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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The living legacy of jihad slavery
By Andrew G. Bostom

A public protest in Washington, DC, April 5, 2005 highlighted the current (ongoing, for centuries) plight of black Mauritanians enslaved by Arab masters. The final two decades of the 20th century, moreover, witnessed a frank jihad genocide, including mass enslavement, perpetrated by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government against black Christians and animists in the Southern Sudan, and the same governments continued massacres and enslavement of Animist—Muslim blacks in Darfur. These tragic contemporary phenomena reflect the brutal living legacy of jihad slavery.

Jihad Slavery



The fixed linkage between jihad— a permanent, uniquely Islamic institution— and enslavement, provides a very tenable explanation for the unparalleled scale and persistence of slavery in Muslim dominions, and societies. This general observation applies as well to 'specialized' forms of slavery, including the (procurement and) employment of eunuchs, slave soldiering (especially of adolescents), other forms of child slavery, and harem slavery. Jihad slavery, in its myriad manifestations, became a powerful instrument for both expansive Islamization, and the maintenance of Muslim societies.


Juridical Rationale and Role in 'Islamization'


Patricia Crone, in her recent analysis of the origins and development of Islamic political thought, makes an important nexus between the mass captivity and enslavement of non—Muslims during jihad campaigns, and the prominent role of coercion in these major modalities of Islamization. Following a successful jihad, she notes:


Male captives might be killed or enslaved, whatever their religious affiliation. (People of the Book were not protected by Islamic law until they had accepted dhimma.) Captives might also be given the choice between Islam and death, or they might pronounce the confession of faith of their own accord to avoid execution: jurists ruled that their change of status was to be accepted even though they had only converted out of fear. Women and children captured in the course of the campaigns were usually enslaved, again regardless of their faith...Nor should the importance of captives be underestimated. Muslim warriors routinely took large numbers of them. Leaving aside those who converted to avoid execution, some were ransomed and the rest enslaved, usually for domestic use. Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized 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. Though neither the dhimmi nor the slave had been faced with a choice between Islam and death, it would be absurd to deny that force played a major role in their conversion. [1]


For the idolatrous Hindus, enslaved in vast numbers during the waves of jihad conquests that ravaged the Indian subcontinent for well over a half millennium (beginning at the outset of the 8th century C.E.), the guiding principles of Islamic law regarding their fate were unequivocally coercive. Jihad slavery also contributed substantively to the growth of the Muslim population in India. K.S. Lal elucidates both of these points: [2]


The Hindus who naturally resisted Muslim occupation were considered to be rebels. Besides they were idolaters (mushrik) and could not be accorded the status of Kafirs, of the People of the Book — Christians and Jews... Muslim scriptures and treatises advocated jihad against idolaters for whom the law advocated only Islam or death... The fact was that the Muslim regime was giving [them] a choice between Islam and death only. Those who were killed in battle were dead and gone; but their dependents were made slaves. They ceased to be Hindus; they were made Musalmans in course of time if not immediately after captivity...slave taking in India was the most flourishing and successful [Muslim] missionary activity...Every Sultan, as [a] champion of Islam, considered it a political necessity to plant or raise [the] Muslim population all over India for the Islamization of the country and countering native resistance.


Vryonis describes how jihad slavery, as practiced by the Seljuks and early Ottomans, was an important modality of Islamization in Asia Minor during the 11th through the 14th century 3:


A further contributing factor to the decline in the numbers of Christian inhabitants was slavery...Since the beginning of the Arab razzias into the land of Rum, human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils. There is ample testimony in the contemporary accounts that this situation did not change when the Turks took over the direction of the djihad in Anatolia. They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless. In the earlier years before the Turkish settlements were permanently affected in Anatolia, the captives were sent off to Persia and elsewhere, but after the establishment of the Anatolian Turkish principalities, a portion of the enslaved were retained in Anatolia for the service of the conquerors


After characterizing the coercive, often brutal methods used to impose the devshirme child levy, and the resulting attrition of the native Christian populations (i.e., from both expropriation and flight), Papoulia concludes that this Ottoman institution, a method of Islamization par excellence, also constituted a de facto state of war: [4]


