SLAVERY IN ISLAM AND IN THE WEST: THE DOUBLE STANDARDS OF THE INTELLECTUAL ELITES

In 2006, Tony Blair expressed his “deep sorrow” over Britain's role in the slave trade. In an article for the New Nation newspaper, the then-prime minister said it had been a “profoundly shameful” affair in Britain's history.

But Blair's words angered some African groups, such as the Pan African Reparation Coalition – because he had not been fawning enough in his apology. “An apology is just the start – words mean nothing,” said a spokeswoman.

There are a number of double standards and misplaced priorities in this scenario. Is it really right that Britain – and the West in general – be singled out for the slave trade? And should it be necessary for Blair, or anyone else, to apologise for it at all?

The fact the mainstream media and groups such as the Pan African Reparation Coalition repeatedly ignore is that there was another slave trade which was just as shameful a blot on the history of the human race – that of Islamic slavery. Not only is this never mentioned, but the Islamic world has never been subjected to any worldwide condemnation or shame because of it.

My posts over the next couple of days are intended to redress the balance and provide the corrective to the current politically correct malaise, by examining and comparing the West and the Islamic world and their roles in the slave trade. In doing so, I hope to call attention to the neglected victims of a slave trade that no one condemns, as well to emphasise that the West has nothing to be ashamed of, and everything to be proud of.

Tune in tomorrow to read my examination of Western attitudes towards slavery.

ISLAMIC SLAVERY

In the Islamic world, the story regarding slavery is very different to that of the West. There was no organised abolitionist movement at any time within the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, in modern Turkey, the abolition of slavery is not taught in the educational curriculum.

Muslims had an even greater hand in the African slave trade than did the West. It is estimated that around 11 million slaves were deported in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, while Muslims are believed to have taken over 17 million Africans as slaves between the seventh and nineteenth centuries. Muslims dealing with black slaves were prone to racist attitudes that modern liberal thinkers tend to attribute exclusively to white Westerners. For example, the great Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun (d.1406) wrote that blacks submitted willingly to slavery because they “have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals”.

Little known to the average Westerner is the history of the “hideous trade” in eunuch slaves from Africa in Muslim societies. Slaves from sub-Saharan Africa underwent dangerous and painful operations whereby their penis and testicles were completely removed. This operation often caused extensive hemorrhaging and urethral infection, and it is estimated that up to 90% of those castrated died as a result of it.

Even less well-known to the average Westerner is the enslavement of white Europeans and Americans by Arab Muslims. Between 1530 and 1780, there were at least one million white European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary coast. These white slaves were treated abysmally, often subjected to torture in order to force them to convert to Islam. One English slave, Thomas Pellow, who was captured in 1716, eventually succumbed to the intimidation after his torturer resorted to setting his flesh on fire on multiple occasions.

Interestingly, the Muslim rulers would often employ black slaves to oversee their white counterparts in their forced labour. The blacks were cruel and vicious, often beating the workers with cudgels and entertaining themselves by waking the Christian slaves at night, beating them, and forcing them to do more hard labour. These inhuman conditions were only lifted in 1816, not through Islamic reform but by British military force, with the total destruction of Algiers.

A major reason for the Islamic tolerance of slavery is that the Qur'an itself, like the Bible, takes the practice for granted. It even goes so far as to give Muslim men permission to have sex with slave girls: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.” (4:24) The Prophet Muhammad himself is recorded to have owned around sixty slaves in his lifetime, and although Muslims are keen to point to a couple of examples in which he freed individual slaves, there is no evidence to suggest that he disapproved of slavery in principle. Muslims of future generations justified slavery with reference to Islamic theology, and as a result tended to take slaves from non-Muslim populations. The Muslim jurist al-Wanshirisi (d.1508), for example, said that slavery is an affliction against unbelievers, and a way of deliberately humiliating them for their infidelity.

Unlike Christianity, however, Islamic tradition never developed a pluralistic conception of the unity of mankind which could lead to the discarding of such a worldview, and the Qur'an contains a sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that does not allow for the equal dignity and rights of all people in Muslim societies.

Thus it is not surprising that anti-slavery views did not resonate anywhere in the Islamic world until Western powers began to intervene. Slavery was not abolished in Saudi Arabia until 1962, and Yemen and Oman in 1970. Although slavery was “officially” abolished in Mauritania in 1980, it nevertheless still goes on there. Niger did not ban slavery until 2004, although these laws are largely ignored and as many as a million people remain in bondage. There has also been a recrudescence of slavery in the Sudan since 1983.

