suppose the Nahda, the awakening within the Muslim world was later 19th century. So perhaps it was a case of a smaller publishing market as well. But I think part of it does seem to be reading Nabil Matar again, a very important historian in this period. He just makes the point that there aren't, much as the historian would love to fall upon, piles of manuscripts and memoirs. They're just not there.

48:45And we don't really know the answer to that. But yeah, I suspect publishing is part of it. But maybe also a cultural difference in how people respond to that traumatic experience or adventure, call it what you like. But yeah, we don't have the sort of corresponding narrative for the enslaved Muslims. There's a famous clip by Christopher Hitchens on the Bill Maher show, probably from the 2000s or maybe 2009 or something like that,

49:16Coleman Hughes:where he's talking about the psychology of jihadism. And he makes the point that the Barbary pirates who took some American sailors captive justified it by reference to Islam. And the punchline of this was that jihadism has nothing to do with American foreign policy and everything to do with kind of a religious mandate to wage jihad. That point aside, which I think, you know, in cases like ISIS and Al Qaeda, I would argue is clearly true. I thought the more I read about the actual Barbary piracy world, I thought this was a very bad example of the point because it seemed to me clear, not only from reading your book, but from reading the Ohio State Professor's book, that these were basically businessmen who happened to be Muslim.

50:11Coleman Hughes:And so they were primarily focused on profit. And Islam was the legal structure of their world. It was the regulatory structure of their world. So they had to do it in an Islamic way, so as not to rankle society. But it's not like they were motivated to self-sacrifice and do this as a kind of jihad in the way that an ISIS fighter may actually give his life for jihad, right? These were businessmen first. I'm curious if that is an accurate reading of the situation. Yeah, I'd agree with that. Specifically in the Barbary case, it was a business. These are people who want to make a fortune. And from time to time, there are memoirs from these corsairs in later life, or people go and meet them in their dotage in North Africa and talk about the luxury they're living in as a result of the plunder, the decades of raiding and enslaving in the Mediterranean.

51:16Although I think there was a 17th century historian who talked about jihad on the high seas, but that was, I don't know, that's an expression. There will always be Muslim writers in various historical periods who will talk about jihad or justify attacks against non-Muslims in those terms. But I think I agree with that analysis that you've suggested, that this was primarily business. looking towards al-Qaeda and ISIS and Islamic State. I think some people can get caught up in almost wanting to apologize on behalf of Muslims or Islam for what's happening. I think it was President Obama who said there was nothing Islamic about Islamic State.

52:03I don't think I do agree with that. I think that's a category error, and it's important to look at the words of the people who are doing what they say. For example, in the magazine called Dabiq, which is the house magazine of ISIS, at the time of the enslavement of Yazidi women in northern Iraq, they make very explicit the Quranic justification, the traditions of the Prophet. it. It's perverted, but it's almost banal in what can be almost tedious theological justifications of enslavement, of rape. You're allowed to do virtually whatever you like. Are you allowed to hit a woman when you've enslaved her?

52:48Yes, but not in the face. I mean, I think I describe it as a mixture of perversion and banality and abominable cruelty. But to say that is not Islamic, I think is a very curiously Western, a form of Western apology that I don't think is always appropriate. Yeah.

53:14Coleman Hughes:It's a kind of wishful thinking because we would like it to be true that you couldn't justify these things by reference to the text, but unfortunately you can. And as you point out, that is not unique to the Quran. The Old Testament is no walk in the park either. but we're not, the evolution of Judaism, there's no slavery in the Jewish world. So we're not having to talk about that or think about that. So I wanna talk about modern day slavery. This is a topic that's really conceptually hard for me to categorize because in the West, one of the greatest achievements that we have secured is the abolition of slavery.

54:00Coleman Hughes:It used to be legal in almost every country you could name. And then one by one, this incredible thing happened where consciousness is awakened and people marched and protested and petitioned and sometimes went to war, sometimes died. And we now live in a world where you literally cannot meet a person in the West that thinks slavery is anything but an abomination. It's one of the great victories for human rights. And yet we live in a world where you have literally met slaves, right? You've met slaves, you've talked to people who are formerly enslaved in very recent history. And it's no longer a matter, I fear, of writing a letter to some congressman or of marching somewhere, how is that going to help the guy that's enslaved in Mali or Mauritania?

