Despite the title of his book, Mohamed Hassan Mohamed's main arguments in Between Caravan and Sultan are not about the Bayruk family of Morocco. Rather, Mohamed is primarily interested in arguing that the ‘black’ population of the Maghrib is indigenous and that Western scholarship has failed to report this fact because it is mired in a racist and sexist ‘textual tradition’ first established by European abolitionists in the nineteenth century. This argument unfortunately led Mohamed to deny that there was ever a significant trans-Saharan slave trade, as this would complicate the origins of black Moroccans. Indeed, at times Dr Mohamed seems to doubt whether slavery was ever a significant institution in Morocco. More broadly, he argued that the Western misapprehension of race and slavery in the Maghrib is part of an ‘orientalist’ portrayal of Maghribi society as being dominated by tribal politics, slavery, and rampant sexuality.
Since the work of Edward Bovill and Emile Gautier in the 1930s, Western historians have generally suspected that a substantial portion of the dark-skinned populations of the northern Sahara were indigenous to the region. Since at least the 1500s, these peoples, regionally referred to as ‘Haratin’ or ‘Sudan’, generally labored under an ambiguous servile status. However, in the late seventeenth century, the Moroccan Sultan Ismail re-enslaved many of the apparently free Haratin when he forcibly conscripted more than 221,000 of them into a slave army he called the ‘Abid al-Bukhari. So, while it is impossible to prove, most historians, including the most prominent current scholars of the history of Moroccan slavery, Mohammed Ennaji and Chouki El Hamel, would agree that some of the ancestors of the Haratin were probably indigenous and that this indigenous population was augmented by substantial numbers of West Africans taken across the Sahara as slaves over the past millennium.
Scholars mainly rely on the occasional reference to slaves and slave trading in travelers’ accounts and chronicles; for example, in 1353, Ibn Battuta described a single caravan that traveled from West Africa northward across the Sahara carrying 600 female slaves. According to West African and Moroccan chronicles, one of the spoils of the Moroccan invasion of Songhay in 1591 was 1,000 slaves every year sent to the Moroccan king. Scholars such as Ralph Austen and John Wright have offered estimates between 4,000 and 6,000 captives per year, very explicitly acknowledging that these are rough estimates. But even if only 1,000 West Africans were traded across the Sahara into the Maghrib per year between CE 900 and 1900, then that would still amount to one million souls – which any reasonable person would consider significant.
The primary evidentiary basis for Mohamed's revisionist argument about the trans-Saharan slave trade is a very small sampling of nineteenth-century business ledgers or registers belonging to the Bayruk family in the Wadi Nun area of southern Morocco. This sampling is only a tiny fragment of the Arabic documentation of Saharan and trans-Saharan trade in the region and only covers the period between 1831 and 1864. Furthermore, this type of ledger mainly documents credit and debt relationships, rather than information about the commodities traded (pp. 256–8). Mohamed concedes that his sampling of ledgers contained some 47 transactions involving slaves (p. 263). This figure is comparable to the number found by Mustafa Naimi in an overlapping set of Bayruk ledgers covering the period 1842 to 1872. Because the purchase of large quantities of grain, gum arabic, cloth, or ostrich feathers from the Bayruk, often destined for resale, were more likely to involve credit, they were more likely to be recorded in the ledgers. By contrast, a cash transaction for a slave or a few slaves would generally not involve credit and would not be recorded. Similarly, Mohamed acknowledged that the Simlali, another trading family in the region, conducted 19 slave auctions between the years 1853 and 1868 (p. 259). Once again, in Mohamed's view, this is evidence for the unimportance of slave trading, what he referred to as the ‘verdict of the family's commercial ledger’ (p. 248).
Of course, when trading families retained slaves for their own use there was no need for a ledger entry or a slave auction and that seems to have happened frequently in the Bayruk family. The Moroccan chronicler al-Rabati described Bayruk's father, Ubaydallah, as owning 1,500 slaves (‘abid). His statement most likely referred to slaves owned by Ubaydallah's extended family or confederation, which would include several nuclear families, and it is also possible that al-Rabati's number is an exaggeration. Still, it is clear that he intended to convey the idea that Ubaydallah had many slaves and that they were an important part of his power, which is supported by other sources from within and beyond the Bayruk family. So, how did Mohamed deal with this bit of inconvenient evidence? He translated the word ‘abid as ‘retainers’ rather than slaves (pp. 217, 259).
Given the impossibility of proving his main thesis with specific evidence from this fascinating, but relatively small, corner of the Sahara, Mohamed turns to ‘orientalism’. Nineteenth-century Europeans who traveled in North Africa and the Sahara provided some of our most specific, though problematic, evidence about Saharan trade. Mohamed argues that these accounts were wholly invented, mere ‘textual constructions’ with no basis in reality. Mohamed justifies this conclusion by arguing that the Europeans were biased, rather than comparing their testimony to earlier or contemporary estimates produced by West or North Africans. Indeed, he almost completely ignores the pre-nineteenth-century evidence of slave trading produced in Africa by Africans.
Daniel Schroeter and Ghislaine Lydon have acknowledged the problematic nature of the nineteenth-century European accounts of southern Morocco. Still, they have portrayed slavery and slave trading as an important part of the region's history and, therefore, have drawn the ire of Mohamed, who dismisses their work as a fantasy of ‘anglophone Africanists’ who ‘conflate black with slave’ (pp. 227, 235–8). Because these scholars (as well as many others, including Mohammed Ennaji and Chouki El Hamel) have also argued that concubinage was an important factor in the trans-Saharan slave trade and North African slavery, Mohamed accused them of perpetuating the ‘Africanist contraption of a generic fixation on concubines. This contraption is, in any case, rooted in the pre-modern discursive deployment of the harem, as a den of concubines, to decry Moorish sensuality.’ (p. 265) Of course, historians of Africa are familiar with the abundant evidence going back several centuries regarding the importance of women in African slavery and, while many factors contributed to this phenomenon, the use of female slaves as concubines was certainly one of them. Indeed, Bayruk family histories recorded by Lydon describe him as the son of a West African concubine who fathered many children by concubines – a bit of evidence that Mohamed does not contradict.
