Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, Justin Marozzi, Allen Lane, £35

In 1615, Ahmad Baba, the leading religious scholar of Timbuktu, sat down to write a fatwa, a legal opinion issued by a Muslim jurist in response to a petition for advice. In this case, the petitioner was a Muslim from Tuwat, in what is today southern Algeria. Perhaps an aspiring scholar, or a merchant involved in the Saharan slave trade, his question concerned the permissibility of enslaving the peoples of West Africa. ‘What do you say’, he asked, ‘concerning slaves imported from lands whose inhabitants are known to have become Muslim, such as the lands of Bornu, Afnu [Hausa], Kano, Gao, Katsina, and similar, news of whose acceptance of Islam has spread far and wide? Is it permitted to own them [as slaves] or not?’

In his reply, Ahmad Baba – as Justin Marozzi explains in his brilliant new study – made three arguments, all of which were derived from classical Islamic jurisprudence on slavery. First, it was wrong to equate blackness with slavery. Those who did so justified their position by referring to the so-called ‘Curse of Ham’, a twisted reading of Genesis 9:20-27, according to which, when Noah’s son Ham saw his drunken father naked, Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan, declaring that he would be ‘the lowest of slaves’ to his brothers. As David M. Goldenberg has shown, the origins of this tradition can be traced to a widely-read late antique Syriac Christian text known as The Cave of Treasures. In the Arabic and Ethiopic versions of this text, Canaan’s descendants are identified as ‘the Copts, the Kushites, the Indians, the Mysians, and all the other blacks (sudan)’. A version of the tradition is found in a wide range of Islamic literature. Baba, however, cited the prolific 15th-century Egyptian religious scholar al-Suyuti, who, in his book Raising the Status of the Abyssinians, had declared the story ‘neither sound nor true’.

Ahmad Baba’s second argument concerned the impermissibility of enslaving Muslims. This was an undisputed principle in the Islamic legal tradition. As Jonathan A.C. Brown writes in his book Slavery & Islam (2019): ‘There was no doubt or disagreement in the Shariah that no one belonging to the umma of Muhammad could be enslaved.’ If the peoples of West Africa mentioned in the petitioner’s question had converted to Islam before being taken as slaves, then their enslavement was forbidden in God’s law. This rule extended to dhimmis, Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule. It did not extend, however, to non-Muslims living outside the Abode of Islam. Baba’s third argument was that the legal ‘cause’ of enslavement – meaning the necessary condition for its permissibility – is unbelief. ‘The unbelievers of the Sudan’, he opined, ‘are like any other unbelievers in this regard – Jews, Christians, Persians, Berbers or others… Whoever is enslaved in a state of unbelief may rightly be owned, whoever he is…’

In the modern period, Ahmad Baba’s fatwa would be cited by Muslim reformers as evidence of the emancipatory impulse of the Islamic tradition. Yet, as Brown observes, ‘the emancipatory arc running through figures like Ahmad Baba… rages against the enslavement of Muslims, not against slavery itself’. If, in Marozzi’s words, ‘there was no question [in Baba’s mind] of abolishing slavery’, that is because both the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet – the two fundamental sources of Islamic law – acknowledge that slavery exists, and, while repeatedly commending the emancipation of slaves as a meritorious act of piety, do not advocate its abolition. As a result, though the Islamic legal tradition, like Roman law, asserts that the natural state of human beings is freedom – and though it echoes the Qur’an and Sunna’s commendation of emancipation – it also recognises that human beings can be owned – meaning, as Brown relates, that ‘they could be bought, sold, rented or lent out, and inherited’.

The deep embeddedness of slavery in Islamic law repeatedly caused problems for abolitionists – both Western and Muslim – in the 19th century. When the British Consul-General in Tangier John Hay Drummond Hay wrote to the Sultan of Morocco, Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman in 1842, asking what measures the sultanate had taken to abolish slavery, the sultan responded by observing that not only was the slave trade ‘a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed, from the time of the sons of Adam… up to this day’, but also, and more importantly, that ‘it is confirmed by our book [the Qur’an], as also by the Sunna of our Prophet… and furthermore there is not any controversy between the oolamaa [religious scholars] on that subject, and no one can allow what is prohibited or prohibit that which is lawful’.

When, four years later, Justin Sheil, the British minister in Tehran, tried to convince the Qajar ruler of Iran, Mohammad Shah, to abolish slavery, the Shah responded in similar terms, telling the diplomat: ‘I cannot say to my people that I am prohibiting something which is lawful.’ Bernard Lewis, who opened his pioneering study Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990) with Mawlay ‘Abd al-Rahman’s words, wrote: ‘From a Muslim point of view, to forbid what God permits, is almost as great an offence as to permit what God forbids – and slavery was authorised and regulated by the holy law.’