...that the sources speak of piasimo (seizure) aichmalotos paidon (capture) and arpage paidon (grabbing of children) indicates that the children lost through the devşirme were understood as casualties of war. Of course, the question arises whether, according to Islamic law, it is possible to regard the devşirme as a form of the state of war, although the Ottoman historians during the empire's golden age attempted to interpret this measure as a consequence of conquest by force be'anwa. It is true that the Greeks and the other peoples of the Balkan peninsula did not as a rule surrender without resistance, and therefore the fate of the conquered had to be determined according to the principles of the Koran regarding the Ahl—al—Qit�b: i.e. either to be exterminated or be compelled to convert to Islam or to enter the status of protection, of aman, by paying the taxes and particularly the cizye (poll—tax). The fact that the Ottomans, in the case of voluntary surrender, conceded certain privileges one of which was exemption from this heavy burden, indicates that its measure was understood as a penalization for the resistance of the population and the devshirme was an expression of the perpetuation of the state of war between the conqueror and the conquered... the sole existence of the institution of devshirme is sufficient to postulate the perpetuation of a state of war.


Under Shah Abbas I (1588—1626 C.E.), the Safavid Shi'ite theocracy of Iran expanded its earlier system of slave razzias into the Christian Georgian and Armenian areas of the Caucasus. Georgian, Armenian, and Circassian inhabitants of the Caucasus were enslaved in large numbers, and converted, thereby, to Shi'a Islam. The males were made to serve as (primarily) military or administrative slaves, while the females were forced into harems. A transition apparently took place between the 17th and 18th centuries such that fewer of the slaves came from the Caucasus, while greater numbers came via the Persian Gulf, originating from Africa. [5] Ricks notes that by the reign of Shah Sultan Husayn,


The size of the royal court had indeed expanded if the numbers of male and female slaves including white and black eunuchs are any indicators. According to a contemporary historian, Shah Sultan Husayn (d. 1722) made it a practice to arrive at Isfahan's markets on the first days of the Iranian New Year (March 21) with his entire court in attendance. It was estimated by the contemporary recorder that 5,000 male and female black and white slaves including the 100 black eunuchs comprised the royal party. [6]



Clement Huart, writing in the early 20th century (1907), observed that slaves, continued to be the most important component of the booty acquired during jihad campaigns or razzias: [7]


Not too long ago several expeditions crossed Amo�—Dery�, i.e. the southern frontier of the steppes, and ravaged the eastern regions of Persia in order to procure slaves; other campaigns were launched into the very heart of unexplored Africa, setting fire to the inhabited areas and massacring the peaceful animist populations that lived there.


Willis characterizes the timeless Islamic rationale for the enslavement of such 'barbarous' African animists, as follows: [8]


...as the opposition of Islam to kufr erupted from every corner of malice and mistrust, the lands of the enslavable barbarian became the favorite hunting ground for the 'people of reason and faith'—the parallels between slave and infidel began to fuse in the heat of jihad. Hence whether by capture or sale, it was as slave and not citizen that the kafir was destined to enter the Muslim domain. And since the condition of captives flowed from the status of their territories, the choice between freedom and servility came to rest on a single proof: the religion of a land is the religion of its amir (ruler); if he be Muslim, the land is a land of Islam (dar al—Islam); if he be pagan, the land is a land of unbelief (dar al—kufr). Appended to this principle was the kindred notion that the religion of a land is the religion of its majority; if it be Muslim, the land is a land of Islam; if it be pagan, the land is a land of kufr, and its inhabitants can be reckoned within the categories of enslavement under Muslim law. Again, as slavery became a simile for infidelity, so too did freedom remain the signal feature of Islam...The servile estate was hewn out of the ravaged remains of heathen villages — from the women and children who submitted to Islam and awaited their redemption...[according to Muslim jurist] al—Wanshirisi (d.1508), slavery is an affliction upon those who profess no Prophecy, who bear no allegiance to religious law. Moreover, slavery is an humiliation — a subjection— which rises from infidelity.


Based on his study and observations of Muslim slave razzias gleaned while serving in the Sudan during the Mahdist jihad at the close of the 19th century, Winston Churchill wrote this description (in 1899): [9]


all [of the Arab Muslim tribes in The Sudan], without exception, were hunters of men. To the great slave markets of Jeddah a continual stream of negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic...Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was increasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them...The warlike Arab tribes fought and brawled among themselves in ceaseless feud and strife. The negroes trembled in apprehension of capture, or rose locally against their oppressors.