55:02Coleman Hughes:What is the, first of all, can you give a sense of the scale of modern slavery? Where are there still modern day slaves? And how many, roughly how many are there, if we even know? And then I want to get to what, if anything, can be done about it. in terms of the prevalence colman um because i was specifically looking at the islamic world and wanted to produce this um this narrative going from um the earliest times of islam to the present day um all roads therefore inevitably led me to to mali and mauritania um specifically because that is where that those are the two um outliers i suppose you'd say nowadays um where it still exists.

55:50I would stress that it is formally illegal in both countries. But what tends to be the case is that it's people from that elite political and economic class, the leaders, the governors, the mayors, who tend to be the people who either justify the practice of slavery or who indeed keep slaves themselves, which is an extraordinary thing to say. But that's what I came up against again and again when discussing this phenomenon in both countries that, you know, there are conversations like, you know, who are you as a campaigner, whether you're Western or Marlian or Mauritanian, to tell us, the governors, the hereditary bosses of this particular region, not to have slaves.

56:34We've done that for 300 years, 400 years, whatever, from time immemorial, who are you to tell us how to change our culture? And that tended to be a very strong view I came across in both Mali and Mauritania. The numbers are really difficult to know because Mauritania is one of the hardest countries I've ever found to work in. It was difficult just to get through the airport. When I said I was a historian, I deliberately said I wasn't a journalist because if you can use the word journalist there, you're not going to get into the country. We were followed throughout the visit by security officials.

57:08So hard data is really difficult. This is not a subject the government of Mauritania wants us to know about. And the estimates vary from, I think a million is the high end and the smaller figure is many levels, many multiples below that. But the real figure is simply unknown and the government would prefer it to be kept that way. In Mali, it's more regional phenomenon. It's Western Mali, particularly the region of Kais. Again, I think figures are hard to come by. And it's not an area where research is welcomed at all. And I think both things, I think, to generalize the view, when questioned about it, both governments, I think, have a sort of fallback position of denial.

57:57Nothing to see here. These are sort of Western agitators or it's a conspiracy against us. and even you'll hear people talking about the hidden hand of Israel or Zionists or Jews trying to bring our country down and discredit Islam and so on and so forth. So it's not a great picture. So those are the numbers and the geographies and could you just, there was one last aspect you wanted me to comment on.

58:27Coleman Hughes:Yeah, so what can be done about this? I mean, because it's, you know, the path to abolition in our history is a lot clearer. It's like we need to change the law and then the reality will soon follow. Here, the laws have already been changed. It seems like these are scenarios where you have deeply embedded cultural decisions, cultural traditions, and you have a government that probably doesn't really have the state capacity for a crackdown. That's really effective. So what can a person who cares about this issue do here? I think reporting on it, I mean, you know, the old expression about the oxygen of publicity, I do think it still has a role to play in this area.

59:12And there are respected both international American and local African and Mauritanian and Malian human rights activists and anti-slavery campaigners who I think do very important and brave and remarkable work in bringing these stories to our attention. And in both countries, I was hosted by such organizations who also face enormous pressure as well. I mean, in Mauritania, when you hear stories about the people who have sort of brought up almost like whistleblowers and cases of enslaved girls and women then being prosecuted for having complained about their rape or their enslavement, you just think, you know what, there's so much more that needs to be done.

59:57But I do think powerful foreign voices, I mean, not least the American government, do have an ongoing role to play and to try to keep accountable governments that are not accountable to their own citizens. But I don't think that's, it's certainly no magic bullet either because I think it is extremely difficult as the capacity to eliminate it isn't there either. Yeah.

1:00:28Coleman Hughes:Okay. Thank you so much, Justin. I once again want to recommend your book, Captives and Companions. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's the best book on the subject. It's a great example of how to do history and weave individual anecdotes and stories into a wider historical analysis. So it's really an amazing accomplishment. I highly recommend that people read it. And thank you so much for coming on my show. That's incredibly kind, Coleman. And just want to say what a great pleasure it was to join you. And I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much.