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Weekend///

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February 21 - 22, 2026

As schools take time this month to educate our youth on the scourge of slavery, it's also worth remembering human enslavement was a global problem that didn't end, in some countries, until 1981. Tunku Varadarajan explains in his moving review of Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World by Justin Marozzi.

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“Marozzi offers an engrossing (and depressing) account of this cross-Saharan trade in slaves. It was conducted—largely unmolested—by the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks for 1,400 years, targeting eastern, central, and western Africa. The violent capture, trafficking, sale, and possession of black Africans by Muslims from the north of the continent, the lands of Arabia, and Greater Turkey endured as a practice for far longer than the transatlantic slave trade, and turned many more humans into chattel than did the white European and American slavers and slave-owners of the Western Hemisphere: 17 million, as opposed to 11 million in the New World. And this number doesn’t include the white slaves, taken in the hundreds of thousands by Barbary pirates, from Ireland, Spain, and Italy, and by the Ottomans from Greece, the Caucasus, and the oft-ravaged Slavic lands, about whom Marozzi writes with as much sympathy and humanity as he does those who were abducted from black Africa.”

“No comparison between Western and Muslim slaving is intended to minimize the vileness of the Western slave trade; but it is worth noting that modern-day criticisms of slavery (including demands for reparations) are voiced at a much lower volume by the descendants of those who were at the receiving end of slavery in the Islamic world. Some would say it is voiced hardly at all, which isn’t surprising, given that the heirs and offspring of slaves who live in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Morocco do not enjoy the constitutional protections—or the spirited, rights-based political discourse—that blacks in the United States and elsewhere in the West enjoy. And there appears to be limited political will in countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Mali, Benin, and Nigeria to hit the moneybag sheikhs and emirs of the Arab world (or even President Erdogan of Turkey) with a hefty bill for slavery reparations. Will we ever see a Black Lives Matter riot on the streets of Riyadh or Ankara?”

“Slavery in the Muslim world has demonstrated, he tells us, ‘extraordinary longevity,’ continuing well into the modern era. ‘As late as the early 1950s, the first workers in the Qatari oil sector were enslaved men who were required to surrender as much as 90 per cent of their earnings to their owners.’ The last countries to formally abolish slavery are all of the Muslim world: Iran (1929), Yemen and Saudi Arabia (1962), Turkey (1964), Oman (1970), and, most notoriously, Mauritania, which abolished slavery as recently as 1981—12 years after man set foot on the moon. (The last country to outlaw slavery in the Western Hemisphere was Brazil, in 1888.)”