All these elements of jihad slavery— its juridical rationale, employment as a method of forcible Islamization (for non—Muslims in general, and directed at Sub—Saharan African Animists, specifically), and its association with devshirme—like levies of adolescent males for slave soldiering— are apparent in the contemporary jihad being waged against the Animists and Christians of southern Sudan, by the Arab Muslim—dominated Khartoum regime. [10]


Extent and Persistence


The scale and scope of Islamic slavery in Africa are comparable to the Western trans—Atlantic slave trade to the Americas, and as Willis has observed (somewhat wryly), [11] the former '...out—distances the more popular subject in its length of duration.' Quantitative estimates for the trans—Atlantic slave trade (16th through the end of the 19th century) of 10,500,000 (or somewhat higher [12]), are at least matched (if not exceeded by 50%) by a contemporary estimate for the Islamic slave trade out of Africa. Professor Ralph Austen's working figure for this composite of the trans—Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean traffic generated by the Islamic slave trade from 650 through 1905 C.E., is 17,000,000. [13] Moreover, the plight of those enslaved animist peoples drawn from the savannah and northern forest belts of western and central Africa for the trans—Saharan trade was comparable to the sufferings experienced by the unfortunate victims of the trans—Atlantic slave trade. [14]


In the Nineteenth Century, slaves reached the ports of Ottoman Tripoli by three main Saharan routes, all so harsh that the experience of slaves forced to travel them bore comparison with the horrors of the so—called 'middle—passage' of the Atlantic.


This illuminating comparison, important as it is, ignores other vast domains of jihad slavery: throughout Europe (Mediterranean and Western Europe, as well as Central and Eastern Europe, involving the Arabs [Western/Mediterranean], and later the Ottoman Turks and Tatars [Central and Eastern Europe]); Muscovite Russia (subjected to Tatar depredations); Asia Minor (under Seljuk and Ottoman domination); Persia, Armenia, and Georgia (subjected to the systematized jihad slavery campaigns waged by the Shi'ite Safavids, in particular); and the Indian subcontinent (razzias and jihad campaigns by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries, and later depredations by the Ghaznavids, during the Delhi Sultanate, the Timurid jihad, and under the Mughals). As a cursory introduction to the extent of jihad slavery beyond the African continent, three brief examples are provided: the Seljuks in Asia Minor (11th and 12th centuries); the Ottomans in the Balkans (15th century); and the Tatars in southern Poland and Muscovite Russia (mid—15th through 17th centuries).


The capture of Christians in Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks was very extensive in the 11th and 12th centuries. [15] Following the seizure and pillage of Edessa, 16,000 were enslaved. [16] Michael the Syrian reported that when the Turks of Nur al—Din were brought into Cilicia by Mleh the Armenian, they enslaved 16,000 Christians, whom they sold at Aleppo. [17] A major series of razzias conducted in the Greek provinces of Western Asia Minor enslaved thousands of Greeks (Vryonis believes the figure of 100,000 cited in a contemporary account is exaggerated [18]), and according to Michael the Syrian, they were sold in slave markets as distant as Persia. [19] During razzias conducted by the Turks in 1185 and over the next few years, 26,000 inhabitants from Cappadocia, Armenian, and Mesopotamia were captured and sent off to the slave markets. [20] Vryonis concludes: [21]


...these few sources seem to indicate that the slave trade was a flourishing one. In fact, Asia Minor continued to be a major source of slaves for the Islamic world through the 14th century.


The Ottoman Sultans, in accord with Shari'a prescriptions, promoted jihad slavery aggressively in the Balkans, especially during the 15th century reigns of Mehmed I (1402—1421), Murad II (1421—1451), and Mehmed II (1451—1481). [22] Alexandrescu—Dersca summarizes the considerable extent of this enslavement, and suggests the importance of its demographic effect: [23]


