While America grapples with its own dark past of slavery, a massive chapter of history gets buried by academics who fixate on Western guilt.
Justin Marozzi’s eye-opening book, Captives and Companions, shines a light on the Islamic world’s slave trade, spanning over a millennium with unmatched scale and savagery. This isn’t ancient news, but it is a wake-up call for historians.
Marozzi estimates that from the 7th century to the 20th, up to 17 million Africans and Europeans were enslaved in Muslim lands, dwarfing the transatlantic trade’s 11-15 million.
Brutal raids targeted black Africans for labor and white Europeans for markets in North Africa and the Middle East. The sheer numbers reveal a system that caused more deaths and misery than often admitted.
In the opulent courts of Abbasid Baghdad, slave concubines like the poet ʿInān rose to fame, dazzling with wit and beauty while navigating deadly risks.
These women, often captured from distant lands, became cultural icons but remained property, their lives hanging on a ruler’s whim. Yet, their stories mix triumph with tragedy, showing resilience amid cruelty.
Raiders from Barbary coasts struck fear across Europe, hitting places like Devon, Cornwall, and even Iceland in 1627, where pirates abducted over 400 people into lifelong bondage.
Witnesses recounted horrors: families torn apart, villages burned, and captives sold far from home. This white slavery terrorized coasts for centuries, a truth sidelined in today’s narratives.
Castration created eunuchs for harems, with Victorian-era Sudan alone seeing 35,000 boys die yearly from botched operations to supply 3,500 survivors.
Female slaves faced routine violation, arriving in Egypt or Arabia rarely as virgins after brutal journeys. Such practices highlight a level of barbarism that demands honest reckoning.
Today, descent-based slavery traps over 200,000 in Mali, where people inherit bondage through ancestry, facing violence for resisting.
UN experts urge criminalization, but cultural norms and weak laws let it persist. Victims like one defiant man in Bamako declare inner freedom despite poverty.
In Morocco, King Hassan II kept dozens of young concubines until his 1999 death, echoing royal traditions.
Saudi Arabia holds 740,000 in modern slavery, fueled by migrant exploitation under kafala systems. These nations cling to a “tradition” of foreign enslavement dating back ages.
Marozzi’s fearless history exposes this ongoing nightmare we pretend ended long ago. He also illuminates a forgotten chapter of world history that many historians have conveniently overlooked, enabling them to attribute all conceivable evils to the Western world.
