Mulai Ismail and the Slave Trade

Genuine slavery is woeful.

It has existed ever since the first caveman said “ugg” and wielded a club, and it still goes on today.  It has historically been part of the meat and potatoes of warfare: the Angles and the Saxons, for example, when they invaded the British Isles after the Romans left, enslaved as many of the indigenous Kelts as they could find, often working them quite literally to death.

The slave was a source of cheap labour, requiring the minimum of maintenance for the cruel owners – although more benificent owners could recognise the humanity resident in each slave and, perhaps, not be quite so brutal. Obviously, being taken as a slave meant that, basically, your life was ripped to shreads: if you were taken from your village, you could expect never to see your loved ones any more, nor to see your village or anything that was familiar, or in any way dear to you.  You could possibly never be loved or cherished again, or valued in any way save for what a merchant selling you could line his pockets with.

Yes, slavery was, and is, barbaric – and those who practiced it were right to apologise.  But let’s put things in perspective.  In Britain, William Wilberforce worked tirelessly – and against seemingly insurmountable odds – to put slavery in Britain on the other side of the law.  In America, Abraham Lincoln caused a civil war to be fought so that the slaves of the southern states could be freed, and for slavery to be illegal in every state.  Why, then, are the British and Americans the loudest voices of apology?

In Morocco, Mulai Ismail ibn Sharif, Sultan during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, was well known for taking slaves.  He had an immense Black Guard of slaves taken from sub-Saharan Africa, but most of the slaves he had were caucasians snatched – many of them from the shores of Cornwall – in the dead of night by Barbary pirates.  These he would work up to fifteen hours a day, in sweltering heat, and if you go to Morocco now you will see some of the constructions they built.  Ismail was, by any standards, a psychopath: often, just for amusement, he would set the hair of one of his slaves alight and watch the spectacle as she danced frantically trying to dowse the flames.

Not much is taught about Mulai Ismail these days.  It isn’t deemed “politically correct” to remind the world of our suffering at the hands of slavery, especially when the hand-wringing moral minority want to keep the shame of our part of the slave trade as a whip to keep us cowed.  But he was a real, documented, historical person, and his story needs to have a higher profile if we are to counter the one-sidedness that abounds.