This is not to say, however, that abolition is impossible from an Islamic legal standpoint. Brown points out that one of the basic principles of the Islamic law of slavery is that the system is supervised by the Muslim state. When brought together with another relevant concept – namely, the Muslim ruler’s right to ‘restrict the permissible’ (taqyid al-mubah) in the interest of achieving the higher purposes of the Shariah – this principle could be used as grounds for abolition, as it was by modern Muslim reformers such as the Tunisian Muhammad Bayram Khamis, the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh, and the latter’s disciple Rashid Rida.

Another key principle is the consensus of Muslim religious scholars, which, in Islamic legal theory, is one of the four main sources of law alongside the Qur’an, Sunna, and analogical reasoning. When, in 2014, ISIS reintroduced slavery in the territories it had conquered in Iraq and Syria – subjecting thousands of Yazidi women to brutal sex slavery, which it justified on Islamic grounds – an open letter signed by dozens of leading Muslim scholars, including the prominent neo-traditionalists ‘Abdallah bin Bayyah, ‘Ali Gomaa, and Hamza Yusuf, declared that ‘the reintroduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam’ since it had been ‘abolished by universal consensus’. A similar argument was made by the Syrian scholar Muhammad Yacoubi, who observed that all Muslim scholars had agreed on ‘slavery’s nullification and its non-permissibility’ – and, furthermore, that Muslim states had signed treaties prohibiting slavery.

Nevertheless, modern Muslims – like contemporary Christians who regard the Bible as authoritative and infallible – still have to face up to what Jonathan Brown has termed the ‘Slavery Conundrum’. This involves trying to reconcile three mutually contradictory axioms. First, ‘Slavery is an intrinsic and gross moral evil.’ Second, ‘Slavery is slavery’, meaning that there is a single, objective reality called ‘slavery’ that transcends time and space. Third, that ‘Our past has authority over us’ – which in the Islamic context refers to the word of God and His Prophet and the legal tradition derived from them. In trying to square this circle, contemporary Muslims have limited room for manoeuvre. The overwhelming majority of modern people, Muslim or otherwise, seem to agree on the first axiom – or at least must profess to do so if they want to avoid being condemned as wicked. To reject the third axiom – that is, to question the authority of the Qur’an and Sunna – is effectively to put oneself beyond the pale of Islam. In this light, it is unsurprising that many Muslims have focused on the second axiom, by highlighting the differences between slavery as it was practised in the Islamic world and the type of slavery that leaps most readily to mind when we talk about the topic – namely, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation system of slavery in North America and the Caribbean.

The idea that slavery as practised by Muslims was relatively benign has a long history. Marozzi quotes the Swiss explorer J.L. Burckhardt, who in his 1819 book Travels in Nubia writes: ‘Slavery, in the East, has little dreadful in it but the name; male slaves are everywhere treated much like the children of the family, and always better than the free servants.’ It has often been employed with respect to a uniquely Islamic phenomenon – the story of former slaves who rose to become the rulers of sultanates and empires. The most notable example of this phenomenon is the Mamluk dynasty, which ruled over Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz from the mid-13th century until 1517, and whose very name means ‘owned’ in Arabic.

Recruited mainly from the Circassian tribes of the Caucasus or the Qipchaq Turks of the steppes of Central Asia, the Mamluks were given Muslim names, an Islamic education, and a demanding military training, before being manumitted and incorporated into the military elite. The historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in Mamluk Cairo in the late 14th century, described how ‘cured by slavery, they enter the Muslim religion with the firm resolve of true believers and yet with nomadic virtues unsullied by debased nature, unadulterated by the filth of pleasure, undefiled by the ways of civilised living, and with their ardour unbroken by the profusion of luxury’. ‘Islam,’ the great historian concluded, ‘rejoices in the benefit which it gains through them, and the branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth.’

Equally remarkable is the role played by elite slaves in the Ottoman Empire. The title of Marozzi’s chapter on the Ottomans is inspired by a comment from Paul Rycaut, Consul of the Levant Company at Smyrna in the 17th century, who described the Ottoman Empire as ‘a lordship or republic of slaves where it is theirs to command’. From the time of Mehmed II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman bureaucracy was staffed overwhelmingly by slave administrators. One of the many remarkable statistics recorded by Marozzi is that only five of the first 48 Ottoman grand viziers following the conquest of Constantinople were native-born Turks, leading to mischievous references to the imperial council as ‘the slave market’.

