Awareness of the Atlantic slave trade - in which Europeans transported millions of Africans to the Americas - has become nearly universal. However, there is another, earlier human traffic that has been neglected by historians. It matches European slavery in scale and exceeds it massively in duration.
'Islam's Black Slaves' is the first book in general readership to describe in detail the Islamic slave trade. Ronald Segal traces the business of slavery from the birth of Islam in seventh-century Arabia to the present, where, in Sudan and Mauritania, Africans continue to be bought and sold. The book identifies how many millions of black Africans were enslaved and explores the differences between the Western and Eastern traders.
Ronald Segal concludes his groundbreaking book with an examination of why the existence of this other black diaspora has gone unrecognised in the West for so long, and criticises the blindness that black Muslim leaders today have in acknowledging this other oppressive tradition.
