Posted on 03/27/2012 5:40:01 PM PDT by nickcarraway
As a member of Mauritania's slave-owning class, Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane could have had anything he wanted as a present for his circumcision ceremony: a toy, money, a camel, or, as his brother would choose, a bicycle. But the 7-year-old wanted something more sinister. He chose Yebawa Ould Keihel, a young boy with skin the color of coal. At that moment, Abdel became a slave master.
It's an experience that's common here in Mauritania, a vast country in West Africa's Sahara Desert where activists and the United Nations estimate 10% to 20% of people are enslaved -- usually dark-skinned people who have lighter-skinned masters.
For the owners of slaves, a group of Arab people called the White Moors who raided sub-Saharan Africa for slaves centuries ago, this is no big deal.
"It was as if I were picking out a toy," Abdel, now 47, said of choosing Yebawa as his slave. "For me, it was as if he were a thing -- a thing that pleased me. This idea came to me because there were all these stories about him which made me laugh -- that he talked in his sleep, that he was a bit chubby and a bit clumsy, that he was always losing the animals he was supposed to be watching over and was then always getting punished for this. So for me, he was an interesting and comic figure. "It's normal that I chose him."
Sadder still, Yebawa didn't consider himself human either -- at least not in the way Abdel was. Mauritania's slaves are very often brainwashed by their masters into thinking they are less than human and that their place is at the bottom of a rigid and still-enforced caste system that allows them only to serve their masters without pay or free will.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Bush’s Fault!
Slavery vanished from Europe with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and was reintroduced by Muslim traders a millennium later.
Good story.
Slavery was brought to America by Europeans looking to make sugar. If you can get it, you need to watch this PBS show:
http://wptschedule.org/episodes/11452/Burt-Wolf-What-We-Eat/How-Sweet-It-Is-The-Story-of-Sugar/
Nonsense. Slavery long predated Islam and for that matter Christianity. The slave trade was one of the main economic props of the Carthaginian economy.
spread slavery to the Americas
Double nonsense. Muslims had little to do with the trans-Atlantic trade, at least directly. This is because various powerful African coastal nations prevented the Muslim traders from directly contacting the Europeans. Of course, some of the slaves sold were probably originally captured by Muslims, then resold to the pagan coastal middlemen.
were the last to give it up
Pretty much true.
and are the only culture on earth still practicing it.
Not entirely true. Various African (non-Muslim) groups still practice it. And if you classify the various "human trafficking" practices as slavery it is widespread, including in this country. Just not legally.
Slavery vanished from Europe with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and was reintroduced by Muslim traders a millennium later.
Nope. Slavery existed throughout the Middle Ages, it just wasn't dominant, being replaced in most of Europe by serfdom.
http://www.scatoday.net/node/3565
The term "slave" itself comes from Slav. "This sense development arose in the consequence of the wars waged by Otto the Great and his successors against the Slavs, a great number of whom they took captive and sold into slavery. [Klein]"
Please remind us also to watch PBS shows on the McCarthy hearings and the Nuclear Freeze movement.
The Europeans and Americans have been pretty poor customers for slaves, as cultures go. They took it up for a brief period and then went around the world trying to abolish it. The Moslems, Orientals, and the Africans themselves have been the real enthusiasts. All those cultures that believe people are essentially ants. The American Indians kept Indian and black slaves as well.
There would have been no international African slave trade without the Arabs. It would have been confined to the incessantly warring African tribes themselves. Any book, even by a liberal historian, will make it clear that it was the Arabs alone who created and used the slave-trading routes. They bought the slaves from tribes in the interior and sold them to the rest of the world from the handful of ports that exist on the African continent. Most of the African slave trade went to the Middle East. About 5 percent went to the Americas.
It's significant that all African slavery, including America's, was supplied by Moslems.
Not completely accurate. The latter is 100% accurate yes, but the former, no. For 'Americans' if we extend the history back as being times from say 2000 BC to now, then 'Americans' have practised slavery. We as a nation however are a young nation, and we only had slavery for the first century of our nation's life and then abolished it completely -- better than most countries, yes.
however, in the case of Europeans slavery was commonplace before Christianity -- think of the Spartans and their slave society etc. Athens had 60% or more of it's population as slaves
In the medieval world only the rich lands: the Byzantines and Moslem lands could afford slaves.
As the Black Death killed much of the population, the cost of slave labor increased.
