Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam by Chouki El Hamel

Abstract

246 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Mecca to establish “indirect rule” in areas they wished to control. But in a setting such as Iraq, where Sharif Faisal of Mecca was made king, it had no local roots. Western powers have since turned to an emphasis on democratic elections as the basis of authority, but this has contributed to conflict and chaos in such settings as Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Iraq. In short, this is a book that should be of great value to the limited number of scholars who have a focus on the western Maghrib and al-Andalus in the period it covers, but it also presents ideas that can stimulate the development of interesting new perspectives on history and present day events in an area that spread from West Africa to the Middle East. ALLAN CHRISTELOW Idaho State University, Idaho, USA CHOUKI EL HAMEL, BLACK MOROCCO: A HISTORY OF SLAVERY, RACE, AND ISLAM. (CAMBRIDGE AND NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. PP. XIII, 331) Chouki El Hamel has written a valuable book of comparative importance. Although Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam focuses explicitly on Morocco, El Hamel engages scholarly discourse in the Atlantic world to unravel the silence surrounding the subjects of slavery, racial attitudes, discrimination and marginalization in the wider Islamic context. By interrogating the role of slavery in Moroccan society and by placing it within a wider historical and contemporary discourse, Black Morocco tackles racial stereotypes and other legacies arising from slavery in Moroccan society for centuries. The book begins by critically engaging the conventional scholarship and the local academic discourse depicting slavery in the Muslim context as ‘benign’ and holding the viewpoint that ‘slavery was not harsh in North Africa’ (p. 3). To debunk this approach, the book convincingly shows that probing the culture of silence that nourished racial stereotype is crucial in understanding the legacy of slavery in Moroccan and Muslim societies in generally. The author argues that ‘the history of slavery in Morocco cannot be considered separately from the racial terror of the global slave trade’ (p. 4). According to him, ‘For racial groups such as blacks in Morocco, the problems of slavery, cultural and racial prejudice, and marginalization are neither new nor foreign. Blacks in Morocco have been marginalized for centuries, with dominant Moroccan culture defining this marginalized group as “Abid (plural of Abs)”, meaning slaves’ (p. 4). Throughout the book, El Hamel makes a strong case that in order to critically understand the legacy of slavery in Moroccan society, one cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explaining social relations. For El Hamel, relying BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 247 solely on a religious viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in northwest Africa. El Hamel divides the book into two parts consisting of eight chapters and a conclusion. In the first two chapters in Part One, before taking a critical examination of the practice of concubinage which had been justified in religious terms, he marshalled crucial textual sources that allowed him to trace its development within the institution of slavery from its early Islamic milieu as reflected in the Quran, the Hadith (Sayings and Deeds of the Prophet Mohammad), the process of expansion of Islam and the teachings of the various legal schools, especially the Maliki school in the Islamic Mediterranean. The second chapter advances El Hamel’s argument to unravel the root cause of racial prejudice and discrimination in Morocco. This chapter is important not only in its masterful unpacking of the historical and contemporary complexities of racial prejudice in the Moroccan and the wider context of Muslim societies but also its critique of European literature that in reference to plantation slavery in the Americas and the racist attitudes to black Africans in European and American societies misconstrues slavery and racial stereotypes in Morocco as benign. The second part of the book provides a historical and sociological grounding of the book. In chapter 3, the author chronicles the tale and dynamics of the trans-Saharan diaspora. Here, El Hamel is upfront in rightly correcting the popular misconception that all blacks in northwest Africa had been slaves...