One Million White Slaves

Though it is almost forgotten today - suppressed, perhaps, by some squeamish historians - the Muslim trade in both black African and white European slaves was deeply feared for three centuries...

Now, a book by historian Justin Marozzi unflinchingly reveals the extent of slavery in Arab countries, which was conducted with unequalled brutality.

More shocking still, he shows that it continued in much of the Islamic world well into the 20th century - and, for hundreds of thousands of West Africans born into life as slaves, carries on to this day.

For Marozzi to investigate these stories, let alone publish, is courageous. His book invites an inevitable backlash from Left-wing academics and broadcasters who focus solely on the slave trade triangle between Europe, West Africa and the Americas that operated from the 16th to the 19th centuries...

To accuse Arabs, Turks and other Muslims of complicity in slavery is likely to be met with accusations of 'Islamophobia'. Yet, as Marozzi's research proves beyond doubt, slavery in the Muslim world has existed for far longer, caused even more deaths and misery and inflicted tortures that exceed anything imagined by the worst of the transatlantic traders...

... in the Victorian era, Sudan exported countless thousands of eunuchs to serve as slaves in Turkey and the Arab countries...

Muslim pirates sailing out of Algiers raided all along the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic as far as Madeira. By the 1620s, 10,000 European slaves were being held in the city's dungeons, including Scots, Irish, Dutch, Danish, Slav and Spanish captives. Others included Japanese and Chinese victims.

The Flemish aristocrat Emanuel d'Aranda, who spent two years as a prisoner doing punishingly heavy labour before he was ransomed, calculated that 600,000 European Christians were enslaved in Algiers between 1536 and 1640 alone...

It does not suit the politically correct narrative to admit that Muslim slave traders were the scourge of Africa, long before the Europeans arrived . . . and long after they left...

Between that time and the First World War, up to 17 million people were taken prisoner and used as slaves in Muslim armies and in brothels, on building sites and in private homes. That could be 50 per cent more than the total number of Africans transported across the Atlantic, a figure usually put at 11 million to 15 million...