Hana’s Reviews > Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora > Status Update

Slavery still persists in Mauritania and the Sudan; against a background of fourteen centuries of Islamic colonization and slave-owning, the practice becomes more comprehensible, if no less painful. An imam in Mauritania explains, "This 'abolition'...amounts to the expropriation from Muslims of their goods, goods that were acquired legally." Racial and religious dimensions are clearer with the historical context.

Detailed and thoughtful examinations of policies in Nigeria (Britain), Somalia (Italy), Mauritania (France) and Zanzibar/Kenya Coast (Britain) illustrate how uneven, careless policy-making created populations of squatters, impoverished day-laborers and vagrants who were often conscripted for government projects or even as labor gangs or fighting units in Europe's world wars.

Colonization of Africa by European powers, some of whom had committed to eliminating the Atlantic slave trade, had a curiously mixed effect on the actual practice of slavery in former Islamic African provinces. European administrators, unwilling to disrupt the effective pursuit of profits or antagonize local strong men, were inconsistent about the issue, often doing more harm than good.

It was the spreading use of camels during the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, and then the Islamic conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, that promoted a flourishing trans-Sahara trade. On the route fro Tripoli to Lake Chad in the 14th century, Ibn Battuta observed a large caravan of six hundred black female slaves being transported north to Tunis or Tripoli by Berber traders.

Chapters Five through Seven provide a historical overview the Islamic Empire and the spread of Islam through trade as well as conquest, covering Spain, India and China; then trade with sub-Saharan Africa, and an overview of the Ottoman Empire. The role of slaves and the slave trade is discussed in context. Very helpful.

The number of Africans enslaved is obviously difficult to estimate and Segal does a good job reviewing various sources drawing on tax records, business documents in such repositories as the Cairo geniza, and Islamic and European writers. Spread over thirteen and a half centuries a number of 14 million for the total Islamic black slave trade (an average of about 10,000 per year) seems, if anything, a bit conservative

While the North Atlantic slave trade arose primarily to provide agricultural workers, that role was filled in the Medieval Islamic world largely by local peasants rather than slaves. Black male slaves did serve in the military, a path that could lead to advancement and riches. But overall, the ratio of female to male slaves was about 2:1 in the Islamic world.

Slave eunuchs sold for up to seven times the price of uncastrated male slaves reflecting the high death rate from the operation, but also high demand. In addition to their role as harem guards eunuchs also served as administrators, tutors and secretaries--and as male concubines. The Caliph in Baghdad in the early 10th century had seven thousand black eunuchs and four thousand white ones in his palace.

Homes of those who could afford the space were divided into separate quarters for men and women and the men were served by male slaves in addition to serving as grooms, guards, messengers and porters. To secure the virtue of the women of the household harems were secured not just by locks, but by slave guards, who were invariably eunuchs.

There was no social degredation in being a concubine. For a master to marry his concubine was neither disreputable nor rare. Indeed, concubines were often bought to be tried out as potential wives...those who bore their masters' children could not be sold or given away and were arguably more secure than wives who could be divorced against their will.