Until his death in 1999, King Hassan II of Morocco enjoyed the offices of numberless human chattel. As Justin Marozzi tells us in his superb new book on Islamic slavery, in a relatively recent time, with Cool Britannia in the air and Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, it was slaves who washed the feet of Morocco’s Amir al Muminin (‘Commander of the Faithful’) and slaves who ‘dressed him in his holiday finery, carried incense, ran his baths, brought him food and drink’. 

There was a slave choir. There were slave chefs to make tagines and hashish jam. There were ‘fire slaves’ to punish the other slaves and the children of the royal household. King Hassan’s eighty-odd concubines, and any others who caught his fancy, ‘ministered to his sexual appetites’. Hassan had inherited forty girls from his father; of the dozens that he acquired for his own household, none was older than fifteen.

The French, who took Morocco in 1907, formally banned slavery there in 1925, but they allowed its de facto continuation, mostly in domestic settings, until their departure in 1956. French officials made frequent reference to their politique musulman (‘Muslim policy’), which saw colonial administrators defer to facts on the ground.