Edena ANDREEVA and Kevin McNEER, eds.  Slavery in the Modern Middle East and North Africa: Exploitation and Resistance from the 19th Century – Present Day.   ISBN: 978-0-7556-4793-4 (Hb).  Pp. 239 + xii.  $120.00. London and New York: I.B. Taurus/Bloomsbury.  Reviewed by Daniel SMITH-CHRISTOPHER, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045

Slavery continues to be a topic of voluminous scholarship, although almost always focused on slavery in European-colonized lands of North and South America.  The topic of slavery in these contexts is clearly of critical important in Christian historical and theological scholarship because it represents (along with, and often accompanying, warfare) one of the major and persistent ethical failures of Christian faith and practice.  Therefore, studies of how slavery was theologically and biblically defended as an“acceptable” Christian practice become crucial historical test cases.

This important volume, on the other hand, focusses on the legacies of slavery in the Middle East and North Africa, where slavery as economic and social systems continued until the 20th Century.  Slavery in this context becomes an important topic of Christian-Muslim dialogue, uniting people of good faith from both traditions in reviewing and lamenting the moral failures of both world religions.

The essays are divided into four sections: (1) Gender and Slavery: Female Slaves; (2) Resistance and Abolition; and (3) Preserving Identity and Tradition, and (4) Slavery in a Post-Slavery World.  Although usually not a helpful practice in reviewing collections of essays – the titles of this particular volume are especially clear and helpfully indicators of the topics of this collection.

For example, Anthony Lee’s first essay’s title tells the story: “Ziba Khanum of Yazd: An Enslaved African woman in Nineteenth-Century Iran”.  This essay discusses the difficulties of documenting what we can about the story of how the descendants of an enslaved African woman became a significant presence in Iran, since the descendants often married into Iranian families.  Along the way, Lee demonstrates how the story reveals traditions of Islamic slavery and manumission in Iranian history.  Irvin Cemil Shick has provided an excellent essay on “Captivity Narratives” in Islamic contexts.  “Captivity” stories tell of the survival of captivity by different enemies, and is a critically important literary genre that became very influential in a variety of European contexts, as early as early American settlement.  Shick’s essay is “On the Multivalence of Women’s Captivity Narratives: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries”.

Kadir Yildirim writes “The Gradual Elimination of Female Slavery in the late Ottoman Empire: Institutional Change” and summarizes the interesting abolitionist movement especially among Ottoman intellectuals in a study that allows interesting comparisons with the role of abolitionists in European and North American history.  Similarly, Jerzy Zdanowski’s essay discusses Western European influence on slavery practices and abolition in his essay: “The Social Construction of Slavery, Injustice and Manumission on the Gulf Coast or Arabia and Oman in the 1920s and 1930s”.  Elena Andreeva documents Russian social and military interactions and interventions with their own colonized Islamic societies and difficulties with Iran, focusing on the influential artist, journalist, and ethnographer Karazin in her fascinating essay “Slavery on the Central Asian Steppe in the works of Nikolai Karazin (1842-1908)”.  Josep Lluis Mateo Dieste contributes a study on “mercy releases” in his essay: “Mercy Releases: Manumission Practices in Tetouan, Morocco (1890-1960)” which extends the books survey into North African Islamic contexts.

In the third section, Maryam Nourzaei studies a little-known African descendent minority in modern Iran: “Afro-Balach Communities in Modern Iran and Their Healing Traditions”.  This study examines the contemporary traditions associated with a group that sometimes affirms their unique background, but in other situations prefers not to emphasize these differences.  Still, particular ritual practices have become associated with this modern minority.  Kevin McNeer and Sarali Gintsburg survey information about the island of “Soqotra” in the history of transportation of slaves between Yemen and Africa: “Transmuted Memories: Slavery and Its Shadow on the Island of Soqotra”.

The Fourth section has two essays examining tragic contemporary situations.  Dina Al Raffie’s essay “Enslaved by the Street: Contemporary Forms of Slavery Among the Street Children of Cairo” examines an ongoing issue in Egypt, and Lana Ravandi-Fadai looks at the continued trauma of “Yazidi Women and Girls Held as Slaves under the Islamic State: Healing Wounds and Reassessing Doctrines”.

Granted - this is not the type of book normally included in a theologically oriented Book Review publication, but overlooking this book would be a very unfortunate oversight for any Christian ethicists or historians interested in slavery and abolitionism.  Not only is slavery still a crucially important legacy of present social and racial realities around the world, it is an issue that needs to be a serious topic of cooperative research between Christian and Muslim scholars of good will.