Culture | Islam and slavery

Shades of grey

THERE are few examples of cruelty so appalling as the Atlantic slave trade. A rarely noted fact, however, is that the scale of the trade in the lands of Islam was broadly similar. Not only this, but slavery persisted in some Muslim societies well into the 20th century and continues, albeit in a tiny trickle, right up to the present.

Such is the message of this odd book, part history, part tract, by Ronald Segal, a seasoned anti-apartheid activist. Yet, as he explains, slavery's moral stain on Islam is not so dark as mere numbers would suggest. An estimated 11.5m African slaves were marched through deserts to the markets of Marrakesh, Tripoli and Cairo, or shipped to the ports of Jeddah, Muscat and Basra, but this movement took place over 1,300 years rather than in the course of a few violent centuries.

Islamic law treated slaves as people, not chattel. They often owned property including, at times, their very own slaves. Manumission of slaves, considered an act of great piety, was common. Slaves seldom worked plantations, but rather were employed as household servants, concubines or soldiers. In numerous instances black slaves, and particularly eunuchs—whose value was up to seven times that of ordinary slaves—rose to positions of great wealth and even kingship.

Whatever mild racism existed was never, as in America, underlain by peculiar taboos against miscegenation. The slave population of pre-modern Muslim cities, which included Turks, Slavs, Javanese and others in addition to Africans, tended to dissolve within a generation into society as a whole. The result is that, despite this book's subtitle, there is no “Black Diaspora” in Islam.

This is not to say that Muslim slavery was benign. The suppression of the Zanj revolt, a ninth-century slave uprising in southern Iraq, took 15 years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The transport of captives always took a ghastly toll, and fatally botched castrations were frequent. The worst damage was inflicted on black Africa itself, especially after the introduction of firearms. Although demand for slaves in Arab markets rose little in the 19th century, populations plunged in the Niger basin and the Great Lakes region as tribal chieftains hunted enemies to trade for guns to fend off other enemies.

Mr Segal is good at sketching the historical dynamics. He strays into polemic, however, when describing modern times. He singles out Sudan and Mauritania as places where some slavery persists, but fails to place this in the context of these crushingly poor countries' other evils, including ethnic strife, famine and drought. He swallows Christian Solidarity International's claim that it bought the freedom of 20,000 southern Sudanese slaves, ignoring press reports that the Geneva-based charity was duped by fake slavers who gleefully pocketed dollars to “liberate” bogus slaves. Mr Segal's ire is strongest in a final chapter that attacks America's Nation of Islam movement for ignoring Muslim slaving traditions in favour of anti-Semitic fantasies. The anger is just, but oddly out of place considering that most Muslims regard Louis Farrakhan as a crackpot.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Shades of grey"

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