The Shame of Islam

Everyone who thinks and writes about Africa--and we are happily more numerous than we used to be--sooner or later comes up with thoughts about the Atlantic trade in slaves and its momentous consequences. The hideous sufferings of the so-called Middle Passage, imposed on helpless captives who somehow managed to survive grim weeks and even months at sea until their vessels could reach the West Indies and at least embark on the process of becoming Americans, have been recovered by an array of historians with more or less sympathetic analysis. Ronald Segal, after giving us an excellent book about the Atlantic trade, “The Black Diaspora,” has turned his attention in “Islam’s Black Slaves” to the even larger subject of slavery and slave-trading in eastern latitudes far removed from the Atlantic. He does this with his usual competence, careful judgment and a shrewd accuracy.

“Islam’s Black Slaves” is concerned with large portions of a history that is little taught, given its sheer complexity and the enormous scope of historical reference, and because its overall framework concerns the highly various nature of “eastern” enslavement. This leads Segal rapidly into the development of medieval Islam and its Arabian beginnings, and thus into a brief review of the corresponding rise and gradual extension of early African state systems, which, broadly, are now well understood to have derived from the progress of Iron Age societies.

All this involves Segal in a variety of controversial issues, but he keeps his nerve in carrying us through matters such as the nature of the Ottoman Empire and its structures of government, which is well done, although he may have cast his net of inquiry too wide by also including chapters ranging from Iran, Libya and East Africa to slavery’s persistence in Mauritania, Somalia and elsewhere. His readers risk a measure of indigestion, but what remains admirable is Segal’s eagerness to tell and to know “what happened” in all this history, and to do this from a standpoint that is notably civilized.

He tends to take difficult textual problems without dismay, such as, for example, the much-discussed and frequently debated question of the number of people who were enslaved at various times (I remain a skeptic in this matter of numbers, but I can see that it has to be discussed and allowed its place in any serious account). Given the huge geographical dimensions of this trade and its underpinning cultures of social coercion, little accuracy can be expected, and little accuracy is what our sources have customarily given us. Certainly the overall numbers that we can compute or guess at were large, even very large, and vast over long periods of time, and in this Segal carefully gives us a guide.

“In all the many centuries of the Islamic trade,” he writes, “it was in the 19th century that the largest numbers of black men, women and children were enslaved,” and the largest number of other blacks killed in the process. This was the case despite--or, arguably, because of--increasing Western pressures against the trade. Certainly, the raiding and ruthless war for slaves was conducted “on a scale that seemed at times to be frantic.”

Even so, how many? As a careful historian, Segal cannot avoid the question, and does not try to avoid it. He gives us many various figures from recent Western guesses, and the difference in these immense totals often turns only upon the difference between “many” and “very many”--and one should prefer, in a perhaps rather cowardly way, to leave it at that. By the end of the 18th century, according to the cautious and undoubtedly expert professor Paul Lovejoy, “a rough total of 9,420,000 slaves might have been dispatched from black Africa to the markets of Islam.”

One of the difficulties in getting any accuracy in the matter of numbers resides in the language we have used, and in the usages of our often fragmentary sources. In 1796, Segal tells readers, “a British traveler reported a caravan of 5,000 slaves departing from Darfur,” and no doubt was in good faith. But how did that traveler manage to count those captives in the heat and dust and scurry of those distant hills? Darfur, in western Sudan, as I myself knew it, some two centuries later, was no easy place to stand around in, let alone make accurate count of the passing traffic. The slave trade, Eastern or Western, was a ferocious affair, and terribly costly in life and social welfare. Segal is right to give us the scale of its probable numbers, even if a skeptic may have preferred not to believe them.

There is also the difficulty of the terms that have been generally used. This was made clear to me, or at any rate fairly clear, a long time ago when I was concerned with journalistic inquiries on this same subject. Little was securely known about these matters in those distant colonial times, and frank discussion of numbers, of any numbers, was at least discouraged. “You cannot ask questions on any of these matters,” one was warned by august persons in colonial authority, “and if you do, you will be smartly invited to return across the frontier. And that will be that.” But, of course, one did ask questions of any source likely to be helpful: as I did, traveling in Hausaland, of one of the guardians of the palace of the immensely prestigious emir of Kano, an ancient city in northern Nigeria.

This old gentleman was customarily to be found, seated in the dust, outside one of the doors of the great ruler’s palatial residence. I managed to get myself admitted to conversation and was proceeding rather well, as I incautiously thought, in the matter of the status and duties of palace personnel. We embarked upon my carefully memorized list of authorities and their customary attributes, until we finally reached questions of actual social status.

All this was done and indeed had to be done in English, given my disgracefully defective fluency in the Hausa language, and my elderly informant became impatient, not to say scornful. He grew all too understandably tired of insistent questions as to the nature of this or that person’s secretarial skills. Considering my persistence, as to who was a slave and who was not, he spat carefully into the dust and said: “Slaves all of them. They are all slaves.” And so our conversation ended on a sour note. There is, after all, a limit to patience with ignorance. And, of course, he was right: Are we not all the slaves of God?

Segal himself is never short of patience. He proceeds from Sudanese habits of slavery to comparable customs in the distant reaches of Islam’s conquests, across the East and the Far East, until he makes new landfalls in Europe, and in this way he brings us back to the more familiar history of the colonial period in the 19th century. And then, as civilization again takes hold, we go through the intrusions and invasions of latter-day imperialism until we reach the great onset of republican independence after and during the 1950s. Slavery ceases gradually to be recognizable, save for exceptions here and there, and Segal can bring this narrative to a close. His last chapter, by no means an afterthought, is devoted to a brief review of “America’s black Muslim backlash” and has interesting things to tell even while these no longer belong to the main concerns of his book. This said, it will be right to congratulate a valiant author on “Islam’s Black Slaves,” work that is well weighed and well judged.