ISLAM AND SLAVERY: THE CONCEALED TRUTH Excerpts from a Lecture by Srdja Trifkovic

The ongoing campaign for so-called Reparations rests upon the allegation that that the European civilization in general—and its trans-Atlantic heirs, the founding fathers of the United States in particular—should be taken to task for the fact that they practiced slavery. That is somewhat ironic since the Western civilization is in fact the only civilization in history to have created from within itself a successful movement to condemn and abolish slavery.

It is a matter of historical record that other civilizations, and most notably Islamic civilization, have not achieved this. The world of Islam has never striven to do so without external prompting. To this day the only places in the world where one can buy a slave for ready cash are Moslem countries. The slaves in question are almost invariably black, and the countries in question are primarily Mauritania and Sudan.

While both the Old and New Testaments recognized slavery, the Gospels do not treat the institution as divinely ordained. The slaves are human, and all men are equal in the eyes of God regardless of their status in this life: “there is neither Jew nor Greek,” says St. Paul, “there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Slavery was to early Christians a fact of life, and a thing of men.

The Kuran, by contrast, not only assumes the existence of slavery as a permanent fact of life, but regulates its practice in considerable detail and therefore endows it with divine sanction. Muhammad and his companions owned slaves, or acquired them in war. Muhammad’s scripture recognizes the basic inequality between master and slave, and the rights of the former over the latter (Kuran, 16:71; 30:28). The Kuran assures the Muslim the right to own slaves (to “possess their necks”) either by purchasing them or as bounty of war (58:3). Its author, Muhammad, had dozens of them, both male and female, and he regularly sold, purchased, hired, rented, and exchanged slaves once he became independently wealthy in Medina after the confiscation of Jewish property. The bounties are lawful to the Muslim, theologian ibn Timiyya wrote, and slavery is justified: “It is lawful to kill the infidel or to enslave him, and it also makes it lawful to take his offspring into captivity” (Ibn Timiyya says,Vol. 32, p. 89). In line with the racist views of Muhammad about his own people, the Arabs, as “the nobles of all races,” they were exempt from enslavement (Ibn Timiyya states,Vol. 31, p. 380).

The four caliphs who came after Muhammad discouraged the enslavement of free Muslims, and it was eventually prohibited. The assumption of freedom as the normal condition of men did not extend to non-Muslims, however. Disobedient or rebellious dhimmis were reduced to slavery—that is, if their lives were spared—and prisoners captured in jihad were also enslaved if they could not be exchanged or ransomed. In 781 7000 Greek prisoners of war were enslaved after a battle at Ephesus. At the capture of Thessalonica in 903, 22,000 Christians were sold into Muslim slavery. The same happened in 1064 in Georgia and Armenia. In Africa Arab rulers regularly raided sub-Saharan black tribes and captured slaves, claiming their raids to be jihad; many Hindus were enslaved on the same pretext.

Divine sanction of slavery means that disobedience to one’s master carries everlasting punishment, while obeying the master is the slave’s only path to paradise: “There are three (persons) whose prayer will not be accepted, nor their virtues be taken above: The runaway slave until he returns back to his master, the woman with whom her husband is dissatisfied, and the drunk until he becomes sober” (Mishkat al-Masabih, Book I, Hadith No. ii, 74). While maltreatment was deplored, there was no fixed sharia penalty. The slave had no legal powers or rights whatsoever. A Muslim slave-owner was entitled by law to the sexual enjoyment of his slave women. The Koran mandated that a freeman should be killed only for another freeman, a slave for a slave, and a female for a female (2:178). The Tradition says that “a Muslim should not be killed for a non-Muslim, nor a freeman for a slave” (The Commentary of al-Baydawi, p. 36).

The slave trade inside the Islamic empire and along its edges was vast. It began to flourish at the time of the Muslim expansion into Africa, in the middle of the seventh century, and it still survives today in Mauritania and Sudan. The Spanish and Portuguese originally purchased Black African slaves for their American colonies from Arab dealers. Every year, for about 600 years, the Nubian kingdom was forced to send a tribute of slaves to the Muslim rulers in Cairo. Nubians and Ethiopians, with their slender features and thin noses, were preferred to the equatorial Bantus, for whom hard toil and lowly menial tasks were generally reserved.

Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes—from West Africa across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia, from Chad across the desert to Libya, from East Africa down the Nile to Egypt, and across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. There are notable differences between the slave trade in the Islamic world and the trans-Atlantic variety. The former has been going on for 13 centuries and it is an integral feature of the Islamic civilization, while the influx of slaves into the New World lasted less than three hundred years and effectively ended by the middle of the 19th century.

