THE TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM AND THE SLAVE TRADE
1). INTRODUCTION
Mention the slave trade and Muslims will quickly jump to the Bible to defend Islamic slavery, just as they jump to it in defence of Islamic violence. As ever when it suits them the Bible is an authority which Muslims appeal to, and when it doesn’t support Islam which is most of the time, it’s corrupt.
To explain why the Biblical concept of “slavery” is actually ‘voluntary indentured servitude’ with break clauses every 7 years, and why accusations of sexism and Old Testament “genocide” are false, watch the excellent video explanation given by Abdu Murray (see link below).
I challenge any Muslim to produce evidence for slavery today being authorised in any non-Islamic State. The fact is it’s Islam that to this day widely practices aspects of slavery which subjugate women. Make no mistake, child marriages, fgm, multiple wives, child grooming gangs, and honour killings where even rape vitims are stoned to death to save “family honour” are the legacy of a brutal era of slavery. In Islam women are routinely treated as the property of the husband’s, women can be taken captive and held as sex slaves and the Quran and Sharia law endorses and upholds all of this. And of course, Jihadist groups such as Boko Haram and Isis make no secret of adopting slave practices and pleading the Quran as justification.¹
The idea of reform included the Turkish government recently making its second bid to introduce a law granting amnesty to child rapists in Turkey if they marry their victim, provoking outrage across the country.
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-marry-rapist-bill-child-marriage-a9296681.html
In short slavery under Islam is incomparable to the Bible’s treatment of both slaves and women. How Sharia degrades women is beyond the scope of this post but will be covered separately in a future post
2). HISTORICAL SURVEY — HOW ARABS CAME TO BE IN NORTH AFRICA
Arab slavery had already begun in Africa more than 700 years before the European transatlantic slave trade. (It was from Islam of the pagan Arabians that the captive slave trade was established).
The slave trade began when the Arabs invaded North Africa for the first time in the 7th century AD. The first Arab entry into Africa was through Egypt.
An Arab military general named General Amir Aben Alas invaded Egypt in December 639 AD.
Amir had successfully conquered Egypt and went ahead and conquered other places such as Tunisia and western Libya.
Once these areas had been completely conquered by the Arabs, they imposed tributes of 360 slaves in all regions they occupied and controlled.
With this Islamic slave trade in Africa, North Africans were Islamized by their Arab slave masters.
Today, many Africans pose as Muslims without knowing how the owners of such a religion brutally enslaved their black African ancestors for over 700 years.
Its a little known fact that the Islamic slave trade was bigger and more brutal than the well documented transatlantic one that we all learn about in school. Watch “The Hidden Islamic Slave Trade & Colorism,” by Tony Gurule & Dr. Jay Smith: t.co/El5C6IaoP7 and https://vimeo.com/246339930
In 1899, Winston Churchill wrote about the Islamic slave trade: “…all [of the Arab tribes in The Sudan], without exception, were hunters of men. To the great slave markets of Jeddah a continual stream of negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic…Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was increasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them…The warlike Arab tribes fought and brawled among themselves in ceaseless feud and strife. The negroes trembled in apprehension of capture, or rose locally against their oppressors.” ²
Muslims ask why if slavery was so prevalent in Arab Muslim states were there so few descendants compared to the Americas?
This is a very good question. There were a number of factors all of which impacted on mortality of Arab slave populations and prove their far more inhumane treatment in comparison to the African American slave trade.
According to Bernard Lewis ³ the growth of internal slave populations through natural increase was insufficient to maintain numbers right through to modern times, which contrasts markedly with rapidly rising slave populations in the New World. He writes that:
□ “Liberation by freemen of their own offspring born by slave mothers was “the primary drain”.
□ Liberation of slaves as an act of piety, was a contributing factor.
□ Other factors include: Castration: A fair proportion of male slaves were imported as eunuchs. Levy states that according to the Quran and Islamic traditions, such emasculation was objectionable. Jurists such as al-Baydawi considered castration to be mutilation, stipulating law enforcement to prevent it. However, in practice, emasculation was frequent. In eighteenth century Mecca, the majority of eunuchs were in the service of the mosques. Moreover, the process of castration (which included penectomy) carried a high risk of death.
