Slavery and Islam: The Whole Story
2026-08-06
In this Conflicted Conversation, Justin Marozzi discusses his new book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.
Justin traces the long, varied history of slavery in the Islamic world, arguing that slavery could sometimes offer remarkable paths to freedom and power, but that these exceptions never erased the violence of capture, ownership and exploitation—or the uneasy entanglement of abolition with Western imperialism.
Justin explains:
The scale and longevity of slavery in the Islamic world
The spiritual status of enslaved people in early Islam
The Quran, manumission and the legal regulation of slavery
The Islamic conquests and the expansion of slave-taking
Anti-black racism and the Zanj Revolt in Abbasid Iraq
Concubines, eunuchs, and sexual slavery
Mamluks, Janissaries and elite forms of servitude
Christian and Muslim slave-raiding across the Mediterranean
Ottoman abolition and its entanglement with Western imperialism
Modern slavery, Daesh and hereditary servitude in Mauritania
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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An ex-Al Qaeda jihadi turned MI6 spy and a former monk turned filmmaker, have been embedded at the heart of conflicts in the Middle East. Together Aimen Dean and Thomas Small unpack the realities of war, fundamentalism and their global implications through first-hand experience.