CONCLUSIONS

The double standards of African reparations groups and white liberals are clear. There is no reason for Britain to be making grovelling apologies for the slave trade, when some of its greatest citizens are responsible for bringing about the end of that degrading traffic. Britain has already done more than enough to apologise to Africans.

It is also notable how no one is asking for an apology from Muslims for the cruelty of their ancestors, whose own slave trade brought suffering to more people and lasted longer, nor for the ongoing slavery in some Muslim countries. Furthermore, no whites are demanding reparations for the way their ancestors were treated centuries ago, not only by Arab Muslims but by blacks also.

It is time for Britain to say, “enough”. We must stand up and be proud of what we did to bring about the end of slavery, rather than apologising for things that we have already apologised for in the most sacrificial way possible. We must also demand that Muslims take responsibility for the crimes of their forefathers, and work to end the trafficking of slaves in their own countries in the modern era.

If they do not, innocent people will continue to suffer.

SLAVERY IN THE WEST

We certainly should not glorify slavery, and nor should we celebrate the role of Western countries such as Britain in participating in it. Slavery is an unethical, inhuman, degrading practice. But the West has already paid its penance for its past crimes – and it did so by being the first to push for abolition of slavery.

The roots of abolition go back to the ancient Greeks, who developed the conception of the unity of man, a common brotherhood that bound all human beings regardless of race or creed. Plato put forward the argument that one of mankind's biggest mistakes was to “divide humanity into two”, treating the Greeks as a separate class while “[a]ll other nations, although their number is unknown and they do not intermingle or share any common language, are called by the single term 'barbarian', and because of this one term it is supposed that they constitute a single class.” Aristotle saw mankind as one race, distinguished from other creatures by the power of reason: “[A]ll men by nature desire to know...the human race lives also by art and reasonings.” Cicero, who introduced Greek philosophy to the Romans, wrote:

“This creature which we call man, endowed with foresight and sagacity, complex, intelligent, equipped with memory, full of reason and understanding, has been created by the supreme deity with a certain distinctive status: out of all the species and varieties of living creatures he alone has a share in reason and thought, which is lacking in all the rest...Since therefore nothing is better than reason and reason exists in both man and god, reason is the first bond of unity between them...Therefore the whole universe must be seen as a single joint community of gods and men.”

There was even direct criticism of slavery during the era of the ancient Greeks. Alcidamas, the fourth-century rhetorician and Sophist, condemned the practice: “God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” And although Aristotle is known to have said that some men are by nature slaves, he also recommended that slaves should eventually be emancipated.

Such views continued to be held in the West long after the Greeks, particularly among Christians, who absorbed Greek and Stoic ethics into their theology. Although it condones and never condemns slavery, the Bible also affirms the oneness of man before God: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) This attitude caused Christians to question the morality of slavery even as far back as the so-called Dark Ages. St. Isidore of Seville declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” In 649, Clovis II, king of the Franks, married a slave, who later began a campaign to halt slavery. The Catholic Church now honours her as St. Bathilda. And in the sixteenth century, a Spanish missionary and bishop named Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a law prohibiting enslavement of the Indians.

These aren't simply the actions and assumptions of a few; they are part of the grand universalist tradition of the West, and have formed our culture, part of who we are as Brits, or Americans, or Europeans. In time, they would form the basis for the abolition of the slave trade.

The pioneering abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson were British. They were supported in their efforts by influential writers such as William Cowper and Laurence Sterne. In America, there was William Lloyd Garrison, and even Abraham Lincoln, both of whom based their opposition to slavery on Biblical principles. Slavery was pronounced to be against the law in Scotland in 1776. English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham called the British colonies where slavery flourished “a disgrace and an outrage on humanity.”

The eighteenth century was the high tide of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but it also gave rise to the principles of freedom, equality and human rights, which were themselves derived from the ancient Greeks and found primarily in the West. Truly one of the greatest things about Western civilisation is its ability to engage in self-criticism: to subject even its most cherished beliefs and institutions to critical analysis and change. It was this willingness for self-criticism that led to the abolition of slavery, not just in the West, but throughout the world.

Tune in tomorrow to read my examination of the Islamic slave trade.

An Addendum To the Recent Posts About Slavery

While I was discussing the differences between Western and Islamic views of slavery, I didn't want to leave out the role of black Africa itself in the slave trade - something else the media never talks about.

