What do you think?
Rate this book
Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: The Autobiography of Mahboob Qirvanian
216 pages, Hardcover
Published May 16, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 21, 2026
As the United States moves closer to the brink of yet another unprovoked and gratuitous war of choice against Iran (against which I have been agitating and speaking out for over a decade now), I have made the conscious choice to read more Iranian literature, a bit more contemporary than the works of Ḥāfiẓ or Rūmī. And, quite fittingly for Black History Month, the book I picked up is an autobiography from a rather unique Iranian: the half-Black, half-Indian, Tunisian-born former slave Maḥbōb Qirvanian. The book, translated with a lengthy and illuminating introduction by Iranian-Canadian scholar Behnaz Mirzai, is The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: the Autobiography of Mahboob Qirvanian.
It may come as a surprise to many that there are such people as Black Iranians. But they are, in fact, a rather sizeable minority particularly along the southern coast of Iran: the survivors of a small-scale but shameful slave trade that was active in the 1800s up until 1929. Qirvanian is unique even among this minority in that he hails not from the Zanzibar coast (which is where most of the Afro-Iranians come from originally), but instead from French-ruled Tunisia—the city of El Qayrawān (from which he takes his surname). His story is already deeply entangled with French and British colonialism from birth: his mother Chanpina was a descendant of Indian-Buddhist émigrés to Tunisia who married a local Black African man, Rashdan.
Qirvanian’s village was attacked by slavers in 1902, when he was eight years old...
Read the full review at my Skeireins Substack.
It may come as a surprise to many that there are such people as Black Iranians. But they are, in fact, a rather sizeable minority particularly along the southern coast of Iran: the survivors of a small-scale but shameful slave trade that was active in the 1800s up until 1929. Qirvanian is unique even among this minority in that he hails not from the Zanzibar coast (which is where most of the Afro-Iranians come from originally), but instead from French-ruled Tunisia—the city of El Qayrawān (from which he takes his surname). His story is already deeply entangled with French and British colonialism from birth: his mother Chanpina was a descendant of Indian-Buddhist émigrés to Tunisia who married a local Black African man, Rashdan.
Qirvanian’s village was attacked by slavers in 1902, when he was eight years old...
Read the full review at my Skeireins Substack.
Displaying 1 of 1 review