From the time of Moses up to the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. But if the Middle East was the last region to renounce slavery, how do we account for its -- and especially Islam's -- image of racial harmony? This book explores these questions. The research presented in this book was first undertaken as part of a group project on tolerance and intolerance in human societies. The group project was never completed but the material gathered for the project on Islam stimulated the book's study of race and slavery in the Middle East, a subject that appears to have so far encouraged scant study. -- Publisher description.

In the 19th century hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly migrated northward to Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean destinations, yet little is known about them. The nine essays in this volume examine the lives of slaves and freed men and women in Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean.

...a comprehensive portrait of slavery in the Islamic world from earliest times until today...D>--Arab Book World

This edited volume determines where slavery in the Islamic world fits within the global history of slavery and the various models that have been developed to analyze it. To that end, the authors focus on a question about Islamic slavery that has frequently been asked but not answered satisfactorily, namely, what is Islamic about slavery in the Islamic world. Through the fields of history, sociology, literature, women's studies, African studies, and comparative slavery studies, this book is an important contribution to the scholarly research on slavery in the Islamic lands, which continues to be understudied and under-represented in global slavery studies.

Traces the history of the Islamic slave trade from its inception in the seventh century through its history in China, India, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Spain.

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.