It is estimated that ten to twelve million Africans were taken to the Americas during that period. The number of captives taken to the heartlands of Islam—while impossible to establish with precision—is many times greater. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there are tens of millions of descendants of slaves in the Americas, and practically none in the Muslim world outside Africa. For all its horrors, the Atlantic slave trade regarded its victims as valuable assets whose lives and progeny should be preserved, admittedly not for altruistic but primarily for economic reasons. In the Muslim world, by contrast, slaves were considerably cheaper, far more widely available, and regarded as a dispensable commodity. They were not allowed to have families, and most men were brutally castrated even before reaching the market.

In the early Caliphate, in Mesopotamia, considerable numbers of black slaves were used as labor on large estates, but the practice effectively ceased after a mass rebellion in the ninth century that at one moment even threatened Baghdad. Since that time the Muslim heartland has been apprehensive of using large contingents of male African slaves working in one location. They were used primarily as domestic servants, or, in the case of women, as sex objects: some harems had hundreds of concubines. In North Africa black slaves were also used as soldiers blindly obedient to their masters.

Many African slaves were eunuchs, and the method of their mutilation, before they could fetch the best price in the Islamic world, defies imagination:

Castration was admittedly against the Islamic law, but its letter—the “spirit” being non-existent—often offered a pragmatic way out for the imaginative believer. Regarding African captives, a handy contrivance was to buy already castrated slaves whose mutilation occurred prior to the wretch’s importation into the lands of the Faithful. The dealers thus had a clear incentive to perform the operation themselves along the route. For African captives nothing short of “castration level with the abdomen” would do; no mere removal of the cojones, like with the Slavic and Greek captives, by the mere removal of testicles. Only such radically castrated eunuchs were deemed fit to be guardians of the harem: that way there was no risk of their damaging any of the property in the harem. The mortality rates were enormous [Islam’s black slaves—an interview with Ronald Segal by Suzy Hansen].

In the period of its decline the Ottoman harems and landed estates were filled by Christian slaves captured in the Caucasus, until the Russian liberation of the area in the early 19th century. The Tatars raided surrounding Christian lands from their stronghold in the Crimea and sold tens of thousands of captured Eastern Europeans in the slave markets of Istanbul and other Turkish cities until the Russian annexation of the peninsula in 1783. Another important source of European slaves was piracy, with its autonomous power-base in the Barbary Coast of Algiers. The captives of the Barbary corsairs could be freed by ransom or conversion. The rest were sold at auctions, and many died from fever, starvation, or the lash. Women were taken into harems as concubines of their captors.

any islamic country, such as Iran, that lives under islamic law. I'm not a religious scholar but the way I understand the Qua ran to read is that it is perfectly ok to take the "infidel" as a slave because we are less than human if we are not disciples of the prophet.

I read your links. And the stories are known. However, the writer is pointing out that it is HYPOCRITICAL to be blaming Europeans only for slave trade as the basis for reparations. What part of that don't you understand?

And while I have no doubt that abuses take place in the U.S. and all other countries of the world I still don't think there are active markets in the U.S. where people are still bought and sold as easily as a loaf of bread as exists in some ME countries.

Let me put it another way; while slavery or trafficking in slaves is condemned and outlawed in the U.S. and other western countries, the practice still seems to be thriving and a blind eye turned toward it in Africa and parts of the ME.

If you think that pointing that out to you means that I hate Muslims then you are no better than Al Sharpton or any of the other race warlords.

death cult of the moon god bump

De-nile ain't just a river in Egypt, andak01.

I also read the part of the Koran where it's considered acceptable to lie to the unbelievers. ;-)

"Just in the nick of time, Mohammed received a revelation that helpfully clarified the theopolitical questions at issue for the Meccan guardians of the gods in the Ka‘aba. When Mohammed had reported that Allah was the only god in town, it turned out that he hadn't received the entire satellite transmission. Perhaps Gabriel had mumbled and Mohammed missed part of the message. Wouldn't you know? The three favorite goddesses of Mecca - al-Lat, al-Uzzah, and al-Manat - were also real! This saved Mohammed's neck and all body parts attached thereto, and the exiles were able to return from Ethiopia. Later, when it was safe to do so, this all-important revelation was expunged from the Qur’an and it was explained that the revelation had come from Shaitan (Satan), not Allah. Thus began the legend of the "Satanic Verses," which more than a thousand years later was to prompt the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa of death against the novelist Salman Rushdie.

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