me of you over others in provision.” Allah had evidently favoured the Prophet Muhammad, whose tastes were ecumenical — his 70 slaves included Copts, Syrians, Persians and Ethiopians.
The sexual exploitation of female slaves by their male owners is permissible too, counsels the Quran. This furnished the Ottoman sultans with an alibi for their harem of enslaved concubines — and in our time armed Islamic State with a sanction for the rape and enslavement of Yazidi women in northern Iraq. As Marozzi rightly argues in this history of slavery in the Islamic world, it is disingenuous to deny the Islamic State its Islamic character, as Barack Obama once attempted. These are not secular fanatics but Muslim fundamentalists. For centuries Quranic justifications were invoked to defend slavery as a cultural tradition — as if it were no more troubling than morris dancing.
Small wonder, then, that Muslim nations were among the last to abolish it — Saudi Arabia in 1962, Oman in 1970, Mauritania in 1981. But the practice persists. In Saudi Arabia, according to the Global Slavery Index, there are 740,000 people living in modern slavery. Marozzi opens his book in the Kayes region of western Mali, where hereditary slavery persists, as does the right of masters to rape the wives and daughters of their slaves.
And why sex slavery in Syria is conducted by men quite convinced of their Islamic virtue.
Also:
The historian Bernard Lewis once lamented that, thanks to contemporary sensibilities, it had become “professionally hazardous” for bright young things to probe slavery in Muslim societies.