Justin Marozzi on Slavery in the Islamic World

The fact of the matter remains that while the last 50 years have resulted in huge sort of strides in understanding more and more about the Atlantic slave trade, the slave trade in the Islamic world has been massively neglected by comparison. So the fact of the matter is we know so much less. It's exciting in the sense of historical research that more and more scholars are looking into this, but they have a lot of ground to catch up on. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. When we talk about slavery in the Western world, in the United States, for very good reason, we think about the horrible history of slavery in the Atlantic.

the horrible history of slavery in particular in the United States. But slavery is a much broader human phenomenon, one that existed in ancient Egypt, in ancient Rome, and ancient China, and one that, when you are looking at the numbers, claimed about as many, but potentially slightly more victims in the Islamic world than it did in the Americas. Well, to discuss the history of slavery more broadly and particularly in the Islamic world. I invited onto the podcast Justin Marozzi.

Justin is a distinguished historian, a journalist who has worked for the BBC and many other outlets. and the author of many fascinating books about the Muslim world, including most recently Captives and Companions, A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World. We talked about what the origins of slavery in that part of the world where how Mohammed both built on pre-existing practices of slavery and tried to regulate them in his religious writings. We talked about where slaves in the Islamic world were quote unquote recruited from, where they were captured from black Africans in sub-Saharan Africa who often had a racially inferior status.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (60 minutes, 9,722 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.