Captives and Companions — a powerful story of slavery in the Islamic world
Justin Marozzi’s history is a masterly, thoughtful account of human cruelty and ‘lost voices’
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Captives and Companions — a powerful story of slavery in the Islamic world
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Justin Marozzi’s history is a masterly, thoughtful account of human cruelty and ‘lost voices’
13th-century painting of a slave market in which three men on a raised platform, in colourful robes, wearing turbans, appear to be exchanging money
A painting by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti from 1237 of the slave market at Zabid in Yemen © Alamy
One of the last eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire, speaking in 1938, proposed a title for his own biography: Scream. He had never, he explained, forgotten the screams of his mother and brother when they were killed in front of him by slave-traders, before he was castrated and sold for the price of a set of crockery.
This could almost be the title of Justin Marozzi’s new book, Captives and Companions, which tells us this and many other stories of slaves in the Islamic world. It is a powerful and important book, but is neither a short nor an easy read.
Using anecdotes and statistics, Marozzi illustrates both the scale and the horror of slavery in Arab caliphates and the Ottoman Empire, with tales of courtesans in early Islamic Baghdad providing a relatively light-hearted interlude. He estimates that between 12mn and 15mn people were enslaved over the course of 13 centuries — a traffic comparable to the Atlantic slave trade, but one that has had far less attention from historians. Most came from Africa but white slaves were also captured, as far north as Iceland.
One important difference from the Atlantic trade is that slaves in Muslim lands could rise to great heights. Eunuchs could amass huge wealth, as did one Beshir Agha who, as Marozzi recounts, was born in the 17th century and lived into his nineties, leaving behind him a fortune one million times greater than the paltry sum he had been sold for as a young castrated boy. Slave soldiers such as the Mamluks and Janissaries ruled some parts of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. The sons of slave women sometimes became caliphs and sultans, while the women themselves might occasionally become courtesans known for their wit and poetry, such as the 8th-century Arib, “the greatest diva of her time”.
As Marozzi points out, though, these stories are exceptions. “The noisy, brilliant and beautiful singing slave girls are no less real for their rarity,” he adds, “but the great numbers of women . . . whose lives were not even marked by a few chiselled lines on a gravestone, tell their own story of slavery and the suffering it entailed.”
He also, importantly, looks at the survival or even revival of slavery in modern-day north Africa, the Gulf and Iraq. Marozzi was living in Libya in 2017, when media reported the existence there of slave markets where men were being sold for a few hundred dollars apiece. Testimony from victims of modern slavery in Mali and Mauritania begins and ends the book.
Even where slavery is no longer practised, it casts a shadow. The bloody overthrow of Arab rule in Zanzibar in 1964; the secession of South Sudan; the Armenian genocide — all have mass enslavement either as a cause or a consequence.
While the Koran enjoins good treatment of slaves, it appears to tolerate slavery as an institution. Marozzi sets out the relevant verses of the Koran in some detail, and explains how the “Islamic State” terror group claimed a religious basis for its enslavement and rape of Yazidi women. But he is careful not to turn his book into a polemic against Islam, explaining that slavery had a long history in pre-Islamic Arabia (and, he might have added, in other cultures that influenced the early Muslims such as Ancient Greece: some Muslim scholars took their justification of slavery straight from Aristotle).
He highlights European enslavement of Muslims, the colonial rapacity of European powers, and Christians’ involvement in the slave trade: it was mainly Christian monks who castrated eunuchs, for instance, since mutilation was forbidden in Islam. He draws on the work of scholars from the region who have recently helped to highlight the historic wrongs of the slave trade. And he mentions the homegrown Ottoman opposition to slavery that contributed, along with international pressure, to its ultimate abolition.
Most of all, Marozzi tries to quote what the slaves themselves had to say. Of course, in far-off history, those voices are hard to find, and those we hear will mainly be slaves who somehow survived the system and prospered enough to leave a trace of themselves behind. Most did not, as Marozzi recognises by dedicating the book to “the voices lost”.
Perhaps this makes Captives and Companions a little uneven. It has far more to say about the Arab world and the Sahara than Iran or Afghanistan or India, let alone Indonesia and Malaysia. Slavery’s economic causes, and consequences, are not much explored. It is not, in short, a complete history of slavery in the Islamic world, but it is a masterly and thoughtful study of human cruelty and endurance.
Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World by Justin Marozzi Allen Lane £30, 560 pages
Gerard Russell is the author of ‘Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East’
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