Posted on 08/13/2010 10:40:50 AM PDT by Justaham
The stoninig of the woman above was because she had unmarried sex with a man. Also, women who are raped are also treated to violent deaths, yet, Obama thinks this is a good thing for American women.
Actually, it is probable few were.
During this period the west African coastlands were controlled by powerful black pagan kingdoms. They acted as middlemen between the actual slave takers inland and the (white) slave buyers at the depots. For obvious reasons they jealously guarded access to their ports.
Muslims controlled the grasslands and deserts north of the forest belt and raided into it for slaves, but the vast majority of their captives were sold to the Middle East and India via the trans-Sahara and Indian Ocean/Red Sea routes.
While it's likely some of the originally Muslim-enslaved blacks were sold the other direction and eventually passed on to the coast and white traders, there couldn't have been very many of them.
BTW, the horrors of the trans-Sahara slave trade vastly exceeded those of the trans-Atlantic trade, awful as that was.
And Muslims engaged in the African slave trade for many centuries before Europeans got into it, and continued it long after Europeans stopped. In fact, they kept it going right up until they were forced (by the evil Europeans) to stop.
Oddly enough, there is a genuine Muslim contribution along these lines to America. The Turkish practice of innoculating for smallpox was used by Washington to immunize his army. The Brits did not do so and the differential death and sickness ratio that resulted played a significant role in assisting the American victory.
In particular, a large number of American slaves defected to the British during the southern campaign, on the promise of freedom. Most of them died of smallpox before they could be used to fight the Americans.
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