The slave trade among the West and the Islamic worlds could not have been fully developed without the Africans themselves offering slaves to them. The African powers entered into the slave trade entirely of their own accord. No opposition to slavery in principle ever came out of Africa. In fact, certain African chiefs actually sent delegates to the West to protest the abolition of slavery, because it was so profitable for them!

Just sayin...

Islam 101

OTHER OPPRESSIONS

“Allah's Apostle never killed anyone except in one of the following three situations: (1) A person who killed somebody unjustly (2) a married person who committed illegal sexual intercourse and (3) a man who fought against Allah and His Apostle and deserted Islam and became an apostate.” (Sahih Bukhari v.9, b.83, no.37)

We have seen that if you are a woman or a non-Muslim, you are going to have an uncomfortable time (to say the least) under sharia. But if you're a Muslim male, it's entirely different, right?

Not quite. While Muslim men enjoy many luxuries under Islamic law, sharia still holds plenty of seventh-century barbarisms in store for anyone who breaks its rules, and others who misbehave are also likely to find themselves in trouble. Islam matches, and maybe even exceeds, the brutal punishments laid out in the Old Testament of the Bible – the main difference being that Islam has never evolved away from these harsh rulings, and they are still part of Islamic law today, for any Muslim authority to legitimately enforce if they so choose.

Perhaps the most notorious and well-known of the Qur'an's over-the-top punishments is the penalty of amputation for theft: “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise.” (Qur'an 5:38) This prohibition, however, does not seem to have been absolute, as Muhammad encouraged the taking of booty from his enemies after raids and battles on numerous occasions, and the Qur'an even directs that one-fifth of all war spoils should be donated to Allah and his charitable works (8:41).

Islam also mandates death penalties for a variety of offenses, one of the most striking being for apostasy – leaving Islam. Numerous hadith traditions have Muhammad recorded as saying simply, “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” (Bukhari v.9, b.88, no.6922, and others). Umdat al-Salik says that “when a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”. Many radical Muslims take this law very seriously, and it has even been implemented in the new Afghanistan, which – backed by Coalition forces – is supposed to be a flowering democracy: Abdul Rahman, a convert to Christianity, was arrested and put on trial for his life there in 2006, only to later be released due to international pressure.

Homosexuals are also to be put to death, in line with Muhammad's sayings: “If a man who is not married is seized committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death” (Abu Dawud, b.38, no.4448); “Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him” (quoted in Umdat al-Salik). There are currently several convicted homosexuals awaiting execution in Iran.

Sharia also punishes adultery with death by stoning. Apologists for Islam are quick to point out that while Islamic law may indeed command this, the punishment is not mandated in the Qur'an, which says only that adulterers should be given a hundred lashes (24:2), and that therefore the law can be easily reformed. However, in one hadith tradition caliph Umar explains that the Qur'an did originally contain a verse calling for the stoning of adulterers, but it was somehow inadvertently dropped (Bukhari v.8, b.86, no.6830). Also, Muhammad himself enforced the stoning punishment, as on one occasion when he came across some Jews who had convicted a couple of adultery. Muhammad asked them what their prescribed punishment was for such a crime. Ever since the destruction of the Temple Mount in 70 CE, the Jews had moved away from barbarous capital punishments, and the group that Muhammad encountered attempted to dissemble, claiming that the punishment the Torah prescribed for adultery was lashes only. However, Muhammad called them out on this and scolded them for ignoring their scriptures, before ordering that the couple be stoned anyway (Bukhari v.4, b.61, no.3635). Convicted adulterers are still feeling the sting of those stones in the Islamic world today.

When British teacher Gillian Gibbons was recently arrested in Sudan for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad, many Westerners were surprised at the anger and death threats that came her way from Sudanese Muslims. Left unexplored in the mainstream media were the roots of this farce, going back to the time of Muhammad, who ordered the assassinations of people who wrote “insulting” poems about him. To this day, some Islamic legal schools still teach that non-Muslims in Islamic countries who “mention something impermissible about Allah, the Prophet . . . or Islam” can face one of four fates: death, enslavement, ransoming in exchange for money or release without paying anything, depending on the will of the person in charge. It is unanimously agreed among all the schools that if a Muslim insults Muhammad they should be put to death.

