# Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean Slave Trades ## Intro People sometimes say "Islam started slavery before Christianity did." That is not true, and it is worth getting right. Slavery is far older than both faiths. It was written into the law codes of ancient Mesopotamia, it existed in Egypt, the Law of Moses regulated servitude in Israel, and the Roman Empire ran on slave labor. Christianity was born inside that Roman world. Islam was born six centuries later in Arabia, where slavery was already normal. There is a true claim hiding behind the false one. From the 7th century onward, Muslim states and Muslim merchants built long-distance trades that carried enslaved Africans across the Sahara Desert, up the Nile, over the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. These trades ran for more than a thousand years, and they were moving Africans to North Africa, Arabia, Iraq, Persia and India roughly eight centuries before European ships began the Atlantic slave trade in the 1400s. So the question "who practiced slavery first?" has one answer (neither, it is older than both), and the question "who first built large-scale trades in enslaved Africans?" has a different one. Getting this right matters for Christians too. Christians held slaves in Rome, and Christian nations ran the Atlantic trade. Christians also led the movement that ended it. Scripture condemns the one who steals a person, the one who sells him and the one who holds him ([Exodus 21:16](/codex/exodus-21-16/)), and that verdict applies to every trade on this page, whoever ran it. ![Engraving of a line of African captives yoked by the neck in forked poles, driven by armed slave traders in robes through palm country, one guard raising an axe over a captive who has fallen](/codex/assets/slave-coffle-livingstone-last-journals-1874.jpg) *"Slavers Revenging their Losses," a coffle of captives driven toward the East African coast, engraved from David Livingstone's sketches of what he saw in 1866. From Horace Waller, ed., The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa (London, 1874). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.* ## In full The **trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades** (often grouped as the "Oriental" or Islamic-world trades, in Patrick Manning's term, beside the "Occidental" Atlantic trade) were the networks by which enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa were moved north across the Sahara to the Maghreb and Egypt, east across the Red Sea to Arabia, and by sea from the Swahili coast and the Horn of Africa to the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Persia and India. They operated from the 7th century to the 20th, in a few places into the second half of it. Three claims need to be kept apart: 1. **Slavery as an institution** is ancient and nearly universal. It long predates both Christianity and Islam, and neither faith introduced it. 2. **Chattel slavery** (persons held as heritable property, salable at will) was practiced by Rome before either faith existed. Christianity arose inside a chattel-slave society; Christianized Rome kept the institution. Islam arose in a society that already had it, and classical Islamic law recognized, regulated and permitted it. 3. **Large-scale long-distance trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans** was built first by Muslim-ruled states and merchant networks, from the 7th century onward. The European Atlantic trade began in the 1440s and moved enslaved Africans to the Americas from the early 1500s. Scholarly volume estimates for the Islamic-world trades rest on thin evidence and vary widely; totals for the whole period from the 7th to the 20th century commonly run from about 10 to 18 million people. The Atlantic trade carried about 12.5 million in roughly three and a half centuries. The defensible comparison is therefore that the Islamic-world trades were of the same broad order of magnitude in total, far longer in duration, and less intense per year than the Atlantic trade at its height. ## Chronology | Period | What happened | Note | |---|---|---| | Ancient Near East, 3rd to 2nd millennium BC | Mesopotamian law codes regulate slaves; the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BC) punishes anyone who helps a slave escape or harbors a runaway | Slavery is assumed everywhere in the ancient world | | Egypt and Israel | Israel remembers itself as "bondmen in Egypt"; the Mosaic law regulates Hebrew servitude, frees Hebrew servants in the seventh year, makes kidnapping a capital crime (Exodus 21:16) and shelters runaways (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) | See [Chattel Slavery vs Biblical Servitude](/codex/chattel-slavery-vs-biblical-servitude/) | | Rome, Republic and Empire | Full chattel slavery on a vast scale; captives of war and the children of slaves supply it | The world into which Christianity was born | | 1st century AD | Christianity arises inside Roman slave society; Paul calls slave-traders lawless (1 Timothy 1:10) and sends Onesimus back to Philemon as "a brother beloved" (Philemon 16) | The church admits slaves as full members | | 4th to 6th centuries | Christianized Rome keeps slavery; Constantine gives legal force to manumission performed in church; Gregory of Nyssa preaches against owning human beings at all | Christian reform is real but partial | | 7th century | Islam arises in Arabia, where slavery already exists; the Quran and early Islamic law regulate it and commend manumission. Early in the Arab conquest of Egypt, the treaty known as the Baqt with Christian Nubia includes, by the Arabic accounts, an annual delivery of several hundred slaves | The beginning of the Islamic-world trades out of Africa | | 7th to 19th centuries | Trans-Saharan caravan routes carry enslaved Africans to North Africa and Egypt; Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes carry them to Arabia, the Gulf, Iraq, Persia and India | Runs alongside a gold, salt and textile trade | | 869 to 883 | The Zanj revolt in lower Iraq: enslaved laborers, many of East African origin, rise against the Abbasid caliphate and hold territory for some fourteen years | One of the largest slave revolts in history | | 16th to 19th centuries | The Ottoman Empire imports slaves from Africa, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe; Barbary corsairs of North Africa enslave Europeans captured at sea and on coasts | Robert C. Davis estimates 1 to 1.25 million Europeans enslaved by Barbary corsairs, 1530 to 1780 | | 1444 onward | Portuguese ships sell African captives at Lagos in Portugal; papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 authorize Portugal to reduce "Saracens and pagans" to perpetual servitude | See [Papal Bulls and Slavery](/codex/papal-bulls-and-slavery/) | | Early 1500s to 1860s | The Atlantic trade carries about 12.5 million Africans toward the Americas | See [African Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade](/codex/african-participation-in-the-atlantic-slave-trade/) | | 19th century | Omani-ruled Zanzibar becomes the hub of the East African trade, supplying its own clove plantations and markets overseas; Livingstone's reports from the interior publicize the trade in Britain | The Zanzibar market closes under British pressure in 1873 | | 1807, 1833 | Britain abolishes the slave trade (1807), then slavery in most of its empire (1833) | The Royal Navy then patrols against the Atlantic and East African trades | | 1846 | Tunisia abolishes slavery | Among the first Muslim-majority states to do so | | 1847, 1857 | Ottoman measures: the Istanbul slave market is closed (1847) and a firman prohibits the trade from Sudan to Egypt and across the Red Sea (1857), with the Hejaz exempted | Enforcement was nominal in many places | | 1865 | The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery in the United States | The import trade had been banned from 1808 | | 1888 | Brazil abolishes slavery, the last nation in the Americas to do so | | | 1890 | The Brussels Conference Act, signed by European powers and the Ottoman Empire among others, targets the African land and sea trades | | | 1962 | Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolish slavery | Oman follows in 1970 | | 1981, 2007 | Mauritania abolishes slavery (1981) and makes it a crime (2007) | Anti-slavery groups report that hereditary servitude persists there | ## How the trades worked **Across the Sahara.** Caravans from the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin crossed to markets in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. The routes also carried gold, salt, cloth and other goods, and the human traffic was one part of a wider commerce. Captives were taken in raids and wars, sold as tribute, or bought from African rulers and merchants, as in the Atlantic trade. Travelers in the 19th century reported very heavy losses in the desert crossing, though no reliable overall mortality figure exists. **Up the Nile and across the Red Sea.** Captives from the upper Nile, the Ethiopian highlands and the Horn of Africa were taken to Egypt or shipped from Red Sea ports to Arabia, including the Hejaz. **Across the Indian Ocean.