Is slavery still happening today — and what was the Arab/Islamic and Ottoman slave trade?¶

Short answer: slavery is not over. It did not end with the US Civil War in 1865 — or even with the last legal abolition, Mauritania in 1981, within living memory. An estimated ~50 million people live in modern slavery today (ILO/Walk Free/IOM, 2021). Hereditary chattel slavery — people born owned, inherited like property — still exists in Mauritania. Open slave auctions of African migrants were filmed in Libya in 2017. ISIS ran sex-slave markets of Yazidi women in 2014. And the deep backstory most readers were never taught: the Arab/Islamic and Ottoman slave trades enslaved an estimated 10–17 million people over ~1,300 years — comparable in scale to the transatlantic trade and roughly three times longer. One standard, stated up front: slavery was a near-universal human institution — Rome, Greece, Europe's Atlantic trade, Africa's own kingdoms, and the Islamic world all practiced it. The point of this page is not to indict any one religion or people; it is to correct a widespread assumption — especially American — that slavery is a closed chapter of history, and to fill a genuine gap in what is taught.

1. Slavery did not end in 1865¶

Most Americans date slavery's end to the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). But legal abolition came startlingly recently in much of the world — and legal abolition is not the same as its end in practice:

The ILO, Walk Free, and IOM estimate ~50 million people in modern slavery on any given day in 2021 — 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage, or roughly 1 in every 150 people alive [VERIFIED via the 2022 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery].
"Modern slavery" is an umbrella term — forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, human trafficking, sexual slavery, and outright hereditary chattel slavery [VERIFIED].
The last countries to legally abolish slavery did so within living memory:

Country	Legal abolition
Qatar	1952
Saudi Arabia	1962 (royal decree, under US/UN pressure)
Yemen	1962 (staged through 1967)
UAE (Trucial States)	1963
Oman	1970
Mauritania	1981 — the last country in the world

[VERIFIED via abolition chronologies]

2. Mauritania — born into slavery, today¶

Mauritanian society is stratified into the Bidhan ("White Moors," the Arab-Berber enslaving class), the Haratin ("Black Moors," the enslaved and formerly-enslaved caste), and other Afro-Mauritanian groups [VERIFIED]. The surviving practice is chattel slavery: people are born into slave status, owned, worked without pay, and their status is inherited by the master's family [DOCUMENTED via HRW, Anti-Slavery International, Arab Reform Initiative].

Abolition on paper, impunity in practice. Mauritania abolished slavery by decree in 1981 (with no criminal penalty), first criminalized it in 2007, and in 2015 declared it a crime against humanity with special courts — yet prosecutions are almost nonexistent, commonly summarized as roughly one conviction since 2007 [VERIFIED].
How many are enslaved — a contested range, honestly labeled. There is no census, so estimates diverge sharply: Walk Free's Global Slavery Index puts it at roughly 43,000–149,000 across its editions [ESTIMATE]; Mauritanian NGOs (SOS-Esclaves) and older CNN reporting have cited up to 10–20% of the population [DISPUTED / un-censused — attribute, never state as fact]. The honest statement: tens of thousands at minimum, with credible local claims far higher, and no reliable count.
The activist. Biram Dah Abeid, a Haratin son of freed slaves, founded the abolitionist movement IRA-Mauritania, won a 2013 UN Human Rights Prize, has been repeatedly imprisoned, and finished second in the 2019 presidential election [VERIFIED].

3. Libya — slave auctions in the 21st century¶

In November 2017, CNN published hidden-camera footage of an auction near Tripoli in which sub-Saharan African migrants were sold as laborers — roughly a dozen men in minutes, some for about $400 [VERIFIED, CNN, 14 Nov 2017]. The markets re-emerged amid the state collapse after Gaddafi's fall (2011): migrants heading for Europe were trapped, held in militia-run detention centers, and sold by traffickers; the IOM had documented "slave markets" in April 2017, months before CNN filmed one [DOCUMENTED]. The UN Security Council condemned the trade in December 2017 as abuses that "may amount to crimes against humanity" [VERIFIED].

