Slavery and Islam: The Whole Story

In this Conflicted Conversation, Justin Marozzi discusses his new book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.

Justin traces the long, varied history of slavery in the Islamic world, arguing that slavery could sometimes offer remarkable paths to freedom and power, but that these exceptions never erased the violence of capture, ownership and exploitation—or the uneasy entanglement of abolition with Western imperialism.

Justin explains:

The scale and longevity of slavery in the Islamic world

The spiritual status of enslaved people in early Islam

The Quran, manumission and the legal regulation of slavery

The Islamic conquests and the expansion of slave-taking

Anti-black racism and the Zanj Revolt in Abbasid Iraq

Concubines, eunuchs, and sexual slavery

Mamluks, Janissaries and elite forms of servitude

Christian and Muslim slave-raiding across the Mediterranean

Ottoman abolition and its entanglement with Western imperialism