From AP, with thanks to Nicolei:
ZANZIBAR, Tanzania (AP) -- Police have arrested a militant Islamic leader on the island of Zanzibar and have begun questioning him about a series of bombings and arson attacks, police said Sunday.The cleric, Sheikh Khalid Azan, was found late Saturday after a three-week manhunt, regional police commander George Kizuguto said.
"Khalid Azan was arrested in connection to different acts of violence, sabotage and vandalism, including the spate of bombings. He will appear in court soon," Kizuguto said.
Khalid is one of the top leaders of a radical Islamic group known as Islamic Propagation and Awareness, known by its Swahili acronym UAMSHO. The group is suspected of involvement in the firebombing of a church, a moderate Muslim leaders and government offices.
The group's leaders want Zanzibar to be ruled under Sharia law, and some have called for the assassination of secular political leaders who oppose their agenda.
Sheik Farid Ali, another of the group's leaders, was released by police in the Indian Ocean archipelago on April 1 after spending nearly two weeks in custody. The group's spokesman said Farid Ali had been tortured by the police and was being treated for his injuries at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, in mainland Tanzania.
Police refused to comment on the allegations.
The Zanzibar archipelago is semi-autonomous from mainland Tanzania, electing its own president and legislature. But like the mainland, where the majority of people follow Christianity or African religions, the archipelago is run by a secular government.
However, moderate Zanzibari Muslim leaders and Tanzanian and foreign officials have expressed concerns about rising extremism among young Muslims in the archipelago, which includes Zanzibar and the smaller island of Pemba.
Mention of Zanzibar and Pemba should cause some readers to turn to the chapter "The Arab Slave ?Trade 1800-1842" (pp. 412-451)in the unsurpassable study by the great historian (and expert on the Frontier Question in Arabia) J. B. Kelly -- Britain and Persian Gulf, 1795-1880. As he notes in the beginning sentence to that chapter, "the institution of slavery in the Islmaic world has been long sanctioned by time and Koranic prescription...the privilege conferred by the teachings of Muhammad was that of a religious right to claim as a slave the defeated infidel, and the doctrine as such contributed greatly to the spread of slavery since the Muslim expansion took the form of a series of jihads in which all infidels taken prisoner automatically became slaves. As time passed and the Muslim world consolidated itself behind its new-won frontiers, the letter of the Prophet's teaching began to be taken for the spirit, to justify the buying and selling of slaves no longer acquired by jihad. Slavery became entgrenched in the social structure of Islam, giving rise in turn to a slave trade which drew for its supplies upon regions as far apart as the Coast of Guinea and Caucasian Georgia. Africa was the great reservoir of manpower: the west supplied the needs of the Muslim states of the Mediterranean littoral, the Sudan met the demands of Egypt and Asia Minor, while Abyssinia and East Africa fed the markets of Arabia. The brutalities attendant upon the acquisition and sale of slaves are so well known as to render a description again here superfluous..." (p. 411).
Kelly further observes that "although East Africa had long served as the great source of the Arab slave trade, it was not until after the Omani conquest of Zanzibar and Pemba at the close of the seventeenth century that exploitation on a large scale began. Under the protection of the Ya'ariva, and later the Al Bu Sai'd, rulers of Oman, Zanzibar developed swiftly as a slave mart, until by the reign of Saiyid Sa'id ibn Sultan it was the greatest centre of the trade in the East, and was being supplied from places in the interior of East Africa as far east as the fringes of Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika...The slaves obtained up-country and brought to the coast were shipped across to Zanzibar, there to be sold either as agricultural labourers to Arabs resident on the island, or to slave dealers from the Arab lands to the northward....The slave trade from Zanzibar was virtually a monopoly of the Muscat Arabs and there rulers...The Red Sea slavers sailed for Zanzibar in the autumn....Most of the slaves carried to Muscat were sold within Oman itself. The remainder were bought by dealers from the Pirate Coast, particularly the Qawasim, for resale on the coast, or in the markets of Persia, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Hasa, and Najd [Hugh's note: these are now provinces of what became Saudi Arabia]. Slaves were "regularly re-exported to the upper Gulf every year...."[there were also] "slaves iported directly by vessels from Kuwait, Bahrain, and the Persian ports, and by pilgrims returning from Mecca or Karbala..."
One British official, the Hon. Monstuart Elphinstone, wrote of attempts by the British to appeal to the Sultan of Muscat to stop the slave trade, that "it seems beyond all hope that His Highness will be persuaded to put a stop to it [the slave trade] without an equivalent, especially as the trade is quite consistent with his ideas of humanity, and is expressly authorized by the relgion which he professes." AS a concesssion to the British, the Sultan forbade the sale of black slaves, but only to "any Christian people whatever" (any attempt to stop the sale of black African slaves to fellow Muslim Arabs would have failed); that was all he would or could do, for as a British writer noted, "slavery being allowed according to the Mohammedan creed, therefore any infringement by [Sa'id] in this case would seriously militate against his personal safety and authority."
The actor John Rhys-Davies (of recent movie and charges-of-Islamophobe fame) recalls seeing, as a boy in Kenya, the Arab dhows, slavers, making their way along the coast on their annual trip to pick up human cargo. Africans are slaves to Arabs today in Mali, Mauritania, and the Sudan (it is part of Jihad, after all, to enslave those Infidels who are captured in Jihad), and thought officially Saudi Arabia, under Western pressure, "abolished" slavery in 1961, there are many reports and anecddotes about slavery in the interior of Saudi Arabia; there are also advertisements in Saudi papers which strongly suggest its continued existence, as in one which recently offered to swap a ten year old Dodge for an "Indian or Ceylonese girl."
One hopes that memories of the Arab Slave Trade may be emphasized, in both East and West Africa, by those who are alarmed at the encroachments made, not only by Islam, but by the brand supported by Saudi Arabia. Historically, Zanzibar and Pemba should be thought of as akin to the coastal forts where early Europeans, in west Africa, picked up their cargo for the Middle Passage -- but Zanzibar and Pemba are still places where Arab Muslims, aware that slavery is sanctioned by the immutable words in Qur'an and hadith (and recent sermons by Saudi clerics forthrightly recognize slavery as part of Islam), may yet again, should Islam prove unstoppable in Africa, decide to renew the practices of yore, before those dastardly Infidel British stamped out the slave trade conducted by, and for, Arabs.
I don't think too many of us in the US know the history of slavetrading in Africa itself. Thanks for enlightening us. I don't think we will see much of this type of reporting despite the fact that we have many African scholars in our universities.
If I recall correctly, secondary school textbooks in several chapters treat slavery in the United States and the West as a "sin of the West." Only few prefunctory lines are dedicated to Africans and Middle Eastern slavers that raided the villages, drove the slaves to the coast land penned them like cattle, and then provided these slaves to the Europeans, and then later to the Americans. Ooops, the textbook writers and publishers just left that out as a little oversight.