Middle Eastern history scholarship suppresses the slave trade that shaped it
Evidence
American histo rians faced this honorably, recognizing the fact, discussing it, documenting it, analyzing it without any attempt to offer excuses. It was not embellished, as it was not long ago at an African History Conference, where one of the most famous African slave traders was described as running “an intercontinental employment agency.” There are societies in which slavery has been a fact of life, in some of them very recently, in some even to the present day. But the subject is taboo. Not long ago a graduate student who wanted to work on slavery in the medieval Middle East was strongly advised, not by any Middle Eastern authority but by a grant-giving body in this country, to choose some “less provocative” subject. To study the history of the Middle East without slavery would be as meaningful as to study the history of the American South or the Roman Empire without slavery. Nevertheless, it is widely done. Many books, indeed I suppose most general books on Middle Eastern history, either don’t mention it or gloss over it, and research in that field is discouraged in a number of ways. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1844
Categorization
- SEED: Article angle: how the same societies handle one acknowledged atrocity (US slavery) with scholarly openness while rendering an equivalent one taboo (Islamic-world slavery) — and how funding bodies, not states, enforce the silence.
- XREF: Connects to the choreography of what a society admits about its past; echoes the moral-panic literature’s point that which wrongs get named is itself political.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: what are the concrete mechanisms (grant pressure, peer review, hiring) that discourage Middle East slavery research today?