□ Liberation of military slaves: Military slaves that rose through the ranks were usually liberated at some stage in their careers.
□ Restrictions on procreation: Among the menial, domestic, and manual worker slaves, casual sex was not permitted and marriage was not encouraged.
□ High death toll: There was a high death toll among all classes of slaves. Slaves usually came from remote places and, lacking immunities, died in large numbers. Segal ⁴ notes that recent slaves, weakened by their initial captivity and debilitating journey, would have been easy victim to climate changes and infection. Children were especially at risk, and the Islamic market demand for children was much greater than the American one.
□ Many black slaves lived in conditions conducive to malnutrition and disease, with effects on their own life expectancy, the fertility of women, and the infant mortality rate. As late as the 19th century, Western travellers in North Africa and Egypt noted the high death rate among imported black slaves.
□ Another factor was the Zanj Rebellion against the plantation economy of ninth-century southern Iraq. Due to fears of a similar uprising among slave gangs occurring elsewhere, Muslims came to realize that large concentrations of slaves were not a suitable organization of labour and that slaves were best employed in smaller concentrations. As such, large-scale employment of slaves for manual labour became the exception rather than the norm, and the medieval Islamic world did not need to import vast numbers of slaves.”
Islam has a track record of destroying history and artefacts that is negative to Islam (the so called Golden Age was a myth – what survived from it was in spite of Islamic rule not because of it), so no surprise at all that nothing was recorded by them of their worst slave trade practices.
John Dewar Gleissner in “Prison & Slavery – A Surprising Comparison” notes:
“Terrible Aspects of Slavery in the Arab World. The Arabs’ treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire’s Sahara salt mines. Black Africans did not enjoy immunity to many of the diseases found in the Arab world, which also resulted in high death rates.
Slaveholders in the Muslim world often castrated black African male slaves to serve as harem guards. This is a prime reason there are not many communities of blacks living in the non-African Muslim world today, despite the millions of black African slaves sold into the Muslim world. Many African boys did not survive their castration surgery. As late as 1903, there were still 194 African eunuchs in service to the Ottoman ruling family.
African women were enslaved by Arabs more than African men. Few black slave children survived in the Muslim world. In 1860, when 3,000 black female slaves were set free in Zanzibar, only 5% of them had children. Because under Islamic law a concubine bearing the child of the master could become a wife and her children would then share in the inheritance, Middle Eastern wives and children of masters had a strong incentive to interfere with the sex lives of female slaves and cause brutal abortions. Islamic jurisprudence historically allowed abortions in the first four months of pregnancy, long before the West allowed it. Islamic tradition supports the view that the soul enters the fetus at 120 days. If a concubine had the only son, the threat to the wife was even greater. The Koran allowed Muslim men to have as many concubines as they could afford, in addition to four wives.
The Arab history of anti-black racism predates European anti-black racism by several centuries. The early Islamic empire exhibited all the characteristics of anti-black racism, and blacks suffered the lowest form of bondage. By 869 AD, black African slaves in southern Iraq, the despised Zanj, launched an extended slave revolt that threatened Baghdad until 883 A.D. The main reasons we have not heard more about the horrors of slavery in the Muslim world are that Muslims did not express moral outrage against slavery and wrote no abolitionist literature against the institution of slavery. Dr. Thomas Sowell characterizes the moral indignation against New World slavery, and the lack of any such indignation against the Muslim or non-Western world, as “selective moral indignation.” The moral outrage against slavery was and is, in the grand historical context, a European-inspired cause gaining significant traction only in the 1760s. Europeans took photographs of chained black African slaves in Arab slave-trading vessels on the East Coast of Africa in the 1880s. Slavery persisted openly in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, 100 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. As late as 1960, African Muslims still sold slaves when they arrived on pilgrimages, as a way to finance their pilgrimages. Arab nations lagged far behind the rest of the world in abolishing slavery: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, United Arab Emirates in 1963, Oman in 1970 and Mauritania officially in 1981. Today, according to U.S. State Department figures, Muslim nations condone international human trafficking more than Western countries do.
