Captives and Companions

I said to myself “This king would be worth 30 dinars in Oman in the [slave] marketplace, and the seven [companions] 160 dinars, and they have clothes worth 20 dinars, so that would bring us at least 3,000 dirhams without any risk attached.”

Ismailawayh the sailor, in the year 923 CE

Slavery has been a hazard for humankind since civilization began.

The unfortunate king in the quote above was from 10th century East Africa. On a diplomatic mission to a neighbouring kingdom, he had booked passage on an Omani boat only for the captain to decide that he would make more money by enslaving rather than transporting him.

The king is never heard of again and it is reasonable to assume he lived out the rest of life in misery and died in captivity.

Justin Marozzi tells this story of his enslavement and the many, many other stories like it in Captives and Companions: a History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.

The age old condition

Oman was typical in the Islamic world in that slavery was woven into their society and economy. It would be misleading to say that this had been the case since the inception of Islam, because slavery had been going strong since well before that. As Marozzi puts it:

Muslim Arabs, surrounded by the ancient slaving civilisations of the Byzantines and the Persians, inherited traditions of slavery from their pagan Arabian forebears and then adapted and refined the institution in an Islamic context.

Justin Marozzi, Captives and Companions

The middle passage or the desert route?

But nevertheless the scale of slavery throughout the Islamic world since the seventh century until the twentieth (and in some case still the twenty first) century is shocking to a modern reader with modern foibles, especially because it is not part of the Western historical consciousness in the same way as the Atlantic slave trade. The total number of people enslaved and trafficked however was of the same magnitude - easily more than 10 million individuals in both cases.

Also like the Atlantic slave trade, racism based on relative darkness of skin colour was deeply ingrained in the Islamic world, with similar prejudices and dehumanising attitudes - prejudices which are still in evidence today.

A capital of slavery

Back to Oman where slavery, and in particular enslaved black Africans, remained a central pillar of society for centuries. Just how central is indicated by the fact that in 1839 the Omani sultan Said moved his capital 3,500 kilometres away to the island of Zanzibar, just off the coast of what is now Tanzania.

Zanzibar was part of the Omani empire, which had been created by ousting the Portuguese from their foothold in Oman, and then their trading posts and forts in East Africa in the late 17th century.

The attraction of Zanzibar? It was the main sea route out of East Africa and provided easy access to hundreds of thousands of slaves from the interior, captured from their villages in violent raids and forced to carry goods such as ivory down to the coast. From there they were packed onboard waiting boats and sold in slave markets, just like the nameless king a thousand years before.

Moving the Omani capital to Zanzibar was a remarkable step, equivalent to say the Spanish monarchy moving its capital from Madrid to Senegal, for the greater convenience of enslaving others.

It wasn’t until 1970 that the Omani state banned slavery.

Old habits

Oman was not the last Islamic state to outlaw slavery, which was Mauritania in 1981 - becoming also the last country in the world to make slavery illegal. Marozzi reports that the law here is only sporadically and weakly enforced however, with an estimated 150,000 to one million slaves (counting them is very difficult) still in servitude now in 2025. Hereditary slavery is common.

What’s in the book?

Captives and Companions does a brilliant job of covering a vast area and a huge span of time from 600 CE up to the modern day. While my introduction just briefly touches on Oman, Marozzi also visits:

• 🇩🇿 Algeria
• 🇪🇬 Egypt
• 🇲🇷 Mauritania
• 🇲🇦 Morocco
• 🇴🇲 Oman and Zanzibar
• 🇹🇷 The Ottoman empire
• 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
• 🇸🇩 Sudan
• 🇸🇾 Syria

On a more thematic basis he delves into:

• Slave concubines
• Slave eunuchs
• Slavery at the beginning of Islam
• Slave soldiers and the Mamluks
• Abolition of slavery
• Trans Saharan slave trade
• The Mediterranean and the Christian powers’ own slaving activities

In other words, he covers a lot!

Handled with care

While the subject - slavery in the Islamic world - could be seen as potentially incendiary, Marozzi writes in a calm and respectful way of Muslim societies over time, for example noting that:

It is just as wrong to call this phenomenon the Muslim trade as it would be to call its Atlantic version the Christian slave trade.

Justin Marozzi, Captives and Companions

At the same time he doesn’t minimise the suffering, misery and death that was caused by slavery. I felt the balance here was perfectly struck.

A rounded picture

Personally I found the book to be excellent in contextualising the more problematic (and inevitably better selling) book White Gold, by Giles Milton, published in way back in 2004, but which I reviewed in 2023 year. Whereas Milton could be accused of producing catnip for the alt right in his fundamentally myopic adventure story, Marozzi’s work is a far more meaty affair: dog food for the rest of us perhaps.

A key reason why I liked the book, and the source of its meaty flavour, is the effort that Marozzi makes to present a wide variety perspectives, reflecting the wide variety of different experiences an enslaved person, and their owners, could have:

... there was no single institution of slavery but rather multiple forms of servitude encompassing both genders, all ages and many ethnicities.

Justin Marozzi, Captives and Companions

Comparing concubines

To take one example: in the chapter on slave concubines, the author introduces us to some of the most celebrated female slaves in the Abbasid court, who were written about with admiration long after their deaths. We have Basbas (Caress) who was valued at an incredible 17,000 gold dinars, more than 500 times the price of the East African king at the start of this review. And then in some detail the lives of Inan, Arib and Mahbuba who were admired for their wit, poetry and of course beauty.

But Marozzi also sets out the much more fleeting evidence of a concubine who died of illness far from home, and whose grave marker didn’t even record her name - she was described simply as the mother of Mohammed. Given the vast multitude of anonymous slave concubines who were not megastars, this latter figure must surely be the more representative.¹

Writing style

Concubines and Companions is written with the ordinary reader in mind: colourful characters are sketched out in each chapter, the narrative moves along at a decent pace, and the author sprinkles in some of his own anecdotes from time to time.

It did take me a little while to get going though, and it was a chapter or two before I tuned into the rhythm of the writing.

Content driven

But what really makes this book shine though is the content. I think Marozzi has done a brilliant job of selecting and arranging a huge range of different stories that when put together give you a powerful sense of the phenomenon of slavery in this part of the world over the last thousand years.

It is also crucial in helping us to understand dynamics we still see at play in the world today.

For example the conflict in Sudan and the emergence of South Sudan only makes sense in the context of hundreds of years of North Sudanese enslaving their darker skinned neighbours to the south. This was revived as government policy under Omar al Bashir, president from 1993 to 2019, for whom “slavery... was an effective weapon of war against his black southern Sudanese compatriots.”

Conclusion

A history of slavery is a history of the world, and Captives and Companions brings the Arab and Islamic world to life through the lens of enslaved people.

Because this story is not often told - and even more rarely told with such balance and a broad empathy - I found it a valuable, important and fascinating book. Read it!

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