Justin Marozzi Explored the History of Slavery in Islam — And Immediately Came Under Fire

(This interview was originally published in Haaretz's Hebrew edition and is reproduced here in translation, with permission)

It was during the Libyan uprising of 2011, at a meeting in Tripoli with a group of rebels, that British journalist and historian Justin Marozzi overheard one of the men turn to his Black friend and say: ‘Hey, slave. Go get me coffee.’ The other rebels laughed. Their friend did not. What struck Marozzi in that moment — and what would eventually reshape his career — was that the word ‘slave’ was still in everyday use across North Africa and the Middle East, entirely outside its historical context.

That encounter set Marozzi on a journey spanning continents and centuries, tracing the history of slavery across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. The result is his book Captives and Companions, published last summer. He estimates that between 12 and 15 million people were enslaved across 1,300 years of this history — a scale comparable to the Atlantic slave trade, but one that has drawn far less attention from historians. This anecdote, along with many others, appears in Marozzi’s monumental book Captives and Companions, which was published in English last summer.

In a speech he gave in 1938, one of the last eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire suggested a name for his own biography: ‘Cry.’ He had never forgotten, he explained, the screams of his mother and brother when they were slaughtered in front of him by slave traders, before he himself was castrated and sold for the price of a set of pottery. ‘Cry’, as the Financial Times author wrote in his review of the book last summer, could also be used as the title of Marozzi’s new book, and it faithfully expresses the mood of the book and the many stories that appear in it, of slaves in the Islamic world, past and present. This is an important and powerful book, but it is naturally not an easy text to read. Captives and Companions seeks to compress into it the complex and terrifying history of slavery in the Muslim world, something that had hardly been done before.

In conversation, Marozzi explains that Africa bore the main burden of slavery, but there were also quite a few white slaves captured throughout this history, some even from Iceland. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, he writes, there were about 1.5 million European slaves traded in the Muslim world. Marozzi explains that many of the slave traders in North Africa at the time were ‘renegados’, meaning deserters, Europeans who converted to Islam not for spiritual reasons, but out of greed and the belief that Muslim slave traders reaped greater profits.

‘I call it the Mediterranean Basin Free Trade Zone,’ Marozzi says. ‘Muslims, Christians and Jews — who were a small minority — all took part in the story, both as slaves and as slave traders.’ Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, roughly 1.5 million European slaves were traded across the Muslim world, some as far from home as Iceland. Many of the slave traders operating in North Africa at the time were renegados — European converts to Islam who switched allegiance less out of faith than out of the belief that Muslim slave traders were more profitable to work for.

What is the difference between slavery in the Islamic world and the plantation slavery in America that most of us know from film and literature?

‘Slavery in the Muslim world also included plantation labour — in the marshes of southern Iraq, the date plantations of Algeria, the clove plantations of Zanzibar. But the range of roles was extraordinary: concubines to the sultan, pearl divers, eunuchs, slave soldiers, agricultural labourers, Ottoman officials. There were also — rare, but real — cases of astonishing social mobility from slavery to the top of society, though these were the exception, not the rule. The more fundamental difference is that slavery in the Islamic world persisted for the entire span of Islamic history, from the seventh century through to today. It should not still be true, but it survives in some places, particularly Mali and Mauritania.’

Marozzi points to Agha as one such exception: born in Abyssinia in the seventeenth century, captured as a teenager by Muslim slave traders, castrated — by Christian monks who worked as subcontractors in the trade, since mutilation was forbidden under Islamic law — and sold into slavery for the price of thirty piastres. He went on to rise to the very top of the Ottoman Empire, serving as chief eunuch in the harem of two sultans, and died leaving behind thirty million piastres, eight hundred diamond-encrusted watches and one hundred and sixty horses. But such stories, Marozzi is careful to note, are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Marozzi was living in Libya in 2017 when reports emerged of open slave markets there, where men were sold for a few hundred dollars. His book also devotes extensive attention to ISIS's slave markets and its sexual enslavement of Yazidi women in northern Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. ‘Women smeared their babies’ excrement on their bodies to avoid being bought,’ he writes. ‘Some claimed to be menstruating, others stopped washing. At least one woman killed her captor and fled. Many were beaten, separated from their children, locked in overcrowded cellars with failing sewage, and starved for refusing sexual violence.’