** From the Swahili coast and its hinterland, captives were shipped to southern Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Persia and western India. Communities of African descent in India (the Siddi, also called Habshi) trace their origins partly to this trade. Some Africans rose to great power there; Malik Ambar, born in Ethiopia and sold as a slave, became regent of the Ahmadnagar sultanate in the Deccan in the early 17th century. **What the enslaved were used for.** Uses differed from the Atlantic plantation system. Many were domestic servants, concubines, soldiers, guards, porters and laborers. The Zanj of 9th-century Iraq were put to work clearing salt flats near Basra, and 19th-century Zanzibar ran clove plantations on slave labor. Boys were castrated to supply eunuchs for courts and households, an operation that killed many of those subjected to it. **Fewer descendants.** Historians note that the Islamic-world trades left a far smaller visible African diaspora than the Atlantic trade did. Reasons commonly given include the high share of women and girls among the captives, castration of many males, high mortality, manumission, and absorption of freed people and their children into the surrounding population. ## How many people: the estimates and the debate Every figure in this field is a reconstruction. Ships' manifests survive for many Atlantic voyages; nothing comparable survives for caravans and dhows. Honest writing gives ranges and names the source. - **Ralph A. Austen** produced the census work most later tables build on: "The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census" (in Gemery and Hogendorn, eds., *The Uncommon Market*, 1979), with companion studies of the Red Sea trade and of the 19th-century East African trade. He stressed that these figures are built by inference from scattered evidence. His later *Trans-Saharan Africa in World History* (Oxford University Press, 2010) sets the trade in its wider setting. - **Paul E. Lovejoy**, in *Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa* (Cambridge University Press, 1983; later editions 2000, 2011), tabulates the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and East African exports by period alongside the Atlantic trade, drawing on Austen. - **Patrick Manning**, in *Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades* (Cambridge University Press, 1990), models the three trades together and argues that their combined drain held down population growth across large parts of Africa. - **Ronald Segal**, in *Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora* (2001), a popular history, gives roughly 1.4 million people forced across the Sahara in the 17th and 18th centuries together and about 1.2 million in the 19th century alone. - **Murray Gordon**, in *Slavery in the Arab World* (1989), discusses the Baqt tribute and the scale of the 19th-century North African trade. - **John Wright**, in *The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade* (Routledge, 2007), gives a narrative history of the desert routes from the early Islamic period to their end. - **Totals.** Estimates for all Islamic-world trades out of sub-Saharan Africa, 7th to 20th century, commonly fall between about 10 and 18 million (the range reported from Segal and from William Gervase Clarence-Smith's *Islam and the Abolition of Slavery*, 2006). The Senegalese anthropologist Tidiane N'Diaye, in *Le génocide voilé* (2008), argues for a figure near the top of that range. **Reading the numbers fairly.** - **Duration.** The Islamic-world trades ran about 1,300 years; the Atlantic trade about 350. - **Intensity.** The Atlantic trade at its 18th-century peak moved far more people per year than the trans-Saharan routes ever did. - **Total.** Depending on the estimate chosen, the Islamic-world total is somewhat smaller than, about equal to, or somewhat larger than the Atlantic total. A claim that it was "far larger" leans on the high end of a contested range; a claim that it was "small" ignores the low end too. - **Who was enslaved.** Neither trade enslaved only Africans. Muslim-ruled states also enslaved Slavs, Caucasians and Europeans; Christian-ruled states also enslaved Muslims, Native Americans and other Europeans. ## The legal framework in classical Islamic law Classical Islamic jurisprudence (all four Sunni schools, and Shia law with differences of detail) treated slavery as a lawful institution and regulated it closely. Stated fairly: - **Who could be enslaved.** The main lawful source was non-Muslim captives taken in war, along with children born to an enslaved mother by someone other than her master. A free Muslim could not lawfully be enslaved, nor could a protected non-Muslim subject (*dhimmi*). Conversion after capture did not by itself bring freedom. - **The rule was often broken.