The Persistence Of Islamic Slavery Options

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The Persistence of Islamic Slavery
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2007


The International Criminal Court recently issued warrants for the arrest of Ahmed Haroun, the minister for humanitarian affairs of Sudan, and Ali Kosheib, a leader of that country’s notorious janjaweed militia. The Sudanese government has refused to hand over the two for prosecution. Charges include murder, rape, torture and “imprisonment or severe deprivation of liberty.” Severe deprivation of liberty is a euphemism for slavery. Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly observed not long ago that in Sudan, “slavery, sanctioned by religious zealots, ravaged the southern parts of the country and much of the west as well.”

Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The black animist and Christian South has been ravaged for many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”

The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005….According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border -- many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan….Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised “Ahmed.” They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. But while non-Muslims slaves are often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains: “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”

Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). But while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame…” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else – except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).


In the past, as today, most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:


The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276,

Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.[1]

Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” As they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, the Turks reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.”[2] The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”[3]

Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. In an analysis of Islamic political theories, Patricia Crone notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized [sic] by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.”[4] Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”[5]

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get stern treatment attention from historians (as well as from reparations advocates and guilt-ridden politicians), the Islamic slave trade, which actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people, is virtually ignored. (This fact magnifies the irony of Islam being presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity.) While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.[6]


And when pressure came to end slavery, it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim William Wilberforce or William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists and began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous. “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam...up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “No one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”[7]


However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished only as a result of Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.

Besides being practiced more or less openly today in Sudan and Mauritania, there is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well -- notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

A shadow cast by the strength and perdurability of Islamic slavery can be seen in instances where Muslims have managed to import this institution to the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki, for instance, was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, Waleed Al Saleh, and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”


All this indicates that the problem of Islamic slavery is not restricted to recent events in the Sudan; it is much larger and more deeply rooted. The United Nations and human rights organizations have noted the phenomenon, but nevertheless little has been done to move decisively against those who still hold human beings in bondage, or aid or tolerate others doing so. The UN has tried to place peacekeeping forces in Darfur, over the objections of the Sudanese government, but its remonstrations against slavery in Sudan and elsewhere have likewise not resulted in significant government action against the practice. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also noted the problem, but as HRW observes, “the government of Sudan has stonewalled on the issue of slavery, claiming it was a matter of rival tribes engaging in hostage taking, over which it had little control. That is simply untrue, as myriad reports coming out of southern Sudan have made abundantly clear.” For Islamic slavery to disappear, a powerful state would have to move against it decisively, not with mere words, and accept no equivocation of half-measures. In today’s international geopolitical climate, nothing could be less likely.



Notes:
[1] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 108.

[2] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Berkeley, 1971. P. 174-5. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 87.

[3] K. S. Lal, Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakashan, 1994. P. 9.

[4] Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam, Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. 371-372. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 86.

[5] Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. P. 84.

[6] Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus, 2005, pp. 89-90.

[7] Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1994. Reprinted at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html.[color="#FF0000"][/color]
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Slavery Lives on in Mauritania

Tradition Thrives Thanks to a Confluence of Cultures

Start streaming audio Listen to Ivan Watson's report.

Aug. 28, 2001 -- The government of Mauritania abolished slavery more than 20 years ago. But despite the government's persistent denials, the practice continues in one form or another.


Slave girls carry water for their master.


A slave works in the fields.
Photo: The American Anti-Slavery Group

The former French colony is a meeting point of two very different cultures. For centuries, the light-skinned Moors have dominated people from the rim of sub-Saharan black Africa. That domination has often taken the form of enslavement. In his report for All Things Considered Ivan Watson talks to former slaves, activists and refugees to get a sense of what's happening in Mauritania.

Slavery in the northwest African country is more of a private tradition than an public institution. The government isn't directly involved, and it even refuses to publicly admit that slavery exists in Mauritania. Individuals and families have been practicing slavery for centuries. Some slaves are treated well by their masters, others are abused. "There are different levels to it," says Franklin Graham, an American aid worker.

Some black Moors, he says, feel they simply can't leave their masters. "They look at it as…'Well, if I lose my relationship with this family, what am I going to do?' They do not have education, regretfully, and the opportunity to go off and do something else is just not provided for them."


Map of Mauritania
Map: Erik Dunham, NPR

The government goes to great lengths to deny the problem. It has banned the word "slave" from use by the media, and foreign journalists risk arrest and deportation for investigating the issue.

Activists are quick to point out that slavery is not practiced only by Arab-Berber Muslims. Both blacks and the Moors continue to own slaves, they say, and some of Mauritania's most powerful families are black. In fact, the president of the national senate -- the country's second-ranking leader -- is a black Moor.

Still, the government has a history of instituting racist policies. In 1987, black officers were purged from the army and the police force. Two years later, more than 60,000 blacks were deported at gunpoint to neighboring Senegal. At least 20,000 black

Mauritanians still live in refugee camps in Senegal along Mauritania's southern frontier.

