Nobody wants to talk about the Muslim slave trade

0A painting from 1870 of a British naval officer overhauling an Arab dhow in Zanzibar – Getty Images/Hulton ArchiveThe government of Malawi is sponsoring a project to commemorate the slave trade that ravaged the country and to recall the actions of the British Empire which fought it. This is surprising only because we have become so used to history being abused for political and financial reasons that a statement of plain fact seems shockingly subversive.

Slave raiding, led by Muslim slave traders, long plagued east and central Africa, as the demand for African slaves in the Islamic world was enormous and long lasting. A Saudi lady told me recently that although she herself had had an Australian nanny, her parents had been brought up by slave girls.

The relationship between slavery and the Islamic world is one that many people shy away from. The leading historian of the subject was heckled in Oxford for talking about it. All religions – zealous readers will correct me if there are exceptions – have at times accepted or practised slavery. Jewish and Christian scriptures regard it as routine. The New Testament has little to say on the subject. The Church of England is self-flagellating over its relatively minor – if not largely imaginary – involvement in 18th-century slave trading. Even the Quakers were for a time eager slave traders.

The Islamic world long had slavery at its core. Religious approval of slavery meant that it was a fundamental feature of society, with ownership of slaves and concubines a sign of status within living memory.

So when the British Empire – motivated from the late 18th century by a powerful progressive and usually Christian anti-slavery lobby – came into contact with Islamic slave traders, the result was potentially explosive. British politicians, diplomats and officials realised this. They knew that slavery was deeply rooted in Africa and the Ottoman realms, and that it could only be gradually eliminated, for example by ending its legal status in British territories to permit enslaved people to free themselves. When dealing with autonomous Middle Eastern states, Britain generally used diplomatic pressure and inducements to reform.

The traffic in newly captured slaves was a more feasible target, though most of it was taking place in central and eastern Africa far removed from British authority. Slave trading was organised and militarised, and its leading figures became hugely wealthy and powerful, notably “Tippu Tip” (real name Ḥamad al Murjab&imacr), who owned 10,000 slaves and died only in 1905.

A few intrepid pioneers laboured to bring the horrors of the trade to public notice, and hoped that their presence could deter the worst violence and perhaps force British intervention. Among them were the two most celebrated Victorian heroes, the working-class Scottish missionary David Livingstone and the Scottish soldier Charles Gordon.

Livingstone wanted to stop the appalling ravages of slave raiders and the tribal violence they caused across central Africa, in which whole villages were being wiped out. “The way in which they murder the men and seize the women and children” – for sex slavery or castration – “makes me sick at heart.” He wrote optimistically in 1859 that the settlement of “twenty or thirty good Christian Scotch families with their minister and elders” could stop the trade. Gordon, equally religiously motivated, was killed in the Sudan trying single-handedly to resist a slave-traders’ uprising led by a Sunni religious leader, Muhammad Ahmed, “the Mahdi”.

It required more than a few individuals to change the situation, and eventually British and other European governments did intervene after an international conference in 1884 – with very mixed consequences. Notoriously, King Leopold of the Belgians set up a private-enterprise colony in the Congo, which used the worst methods of slavery, exposed by a British colonial official, the Irishman (and later nationalist) Roger Casement.

As the Malawi government has reminded us, when the territory of Nyasaland was placed under British protection in 1891 some effective action was taken against slave raiders. This included construction of protective forts, naval action against slave ships, and diplomatic and occasionally military pressure, such as against the slave entrepot Zanzibar. But while slavery was reduced, it was never eliminated. It leaves a legacy of racism in the Arab world today.

Those campaigning for reparations for the Atlantic slave trade claim that it was different and worse than other forms of bondage. They stress that it was “chattel” slavery, based on racism, and even claim that it is the origin of white racism today. It is surely morally dubious to claim, even by implication, that some forms of slavery were relatively innocuous.

But even if that were so, the Muslim slave trade was as horrific as the worst. The fact that a tiny number of survivors rose to power and wealth as soldiers, officials or concubines cannot obscure the vast scale of cruelty, the deaths in long forced marches, the killing of the unwanted, the sexual abuse of girls and the agonising deaths of boys genitally mutilated to become servants.

As the Malawians have said, this story – well known to the Victorians – is forgotten or deliberately neglected. They are right to remind the world of it.

Robert Tombs is emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge

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