4. Other current and recent forms¶

ISIS and the Yazidis (2014). From the assault on Sinjar, ISIS subjected Yazidi women and girls to organized sexual slavery — bought, sold, and re-sold, with prices documented as low as $25, codified in ISIS's own manuals; roughly 6,400 enslaved, thousands still missing a decade later [VERIFIED — see the Yazidi Genocide doc].
Sudan. During the civil war of 1983–2005, Khartoum-allied militias abducted and enslaved women and children — over 14,000 documented abductions, overwhelmingly Dinka [DOCUMENTED]. The 2023– war has produced credible reports of abduction, forced labour, and trafficking, though not yet a settled count [DOCUMENTED / emerging].
The Gulf kafala system — a genuine dispute, labeled as one. The sponsorship system tying a migrant worker's status to an employer is described by Walk Free and some activists as producing modern slavery/forced labour; the ILO and HRW more often call it a system that leaves workers vulnerable to forced labour and demand reform, rather than labeling the whole thing "slavery" [DISPUTED — both framings stated, neither overstated].

5. The deep backstory: the Arab/Islamic and Ottoman slave trade¶

The trade most readers were never taught ran for well over a millennium across three routes — trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean / East African — from the 7th century into the 20th [VERIFIED].

Scale — an estimate, spanning scholars. Historians put the total at roughly 10–17 million enslaved Africans: ~17 million at the high end (Austen / Pétré-Grenouilleau), ~11.5–14 million as a common mid-anchor (Segal), lower figures too [ESTIMATE — wide, contested]. For honest comparison, the transatlantic trade shipped ~12.5 million (well-documented) over ~400 years. So the Arab/Islamic trades were comparable in scale over a span roughly three times longer — "comparable, over far longer," not "definitively larger" [VERIFIED framing; the transatlantic figure is the firm anchor].
Distinctive documented features:
- Eunuchs — forced castration. Enslaved African (and some European) boys and men were forcibly castrated — a violent, non-consensual mutilation, inflicted on captives as property, with very high mortality — to produce harem and court eunuchs (the death rate is why survivors commanded premium prices). Because Islamic law generally barred Muslims from performing the operation, the cutting was often outsourced to non-Muslims — e.g., Coptic monks at the Abou Gerbe monastery in Upper Egypt — the demand Muslim, the mutilation contracted out.
- Concubinage. Enslaved women were widely taken as concubines under Islamic law (umm al-walad).
- The demographic engine — and why the numbers look the way they do. Castration of men and absorption of women's freeborn children into the free population meant the enslaved population did not reproduce itself; combined with high mortality, this required continuous fresh capture — which is why the cumulative toll over 1,300 years is so high even though no large surviving diaspora resulted [DOCUMENTED].
- Not only Africans. The saqaliba were enslaved Slavs and other Europeans; the Ottoman elite drew concubines from Circassian and Georgian captives; the Zanj (East Africans) were worked in plantation gangs in Iraq until the Zanj Rebellion (869–883 CE) [DOCUMENTED / VERIFIED].
The Ottoman system. The devshirme levied Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them, and made them Janissaries and administrators — elite slaves who ran much of the state. The imperial harem was staffed by slave concubines and guarded by eunuchs. And the Barbary corsairs — North African Ottoman-vassal states — enslaved an estimated ~1 to 1.25 million European Christians from Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts (as far as Iceland) between ~1500 and the 1800s [ESTIMATE, Robert Davis — contested; other historians (Earle) call the method an overstatement — flag it]. Ottoman abolition was gradual and Western-pressured — the Istanbul slave market closed in 1847, the African trade was banned in 1857 — dragging into the 20th century.

6. Why is this so rarely discussed?¶

Historians cite a convergent set of reasons — none of which mean the trade was smaller:

Sparse records. No census or shipping-manifest system as in the Atlantic trade — which is exactly why the numbers are estimates with wide error bars, a documentation gap, not evidence of a smaller trade.
No large surviving diaspora. Castration and the absorption of concubines' children meant the enslaved left few distinct descendant communities to carry the memory — unlike the Americas.
Political and religious sensitivity, and Eurocentric/Americentric curricula that center the transatlantic trade because of its direct legacy in the West [DOCUMENTED — attributed to Segal, Austen, Lewis, Toledano].

The one-standard bottom line¶

Slavery was a human institution, not the property of any one faith, race, or region: Rome enslaved Greeks and Gauls; Europeans enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; African kingdoms captured and sold other Africans into every trade; Muslims — Arab and Ottoman — enslaved Africans, Slavs, and Europeans alike. Naming the Arab/Islamic and Ottoman trades, and their distinctive features, is filling a gap in what is taught — not singling out Islam. And the sharpest, most current point stands on its own: slavery is not a closed chapter. It is happening right now — in Mauritania's hereditary bondage, in Libya's migrant auctions, in the ~50 million the ILO counts today. Anyone who assumes it ended in 1865 is off by a century and a half, and counting.