From the 15th century, many of these slave administrators were acquired through the devşirme, the system by which the Ottomans ‘harvested’ young boys from the Christian communities of Anatolia and the Balkans – in an apparent violation of the Shariah’s prohibition on enslaving dhimmis. One product of the devşirme was Sokullu Mehmet Pasha, a slave of Bosnian Christian origins who served as grand vizier under three Ottoman sultans in the 16th century, was married to the daughter of one of those sultans, and himself owned thousands of slaves – again, despite the Shariah prohibiting slaves from owning property. These Ottoman ‘slave-turned-grandee stories’, Marozzi observes, ‘completely refute what Orlando Patterson, author of a seminal comparative study of slavery, referred to as the “social death” which servitude inflicted upon its victims’.

Marozzi acknowledges that these elite forms of slavery were categorically different from slavery as we often imagine it. The Mamluks, he writes, formed ‘a landed gentry ruling class so far removed from the classical notion of slavery that even the most elastic understanding of the word fails to encapsulate it’, while the Ottoman elite slaves ‘resembled the conventional image of slaves less and less’. Yet his impressively wide-ranging history – which takes in the rebellion of East African (‘Zanj’) slaves in Iraq in 869-883, the qiyan, or singing slave-girls, of the ‘Abbasid court, the prominent role played by eunuchs as guardians of the Prophet’s tomb, royal harems, and other sacred spaces until well into the 20th century, the enslavement of millions of Muslims and Christians by corsairs in the Mediterranean across the 16th to 18th centuries, the trans-Saharan trade in black African slaves, and the slow march of abolition over the 19th and 20th centuries – leaves the reader in no doubt that slavery in the Islamic world could be – and often was – a truly hellish experience.

This is particularly true of those boys who were subjected to the torture of castration. Marozzi cites the aristocratic French explorer Count Raoul du Bisson, author of Les Femmes, les eunuques, et les guerriers du Soudan (1868), who, estimating that 90 per cent of African boys who were forced to undergo total castration died from the procedure (a figure only slightly higher than the estimates produced by recent academic studies), ‘reckoned that an astonishing 35,000 little African boys were sacrificed to produce Sudan’s average annual production of 3,800 eunuchs’.

Those who survived suffered physical effects that make for almost unbearable reading, and no reader can fail to sympathise with the Ottoman grand vizier Mesih Pasha, a eunuch of Bosnian origin, who, when fielding a complaint about an abuse of the law, asked rhetorically: ‘Did they first ask the Divine Law before they removed my testicles so that I therefore too should handle such matters according to the Divine Law?’ (As with the enslavement of dhimmis, castration is prohibited by the Shariah: ‘Whoever kills a slave,’ Muhammad is reported to have said, ‘him will we kill. Whoever cuts off the nose of slave, his nose we will cut off; and whoever castrates a slave, him also shall we castrate.’)

Female slaves were similarly subjected to irreparable physical abuse. J.L. Burckhardt, the same writer who thought that male slaves were often treated like family members, observed of the trans-Saharan slave trade that ‘very few female slaves who have passed their tenth year, reach Egypt or Arabia in a state of virginity’. Faced with reports like these, it is hard to disagree with Marozzi’s conclusion that the view that slavery in the Islamic world was benign ‘was never based on the opinions of the slaves themselves’.

Though he presents Islamicate slavery in all of its variety, one of the great virtues of this book is that the author does not fall into moralism or presentism, two traps for anyone writing on a controversial and emotive topic of this kind. While readers looking for a theoretically informed analysis of what slavery meant in this context would still do well to consult Jonathan Brown’s book, Marozzi’s focus on the stories that make up the history of slavery in the Islamic world makes for a particularly vivid and engaging treatment of the topic, and leaves readers to form their own moral judgments. If there is an overall lesson to take away from these stories, then it is perhaps what Marozzi describes as ‘the fundamental tension between ideal principle and real-world practice that would remain at the heart of slavery in the Islamic world for as long as the institution endured’.

Whether it is Muslim slave-traders seeking to enslave their co-religionists in sub-Saharan Africa, Ottoman jurists looking to justify the devşirme, or modern Muslims hoping to reconcile their belief that slavery is an inherent evil with their belief that the Qur’an is the word of God, the history of slavery in the Islamic world highlights the perennial challenge of living by God’s law in a world of changing norms and customs, and unchanging human weakness.