The Persistence of Islamic Slavery

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.

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