Note that in the Domesday book compiled by William the conqueror in 1086, nearly 10% of the population of England were slaves. The trade of slaves was made illegal in England by the 12th century. the Scandanavians had thralls
the world as a whole did not actively stop slavery until the Methodists came along -- and in the 1800s only.
Also, the Methodists were only one of many anti-slavery sects. The Congregationalists (direct descendants of the Puritans) predated them.
And, yes, slavery did indeed survive the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 a.d., but it did not thrive and spread until the introduction of Islam some two centuries later.
Further, it is also true that Native American tribes practiced slavery before the white man arrived. Like our ancient Greek, Roman and Old Testament era forebears, they saw it as a humane alternative to what it had replaced-- wholesale genocide of conquered civilizations.
Slavery took a new twist once the Spanish arrived and found native peoples did not work willingly as slaves, particularly when compared to the growing supply from Africa. It was only natural that later colonizers, including the English, did the same. The first Europeans to trade in African slaves were, of course, the Portuguese who, of course, were also the first explores of the dark continent. Guess who supplied them with slaves?
Speaking of slavery among Native Americans, even as America expanded west, some of our tribes quickly learned to trade on the sympathies of whites opposed to slavery. There was a commonality of Quakers settling Pennsylvania, Methodists settling Kansas and Mormons settling Utah whereby local tribes learned to take slaves from rival tribes and sell them to the anti-slavery settlers (who would try to convert them and set them free) as a type of shakedown racket not so different than modern liberals exploiting certain favored minority groups for political power.
I don't think any of us are trying to argue that Islam originated slavery, not are we trying to argue about the etomological origins of the word slave.
All of us understand that the practice is as old as human civilization itself.
We're simply stating that modern African slavery has Islamic origins.
Up until the last round of Islamic expansion was smacked down at the gates of Vienna and the battle of Lepanto in the mid 17th century, Europeans were also captured and sold into slavery by the Religion of Peace. The biographical account of one such slave, a distant cousin in my family tree, appears here.
Untrue. Arabs and Muslims had little or no direct contact with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Muslims controlled North Africa and the Sahara. Powerful pagan tribes such as Ashanti and Dahomey controlled the rain forest West African coast where almost all slaves were shipped for the Atlantic trade. The pagans and Muslims fought over control of the Sahel, the savannah belt between the desert and the jungle. The pagan tribes did not allow Muslims/Arabs to come into contact with their European customers.
Most of the African slave trade went to the Middle East.
This is true. Though a good many went to India, also.
About 5 percent went to the Americas.
I think you've mixed up a statistic here. The East African and trans-Sahara slave trade lasted from the 7th to 20th centuries. (By Muslims. It's much older than that.) The Atlantic trade from West Africa lasted from the 15th to 19th centuries.
Nobody really knows how many were shipped by either route, but most reasonably unbiased historians estimate roughly similar numbers, with perhaps 15M to 20M from North and East Africa (by Arabs), but spread over a much longer period, and perhaps 12M to 15M across the Atlantic (by white guys) over a shorter period.
IOW, your 5% number is way off. It is possible you have confused the percentage of slaves shipped across the Atlantic who wound up in what is now the USA, which was about 5%. (Somehow the US, 5% of the trade, is morally held responsible for all of it.)
It's significant that all African slavery, including America's, was supplied by Moslems.
Nope. Just wrong. I'm sure Moslems would have been more than happy to have this monopoly, but they never did, except towards the middle and end of the 19th century, when Europeans had given up the trade.
It is also significant that AFAIK Muslims never developed an indigenous abolition movement. Changes in their slavery practice were always forced on them by the West.
It is also interesting that most Muslim slavery was not truly economic in nature. The slaves weren't used on vast profitable plantations, as in the western hemisphere.
Most Muslim slaves were luxury items of consumption, not production. Concubines, enunchs, domestics, soldiers, not workers.
Muslim slave raiding did not end in the 1600s. As can be seen by our own wars against Barbary in the 19th century.
The only thing that finally stopped slave raiding in the Med was European conquest of N. Africa.
That's why Muzzies have to be smacked down regularly and hard, just so they remember.
Pagans will do anything. I'm talking about European civilization, which dates from its conversion to Christianity—as early drafts of even the EU Constitution pointed out. Measured in historical time, Christian Europeans were mere dabblers in slavery. This should be no surprise, since it is Christian philosophy, and only Christian philosophy, that opposed slavery and sparked its abolition in most places.
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