Islam is also very clear in condoning slavery. Muhammad owned dozens of slaves and did not at all disapprove of the practice. He even gave Muslims permission to have sex with slave girls they owned: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.” (Qur'an 4:24) Islamic tradition records numerous unsavoury incidents in which Muhammad gave his men permission to rape women they had captured in battle, e.g: “We got female captives in the war booty and we used to do coitus interruptus with them. So we asked Allah's Apostle about it and he said, 'Do you really do that?' repeating the question thrice, 'There is no soul that is destined to exist but will come into existence, till the Day of Resurrection.'” (Bukhari v.7, b.62, no.137) In other words, you can have as much sex as you like with your captives; the women won't get pregnant if Allah doesn't want them to. The Prophet also did it himself, “marrying” the wife of a Jewish leader whom he had just ordered beheaded after the siege of Khaybar. It is not recorded whether she consented, but it seems unlikely that she would marry and have sex with a man who had that same day murdered her husband.

Slavery has been a constant throughout Islamic history, particularly trading among non-Muslim slaves. Muslim forces would launch regular raids on non-Muslim lands specifically to acquire slaves, particularly from Greece and India, and would then sell them off for trading in other parts of the Islamic world. These slaves often also faced pressure to convert to Islam. One English captive from the eighteenth century recounted how he finally gave in to this pressure after his Muslim captors resorted to torture, setting him on fire on multiple occasions.

There is even evidence that some Western Muslims still keep slaves today. In 2006 a Saudi man in the US was found guilty of keeping a woman as a slave. The following month an Egyptian couple living in California were convicted of keeping a ten year old girl as a slave. And in early 2007 an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christians in slave-like conditions.

But how is this any different to Christianity? The Bible, like the Qur'an, takes slavery for granted, never condemning it, and the Old Testament even contains regulations about selling your daughters as slaves.

And yet there has been opposition to slavery within the Christian world as far back as the Dark Ages. St Isidore of Seville declared that "God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman". Charlemagne and other Christian leaders also opposed it. In the 1500s, the Catholic missionary and bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas was instrumental in enacting a Spanish law forbidding the enslavement of the Indians. Furthermore, the end of slavery has its roots in Christian principles, as pioneering abolitionists such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Garrison were motivated by their deep Christian faith, and the Biblical assumption of the dignity and equality of all who are redeemed in Christ. Even Abraham Lincoln was compelled to help the families of slaves by appealing to Christian principles, including the Golden Rule of Jesus: Treat others as you wish to be treated.

This is not the case with Islam. Islamic slavery lasted longer and brought suffering to more people than did Christian slavery. It is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved 10.5 million people, while the Islamic slave trade lasted from the seventh century to the nineteenth and involved 17 million people.

There was no abolitionist movement within Islam. When slavery did end, it was through British military force. Slavery is still openly practised in Sudan, and only ended in several Islamic countries (through Western pressure) very recently. And there is evidence that it is underhandedly practised in a good deal of other countries, such as Niger, which only abolished slavery in 2004 but where the laws are largely ignored and as many as a million people remain in bondage.

There are, of course, brave anti-slavery campaigners in the Muslim world, but they are finding it hard going because of the support for it in the Qur'an and Muhammad's (the Perfect Man's) example.

With all this oppression mandated in Islamic law, you may find yourself wanting to stay indoors and relax with a bit of self-expression or appreciation of the arts. But alas, this is forbidden also. Muhammad banned musical instruments: “Allah Mighty and Majestic sent me as a guidance and mercy to believers and commanded me to do away with musical instruments, flutes, strings, crucifixes, and the affair of the pre-Islamic period of ignorance. On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress. Song makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water does herbage.” (quoted in Umdat al-Salik) No doubt this would have been on the mind of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini when he famously uttered, “Music is treason to our nation and to our youth.” Muhammad also prohibited representational art: “Angels do not enter a house wherein there is a dog or some images (or pictures, etc) of living creatures (a human being or an animal etc).” (Bukhari v.4, b.59, no.3225)

And don't even think about sitting down and chilling out with a glass of wine, for alcohol is an “abomination, of Satan's handwork” (Qur'an 5:90).

It seems that Islam, in its traditional form, really doesn't allow you to do an awful lot, even if you're an astute believer. Of course, many Muslims do not subscribe to many of their religion's harshest ideals, and most Muslim countries are not enforcing full sharia law. But this system is precisely what Islamic supremacists want to impose on the rest of the world – by violence, if necessary. It is a system which is discriminatory and barbaric, and it stifles - maybe even denies - freedom of thought and expression. Which is why those of us in the West who value our freedom need to be aware of what it is we are defending ourselves against, if we are ever to summon up the will to prevent it from coming to pass.

For, as we shall see, Islam and liberal democracy do not go hand in hand.

