Slavery and Islam

The importation of black slaves from Africa has always been a black mark on this countries history.  We still to this day have the scars that it produced as we have assimilated the people that we once enslaved into our society as equals.  Some would say that black Africans were singled out because the white people of the time thought they were savages, not to be considered equals, and therefore it was OK to treat them like possessions.

But that isn’t quite accurate.  Throughout history, various peoples have made slaves of other peoples without any stigma applied to their race or religion.  That’s just what you did when you defeated their army.  The influx of free labor would advance your culture a bit faster without any extra effort on your part.  Reading the Bible, it was pretty accepted that slaves were a part of society well into the era before recorded history.

Getting slaves over to America wasn’t easy, and colonists would have used other peoples if it had made sense.  Using white people who had fallen into debt, or from parts of Europe that were looked down on wasn’t an option, as people like that can escape and blend into a crowd.  Indians weren’t a great option either, as they knew the country well and were very adept at escaping.

The black slave trade provided a successful answer to that.  Black slaves stood out in a crowd, and they didn’t know the land or have tribes of free black people waiting to take them in if they escaped.  They were also very physically able to do the kind of work the colonists required.

But the slaves brought to American from Africa were just a fraction of the total black African slave trade.

It is estimated that possibly as many as 11 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic (95% of which went to South and Central America, mainly to Portuguese, Spanish and French possessions. Only 5% of the slaves went to the United States).

Who was doing the selling of slaves from Africa?  Other black tribes, of course.  More civilized groups of Africans captured tribal peoples and sold them across the sea.  However, the numbers transported to America pales by comparison to the numbers transported across the Sahara.

However, at least 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. As at least 80% of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets, it is believed that the death toll from the 14 centuries of Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been over 112 million. When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the Trans Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 million people.

Which makes sense when you think about it.  The traders in Africa didn’t have a preference who they sold them to.  All they would care about was earning money, and traders from the Americans and Europe would only be able to carry so many on ships.  The majority were sold to Arabic and Asian cultures.

But here, Joe Katzman asks a couple of important questions:

Question #1: If a much smaller proportion of slaves over a much shorter period leads to the current black population of the United States, where is the black population of the Arab states today?

Question #2: What if Sudan isn't just a modern-day genocide (which includes organized slavery), but simply the latest episode in a long-running genocidal campaign that stretches back centuries?

Indeed.  Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance, but some sects, and even entire countries show a surprising amount of intolerance and hate of others.

As StrategyPage reports, the trend is showing up on the other end as well, in SE Asia.  HT to Reynolds.

The Islamic militants are trying to do some ethnic, and religious, cleansing in the Moslem south. The three southern provinces have a population of some 1.8 million, and only 360,000 of those are Buddhists (the religion of the majority of Thais, who are ethnically different from the Moslems, who are Malays). The terror campaign is having some success, as some ten percent of the southern Buddhists have left the south in the past six months. But many of the remaining Buddhists are arming and preparing to defend themselves, and stay in the south.

As Katzman says later:

How Islam as a whole handles this moral and historical accounting will say a great deal about the maturity, ethics, and future of their religion.

Also, see Winds’ post about slavery in the 21st century.  Chilling that it still goes on in this world with such frequency.