At first glance, Hamey is deceptively normal. Squat and dark, with deep brown eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, he looks like thousands of other middle-aged men in Bamako, Mali’s dusty, sweat-soaked capital. In fact, Hamey was once a slave, a condition he endured until 2018 — when he was in his mid-fifties — and which his family had suffered for as many generations as he could remember. Finally, Hamey escaped, fleeing the village where he’d been publicly whipped and beaten. But in Bamako, he faced new challenges, struggling to provide for two wives and 12 twelve children, together living in a squalid temporary shelter. “I have too much pain in my heart,” he told me, when we met in 2020. “I’m closer to despair than hope.”
Modern slavery is not limited to remote corners of West Africa. There are reportedly 1.1 million people living in modern slavery in the US, and 122,000 in the UK. Yet the numbers are clear, with the Arab world, and especially the Gulf, now a hub of modern slavery in the 21st century. Echoed in other corners of the Islamic world, Mali included, it speaks to a practice with deep cultural roots — and to how different societies choose to deal with their past in strikingly different ways.
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.
ISIS, of course, is the exception rather than the rule: no one would argue that pro-slavery views are widespread across the Muslim world today. As far back as 1990, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation issued the non-binding Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which denied the legitimacy of the institution. Like the ISIS example implies, meanwhile, contemporary voices in favour of slavery tend to be limited to the conservative or extremist fringe. In 2017, for instance, the Kuwaiti cleric Saalim bin Saad al-Taweel declared on his YouTube channel that slavery was “one of the virtues of Islam” since it provided infidels with the opportunity to convert to the faith. A few years earlier, the Saudi government cleric Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan offered an unequivocal defence of slavery in a secretly recorded lecture. “Slavery is a part of Islam,” he declared, dismissing those who argued otherwise. “Whoever says such things is an infidel.”
“ISIS, of course, is the exception rather than the rule”
As that clandestine recording implies, 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.
So how is the Islamic world reckoning with the legacy of slavery? It’s a mixed picture, and not entirely encouraging. There may no longer be “a conspiracy of silence”, as Murray Gordon argued in Slavery in the Arab World in 1989. But a recent study of the life of an African slave in 19th century Iran begins with the words: “The history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written.” Writing last year, Zeinab Badawi came to a similar conclusion. While Arab societies benefited enormously over many centuries from “the blood, sweat and tears of African labour”, there has been no public debate on reparations. “The silence,” Badawi adds, “must be broken.”
Yet if much of the Middle East continues to look the other way, a new generation of scholars has been making important inroads, debating slavery, slave-trading and abolition in books, academic articles and journalism. One good example is Nabil Matar, who’s deftly exposed the legacy of Mediterranean corsairing. The pirates captured hundreds of thousands of Europeans — and Europeans captured large numbers of Muslims, in a multifaith free-for-all — right across the early modern period.
Qatar, for its part, has also started to address the issue directly — albeit tentatively. In 2015, and with Doha under fire for exploiting migrant workers ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it unveiled the Bin Jelmood House. A former mansion, whose courtyard once teemed with enslaved Africans waiting to be sold, the site is now a museum exploring slavery in a global context. According to the museum, the story “begins in enslavement but ends in shared freedom and shared prosperity”. Pretty saccharine stuff, in other words, and hardly a genuine reckoning. You hear similar things elsewhere. “What should we have done?” is how one Arab in the Gulf put it to me the other day. “Everyone was doing it. That was business. Without it we would have starved.”
All the while, survivors of slavery across the Islamic world are battling to reclaim their stolen lives. Last year, I was in Nouakchott, the windswept capital of Mauritania and a repeat offender when it comes to hereditary racialised slavery. Here, in a tiny, sand-blown home of breeze blocks and corrugated metal, I met a remarkable woman called Habi. Like Hamey, she too had escaped decades of enslavement, explaining that it was only once she had been rescued, by her brother in 2008, that she realised she had never truly felt human before. “I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to fighting slavery,” Habi said, her eyes blazing with defiance. But given where countries like Mauritania are right now, she may have her work cut out.
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Captives And Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World is published by Allen Lane.
