Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World by Justin Marozzi
Published by Allen Lane, Penguin-Random House, isbn 978-0241-52215-8
Review published in TLS, October 2025
This is a vivaciously told, ambitious narrative that drags the reader (half hypnotised by horror) through 1,500 years of slavery as practiced across the breadth of the Islamic world. Marozzi has worked as a Press Attache for miisters in Iraq, Somalia, the Gulf and Libya. He also knows the physical geography. This is a project that has been brewing for the last twenty-five years, kick-started by an intrepid camel journey following a caravan route across the Eastern Sahara.
One of the great merits of this work, is that it shines spotlights of research on those areas marginal to the powerful Muslim Empires at the centre of our world. Marozzi provides detailed coverage of the Jihad states of the Sahel and Sudan, the Swahili and Omani maritime traders as well as the caravan trails that cross the Sahara to unite the Maghreb with West Africa. These communities are a vital statistical source, for over the 19-th century, due to the presence of numerate customs officers and politically engaged foreign consuls, they provide firm figures for the size of this millennial trade.
From 1750-1850, it is thought that 74,000 enslaved Africans were shipped westwards across the Atlantic a year, equalled by the slave trade within Muslim lands marched across the Sahara or shipped out of the coasts of East Africa. Marozzi also helps us understand that these numbers are but a percentage of the true suffering. We hear how slave raiders, when they descended on a village in the African interior, routinely burnt houses and storage barns (to flush out the entire population) then usually all the adult men who had valiantly struggled to defend their community (who would be too embittered to ever become trusted slaves). The most useful trading item for a slave merchant were eleven to fourteen year old boys and girls. The violence that many of these young captives suffered and witnessed, including rape or genital mutilation (to create male eunuchs, a naturally expensive commodity as only 10% survived the operation) is deeply and continually disturbing.
Testimony to the brutal (and recent )experiences of the enslaved people of Central and East Africa is a vitally element of this book, but Marozzi makes us aware that sub-Saharan Africa was only one of many frontier-zones from which slaves were extracted. In earlier centuries, the number of white slaves from Europe and brown slaves from Central Asia equalled those extracted from Africa. Crecent-shaped cavalry armies, numbering six thousand men, regularly swept the steppes of Ukraine and Central Asia and the valleys of the Balkans, to harvest slaves well into the 16-th century. Slave boys were traded-up until they reached the hands of government agents purchasing the next generation of soldiers, and often shipped across the Levant by western merchants. For be it the 9th century Abbasid court at Samarra, or the Mameluke Sultanates of Cairo and Damascus (13th to 15th centuries) or the armies of Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco or Muhammad Ali of Egypt, the authority of each of these regimes were upheld by standing armies of professional slave soldiers, between 15,000-70,000 strong.
It was technically illegal for a Muslim to enslave practicing Muslims, but throughout 1,500 years of Islamic history this has always been neatly sidestepped by defining your neighbour as an apostate or a heretic. Which was certainly the attitude of the Sunni Turkmen who continued to raid the Shia villages of Iran well into the 19th-century as well as the Wahhabi who struck against anyone in Arabia not in complete agreement with their narrow creed.
But there is a surprising back story that rolls against this tidal wave of suffering and blood. Like the classical world from which it was born, Islam always accepted slavery as one of the harsh but necessary realities of this world, alongside divorce. At its minimal least, the institution of slavery allowed a prisoner of war their life, rather than to be slaughtered in the hour of defeat. And just as it was within the classical world, so it was with the Islamic world, be it at Troy or alongside the Zenj rebels, you fought for more than your life. It was the duty of a man to die fighting to protect his city or his clan, in the full knowledge that in defeat all their women would become sexually available slave-concubines.
But from his earliest days, even before he became a Prophet, Muhammad had done his best to humanise this grim institution. Later he encouraged manumission as an act of Islamic piety that will be remembered by God, and protected some of the rights of slave mothers and slave children. Three of his most trusted companions: his adopted son Zayd (who commanded more armies than any other Muslim), Bilal (enslaved out of Ethiopia) who was given the honour of calling the public to prayer, and the questing mystic scholar-savant Salman (from Iran) were all slaves freed by the direct action of the Prophet Muhammad - who then trusted, befriended and employed them. So just as in the classical world, the bounds between a freedman and his old master, seem to have been intensified, not ended by manumission. But for all the many astonishing tales of the slaves who became Sultans, and the concubines who rose to become queens, (never available to an enslaved African working on the cotton fields or sugar plantations of the America’s) Marozzi never leaves the equation of suffering in any doubt. Though I appreciated the way he doubted the motives of so many self-serving British politicians and journalists. Or the blinkered abolitionists fighting for the freedom of a Muslim slave but ignoring the worse conditions of British ‘indentured labourers” recruited from China and South Asia.
Tahsin Agha was one of those many slaves who rose to high position within an Islamic society. But he confessed to his interviewer in 1938 that there could only be one title for his autobiography, which had to be SCREAM, for there was not a day when the memory of his enslavement and the simultaneous murder of his mother did not haunt him.
“One of the great merits of this work, is that it shines spotlights of research on those areas marginal to the powerful Muslim Empires at the centre of our world. ”