The material, drawn from a confidential legal affidavit prepared by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability to support future prosecutions, ‘was beyond repulsive,’ Marozzi says. ‘What made it possible to write was knowing that simply documenting the reality of life under the so-called Islamic State was itself a small contribution to discrediting the organisation and the ideology behind it.’

Riding a Camel in the Sahara

Marozzi, 56, is an independent historian unaffiliated with any academic institution. He describes himself as a student and close friend of the British-Jewish historian David Abulafia, a specialist in the history of the Middle East, who died a few days before the two met for this interview at Marozzi’s flat in Belsize Park, north London. ‘David was my mentor,’ he says. ‘Studying under him for my undergraduate degree is where history became something that mattered to me, but I never thought about a doctorate or an academic career. It just wasn’t on my radar. Travel writing and journalism — absolutely.’

Alongside historians like Abulafia, Marozzi cites a number of historical travellers as influences, among them Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who left Muslim Spain in the twelfth century for an eight-year journey through the East. That, combined with his experience as a Financial Times foreign correspondent in the Philippines in the late 1990s, led to his first book, South from Barbary, an account of his own camel journey through the Libyan desert in the early 2000s. ‘That book actually traced the route slaves once took across the Sahara. It combined travel writing, history and journalism — and that approach shaped everything I’ve written since.’

In writing Captives and Companions, Marozzi appears to have fully adopted that same hands-on approach. He spent several years travelling across Africa and the Middle East — from Mauritania and Mali to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — trying to understand the state of modern slavery in each, interviewing former slaves who had become anti-slavery activists, alongside journeys through the Gulf and Central Asia to the shores of the Black Sea.

He knows the Arab culture he writes about well. Marozzi describes his own Arabic as ‘bad’, and says he originally went to Cambridge to study Arabic literature before history drew him away; he later studied Arabic again in Cairo and has kept it up on his frequent visits to the Arab world since. Straight after this interview, he leaves for Jordan to research his next book.

Yet in an academic climate where, he suggests, white is too often equated with evil, empire and enslavement, and Black or brown with goodness, victimhood and the enslaved, there is little natural space for a book like Captives and Companions. That it was published at all, in the current cultural moment, is almost surprising — arguably even brave.

‘It’s an interesting thought,’ Marozzi says, smiling. ‘I’ve talked about this a lot with my wife, my publisher, colleagues and friends, and a few people had already called it “brave” before you did. But I don’t see it that way. Maybe it was naive or careless of me, but what made me want to tell this story came from my instincts as a historian. Slavery in the Muslim world is a huge story that has never really been told properly. Parts of it have surfaced in academic work on the sultans’ concubines or the eunuchs of the Ottoman harems, but I couldn’t find a single book that told the whole story, with a coherent narrative, for a general reader. That struck me as absurd. Maybe it does connect to the dichotomy you’re describing.’

‘Whenever people talk about slavery, they think first of the Atlantic trade and plantation slavery in the United States. From my earlier books, I knew slavery had a long history in the Arab-Muslim world, but I hadn’t grasped how geographically vast it was, or that it continued almost without interruption from the seventh century right through to ISIS today. I knew this was the book I had to write. My wife, my publisher and I used to joke that a fatwa would be good for sales — they didn’t find it funny, but I’m glad my publisher put the book out without what’s now called a “sensitivity reader”.’

How has the book been received?

‘Mostly positively. But recently, an academic whispered to me at the end of a lecture that “there’s enough Islamophobia in the world without you adding to it.” A student then complained to the university that continuing my lecture series would be “harmful and dangerous for students.” The next day I received an unpleasant email from the same academic, comparing me to “the collaborating academics in Germany in the 1930s who enabled the genocide of the Jews” — because I had published this book.’

Marozzi insists this reaction represents a small, if vocal, minority. A closer look at the book’s reception in the mainstream press supports that. Major outlets including The New York Times and The Times of London ran substantial, largely admiring reviews. Several, however, raised a more serious objection: that focusing on slavery in the Muslim world risks distorting the picture if it isn’t set against the far larger scale of European and American practice. The New York Times review, while complimentary, asked readers to ‘be cautious with what they do with their discomfort’, pointing out that Belgium’s King Leopold II — while claiming his Congo campaign partly aimed to ‘destroy Arab slavery’ — was responsible for a death toll estimated at ten million. That, in other words, was the white man behaving worse still.

Isis contribution

Marozzi opens each of his lectures on the subject with a disclaimer: ‘This is not an attack on Islam, nor a defence of it. This is the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Muslim world.’ He then quotes the historian Robert Tombs: ‘Serious history is not about advocacy or categorisation, but about the desire to understand a world that was very different two hundred, or two thousand, years ago.’