The contemporary Turkish, Byzantine and Latin chroniclers are unanimous in recognizing that during the campaigns conducted on behalf of the unification of Greek and Latin Romania and the Slavic Balkans under the banner of Islam, as well as during their razzias on Christian territory, the Ottomans reduced masses of inhabitants to slavery. The Ottoman chronicler A�ikpa�azade relates that during the expedition of Ali pasha Evrenosoghlu in Hungary (1437), as well as on the return from the campaign of Murad II against Belgrade (1438), the number of captives surpassed that of the combatants. The Byzantine chronicler Ducas states that the inhabitants of Smederevo, which was occupied by the Ottomans, were led off into bondage. The same thing happened when the Turks of Mente�e descended upon the islands of Rhodes and Cos and also during the expedition of the Ottoman fleet to Enos and Lesbos. Ducas even cites numbers: 70,000 inhabitants carried off into slavery during the campaign of Mehmed II in Mor�e (1460). The Italian Franciscan Bartholom� de Yano (Giano dell'Umbria) speaks about 60,000 to 70,000 slaves captured over the course of two expeditions of the akinğis in Transylvania (1438) and about 300,000 to 600,000 Hungarian captives. If these figures seem exaggerated, others seem more accurate: forty inhabitants captured by the Turks of Mente�e during a razzia in Rhodes, 7,000 inhabitants reduced to slavery following the siege of Thessalonika (1430), according to John Anagnostes, and ten thousand inhabitants led off into captivity during the siege of Mytilene (1462), according to the Metropolitan of Lesbos, Leonard of Chios. Given the present state of the documentation available to us, we cannot calculate the scale on which slaves were introduced into Turkish Romania by this method. According to Bartholom� de Yano, it would amount to 400,000 slaves captured in the four years from 1437 to 1443. Even allowing for a certain degree of exaggeration, we must acknowledge that slaves played an important demographic part during the fifteenth—century Ottoman expansion.


Fisher [24] has analyzed the slave razzias conducted by the Muslim Crimean Tatars against the Christian populations of southern Poland and Muscovite Russia during the mid—15th through late 17th century (1463—1794). Relying upon admittedly incomplete sources ('...no doubt there are many more slave raids that the author has not uncovered' [25]), his conservative tabulations [26] indicate that at least 3 million (3,000,000) persons — men, women, and children — were captured and enslaved during this so—called 'harvesting of the steppe'. Fisher describes the plight of those enslaved: [27]


...the first ordeal [of the captive] was the long march to the Crimea. Often in chains and always on foot, many of the captives died en route. Since on many occasions the Tatar raiding party feared reprisals or, in the seventeenth century, attempts by Cossack bands to free the captives, the marches were hurried. Ill or wounded captives were usually killed rather than be allowed to slow the procession. Heberstein wrote... 'the old and infirm men who will not fetch much as a sale, are given up to the Tatar youths either to be stoned, or thrown into the sea, or to be killed by any sort of death they might please.' An Ottoman traveler in the mid—sixteenth century who witnessed one such march of captives from Galicia marveled that any would reach their destination — the slave markets of Kefe. He complained that their treatment was so bad that the mortality rate would unnecessarily drive their price up beyond the reach of potential buyers such as himself.

A Polish proverb stated: 'Oh how much better to lie on one's bier, than to be a captive on the way to Tartary'


The persistence of Islamic slavery is as impressive and unique as its extent. Slavery was openly practiced in both Ottoman Turkey [28], and Shi'ite (Qajar) Iran [29], through the first decade of the 20th century. As Toledano points out, [30] regarding Ottoman Turkey, kul (administrative)/ harem slavery,


...survived at the core of the Ottoman elite until the demise of the empire and the fall of the house of Osman in the second decade of the 20th century.


Moreover, Ricks [31] indicates that despite the modernizing pressures and reforms culminating in the Iranian Constitutional Movement of 1905—1911, which effectively eliminated military and agricultural slavery,


The presence of domestic slaves, however, in both the urban and rural regions of Southern Iran had not ceased as quickly. Some Iranians today attest to the continued presence of African and Indian slave girls...


Slavery on the Arabian peninsula was not abolished formally until 1962 in Saudi Arabia, 32 and 1970 in Yemen and Oman. 33 Writing in 1989, Gordon [34] observed that although Mauritania abolished slavery officially on July 15, 1980,


...as the government itself acknowledges, the practice is till alive and well. It is estimated that 200,000 men, women, and children are subject to being bought and sold like so many cattle in this North African country, toiling as domestics, shepherds, and farmhands.



Finally, as discussed earlier, there has been a recrudescence of jihad slavery, since 1983 in the Sudan. [35]


An Overview of Eunuch Slavery—the 'Hideous Trade'


A eunuch of Cairo, nineteenth century lithograph
(reproduced in Richard Millant's Les Eunuques à Travers les Ages, Paris: Vigot Frères, 1908, p. 210)

Eunuch slaves — males castrated usually between the ages of 4 and 12 (due to the high risk of death, preferentially, between ages 8 and 12), [36] were in considerable demand in Islamic societies. They served most notably as supervisors of women in the harems of the rulers and elites of the Ottoman Empire, its contemporary Muslim neighbors (such as Safavid Iran), and earlier Muslim dominions. The extent and persistence of eunuch slavery — becoming prominent within 200 years of the initial 7th century Arab jihad conquests [37], through the beginning of the 20th century [38] — are peculiar to the Islamic incarnation of this aptly named 'hideous trade'. For example, Toledano documents that as late as 1903, the Ottoman imperial harem contained from 400 to 500 female slaves, supervised and guarded by 194 black African eunuchs. [39]


But an equally important and unique feature of Muslim eunuch slavery was the acquisition of eunuchs from foreign 'slave producing areas' [40] , i.e., non—Muslim frontier zones subjected to razzias. As David Ayalon observed, [41]


...the overwhelming majority of the eunuchs, like the overwhelming majority of all other slaves in Islam, had been brought over from outside the borders of Muslim lands.