David Livingstone observed in Africa the horrendous slave trading practices of Arab and pagan slave traders, decades after Great Britain had begun to suppress the international slave trade, and almost a century after Lord Mansfield, with the stroke of a pen, freed slaves in England. The Ottoman Empire resisted British efforts to suppress slavery and the slave trade. Over the course of 70 years, 2,000 British sailors died to free 160,000 slaves. While Islam urged improved treatment of slaves in some ways, the rapid expansion of the Muslim empire rapidly increased the number of slaves, leading to crueler treatment. Africa and the Middle East never developed the moral abolitionist fervor seen in Western nations. Slavery is now most prominent in Africa.
From the time of the Crusades until the early 1800’s, Barbary pirates or corsairs from Muslim North Africa raided European coasts and waters, selling captive Europeans as slaves in North African ports and Istanbul. Barbary corsairs attacked shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, raiding the coasts of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Britain, Ireland, and Africa for slaves. Some Mediterranean islands and coasts in Spain and Italy were abandoned due to the threat of Barbary slave raiding. The United States initially paid tribute to the Barbary pirates to obtain the return of American captives. After building ships, the United States fought the First and Second Barbary Wars to stop this slave trading and piracy. In fact, the desire to defend American shipping and sailors from Barbary piracy gave re-birth to the U.S. Navy. The Marine Hymn refers to the Battle of Derne on “the shores of Tripoli.” The traditional Mameluke sword worn by Marine officers today is based on the one given Marine First Lt. Presley O’Bannon by Prince Hamet of Tripoli.” ⁵
A quote from Booker T Washington: ⁶
“The ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually,morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.”
3). ISLAMIC SLAVERY IN INDIA
Frighteningly high numbers of Hindus were massacred in India by Muslim rulers. A Sikh writer declares that the assault amounted to “the biggest holocaust in World history” ⁷ :
With the invasion of India by Mahmud Ghazni about 1000 AD, began the Muslim invasions into the Indian subcontinent and they lasted for several centuries. Nadir Shah made a mountain of the skulls of the Hindus he killed in Delhi alone. Babur raised towers of Hindu skulls at Khanua when he defeated Rana Sanga in 1527 and later he repeated the same horrors after capturing the fort of Chanderi. Akbar ordered a general massacre of 30,000 Rajputs after he captured Chithorgarh in 1568. The Bahamani Sultans had an annual agenda of killing a minimum of 100,000 Hindus every year.
The Belgian Indologist Dr. Koenrad Elst ⁸ wrote that:
“There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like “punishing” the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526)…. The Moghuls (1526-1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in right earnest.”
He continues:
“Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, “Indian mountain”, was renamed Hindu Kush, “Hindu-killer”, when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took “twenty slaves each”.”
4). CONCLUSIONS
One might have thought that historical facts such as these cited in this post, would have provoked human-rights activists to put the Muslim empires into the same category as the later European ones. Not a word of it. The Islamic slave trade has always had a free pass from the liberal western press, not to mention being whitewashed by Islam’s own sources.
Slavery has been an integral part of Islamic practice from the start. It is scripturally endorsed, embedded in shari’a law, and has been practiced from the seventh century until today. The slave trade was notably carried on by Arab merchants across the Sahara and brought Africans to North Africa. Liberals rightly condemn the European slave trade and its impact on North America; they – again rightly – act to eliminate modern slavery through trafficking – which is estimated to involve some 40.3 million people worldwide by 2016. It is almost unheard of, nevertheless, for people on the left also to speak of the Islamic (mainly Arab) slave trade.
The educational website History World, for instance, has a substantial account entitled “History of Slavery”, in which it describes the use of slaves in Babylon, Greece, Rome, the European Middle Ages, and the Portuguese and triangular (chiefly the Transatlantic) slave trades. Yet it only mentions Islamic slavery in passing, despite its having lasted far longer than the European and American versions. Here one of three short paragraphs the site devotes to the subject, all of which appear to argue that supposedly Muslim slavery was not altogether a bad thing:
“Slavery is an accepted part of life in Arabia during the time of Muhammad, in the 7th century, and the Quran offers no arguments against the practice. It merely states, particularly in relation to female slaves, that they must be well treated.” ⁹
This post hasn’t had space to fully review the three centuries of the Barbary Slavers, where North African Muslims who went out as pirates into the Mediterranean to capture ships from European countries and take crews and passengers as slaves to be sold in the markets of Tunis, Algiers and other towns. Barbary pirates ventured as far as England and Ireland, where they would raid coastal villages, and carry residents off. Professor Robert Davis writes ¹⁰
“The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast in this way”.