** Raiders and dealers routinely enslaved Muslims of sub-Saharan Africa. Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu, in a treatise written in 1615, ruled that blackness was no ground for enslavement, that only unbelief was, and that enslaving free Muslims of the Sudan was unlawful. His ruling shows both the legal limit and how often it was ignored. - **Manumission as virtue and expiation.** The Quran praises freeing a slave (Quran 90:13) and prescribes it as expiation for accidental killing (4:92), for broken oaths (5:89) and for a form of repudiation of a wife (58:3). Many Muslims freed slaves as an act of piety. - ***Mukataba*.** A slave could contract to buy his or her freedom by installments, a practice grounded in Quran 24:33. - ***Umm walad*.** An enslaved woman who bore her master's child became an *umm walad*; in the majority view she could no longer be sold and became free at his death, and the child was free. - **Concubinage.** The law permitted a master sexual access to his female slaves (the Quranic phrase "what your right hands possess", for example 23:5-6). This is the subject of [Islamic Sex Slavery Objection Defeater](/codex/islamic-sex-slavery-objection-defeater/). - **Race.** The law itself did not make slavery racial. In practice, as Bernard Lewis argues in *Race and Slavery in the Middle East* (Oxford University Press, 1990), the word for slave came in many Arabic-speaking regions to be associated especially with black Africans, and racial contempt grew with the trade. The fair summary is that classical Islamic law limited, humanized and encouraged ending individual enslavements while permitting the institution and its supply by capture, and that the law never called for its abolition. Muslim abolition came in the 19th and 20th centuries, largely under outside pressure, with Muslim reformers making their own case from the sources (see Clarence-Smith). ## The Christian record, stated honestly A Christian who uses this history against Islam owes the same honesty about Christian history. **What tells against Christians.** - Christians owned slaves in the Roman Empire, and the Christianized empire kept slavery in its law. - Medieval Christian Europe enslaved and traded people across the Mediterranean, including Muslims and other Christians. - The papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 authorized Portugal to enslave "Saracens and pagans" and opened the door to the Atlantic trade. - The Atlantic trade was run by nations that called themselves Christian, and Christian ministers in the Americas wrote defenses of slavery from the Bible. Slaveholders went as far as printing a censored Bible for slaves (see [Slave Bible](/codex/slave-bible/)). **What tells for Christians.** - Gregory of Nyssa, in the 4th century, preached that no one has the right to own a human being, made in God's image and redeemed by Christ, and is one of the earliest writers in any tradition to condemn the institution as such. - **Bartolomé de las Casas** is a partial case. He fought the enslavement of Native Americans and early on suggested African labor as a substitute. Later, in his *History of the Indies*, he repented of that advice and judged the enslavement of Africans as unjust as that of the Indians. - **Quakers** protested slavery in writing as early as the Germantown petition of 1688, and nine of the twelve founders of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787) were Quakers. - **The Clapham Sect**, a circle of evangelical Anglicans including [William Wilberforce](/codex/william-wilberforce/), Zachary Macaulay and Henry Thornton, carried the parliamentary campaign that ended the British trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833. - Black Christians, [Frederick Douglass](/codex/frederick-douglass/) among them, used Scripture against slaveholding Christianity. See [Christian Abolitionist Movement](/codex/christian-abolitionist-movement/) and [Black Christian Agency](/codex/black-christian-agency/). - British naval action against the East African trade and the closing of the Zanzibar market in 1873 owed much to evangelical pressure and to Livingstone's reports. The Anglican cathedral in Stone Town was built on the site of the old market. The honest verdict: Christians did evil on a vast scale in the slave trade, and Christians also led the first sustained movement in history to abolish slavery itself. The second fact does not erase the first. It shows which of the two was faithful to the text: the Bible that condemns "menstealers" ([1 Timothy 1:10](/codex/1-timothy-1-10/), ASV) and declares "there can be neither bond nor free ... for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus" ([Galatians 3:28](/codex/galatians-3-28/), ASV). ## In debate ### What "Islam started slavery" gets wrong - **It is chronologically false.