While America grapples with its own dark past of slavery, a massive chapter of history gets buried by academics who fixate on Western guilt.
Justin Marozzi’s eye-opening book, Captives and Companions, shines a light on the Islamic world’s slave trade, spanning over a millennium with unmatched scale and savagery. This isn’t ancient news, but it is a wake-up call for historians.
Marozzi estimates that from the 7th century to the 20th, up to 17 million Africans and Europeans were enslaved in Muslim lands, dwarfing the transatlantic trade’s 11-15 million.
Brutal raids targeted black Africans for labor and white Europeans for markets in North Africa and the Middle East. The sheer numbers reveal a system that caused more deaths and misery than often admitted.
In the opulent courts of Abbasid Baghdad, slave concubines like the poet ʿInān rose to fame, dazzling with wit and beauty while navigating deadly risks.
These women, often captured from distant lands, became cultural icons but remained property, their lives hanging on a ruler’s whim. Yet, their stories mix triumph with tragedy, showing resilience amid cruelty.
Raiders from Barbary coasts struck fear across Europe, hitting places like Devon, Cornwall, and even Iceland in 1627, where pirates abducted over 400 people into lifelong bondage.
Witnesses recounted horrors: families torn apart, villages burned, and captives sold far from home. This white slavery terrorized coasts for centuries, a truth sidelined in today’s narratives.
Castration created eunuchs for harems, with Victorian-era Sudan alone seeing 35,000 boys die yearly from botched operations to supply 3,500 survivors.
so stop making only about America for a few years. These bastards have been doing it for centuries.
Delusions of Adequacy 