This piracy continued for 300 years and even as late as the early 19th century, the US Navy with Sweden and Sicily, fought two wars against the Barbary States, finally bringing the piracy to an end.¹¹
Research for this post has proved once again that history does not lie in spite of the best efforts of Islam and Nazism to rewrite and/or whitewash it.
Sources and further research:
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-marry-rapist-bill-child-marriage-a9296681.html
“The Hidden Islamic Slave Trade & Colorism,” by Tony Gurule & Dr. Jay Smith: t.co/El5C6IaoP7 and https://vimeo.com/246339930
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world
www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Arab-owners-usually-castrated-African-male-slaves
Efraim Karsh, “Islamic Imperialism: A History” Yale University Press 2006
Footnotes:
¹ Slavery in 21st-century jihadism en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_21st-century_jihadism
² Winston Churchill. The River War, Vol. II, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899, pp. 248—50.
³ Bernard Lewis historian (1916-2018). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis
⁴ Ronald Segal (1932 – ) “Islam’s Black Slaves: the Other Black Diaspora” 2001 https://www.amazon.com/ISLAMS-BLACK-SLAVES-Ronald-Segal/dp/0374527970
⁵ John Dewar Gleissner (1952? – ) “Prison & Slavery – A Surprising Comparison” 2010 outskirtspress.com/prisonandslavery
⁶ Booker T Washington (1856-1915) Author and Presidential adviser.
⁷ www.sikhnet.com/news/islamic-india-biggest-holocaust-world-history
⁸ Koenrad Elst (1959 – ) “Was There an Islamic “Genocide” of Hindus?” www.academia.edu/16578319/Was_There_an_Islamic_Genocide_of_Hindus
⁹ www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistoriesResponsive.asp?historyid=ac41
¹⁰ Prof. Robert Davis (1948 -) “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters – White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800” (Palgrave Press) 2003
www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
¹¹ en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
Sent from Outlook for Android<aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
1). INTRODUCTION
Mention the slave trade and Muslims will quickly jump to the Bible to defend Islamic slavery, just as they jump to it in defence of Islamic violence. As ever when it suits them the Bible is an authority which Muslims appeal to, and when it doesn’t support Islam which is most of the time, it’s corrupt.
To explain why the Biblical concept of “slavery” is actually ‘voluntary indentured servitude’ with break clauses every 7 years, and why accusations of sexism and Old Testament “genocide” are false, watch the excellent video explanation given by Abdu Murray (see link below).
I challenge any Muslim to produce evidence for slavery today being authorised in any non-Islamic State. The fact is it’s Islam that to this day widely practices aspects of slavery which subjugate women. Make no mistake, child marriages, fgm, multiple wives, child grooming gangs, and honour killings where even rape vitims are stoned to death to save “family honour” are the legacy of a brutal era of slavery. In Islam women are routinely treated as the property of the husband’s, women can be taken captive and held as sex slaves and the Quran and Sharia law endorses and upholds all of this. And of course, Jihadist groups such as Boko Haram and Isis make no secret of adopting slave practices and pleading the Quran as justification.¹
The idea of reform included the Turkish government recently making its second bid to introduce a law granting amnesty to child rapists in Turkey if they marry their victim, provoking outrage across the country.
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-marry-rapist-bill-child-marriage-a9296681.html
In short slavery under Islam is incomparable to the Bible’s treatment of both slaves and women. How Sharia degrades women is beyond the scope of this post but will be covered separately in a future post
2). HISTORICAL SURVEY — HOW ARABS CAME TO BE IN NORTH AFRICA
Arab slavery had already begun in Africa more than 700 years before the European transatlantic slave trade. (It was from Islam of the pagan Arabians that the captive slave trade was established).
The slave trade began when the Arabs invaded North Africa for the first time in the 7th century AD. The first Arab entry into Africa was through Egypt.
An Arab military general named General Amir Aben Alas invaded Egypt in December 639 AD.
Amir had successfully conquered Egypt and went ahead and conquered other places such as Tunisia and western Libya.
