The relationship between slavery, ‘race’, and Islam has often been subject to academic controversy and polemics, which tend to revolve around an implied comparison with racial slavery in the Americas. In Bernard Lewis's seminal work on this question, he argued that racial prejudice against so-called ‘blacks’ is not apparent in seventh-century Arabic or in the Qur'an, but that it developed as a consequence of Muslim imperial expansion and the widespread importation of enslaved people into Muslim lands from sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ¹ Others have contested this view, arguing that racism makes little sense in a social and historical context in which social position was defined genealogically and where phenotype was highly variable along social hierarchies. There are fundamental differences between the forms of slavery practiced in majority-Muslim societies – with emphasis on domestic and military slavery – and the plantation complexes in the Americas. It is surely right to highlight the distinct forms of slavery and ‘racial’ ideas in the history of Muslim-majority societies; but, to suggest that they are completely separate and incomparable with American and Atlantic contexts impoverishes the academic study of these questions by pretending that the differences render comparison impossible and inappropriate.

Happily, Chouki El Hamel's recently-published book on race and slavery in Morocco shows that there is much to learn about this topic by an unapologetic application of the tools of Atlantic World slave studies. The work has three principal arguments. The first is an effort to show that the core texts of Islam are not guilty of justifying slavery, but instead treated it as an existing practice with the eventual goal of abolition (p. 48). It was, according the El Hamel, the codification and spread of Sunni legal schools that shaped the concept and practice of slavery in ways that made it a well-established institution. Over time, the importance of slavery in the region led to the development of ideologies of enslavement and racialized denigration of some of the enslaved. In this, El Hamel follows Lewis in understanding the Muslim institutional support for slavery as an ideological response to significant slaveholding in Muslim-majority societies.

The second, larger, argument is focused on the history of what El Hamel calls the trans-Saharan Diaspora of blacks who constituted the enslaved, people of slave descent, and (perhaps) an indigenous black population in southern Morocco reduced to subordinate social status over time. The center of this story is the dramatic enslavement of all the blacks of Morocco by Mawlay Isma`il beginning in the 1670s to create a slave army. Because these actions created controversy among Muslim scholars in Fez, some of whom paid for their opposition with their lives, there is a rich record of letters and legal opinions that El Hamel uses to demonstrate fairly precisely how slavery was explicitly racialized in Morocco at this moment. Mawlay Isma`il argued that all blacks living in Morocco were slaves de jure, if not de facto. Those black Moroccans living as free people had, according to Isma`il, taken advantage of moments of political disorder to flee their masters. As such, even those descendants of slaves who no longer remembered slave pasts were to be classed as slaves in the present. The intended effect of this explicitly racial argument was to equate blacks with slaves. El Hamel traces the subsequent history of this black army and the dispersion of blacks throughout Morocco as a consequence of Maawlay Isma`il's initiative.

El Hamel's third argument draws again from the scholarship on the trans-Atlantic African Diaspora as a means of recovering the historical consciousness of black Moroccans. In a striking chapter at the end of the book, the lyrics of distinctively black Moroccan songs known as Gnawa are contrasted with slave songs recorded in the United States. The effect is a very convincing juxtaposition of the experiences of enslaved people in similarly diasporic circumstances, expressing longing for a lost Africa (in the Moroccan case rendered as Sudan) and lamenting for the meanness of slaveholders. El Hamel argues that the memory of forced migration across the Sahara is preserved in the distinctively African form and lyrics of Gnawa music. Yet black Moroccans do not seek to return to ancestral homelands south of the Sahara; instead, they want to be accorded full rights as free Muslims within Moroccan society.

This is a very welcome book that accomplishes a number of things. It provides the first overview of the history of black Moroccans and situates this history within a comparative framework of the trans-Atlantic African Diaspora. El Hamel demonstrates that, although there was no explicitly abolitionist anti-slavery movement that emerged in Morocco before the nineteenth century, there was nonetheless room within the intellectual tradition of Islam in Morocco to criticize and contest the practice of slavery. What this book shows is that the racialization of slavery and of black people in Morocco was the consequence of a contested historical conjuncture, not the natural and essential consequence of inherently flawed North African, Arab, or Muslim thought.