About captives and companions, Justin Marozzi

Sometimes the important books appear in the indifference of the clerics, as if their truth too naked immediately excluded them from the field of the saying.

Justin Marozzi’s latest work. For example, Captives and Companions, belongs to this breed of discreet revelations, ignored because they disturb the moral scheduling of time. Nevertheless, It was necessary a historian of his scale. In addition, both a writer and surveyor of the lands of Islam, to show the evidence that everyone is bent not to see: slavery in the Muslim world was neither marginal, nor accessory, nor abolished in a frank manner, even less condemned.

Marozzi does not make a controversy. However, He is content to bring back the facts, and that is what makes his book unbearable. Therefore, Caravans of children captured in the Sahel. In addition, Christian concubines sold in barbarism, eunuchs mutilated about captives companions, justin marozzi in Cairo, to the slave markets filmed in Libya in 2017 or with servile castes always active in Mauritania, everything is there, with the sobriety of a man’s look. Therefore, By retracing more than thirteen centuries in continuous trafficking. Similarly, from the Omeyyad Caliphates to the postcolonial states of the Gulf, the author recalls that this system is not an accident on a journey, but an institution religiously founded, culturally assimilated, legally tolerated. Moreover, The Koran frames it, the hadiths regulate it, the jurisconsults the legitimacy.

What the Muslim world has never produced, and Marozzi shows it is an equivalent of the Western abolitionist movement. Consequently, There was neither WilberForce, Victor Schœlcher, nor rebellious Quakers in the name of consciousness. Meanwhile, And for good reason: we do not denounce an order wanted by God. However, Certainly. some Ottoman firmans eventually prohibited the slave markets, often under the pressure of European about captives companions, justin marozzi powers; Certainly, here and there, ulemas pleaded for the humanization of the fate of captives. But slavery has never been bound to intrinsically unfair. He was therefore not abolished by moral start, but by strategic adaptation. And nothing prohibits the return. as the Islamic State has proven in Iraq and Syria, with its public sales of Yezidies women, its theological arguments and its textbooks of slave jurisprudence. Hell is not always in the margins.

What strikes is less the brutality of the system than the silence that surrounds it. In France, this silence has become a doctrine. Our textbooks. our official commemorations, our subsidized documentaries speak of the Atlantic trafficking with reason, but never of the oriental trafficking. We teach Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, the slave ships who left for the Antilles, but never Zanzibar, Cairo or Timbuktu. We evoke the colonists and the planters, but never the barbarism raïs about captives companions, justin marozzi or the slave sultans of the Sahel. It is not an omission: it is a choice.

This choice is that of the moral left, which prefers to accuse it to risk named the other. It is that denouncing Arab-Muslim slavery would be to recognize that there were not on the one hand the white executioners. on the other the brown victims, but a global system, in which all the civilizations were compromised. This would ruin the dogma of a guilty West and an eternally innocent south. This would destroy the beautiful victim symmetry which allows the Republic to flage itself at reduced costs.

In this about captives companions, justin marozzi refusal there is self-hatred that borders on self-mutilation. A hatred that prefers selective repentance to complex truth. A hatred so strong that it pushes some to defend the indefensible. such as these academics who excuse Islamic trafficking in the name of its cultural particularisms, or who salute the possible social promotion of certain slaves, as if a Mamluk who has become sultan could absolve the chains of ten million anonymous.

Marozzi never falls into these flaws. He writes to the height of a man, restoring the lost voices, the forgotten cries, the silences dug in stone. It tells the story of a denied humanity, often twice: first by the sequence, then by erasure. It gives their name to captives and companions, to these beings that official history has deemed unworthy of memory.

This book, in other times, would have caused a scandal. Today, he is ignored. And it may be about captives companions, justin marozzi even more serious. Because we no longer live in the era of controversy, but of indifference under control. It is therefore up to us not to let this book fall into silence. It is up to us to make a weapon, not against peoples, but against amnesia. Muslim slavery is not a closed affair. It is not a peripheral detail. It is an open scar on the face of the world. And as long as this wound is not looked at, no memory has meaning.

Balbino Katz – Wind and tides columnist

Photo credit: DR (Illustration Photo)
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