Once these areas had been completely conquered by the Arabs, they imposed tributes of 360 slaves in all regions they occupied and controlled.
With this Islamic slave trade in Africa, North Africans were Islamized by their Arab slave masters.
Today, many Africans pose as Muslims without knowing how the owners of such a religion brutally enslaved their black African ancestors for over 700 years.
Its a little known fact that the Islamic slave trade was bigger and more brutal than the well documented transatlantic one that we all learn about in school. Watch “The Hidden Islamic Slave Trade & Colorism,” by Tony Gurule & Dr. Jay Smith: t.co/El5C6IaoP7 and https://vimeo.com/246339930
In 1899, Winston Churchill wrote about the Islamic slave trade: “…all [of the Arab tribes in The Sudan], without exception, were hunters of men. To the great slave markets of Jeddah a continual stream of negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic…Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was increasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them…The warlike Arab tribes fought and brawled among themselves in ceaseless feud and strife. The negroes trembled in apprehension of capture, or rose locally against their oppressors.” ²
Muslims ask why if slavery was so prevalent in Arab Muslim states were there so few descendants compared to the Americas?
This is a very good question. There were a number of factors all of which impacted on mortality of Arab slave populations and prove their far more inhumane treatment in comparison to the African American slave trade.
According to Bernard Lewis ³ the growth of internal slave populations through natural increase was insufficient to maintain numbers right through to modern times, which contrasts markedly with rapidly rising slave populations in the New World. He writes that:
□ “Liberation by freemen of their own offspring born by slave mothers was “the primary drain”.
□ Liberation of slaves as an act of piety, was a contributing factor.
□ Other factors include: Castration: A fair proportion of male slaves were imported as eunuchs. Levy states that according to the Quran and Islamic traditions, such emasculation was objectionable. Jurists such as al-Baydawi considered castration to be mutilation, stipulating law enforcement to prevent it. However, in practice, emasculation was frequent. In eighteenth century Mecca, the majority of eunuchs were in the service of the mosques. Moreover, the process of castration (which included penectomy) carried a high risk of death.
□ Liberation of military slaves: Military slaves that rose through the ranks were usually liberated at some stage in their careers.
□ Restrictions on procreation: Among the menial, domestic, and manual worker slaves, casual sex was not permitted and marriage was not encouraged.
□ High death toll: There was a high death toll among all classes of slaves. Slaves usually came from remote places and, lacking immunities, died in large numbers. Segal ⁴ notes that recent slaves, weakened by their initial captivity and debilitating journey, would have been easy victim to climate changes and infection. Children were especially at risk, and the Islamic market demand for children was much greater than the American one.
□ Many black slaves lived in conditions conducive to malnutrition and disease, with effects on their own life expectancy, the fertility of women, and the infant mortality rate. As late as the 19th century, Western travellers in North Africa and Egypt noted the high death rate among imported black slaves.
□ Another factor was the Zanj Rebellion against the plantation economy of ninth-century southern Iraq. Due to fears of a similar uprising among slave gangs occurring elsewhere, Muslims came to realize that large concentrations of slaves were not a suitable organization of labour and that slaves were best employed in smaller concentrations. As such, large-scale employment of slaves for manual labour became the exception rather than the norm, and the medieval Islamic world did not need to import vast numbers of slaves.”
Islam has a track record of destroying history and artefacts that is negative to Islam (the so called Golden Age was a myth – what survived from it was in spite of Islamic rule not because of it), so no surprise at all that nothing was recorded by them of their worst slave trade practices.
John Dewar Gleissner in “Prison & Slavery – A Surprising Comparison” notes:
“Terrible Aspects of Slavery in the Arab World. The Arabs’ treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire’s Sahara salt mines. Black Africans did not enjoy immunity to many of the diseases found in the Arab world, which also resulted in high death rates.
Slaveholders in the Muslim world often castrated black African male slaves to serve as harem guards. This is a prime reason there are not many communities of blacks living in the non-African Muslim world today, despite the millions of black African slaves sold into the Muslim world. Many African boys did not survive their castration surgery. As late as 1903, there were still 194 African eunuchs in service to the Ottoman ruling family.