Eunuch slaves in China, in stark contrast, were almost exclusively Chinese procured locally. [42]


Hogendorn [43] has identified the three main slave producing regions, as they evolved in importance over time, from the 8th through the late 19th centuries:


These areas were the forested parts of central and eastern Europe called by Muslims the 'Bild as—Saqaliba' ('slave country'), the word saqlab meaning slave in Arabic (and related to the ethnic designation 'Slav'); the steppes of central Asia called the 'Bilad al—Atrak' ('Turks' country' or Turkestan); and eventually most important, the savanna and the fringes of the wooded territory south of the Sahara called the country of the blacks or 'Bilad as—Sudan'.


Lastly, given the crudeness of available surgical methods and absence of sterile techniques, the human gelding procedure by which eunuchs were 'manufactured' was associated with extraordinary rates of morbidity and mortality. Hogendorn describes the severity of the operation, and provides mortality information from West and East Africa: [44]


Castration can be partial (removal of the testicles only or removal of the penis only), or total (removal of both). In the later period of the trade, that is, after Africa became the most important source for Mediterranean Islam, it appears that most eunuchs sold to the markets underwent total removal. This version of the operation, though considered most appropriate for slaves in constant proximity to harem members, posed a very high danger of death for two reasons. First was the extensive hemorrhaging, with the consequent possibility of almost immediate death. The hemorrhaging could not be stopped by traditional cauterization because that would close the urethra leading to eventual death because of inability to pass urine. The second danger lay in infection of the urethra, with the formation of pus blocking it and so causing death in a few days.


...when the castration was carried out in sub—Saharan West and West—Central Africa...a figure of 90% [is] often mentioned. Even higher death rates were occasionally reported, unsurprising in tropical areas where the danger of infection of wounds was especially high. At least one contemporary price quotation supports a figure of over 90% mortality: Turkish merchants are said to have been willing to pay 250 to 300 (Maria Theresa) dollars each for eunuchs in Borno (northeast Nigeria) at a time when the local price of young male slaves does not seem to have exceeded about 20 dollars...Many sources indicate very high death rates from the operation in eastern Africa.. Richard Millant's [1908] general figure for the Sudan and Ethiopia is 90%


Conclusion


Contemporary manifestations of Islamic slavery—certainly the razzias (raids) waged by Arab Muslim militias against their black Christian, animist, and animist—Muslim prey in both the southern Sudan and Darfur—and even in its own context, the persistence of slavery in Mauritania (again, black slaves, Arab masters)—reflect the pernicious impact of jihad slavery as an enduring Muslim institution. Even Ottoman society, arguably the most progressive in Muslim history, and upheld just recently at a United Nations conference as a paragon of Islamic ecumenism, never produced a William Wilberforce, much less a broad, religiously—based slavery abolition movement spearheaded by committed Muslim ulema. Indeed, it is only modern Muslim freethinkers, anachronistically referred to as 'apostates,' who have had the courage and intellectual integrity to renounce the jihad, including jihad slavery, unequivocally, and based upon an honest acknowledgement of its devastating military and social history. When the voices of these Muslim freethinkers are silenced in the Islamic world—by imprisonment and torture, or execution—the outcome is tragic, but hardly unexpected. That such insightful and courageous voices have been marginalized or ignored altogether in the West is equally tragic and reflects the distressing ignorance of Western policymaking elites.