A literary festival in one Gulf state that had previously invited Marozzi withdrew the invitation once the book was published. ‘Parts of the Muslim world simply have no appetite for dealing with the subject,’ he says.

To understand the roots of the problem, Marozzi traces it to a racism that accompanied slavery from its earliest days — medieval Muslim scholars including Ibn Khaldun and al-Mas’udi wrote what he describes as explicitly racist passages about Black people. At a recent lecture at Oxford, one student pushed back hard against this. ‘I think he simply didn’t want to confront something that complicated his assumption that only white Westerners can be racist, past or present,’ Marozzi says. ‘That’s a mistaken view — it misses the roots of a problem that continues today, the same one I witnessed among the rebels in the Libyan desert.’ He recalls a seventy-year-old sheikh he met in Oman, discussing the East African slave trade. ‘He said to me, “What did you expect us to do? We would have starved if we hadn’t gone into this business.” He expressed no remorse. To him it was simply a matter of commerce.’

The subject appears repeatedly in the Quran; Marozzi cites one of the verses most commonly invoked in this context, which frames the inequality between master and slave as divinely ordained: ‘Allah has favoured some of you over others in provision.’ The Prophet Muhammad introduced reforms intended to moderate slavery’s harshest practices, though he himself is recorded as having owned around seventy enslaved people across his lifetime. Marozzi notes that groups like ISIS still cite Quranic verses to justify the rape and enslavement of Yazidi women.

Part of why the subject has drawn so little scholarly attention, Marozzi argues, is that the conventional narrative treats slavery as an exclusively white, European and North American story. ‘Muslims enslaved other Muslims, Africans enslaved other Africans, and Muslims were complicit in the Atlantic slave trade itself — you’ve almost never heard that mentioned. I hope it gets studied properly in the years ahead.’

A Handmaid’s Tale

Islamic-majority countries were among the last in the world to formally abolish slavery: Saudi Arabia only did so in 1962, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania not until 1981. According to the Global Slavery Index, published by Walk Free with backing from the Minderoo Foundation, more than a million men, women and children currently live in conditions of modern slavery across Arab countries — the highest concentration anywhere in the world. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait have the highest prevalence, though the exploitation of migrant workers under conditions widely classified as modern slavery remains common in Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon and Oman as well.

Marozzi opens his book in the Kayes region of western Mali, where slavery is still hereditary and includes masters’ presumed right to rape the wives and daughters of those they hold in bondage. There he met Hamey, who had escaped slavery in 2018. ‘In my ignorance, I assumed that because he’d had the courage to escape, this would be a story with a positive ending,’ Marozzi says. ‘But as he described his situation, it became clear he was in about the worst position imaginable — poor, illiterate, with no means to support himself. He cried without stopping. He knew his own life was effectively over; the only thing he held onto was that his children would never be enslaved. He broke the chains, but the price he is still paying for it is devastating.’

On the evening of 18 August 2018, Hamey was stripped and beaten for hours in front of the entire village by a group of young masters wielding clubs and whips, while the community watched and filmed it on their phones, cheering. This followed years of slavery he had been born into, years during which the masters could rape his two wives and his daughters if they chose — a practice with clear echoes of what medieval Europe called droit du seigneur, the lord’s presumed right to a vassal’s bride. After the attack, the little property he had — a few sheep, a cow — was taken from him. He and his family fled to the outskirts of Bamako, where they now live in extreme poverty.

Marozzi’s interview with Habi Rabah, a former slave in Mauritania, is similarly harrowing — but with one difference: Habi devoted the rest of her life to fighting the practice. She ran for parliament and continues to campaign against a government that, Marozzi says, still does very little to enforce its own laws against slavery.

The British-Jewish orientalist Bernard Lewis once observed that ‘contemporary sensitivities’ — political correctness, in plainer terms — had made it ‘professionally dangerous’ for young scholars to study slavery in Muslim societies at all.

‘In the end,’ Marozzi says, ‘this is an enormous story with real consequences for the present, and it deserves to be treated as history rather than politics. It’s absurd that some people try to frame it as a political statement. You cannot responsibly ignore either the racism in the Muslim world or the slavery that, in various forms, continues there to this day.’

(https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/galleryfriday/2026-02-19/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/0000019c-6b61-d759-a7bf-fffbcfd70000)