African women were enslaved by Arabs more than African men. Few black slave children survived in the Muslim world. In 1860, when 3,000 black female slaves were set free in Zanzibar, only 5% of them had children. Because under Islamic law a concubine bearing the child of the master could become a wife and her children would then share in the inheritance, Middle Eastern wives and children of masters had a strong incentive to interfere with the sex lives of female slaves and cause brutal abortions. Islamic jurisprudence historically allowed abortions in the first four months of pregnancy, long before the West allowed it. Islamic tradition supports the view that the soul enters the fetus at 120 days. If a concubine had the only son, the threat to the wife was even greater. The Koran allowed Muslim men to have as many concubines as they could afford, in addition to four wives.
The Arab history of anti-black racism predates European anti-black racism by several centuries. The early Islamic empire exhibited all the characteristics of anti-black racism, and blacks suffered the lowest form of bondage. By 869 AD, black African slaves in southern Iraq, the despised Zanj, launched an extended slave revolt that threatened Baghdad until 883 A.D. The main reasons we have not heard more about the horrors of slavery in the Muslim world are that Muslims did not express moral outrage against slavery and wrote no abolitionist literature against the institution of slavery. Dr. Thomas Sowell characterizes the moral indignation against New World slavery, and the lack of any such indignation against the Muslim or non-Western world, as “selective moral indignation.” The moral outrage against slavery was and is, in the grand historical context, a European-inspired cause gaining significant traction only in the 1760s. Europeans took photographs of chained black African slaves in Arab slave-trading vessels on the East Coast of Africa in the 1880s. Slavery persisted openly in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, 100 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. As late as 1960, African Muslims still sold slaves when they arrived on pilgrimages, as a way to finance their pilgrimages. Arab nations lagged far behind the rest of the world in abolishing slavery: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, United Arab Emirates in 1963, Oman in 1970 and Mauritania officially in 1981. Today, according to U.S. State Department figures, Muslim nations condone international human trafficking more than Western countries do.
David Livingstone observed in Africa the horrendous slave trading practices of Arab and pagan slave traders, decades after Great Britain had begun to suppress the international slave trade, and almost a century after Lord Mansfield, with the stroke of a pen, freed slaves in England. The Ottoman Empire resisted British efforts to suppress slavery and the slave trade. Over the course of 70 years, 2,000 British sailors died to free 160,000 slaves. While Islam urged improved treatment of slaves in some ways, the rapid expansion of the Muslim empire rapidly increased the number of slaves, leading to crueler treatment. Africa and the Middle East never developed the moral abolitionist fervor seen in Western nations. Slavery is now most prominent in Africa.
From the time of the Crusades until the early 1800’s, Barbary pirates or corsairs from Muslim North Africa raided European coasts and waters, selling captive Europeans as slaves in North African ports and Istanbul. Barbary corsairs attacked shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, raiding the coasts of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Britain, Ireland, and Africa for slaves. Some Mediterranean islands and coasts in Spain and Italy were abandoned due to the threat of Barbary slave raiding. The United States initially paid tribute to the Barbary pirates to obtain the return of American captives. After building ships, the United States fought the First and Second Barbary Wars to stop this slave trading and piracy. In fact, the desire to defend American shipping and sailors from Barbary piracy gave re-birth to the U.S. Navy. The Marine Hymn refers to the Battle of Derne on “the shores of Tripoli.” The traditional Mameluke sword worn by Marine officers today is based on the one given Marine First Lt. Presley O’Bannon by Prince Hamet of Tripoli.” ⁵
A quote from Booker T Washington: ⁶
“The ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually,morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.”
3). ISLAMIC SLAVERY IN INDIA
Frighteningly high numbers of Hindus were massacred in India by Muslim rulers. A Sikh writer declares that the assault amounted to “the biggest holocaust in World history” ⁷ :
With the invasion of India by Mahmud Ghazni about 1000 AD, began the Muslim invasions into the Indian subcontinent and they lasted for several centuries. Nadir Shah made a mountain of the skulls of the Hindus he killed in Delhi alone. Babur raised towers of Hindu skulls at Khanua when he defeated Rana Sanga in 1527 and later he repeated the same horrors after capturing the fort of Chanderi. Akbar ordered a general massacre of 30,000 Rajputs after he captured Chithorgarh in 1568. The Bahamani Sultans had an annual agenda of killing a minimum of 100,000 Hindus every year.
