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Segal, Ronald. 2001. ISLAM'S BLACK SLAVES: THE OTHER BLACK DIASPORA. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 257 pp. $30.00 (cloth).
This book is a largely narrative history of African slaves in the Muslim world, from the earliest centuries of the faith to the present. As Ronald Segal notes in his preface, it is intended as a companion volume to his earlier work, The Black Diaspora, which dealt with the evolution of African communities in the New World resulting from the Atlantic slave trade. Like that earlier work, Islam's Black Slaves is a wholly synthetic book, which seeks to make the larger body of (primarily English language) scholarship on African slavery and the Muslim world available to a wider general audience. On the face of it, any attempt to bridge the all-too-often large gap between the academy and the wider reading public is an admirable goal. Segal's book, however, is riddled with such structural, historiographical, and theoretical shortcomings that his achievement of this objective is in serious doubt.
To be fair, Islam's Black Slaves provides a gripping narrative account of slavery in at least parts of the Muslim world from the middle ages to the present. Starting with the birth of the faith, Segal's book attempts a largely chronological description of the traffic in human beings across Islamic history. He also seeks to provide a broad geographical sweep, thus devoting chapters not only to the so-called Islamic "heartland" of the Middle East, but also to Africa, Asia, and the Muslim dominions of Europe as well. His work begins with the early expansion of the faith and ends with an epilogue dedicated to the place...