The Islamic world is astonishingly silent on its gruesome history of slavery

In his new book, The Big Payback, the British comedian Sir Lenny Henry has called on the UK Government to pay £18tn in reparations for slavery to black British people.

Having spent the past five years researching a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world, what struck me especially about Sir Lenny’s intervention (apart from the figure of £18tn, which is equivalent to between six and seven times the size of the UK’s economy), was the continued dominance of the transatlantic trade in public discourse about slavery.

While the West has engaged in critical discussions over this egregious phenomenon for many years, the same cannot be said for swathes of the Middle East: a region in which slavery and the accompanying trade endured without pause from the seventh to the 20th centuries.

As the Sudanese-British journalist Zeinab Badawi has argued in An African History of Africa, while Arab societies benefited enormously from enslaved African labour for more than a millennium, there has been little, if any, meaningful examination of the subject in Arab states, and no public debate on reparations. “The silence must be broken,” she writes.

Under pressure from African and Caribbean states, together with organisations like the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the debate continues in the West, but no such discourse is underway in the Muslim world.

The reality is that there is barely any public discussion in Arab countries, Turkey or Iran, of the historical practice of slavery, let alone the issue of reparations.

The inability or unwillingness to reckon with the legacy of slavery is not a marginal issue. The Atlantic trade accounted for between 11–14 million enslaved Africans, the corresponding trade with the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, was probably responsible for 12–15 million, possibly as many as 17 million if India is included. That is without Malaysia and Indonesia.

Such reckoning as does exist remains in its infancy. In 2015, when Qatar was under pressure for its treatment of migrant workers ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it turned Bin Jelmood House, once a holding area for enslaved East Africans waiting to be sold, into a museum memorialising slavery.

The museum says it explores the role Islam played in providing guidance for the humane treatment of the enslaved and the ultimate abolition of slavery‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬. “The story in Qatar begins in enslavement but ends in shared freedom and shared prosperity,”‬‬‬‬‬‬ it declares. This gloss fails to address the appalling reality of slavery and its legacy.

In the West, governments and institutions often follow the lead of academics and activists. Although it is no longer true that the study of the history of slavery in Ottoman society and the wider Muslim world is characterised by “a deafening silence”, as the historian Ehud Toledano argued a generation ago, it is fair to say that, with some honourable exceptions among a courageous new generation of scholars, in both the West and the Islamic world itself, it remains little more than a murmur.

A recent study of the life of Fezzeh Khanom, an enslaved African woman in 19th-century Iran, to give one example, begins with the words: “The history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written.”

As the Moroccan-born historian Maha Marouan has written: “Talking about slavery in Morocco is taboo.” The subject is not even included in educational curricula. “It is also difficult to talk about slavery because we are a Muslim nation who enslaved other Muslim nations – a practice that is strictly prohibited in Islam.”

In Istanbul I interviewed a young Turkish historian who described how a professor brushed her off when she sought his advice on a doctoral thesis on Ottoman war captives. “Our ancestors treated their slaves very well,” he told her. “Don’t waste your time with this.”

Earlier this summer in Oman, once a powerful slave-trading empire, I talked to a man in his 70s who demonstrated a similar sense of denial. “Everyone criticises the Arabs for taking African slaves,” he said. “What should we have done? Everyone was doing it. That was business. Without it we would have starved.”

In some quarters, merely discussing the history of slavery in the Islamic world, never mind broaching reparations, brings about immediate accusations of Islamophobia. The historian Dahlia Gubara argues that histories of slavery and the slave trade in the Middle East constitute a “liberal incitement to racial discourse”. It is an academic way of saying “nothing to see here”.

This month, I have been giving a lecture series on “Slavery and Islam” in Oxford, hosted by the Pharos Foundation, a research institution and educational charity.

After my introduction to the historical, legal and theological underpinnings of slavery in the Islamic world, I was disappointed but not surprised to hear that one student had complained to the university. While academic freedom was very important, he wrote, it would be “potentially harmful to students” if the lectures continued.

In a stronger reaction I was accused of Islamophobia and likened to the “compromised academics” of 1930s Germany who enabled the genocide of the Jews.

I mention this reaction from a small, but vocal, minority in the context of the ongoing conversations in the West about reparations. Such discussions will continue, and governments such as our own and those of the US, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal and others will face strong external pressures to apologise and pay up.

Yet any meaningful and historically worthwhile international debate on reparations must necessarily include Arab states and Turkey. As a 2003 conference in Johannesburg on the “Arab-led Slavery of Africans” noted, there was a “collective amnesia about Arab enslavement of Africans,” despite it representing the largest and longest “removal of any indigenous people in the history of humanity”. Tidiane N’Diaye, the Franco-Senegalese anthropologist, calls it a “veiled genocide”.

In Daring to be Free, a powerful new history of black resistance in the Atlantic world, the Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh ends his reflections on reparations with the words of Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist: “power concedes nothing without a demand.” That may be true in the West. In the more autocratic Middle East, however, the conversation has yet to even begin.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]