The Belgian Indologist Dr. Koenrad Elst ⁸ wrote that:
“There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like “punishing” the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526)…. The Moghuls (1526-1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in right earnest.”
He continues:
“Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, “Indian mountain”, was renamed Hindu Kush, “Hindu-killer”, when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took “twenty slaves each”.”
4). CONCLUSIONS
One might have thought that historical facts such as these cited in this post, would have provoked human-rights activists to put the Muslim empires into the same category as the later European ones. Not a word of it. The Islamic slave trade has always had a free pass from the liberal western press, not to mention being whitewashed by Islam’s own sources.
Slavery has been an integral part of Islamic practice from the start. It is scripturally endorsed, embedded in shari’a law, and has been practiced from the seventh century until today. The slave trade was notably carried on by Arab merchants across the Sahara and brought Africans to North Africa. Liberals rightly condemn the European slave trade and its impact on North America; they – again rightly – act to eliminate modern slavery through trafficking – which is estimated to involve some 40.3 million people worldwide by 2016. It is almost unheard of, nevertheless, for people on the left also to speak of the Islamic (mainly Arab) slave trade.
The educational website History World, for instance, has a substantial account entitled “History of Slavery”, in which it describes the use of slaves in Babylon, Greece, Rome, the European Middle Ages, and the Portuguese and triangular (chiefly the Transatlantic) slave trades. Yet it only mentions Islamic slavery in passing, despite its having lasted far longer than the European and American versions. Here one of three short paragraphs the site devotes to the subject, all of which appear to argue that supposedly Muslim slavery was not altogether a bad thing:
“Slavery is an accepted part of life in Arabia during the time of Muhammad, in the 7th century, and the Quran offers no arguments against the practice. It merely states, particularly in relation to female slaves, that they must be well treated.” ⁹
This post hasn’t had space to fully review the three centuries of the Barbary Slavers, where North African Muslims who went out as pirates into the Mediterranean to capture ships from European countries and take crews and passengers as slaves to be sold in the markets of Tunis, Algiers and other towns. Barbary pirates ventured as far as England and Ireland, where they would raid coastal villages, and carry residents off. Professor Robert Davis writes ¹⁰
“The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast in this way”.
This piracy continued for 300 years and even as late as the early 19th century, the US Navy with Sweden and Sicily, fought two wars against the Barbary States, finally bringing the piracy to an end.¹¹
Research for this post has proved once again that history does not lie in spite of the best efforts of Islam and Nazism to rewrite and/or whitewash it.
Sources and further research:
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-marry-rapist-bill-child-marriage-a9296681.html
“The Hidden Islamic Slave Trade & Colorism,” by Tony Gurule & Dr. Jay Smith: t.co/El5C6IaoP7 and https://vimeo.com/246339930
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world
www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Arab-owners-usually-castrated-African-male-slaves
Efraim Karsh, “Islamic Imperialism: A History” Yale University Press 2006
Footnotes:
¹ Slavery in 21st-century jihadism en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_21st-century_jihadism
² Winston Churchill. The River War, Vol. II, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899, pp. 248—50.
³ Bernard Lewis historian (1916-2018). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis
⁴ Ronald Segal (1932 – ) “Islam’s Black Slaves: the Other Black Diaspora” 2001 https://www.amazon.com/ISLAMS-BLACK-SLAVES-Ronald-Segal/dp/0374527970
⁵ John Dewar Gleissner (1952? – ) “Prison & Slavery – A Surprising Comparison” 2010 outskirtspress.com/prisonandslavery
⁶ Booker T Washington (1856-1915) Author and Presidential adviser.
⁷ www.sikhnet.com/news/islamic-india-biggest-holocaust-world-history
⁸ Koenrad Elst (1959 – ) “Was There an Islamic “Genocide” of Hindus?” www.academia.edu/16578319/Was_There_an_Islamic_Genocide_of_Hindus
⁹ www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistoriesResponsive.asp?historyid=ac41
¹⁰ Prof. Robert Davis (1948 -) “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters – White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800” (Palgrave Press) 2003
www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
¹¹ en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
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