"Will be welcomed by all interested in African history and anthropology. A valuable contribution and a rich mine of material."
"--Journal of African History"

In many parts of the African Muslim world, slavery still blights the landscape. What are the origins of this terrible institution? Why is it still practiced? How widespread is it and how does it differ from Western chattel slavery?

This book tells the story of how the enslavement of Africans by Berbers, Arabs, and other Africans became institutionalized and legitimized throughout Muslim Africa. A classic, pioneering study, first published in 1971 and extensively updated in this revised edition, Slavery in the History of Black Muslim Africa provides an expansive portrait of domestic slavery from the tenth to the nineteenth century in the context of the religious, social, and economic conditions of the African Islamic world.

Drawing on a host of accounts from contemporary observers such as Leo Africanus and Ibn Battuta, Fisher and Fisher describe the status and rights of slaves in Africa, and their various roles as currency, goods, eunuchs, soldiers, and statesmen, as well as the jarring historical interruption brought on by slave raiders and traders in West and North Africa.

In African Muslim societies domestic slavery was a deeply entrenched institution, accepted as a matter of course by African believers and Muslim lawyers. This study, first published by Hurst in 1970, has been extensively revised, with a new introduction and an extra chapter on slavery taken from the work, "Sahara and Sudan". It discusses domestic slavery in the context of the religious, social and economic conditions of Islamic societies, the status of slaves and their roles as currency, goods, enuchs, soldiers and statesman. Comparative detail has also been added from the accounts of Leo Africanus, Ibn Battuta and other African scholars.