Dr. Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine and author of the forthcoming, The Legacy of Jihad on Prometheus Books

Notes
1. Patricia Crone. God's Rule. Government and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 371—72
2. K.S. Lal, Muslim Slave System India, New Delhi, Aditya Prakashan, 1994, pp. 46, 69.
3. Speros Vryonis, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism and the Islamization of Asia Minor, 11th Through 15th Century, 1971, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 174—175.
4. Vasiliki Papoulia. 'The impact of devshirme on Greek society' in East Central European society and war in the prerevolutionary eighteenth century. Gunther E. Rothenberg, B�la K. Kir�ly and Peter F. Sugar, editors. Boulder : Social Science Monographs ; New York : Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 555—556.
5. Thomas Ricks. 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran, AD 1500—1900', Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2001, Vol. 36, pp. 407—418.
6. Ricks, 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran', pp. 411—412.
7. Clement Huart. 'Le droit de la guerre' Revue du monde musulman, 1907, p. 337. English translation by Michael J. Miller.
8. John Ralph Willis. "Jihad and the ideology of enslavement", in Slaves and slavery in Muslim Africa— vol. 1. Islam and the ideology of enslavement, London, England; Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1985, pp. 17—18; 4.
9. Winston Churchill. The River War, Vol. II , London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899, pp. 248—50.
10. John Eibner. 'My career redeeming slaves', Middle East Quarterly, December, 1999, Vol. 4, Number 4, http://www.meforum.org/article/449 . Eibner notes:


...based on the pattern of slave raiding over the past fifteen years and the observations of Western and Arab travelers in southern Darfur and Kordofan, conservatively puts the number of chattel slaves close to or over 100,000. There are many more in state—owned concentration camps, euphemistically called "peace camps" by the government of Sudan, and in militant Qur'anic schools, where boys train to become mujahidun (warriors of jihad).


11. John Ralph Willis. Slaves and slavery in Muslim Africa, Preface, p. vii.
12. This controversial topic is discussed here: Philip D. Curtin, Roger Antsey, J.E. Inikori. The Journal of African History, 1976, Vol. 17, pp. 595—627.
13. John Ralph Willis. Slaves and slavery in Muslim Africa, Preface, p. x.
14. John Wright. 'The Mediterranean Middle Passage: The Nineteenth Century Slave Trade Between Triploi and the Levant', The Journal of North African Studies, 1996, Vol. 1, p. 44.
15. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism, p.175, note 245.
16. Bar Hebraeus. The chronography of Gregory Ab�'l Faraj, the son of Aaron, the Hebrew physician, commonly known as Bar Hebraeus; being the first part of his political history of the world, translated from the Syriac by Ernest A. Wallis Budge, Oxford University Press, 1932, Vol. 1, pp. 268—273; Michael the Syrian, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d'Antioche (1166—1199), translated by J—B Chabot, 1895, Vol. 3, p. 331.

17. Michael the Syrian, Chronique, Vol. 3, p. 331.
18. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism, p.175, note 245.
19. Michael the Syrian, Chronique, Vol. 3, p. 369.
20. Michael the Syrian, Chronique, Vol. 3, pp. 401—402; Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography, Vol. 1, p. 321.
21. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism, p.175, note 245.
22. M—M Alexandrescu—Dersca Bulgaru. 'Le role des escalves en Romanie turque au XVe siecle' Byzantinische Forschungen, vol. 11, 1987, p. 15.
23. Alexandrescu—Dersca Bulgaru, 'Le role des escalves en Romanie turque au XVe siecle', pp. 16—17.
24. Alan Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', Canadian American Slavic Studies, 1972, Vol. 6, pp. 575—594.
25. Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', p. 579, note 17.
26. Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', pp. 580—582.
27. Fisher 'Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade', pp. 582—583.
28. Reuben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1957, p. 88.
29. Ricks, 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran', p. 408.
30. Ehud Toledano. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998, p. 53.
31. Ricks, 'Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi'i Iran', p. 415.
32. Murray Gordon. Slavery in the Arab World, New York: New Amsterdam, 1989, p. 232.
33. Gordon. Slavery in the Arab World, p. 234.
34. Gordon. Slavery in the Arab World, Preface, second page (pages not numbered).
35. Eibner, 'My career redeeming slaves'.
36. Jan Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade. Economic Aspects of the 'Manufacture' and Sale of Eunuchs', Paideuma, 1999, Vol. 45, p. 143, especially, note 25.
37. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 137.
38. Ehud Toledano. 'The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul: From Africa to the Heart of Islam', Middle Eastern Studies, 1984, Vol. 20, pp. 379—390.
39. Toledano. 'The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul', pp. 380—381.
40. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 138.
41. David Ayalon. 'On the Eunuchs in Islam', Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 1979, Vol. 1, pp. 69—70.
42. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 139, note 5.
43. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', p. 139.
44. Hogendorn. 'The Hideous Trade', pp. 143, 145—146.
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