** Slavery is attested in the earliest law codes, more than two thousand years before Muhammad. Rome practiced chattel slavery before both Christianity and Islam. - **It invites an easy rebuttal.** Any informed opponent will point to Rome and to slavery among Christians before the 7th century, and the speaker loses credibility on the true point that follows. - **Narrowing it to "chattel slavery" does not save it.** Rome was a chattel-slave society, and Christianized Rome remained one, before Islam existed. ### The stronger, accurate claim State it this way: 1. Slavery predates both Christianity and Islam. 2. Islam, like the Christian empire before it, did not abolish slavery; classical Islamic law permitted it, regulated it and encouraged individual manumission. 3. Muslim-ruled states and merchants built large-scale trades in enslaved Africans across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean from the 7th century, about eight centuries before the Atlantic trade. 4. Those trades lasted into the 20th century, and several Muslim-majority countries abolished slavery only in the 1960s or later. 5. So "who practiced chattel slavery first?" and "who first built large-scale African slave-trading networks?" have different answers, and the second answer is the Muslim world. ### Answering the reverse claim The reverse version runs: "Christianity is the religion that enslaved Africans; Islam is the black man's religion." It has a history, from Edward Wilmot Blyden's 19th-century argument that Islam suited Africans better than missionary Christianity, to the Nation of Islam. Answer it with the same accuracy: - **Islam also enslaved Africans,** for longer than the Atlantic trade lasted, and Arabic and Ottoman sources document it. A faith cannot be exempted from a history its own states and merchants made. - **Christianity was in Africa before Islam.** Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia and North Africa were Christian centuries before the Arab conquests; the Ethiopian official of [Acts 8:27](/codex/acts-8-27/) was baptized in the first generation of the church. See [Christianity in Africa](/codex/christianity-in-africa/) and [Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater](/codex/christianity-is-the-white-mans-religion-objection-defeater/). - **Africans were among the first believers of both faiths.** Bilal, an Ethiopian-born freedman, was Islam's first caller to prayer. Neither faith is a "white" or "black" religion. - **Grant the hard part.** Christian nations ran the Atlantic trade and Christian ministers defended it. Say so without hedging. Then show that the abolition movement came from inside the church and argued from the Bible. - **Do not trade one tribal story for another.** The point is not that Muslims were worse sinners than Christians or the reverse. Both histories contain this evil, and the Bible condemns it in both. **Tone.** Be polemical on the position and tender toward the person. Someone who says "Islam is the black man's religion" is often carrying real grief over the Atlantic trade and what followed it. Take the grief seriously and correct the history. ## Honest limits - **All volume figures are estimates,** some resting on very thin evidence. Use ranges and name the scholar. - **"Islamic slave trade" is shorthand.** The trades were run by states and merchants who were Muslim, often against the letter of their own law. The label describes who ran the networks, not a claim that every Muslim jurist approved every practice. - **"Arab slave trade" is partly inaccurate.** Many traders were Berber, Persian, Turkish, Swahili, Somali, Indian or sub-Saharan African. African rulers and merchants supplied these trades as they supplied the Atlantic one. - **Comparisons of total size are contested.** The safe claims are about duration, about which came first, and about the late date of abolition, not about one trade being far larger than the other. ## Scholarship Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record. - Ralph A. Austen, *Trans-Saharan Africa in world history* (Oxford University Press, 2010). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15440627W) - W. G. Clarence-Smith, *Islam and the abolition of slavery* (Oxford University Press, 2006). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5359452W) - Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, *The Uncommon market* (1979). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18334506W) - Bernard Lewis, *Race and slavery in the Middle East* (Oxford University Press, 1990). