In his tome L’Esclavage dans le Monde Musulman (Slavery in the Muslim World), published in French by Amsterdam, M’hamed Oualdi, a professor at Sciences Po Paris says he wants to “cut through the endless controversy surrounding this supposedly taboo subject”.

Oualdi, also an associate professor of history and Near Eastern studies at Princeton University in the US, knows his subject inside out, having already published two books and a research project on slavery in the Muslim world.

First, in 2011, came Esclaves et Maîtres (Slaves and Masters), a study of the mamluks, mercenaries and slaves of European origin who converted to Islam and served the governors of the Ottoman province of Tunis from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Then, in 2020 he published Un Esclave Entre les Empires (A Slave Between Empires), which looks at the transition from Ottoman tutelage to French colonisation in Tunisia, based on the life of one of the last mamluks of Tunis, Husayn, between the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the meantime, Oualdi has also published a research project on the narratives of slaves (white prisoners, Black slaves and Ottoman servants) during the abolition era in 19th-century North Africa.

His work is part of a growing interest in the issue throughout the Arab world, including literature, cinema, academic works and museums. So while the “Islamic” slave trade is still subject to censorship under certain authoritarian political regimes and is still relatively neglected by publishers and the media, it is no longer a taboo subject.

Ideological and political instrumentalisation

Slavery in the Muslim World is broader in scope but still concise (237 pages), covering the first slave trades at the end of the 7th century and post-slavery trauma in Arab and Muslim societies. Above all, however, it is the work of a historian, a “rigorous clarification” of the subject, well-documented to quell any myths or other ideological and political issues.

Oualdi shows that the clichés about the “Islamic slave trade” are a way “for certain writers” to exonerate European slavery (particularly the Atlantic slave trade) by pointing the finger at “Muslim slavery”.

Two specific points support the historian’s argument. First is the very notion of the “Eastern slave trade” or “Islamic slave trade”, which in reality encompasses disparate trades (the Saharan slave trade, the East African slave trade on the Swahili coast, and the Red Sea slave trade), and which fails to take into account the enslavement of Muslims by other Muslims (Berbers, Circassians, Shiites) within the Muslim worlds, but which is also linked to global trade.

Millions of victims

This homogenisation leads to a second point: the famous battle of statistics between the “Islamic slave trade” (which spanned more than 12 centuries) and the Atlantic slave trade (four centuries). French historian Olivier Grenouilleau has put forward the figure of 17 million victims of the Eastern slave trade compared with 12 million slaves who were victims of the Atlantic slave trade, while claiming to want to avoid falling into a “competition of remembrance”, but suggesting all the same that, after all, Westerners are less evil than Arabs.

While there were indeed millions of victims on both sides, precise estimates are difficult to obtain. M’hammed Oualdi argues that the “slave trade organised by Europeans in the Indian Ocean” has never been added to the Atlantic slave trade.

However, the author does not play down the Eastern slave trade. Rather, he aims to show the complexity and heterogeneity of this practice, which originated in different regions and was regulated differently according to political and sociological systems and Islamic legal schools of thought.

White slaves and ‘racialisation’

Oualdi also identifies three main types of slaves in the Muslim world:

• Domestic servants
• Concubines (or so-called royal slaves)
• Agricultural slaves

It was among the “royal slaves” that the highest number of Europeans or Caucasians who had converted to Islam and joined the Ottoman harems as well as the administration and military apparatus (mamluks) could be found.

Some of these mamluks had extraordinary destinies: there was the concubine who became the mother of a sultan and a sultana herself (Chajarat ed-Or, who ruled Egypt and Syria in the 13th century); or those who became sultans in medieval Egypt. Via this group, Oualdi also examines the origins of “racialisation”, in which white slaves – very much in the minority – were differentiated from Black slaves, who were in the majority.

While reviewing at length the process that led to the abolition of slavery, both by Muslims and Europeans (which in part fuelled their imperialist conquests), the historian studies the traumas left by slavery, and its persistence, in Arab-Muslim societies. He establishes a direct link between contemporary anti-Black racism and slave trade and suggests that the slave trade is one of the sources of the region’s political authoritarianism. It’s a fascinating, informative and uncompromising read.

 L’esclavage dans le monde musulman (The Slave Trade in the Arab-Muslim World), by M’hamed Oualdi, published in French by Amsterdam editions, 256 pages, €19).