Up to 17 million people have passed through the slave trade in the Muslim world since the 7th century. Tragically, the practice lives on. I began my research into the history of slavery in the Islamic world in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in 2020. Yes, you read that right. Not 1820 or 1920, but five years ago, during a harrowing encounter. Sitting cross-legged on the mud floor of a temporary shelter, a man in his late 50s called Hamey told me how he and his ancestors had been enslaved to a slave-owning family in the western region of Kayes for many generations. It was only two years earlier, after a savage public beating, that he’d managed to escape his enslavement. He broke down repeatedly as he described the near-impossibility, now that he was free, of finding somewhere to live and providing for his family in one of the poorest countries on earth.
Slavery is officially illegal in Mali, but it continues, a hereditary and racialised system, as it does in Mauritania and other parts of west Africa. Nor is the problem unique to the region. In recent years, the Arab world, especially the Gulf, has become a hub of modern slavery – defined by Walk Free, the international human rights and anti-slavery group, as “situations of exploitation in which a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power”.
In its most recent report, from 2023, Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index reported that Arab states have the world’s highest prevalence of slaves (10.1 per 1,000 people), ahead of Asia and the Pacific (6.8), Europe and Central Asia (6.6) and Africa (5.2). The countries in the region with the highest numbers of people trapped in modern slavery were Saudi Arabia (740,000), Iraq (221,000), Yemen (180,000) and Syria (153,000).
The history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world is as long as the history of Islam. Whereas the notorious Atlantic slave trade lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries and enslaved 11-14 million Africans, the slave trade practised within the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, lasted from the seventh century until the 20th and enslaved 12-15 million, perhaps even 17 million. Vast numbers of men, women and children were taken overwhelmingly from sub-Saharan Africa, together with Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus during the Ottoman period. More covertly and in much smaller numbers, slavery – if not institutionalised trafficking – continues today.
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