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1157036W) - John Wright, *The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade* (Routledge, 2007). [doi:10.4324/9780203962817](https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203962817) ## See also - [Slavery](/codex/slavery/), the search-landing page for the slavery cluster - [African Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade](/codex/african-participation-in-the-atlantic-slave-trade/), the African supply side of the Atlantic trade - [Chattel Slavery vs Biblical Servitude](/codex/chattel-slavery-vs-biblical-servitude/), why Mosaic servitude is not the institution these trades practiced - [Four Pillars of Chattel Slavery](/codex/four-pillars-of-chattel-slavery/), kidnapping, commodification, domination and caste as a diagnostic - [Islamic Sex Slavery Objection Defeater](/codex/islamic-sex-slavery-objection-defeater/), the concubinage permission in Islamic law - [Biblical Slavery Objection Defeater](/codex/biblical-slavery-objection-defeater/), the full defeater on biblical slavery - [Why Didnt God Ban Slavery Objection Defeater](/codex/why-didnt-god-ban-slavery-objection-defeater/), the "regulated, not abolished" question from the biblical side - [Christianity Is the White Mans Religion Objection Defeater](/codex/christianity-is-the-white-mans-religion-objection-defeater/), the race-of-the-faith charge - [Deuteronomy 28-68 Slave Trade Prophecy Objection Defeater](/codex/deuteronomy-28-68-slave-trade-prophecy-objection-defeater/), the Hebrew Israelite reading of the Atlantic trade - [Papal Bulls and Slavery](/codex/papal-bulls-and-slavery/), the 15th-century bulls behind Portuguese enslavement - [Christian Abolitionist Movement](/codex/christian-abolitionist-movement/), the Christian campaign that ended the trades - [Islam](/codex/islam/), the faith whose states and merchants ran these trades - [The Muslim Defense](/codex/the-muslim-defense/), the codex's frame for engaging Islamic claims ## Common questions this page answers **Q: Did Islam start slavery before Christianity?** No. Slavery is far older than both. It appears in the earliest Mesopotamian law codes, the Law of Moses regulated servitude, and Rome practiced chattel slavery before either faith existed. Christianity arose inside Roman slave society in the 1st century, and Islam arose in 7th-century Arabia, where slavery already existed. **Q: Who started the African slave trade, Muslims or Europeans?** Large-scale long-distance trading of enslaved Africans was built first by Muslim-ruled states and merchants, across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, from the 7th century onward. The European Atlantic trade began in the 1440s, about eight centuries later. In both, African rulers and merchants supplied many of the captives. **Q: How many Africans were enslaved in the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades?** Nobody knows precisely, because few records survive. Estimates for all the Islamic-world trades from the 7th to the 20th century commonly range from about 10 to 18 million people, building on Ralph Austen's census work. The Atlantic trade carried about 12.5 million in a much shorter period. **Q: Did Islamic law allow slavery?** Yes. Classical Islamic law permitted slavery, mainly of non-Muslim war captives, and regulated it in detail. It also commended freeing slaves, made manumission an expiation for certain sins, let slaves buy their freedom by contract (*mukataba*), and protected a slave mother of her master's child (*umm walad*) from sale. It did not call for abolition. **Q: When did Muslim countries abolish slavery?** At different times: Tunisia in 1846, the Ottoman Empire by stages from the mid-19th century, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania in 1981, which made slavery a crime only in 2007. **Q: Is Islam the black man's religion because Christianity enslaved Africans?** No. Muslim states and merchants enslaved Africans for over a thousand years, and Christianity was established in Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia before Islam reached Africa. Christian nations did run the Atlantic trade, and that should be admitted plainly, but Christians also led the movement that abolished it. Neither faith belongs to one race. **Q: Did Christians also practice chattel slavery?** Yes. Christians owned slaves in the Roman Empire, Christian Rome kept slavery in its law, and Christian nations ran the Atlantic trade. Christians, from Gregory of Nyssa to the Quakers and the Clapham Sect, also produced the arguments and the campaigns that ended it.