Many black Mauritanians are convinced that the government is trying to consolidate power in the hands of the Arab-Berber elite. As evidence, they point to the decision to declare Arabic the country's official language.

Some activists disagree. They say the current regime is a dictatorship that oppresses both blacks and whites. Last spring, the government arrested a popular white Moor opposition leader and presidential candidate on charges of sabotage and terrorism. He has since been sentenced to five years in prison. The group Human Rights Watch recently condemned what it calls the government's ongoing repression of opposition political parties and rights activists.
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/racis...mauritania.html




Born to be a slave in Niger


By Hilary Andersson
BBC Africa Correspondent, Niger

Slavery continues to blight the lives of many millions around the world. Although officially abolished in some countries two centuries ago, people trafficking, bonded labour and child labour still exist.

Niger nomads


Slaves come from the poorest communities in Niger

There are some places on earth that few outsiders visit or know about, vast empty sections of the earth where time has stood still for centuries.

Niger is one of those places. It is a country that you can drive through for hours without seeing a soul.

A nation of vast, barren and windswept landscapes, a country of people who live almost entirely off cattle, and off the labour of human slaves.

Slavery in Niger is not an obscure thing, nor a curious relic of the past, it is an intrinsic part of society today.

A Nigerian study has found that almost 8% of the population are slaves.

You wonder how this can be in the 21st Century and why people do not know about it?

We began a journey to find out more.

Humiliation

We drove for hundreds of miles north across the desert. There were no roads for much of the journey and our cars rattled and jarred across plains set with, what seemed like, solidified waves of sand every few feet.

We choked on the dust, hour after hour, wondering if we would ever see another human being at all in this desolate place, let alone a slave.

We were heading for a well, owned by a local nomadic leader and we had been told he, like many here, owned slaves.

We eventually found his tents and reversed our cars immediately, hoping to locate his slaves without his knowledge first, so that we could speak freely to them, without them being afraid of intimidation.

We found the slaves' tents some way off, and there we met Fatima, a mother of seven children.

She lived in a scrawny brown tent that rose no higher than my elbow off the ground. Her children were all around and one of them had a face bloated with a terrible infection for which she had no medicine.


She seemed humiliated by her status, but seemed to have no greater expectations of her life

Fatima told us she had been working for her master for as long as she could remember.

She said her master did not pay her, but fed and clothed her.

"What can I do?" she said. "I have no money, I need food, I have children and so if I can work for a man who at least feeds me then that is good."

When I asked her if she was a slave she looked at the ground, and said yes.

She seemed humiliated by her status, but seemed to have no greater expectations of her life.

Appalling abuse

When we spoke to her masters they denied owning slaves. The practice of slavery was outlawed in Niger last year.

Trading in slaves has been banned in Niger since the days of the French colonists in the last century, but ownership of slaves was never specifically banned.

Most slaves in Niger today are the descendent's of slaves who were kidnapped in wars and raids centuries ago, and were simply born into their status.

Many slaves in Niger are appallingly abused by their masters.

Slave children are taken away from their parents before they are two-years-old, to break the bonds between parent and child and to eliminate any sense of identity.

The children grow up working in the house of the master.


Assibit, a former slave (Photo: Anti-Slavery International)
Assibit was born into slavery, as was her mother and her husband

The slave owners encourage the slaves to reproduce to increase their numbers, sometimes even determining when they have sexual intercourse.

They treat the slaves like their cattle.

Slaves are often beaten for small misdemeanours.

They work long hours and are sometimes deprived of food as punishment.

There are documented cases of slaves being stripped naked in front of their families to humiliate them, of female slaves being raped by their owners, and even of male slaves being castrated by their owners as punishment.

Hopes and fears

Assibit, another slave we met, could not bear the punishment any longer and ran away from her master last July, leaving her husband, also a slave, behind.

She undertook a traumatic journey back to her former owner with us and a human rights worker to see if, under Niger's new laws, her husband could be freed.

When we got to his tents, she lowered herself in the seat so that she would not be seen.

The human rights activist confronted the owner, a lanky thin older man, surrounded by his tall sons.

They became aggressive and began to shout at us to turn off our cameras and leave.

They screamed that the human rights activist was a slave too, and that he deserved a beating.


An entire section of the population would have to be taught that they are not intrinsically inferior to others

We tried to retreat into the car, but our vehicle was stuck in the deep soft sand and would not move.

Eventually, with the sons banging on the windows the car began to plough forward slowly, and we fled.

When Assibit first ran away from her owners she was asked what it was like to be free, but she did not understand the question.

She did not understand the concept of freedom, or even the word.

When I arrived in Niger, I could barely believe that slavery exists in this century on such a scale, but when I left I could not see how it could end in our generation.

Ending slavery in Niger would require a social revolution.

An entire section of the population would have to be taught that they are not intrinsically inferior to others, but that is what they have believed for generations.

The slave owners, and the establishment, are reluctant to teach them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from...ent/4250709.stm