Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (review)

This book is a largely narrative history of African slaves in the Muslim world, from the earliest centuries of the faith to the present. As Ronald Segal notes in his preface, it is intended as a companion volume to his earlier work, The Black Diaspora, which dealt with the evolution of African communities in the New World resulting from the Atlantic slave trade. Like that earlier work, Islam's Black Slaves is a wholly synthetic book, which seeks to make the larger body of (primarily English language) scholarship on African slavery and the Muslim world available to a wider general audience. On the face of it, any attempt to bridge the all-too-often large gap between the academy and the wider reading public is an admirable goal. Segal's book, however, is riddled with such structural, historiographical, and theoretical shortcomings that his achievement of this objective is in serious doubt.

To be fair, Islam's Black Slaves provides a gripping narrative account of slavery in at least parts of the Muslim world from the middle ages to the present. Starting with the birth of the faith, Segal's book attempts a largely chronological description of the traffic in human beings across Islamic history. He also seeks to provide a broad geographical sweep, thus devoting chapters not only to the so-called Islamic "heartland" of the Middle East, but also to Africa, Asia, and the Muslim dominions of Europe as well. His work begins with the early expansion of the faith and ends with an epilogue dedicated to the place of "black" Islam in twentieth-century America. It is a tale packed with enormous detail, copious anecdotes, and, at times, wrenching tales of human cruelty—facts that are more than enough to satisfy any general-history buff, or undergraduate for that matter. While such narrative structure provides a comfortable and familiar space for both the author and his audience, the result is a broad but, in the end, largely superficial account of involuntary servitude within Muslim societies. What it fails to supply is any sense of the deeper social meaning or consequences of involuntary servitude within Islamic contexts. What did it mean for an African to be enslaved by a Muslim? What did it mean for Muslims to enslave Africans? Was the experience of enslavement in any way inherently different for Africans than for members of other races? These are important issues, which Segal fails to engage in even at the most basic level.

A further weakness of the work is Segal's barely rudimentary grasp of the current historiography surrounding his subject-matter. This weakness unfortunately extends to his understanding of Islamic history and African slavery. To his credit, he attempts to lay out a basic chronology of early Islamic history in order to situate the reader in space and time; however, while citing from a great deal of current scholarship on the development of Islam, he fails to distinguish between that which is widely accepted and that which is still the subject of debate. Most notably, he states that the conventional "view of historians" of the rise of Islam stemming from social, political and economic inequalities has been "persuasively challenged or qualified" by the work of Patricia Crone. Professor Crone's thesis contends that the mission of the Prophet Muhammad was born from a political agenda to unite the Arab tribes of the peninsula, "rather than [from] any message of spiritual value or social reform" (p. 16). What Segal fails to recognize is the incredibly controversial nature of Crone's 1987 book Meccan Trade and Islam and the fact that her conclusions are still hotly contested by most other scholars of the early Islamic period. While a seemingly minor point, Segal's highly selective reading of this debate is symptomatic of his interpretation of most other historiography throughout the book. The most egregious example of this...