Islam’s Black Slaves

"I read this book when it came out and did a radio interview with the author. A few weeks later he asked, very kindly, if I wanted to be the facilitator when he discussed the book at the Hay-on-Wye book festival. Well, I’d never been to Hay-on-Wye and I also didn’t really appreciate who Ronald Segal was, and I was going to a party that weekend, so I said ‘no’. I then learnt who Ronald was and really regretted it. Ronald was one of the great intellectual campaigners of the anti-apartheid movement. He was born in the 30s in Cape Town and was involved with people like Oliver Tambo and the ANC. He became a great writer about South Africa’s history and returned to South Africa in 1994 having been invited by the ANC to help with the first free elections. He also founded the Penguin African Library. When I was a small boy those little brown Penguin books about Africa were really important to me. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But, getting back to this book, what it does is to tell the story of the other half of the Atlantic slave trade. I think we’re now very familiar with the story of the transportation of an unknowable number of millions of Africans through the Atlantic trades to the Americas. What we are less familiar with is what happened on the other side of Africa, on the East Coast. Eastern Africa was the hub of a slave trade that was already centuries old when the first Europeans landed in West Africa. It drew enslaved Africans up into the Islamic world and into a slave system that was very different from the one that we’ve come to know in the Caribbean and United States. This book tells that story in incredible detail, painting a picture of forms of slavery that most of us are unfamiliar with. It is in some ways an historical balance. It is the other side of the tragedy of slavery and it has left a legacy on the Islamic world and Asia, just as much as slavery has shaped the modern Americas. As in the West, a negative view of blackness and dark skin colours continues to this day in parts of the Islamic world, especially Arabia, which is one of the world centres of skin bleaching. But Islamic slavery was different from slavery in the West. What you get in the Islamic world is enslaved people rising out of slavery into positions of power, sometimes military power. The slave wives of important men were on occasions able to become extremely powerful people, so you haven’t got the situation as in the Americas where to be black is to be a slave and to have little chance of rising out of that status. So there is a different approach to race in the sense that slavery was not regarded as a category only applicable to one race: it was a status defined by the law and by religion."