Mick Hartley

Justin Marozzi's book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World is just out. Here he is at UnHerd:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Westerners tend to focus on their own historical relationship with slavery. But if the triangular Atlantic trade came strewn with blood, it was far from unique in either scale or timespan. Enduring some 400 years until the 19th century, European slavers turned some 14 million Africans into property. By contrast, the slave trade in the Muslim world has been even more enduring. Beginning in the 7th century, and continuing right into modern times, the institution has overseen the enslavement of up to 17 million souls.

From early in the Islamic experiment, this behaviour has been justified on religious grounds: via the Quran, the Sunnah, or traditions of the Prophet, and Shari’a law. To an extent, that’s endured until the present. Indeed the most famous — and shocking — recent example of slavery in the Muslim world came courtesy of the so-called Islamic State. During its short-lived, self-declared “caliphate”, the jihadis glorified in raping and enslaving Yazidi women and children, seeing slavery as an essential component of contemporary Islamic government. In 2014, Dabiq, their English-language magazine, even ran a piece on reviving the practice, likening its slave-trading fighters to the Companions of the Prophet almost 1,400 years before. At the same time, Dabiq gave specific instructions on how to share the human spoils of war. “Yazidi women and children,” it said, are to be “divided” among Islamic State fighters, all in apparent keeping with Shari’a law.

Nor was that all. ISIS also set up slave markets: which essentially functioned like brothels. One woman was sold 14 times, to 14 different men, and was raped by 12 of them. Some women smeared their baby’s excrement on their bodies to avoid being bought, while others claimed to have periods or professed to be sick. Some fought back. Many received punishment beatings, or were separated from their children and locked in basements amid rising sewage and the boiling heat of the Syrian desert. One woman’s five-year-old daughter was even hanged from a window for bedwetting. No wonder many of the victims describe their plight as something approaching hell.

Despite earnest claims that this is now all in Islam's past, the mindset lingers on.

ISIS are unusual in defending Islamic slavery openly. Yet it is also true that abolition came relatively late in the day. Some of the last nations to abolish slavery include Iran (1928), Saudi Arabia (1962) and Oman (1970). Even relatively secular Turkey only got round to it in 1964, while Mauritania did so in 1981. The fact is that slavery, modern and hereditary, has lingered uncomfortably in parts of the Muslim world. That’s clear enough in the Gulf, where Asian migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines routinely end up as forced labourers. They may build the skyscrapers, and drive the cabs, and wait the swanky restaurants from Riyadh to Doha. But ensnared by the so-called kafala system, which forbids them from changing jobs without their employer’s permission, they’re also deeply vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. In the UAE alone, there may be 132,000 such workers.