Round-up

1. This opinion piece is intelligently written and contains some valid points, but at the end of the day I simply cannot accept the author's thesis that "there is simply too little respect by our white compatriots for black people's sensitivities to colonialism and racism." Is the author unaware of such activities as Tony Blair's groveling apologies for the slave trade last year? And it seems to me that any analysis of the media will demonstrate that whites are all too quick to bemoan white racism against blacks, even when no such racism actually exists.

Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya writes eloquently, but his piece reads too much as a victimhood session, even though he insists that's not what it's supposed to be. I found myself only truly agreeing with one statement he made in the article, and that's this one:

"Newsflash: racism, the slave trade, colonialism and apartheid are just as evil as the Holocaust and other forms of behaviour based on the assumption that your own people are more human and thus deserving of greater respect than others."

2. In the Unbelievable Story of the Day, a nineteen year old boy with Down's Syndrome who has a mental age of five was accused of "racism" after he allegedly attacked a girl - who is "Asian" - at college. I'm thinking that perhaps it was the Motherwell authorities, and not the boy, who truly has a case of severe mental retardation.

Round-up

1. In this article someone wants to shock us with the news that Racism is Alive and Well (RAW: a phenomenon which I've written about many times before) in the world today. Gasp! Who would have guessed? Liberals like this always claim that "most people think racism is no more", but they can never actually quote anyone or give any examples of anyone who thinks this.

Anyway, Ms Laura Donovan goes on to invoke the FBI's 2006 hate crime statistics, which show that there was "a rise of 7.8 percent from 7,163 to 7,722 criminal incidents which targeted victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability." OK, fair enough, although Ms Donovan doesn't seem to acknowledge that in a country with a population of 300 million, seven and half thousand hate crimes is not actually very much, relatively.

So having mentioned all of this, why does she then only go on to discuss racism against black people? Is she aware that Jews suffered the second-highest amounts of discrimination? And, perhaps more tellingly, is she aware that the same figures showed that whites in America were the third-highest victims of hate crimes? I'm guessing not. But if she does know, she's clearly deliberately ignoring this facts. Because racism against black people is worse than any other form of hatred, it seems.

2. This long piece about racism is generally sensible and unsensationalist. But I find it problematic that at one point it says: "Racial Hierarchy Began With Slavery". And indeed, slavery was and is an awful thing. But what bothers me is that the article then only goes on to mention the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It makes no mention of the Islamic slave trade, which lasted from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries (and still continues in some places today), and brought suffering to approximately six and a half million more people than white slavery did. Once more all the blame, all the responsibility for the world's ills is placed on Whitey, even though he no longer needs to apologise. Meanwhile, the Islamic world is never called upon to apologise for the misery it brought to the world, including among many black slaves from North Africa. Why not?

Round-up

1. Morrissey, who you will remember was accused of racism last November, has been offered a formal apology by monthly music magazine The Word over the allegations.

2. In this bizarre story a black man has written an alternative history novel in which whites are the victims of racism and oppression from blacks, just to show us "what it's really like" to be on the receiving end. The suggestion here is that most whites "don't understand racism" - another unsubstantiated charge which is in itself racist because it suggests that white people are either too stupid or too self-absorbed to understand, and as if white people haven't apologised enough for the slave trade (still no large-scale apologies for the Islamic slave trade, though). Author Adam L. Perkins says, "The reviews from whites have been positive and are a good indication that this is what the country needs. It is bitter sweet, but necessary." Gee, whites are accepting? I guess they aren't as bigoted as you make out, then.

Round-up

1. Canada is poised to become the first country to significantly distance itself from a major anti-racism conference the United Nations is planning for next year. Insiders say the government feels the new conference is shaping up to be like the anti-West and anti-Israel free-for-all that critics said the initial gathering quickly turned into. Arab- and Muslim-led verbal attacks on Israel at the 2001 conference were so dominant the United States and Israel walked out in protest. Beyond Israel, some Arab and Muslim countries additionally seek the 2009 agenda to focus on "Islamophobia". While that could mean a legitimate study of discrimination against Muslims, UN skeptics say it is actually code to characterize Western anti-terrorism efforts as a plot to subjugate Islam. The 2001 conference also saw Nigeria and Zimbabwe lead African countries in a demand Western powers apologize for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and pay huge reparations.

2. Authorities in Brazil have opened a probe into suspected racism at the Sao Paulo Fashion Week after reports that non-white models were badly under-represented on the catwalk. The Sao Paulo Fashion Week's organizer, Paulo Borges, had defended the small number of minority models by saying there were fewer non-white models available for the designers.

"We're not convinced," the prosecutor said.

Well, you wouldn't be, would you?