Captives and Companions

Slavery in the Islamic world has a long, rich and controversial history. Unlike the notorious and shorter-lived Atlantic slave trade, its story is much less known. In the earliest days of Islam, Arab Muslims enslaved men, women and children as the spoils of war. Later, and for many centuries, young boys were imported to imperial Islamic courts in enormous numbers. Some were castrated to serve as eunuch guardians of sacred spaces, from the imperial harem of Istanbul to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. In the twentieth century, more than a thousand years later, their cosmopolitan counterparts were still entertaining Ottoman sultans. Yet it was Africa which bore the brunt of the Islamic world’s insatiable demand for slave labour. ‘Captives and Companions’ takes the reader on an extraordinary historical journey across deserts, continents and oceans, from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu, Istanbul to the Black Sea.