My article "Slavery, Christianity, and Islam" is up now at First Things.
It has become a feature of today’s atheist chic to shy bricks at Christianity for its record on slavery. This is part of a larger assault on Western history and society, which, by accident or design, plays into the hands of those who are today mounting on a global scale a sweeping and explicit cultural challenge to Judeo-Christian as well as post-Christian values. The fundamentally most misunderstood and overlooked aspect of today’s defense against the global jihad is this challenge that Jihadists make to Western values, which are in large part Judeo-Christian. Combine this with a historical critique that relentlessly portrays the West as the aggressors against the rest of the world, and as uniquely responsible for its evils, and Westerners’ will to defend something as rotten as Western civilization begins to ebb away.This is the concern of my book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t—which I wrote in order to counter these tendencies and answer the Islamic cultural critique. For in fact, taken at face value, the Bible condones slavery. The Apostle Paul says flatly: “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ” (Eph. 6:5). He wasn’t saying anything remotely controversial (and of course has been criticized for apparently accepting the cultural status quo instead of challenging it). No culture on earth, Christian or otherwise, ever questioned the morality of slavery until relatively recent times.
But in the popular mind the onus for slavery is squarely on the West. When Britain commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of its abolition of the slave trade in March 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair called it “an opportunity for the United Kingdom to express our deep sorrow and regret for our nation’s role in the slave trade and for the unbearable suffering, individually and collectively, it caused.” Britain’s role in the slave trade? Some Americans might be surprised to learn that the British, or anyone besides American southerners, ever owned slaves, since after coming through American schools as they stand today many people no doubt have the impression that slavery was invented in Charleston and Mobile. “The American education system,” observes Mark Steyn, “teaches it as such—as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.”However, as Steyn details, it was a cross-cultural fact of life for centuries: “In reality, it was more like the common cold—a fact of life. The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Eric Metaxas puts it, ‘Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.’”
Likewise unacknowledged has been the role that Christian principles played in the abolition of slavery in the West, which was an enterprise unprecedented in the annals of human history. The roots of abolitionism can be traced to the Church’s practice of baptizing slaves and treating them as human beings equal in dignity to all others. St. Isidore of Seville (560–636) declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” His statement was rooted in what St. Paul told the slaveowner Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus: “Perhaps this was why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Phil. 15–16).
Once it was recognized that the slave had a soul just as did the master, it could not forever be justified that he be another person’s chattel. In the year 649, Clovis II, king of the Franks, married a slave—who later began a campaign to halt the traffic in slaves. The Catholic Church now honors her as St. Bathilda. Charlemagne and others later also opposed the practice in Christian Europe. According to historian Rodney Stark, “slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.” And in the New World, when the Spanish conquistadors were energetically enslaving South American Indians, and importing black Africans as slaves as well, their chief opponent was a Catholic missionary and bishop, Bartolome de las Casas (1474–1566), who was instrumental in compelling the Spanish crown to enact a law in 1542 prohibiting the enslavement of the Indians.
Still, there was no consensus about slavery within Christendom. Slavery persisted, and was at times even given ecclesiastical sanction. In the antebellum United States, there was no shortage of Southerners who used Scripture to support the morality of slavery. Typical of such expositions was one delivered in 1822 by the Rev. Dr. Richard Furman, President of the South Carolina Baptist State Convention, to South Carolina Governor John Lyde Wilson. Although slavery was not in 1822 the nation-rending controversy it would become in the succeeding decades, Furman was already feeling pressure from the arguments against slavery that abolitionists were advancing on Christian principles. He complained that “certain writers on politics, morals and religion, and some of them highly respectable, have advanced positions, and inculcated sentiments, very unfriendly to the principle and practice of holding slaves,” and had even attributed those positions “to the Holy Scriptures, and to the genius of Christianity.” On the contrary, Furman affirmed that “the right of holding slaves is clearly established by the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were directed to purchase their bond-men and bond-maids of the Heathen nations; except they were of the Canaanites, for these were to be destroyed. And it is declared, that the persons purchased were to be their ‘bond-men forever;’ and an ‘inheritance for them and their children.’”
Furman goes on to assert that “had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles, who feared not the faces of men, and were ready to lay down their lives in the cause of their God, would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church.” And moreover, “in proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority, its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions.”
Such arguments held no water for the abolitionists, who read from the same Bible as did the slaveholders. The abolitionist movement was predicated upon the Christian principle of the dignity of all the redeemed in Christ. The pioneering English abolitionists Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) and William Wilberforce (1759–1833) were both motivated to work for an end to slavery by their deep Christian faith; so was the American anti-slavery crusader William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), who remarked in a speech in Charleston, South Carolina on the day Abraham Lincoln was shot: “Abolitionism, what is it? Liberty. What is liberty? Abolitionism. What are they both? Politically, one is the Declaration of Independence; religiously, the other is the Golden Rule of our Savior.”
Abraham Lincoln was himself much preoccupied with Genesis 3:19, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.” In May 1864, he wrote to a delegation of Baptists, “To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ and to preach there–from that, ‘In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread,’ to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.” Later that same year he replied to the wife of a Confederate prisoner who had appealed to him for the release of her husband: “You say your husband is a religious man; tell him when you meet him, that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, but that, in my opinion, the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven!” He gave this theme its most lapidary formulation in his Second Inaugural Address, saying of the opposing sides in the Civil War:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
This is, of course, the view that has prevailed in the Christian world: that it is indeed “strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” And this was the view that was instrumental in the global abolition of slavery.
Islamic Slavery
In the Islamic world, however, the situation is very different. 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). Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb adduces this as evidence that in Islam “there is no difference between a prince and a pauper, a seigneur and a slave.” Nevertheless, 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).
Why should such passages be any more troubling to anyone than passages in the Bible such as Exodus 21:7–11, which gives regulations for selling one’s daughter as a slave? Because in Islam there is no equivalent of the Golden Rule, as articulated by Jesus: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12). The closest Islamic tradition comes to this is one hadith in which Muhammad says, “None of you will have faith till he likes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.” The parenthetical “Muslim” in that sentence was added by the Saudi translator, and does not appear in the original Arabic; however, “brother” is generally not used in Islamic tradition to refer to anyone but fellow Muslims. Also mitigating against a universal interpretation of this maxim is the sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that runs through all of Islam. The Qur’an says that the followers of Muhammad are “ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the “worst of created beings” (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the worldview presented by such verses and others like them, the same courtesy is not properly to be extended to unbelievers.
That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus or pagans. 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.
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.” The Turks, as they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, 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.” 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.”
Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. Patricia Crone, in an analysis of Islamic political theories, 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 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.” 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.”
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 lavish attention from historians (as well as from mau-mauing reparations advocates and their marks, guilt-ridden contemporary politicians), the Islamic slave trade actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people. It is exceedingly ironic that Islam has been presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity, since Islamic slavery operated on a larger scale than did the Western slave trade, and lasted longer. 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.
Also, the pressure to end it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “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.”
However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the plain words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished under Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.
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.
Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki 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 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.”
Slavery is still practiced openly today in two Muslim countries, Sudan and Mauritania. In line with historical practice, 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 founded in 1995, “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 remembers 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.”
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. 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.” Yet even today, while non-Muslims were enslaved and often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains that “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. Particularly when the slaves are non-Muslims, there is no verse of the Qur’an corresponding to Lincoln’s favored Bible verse, Genesis 3:19, that anti-slavery Muslims can invoke against those who continue to approve of and even to practice slavery.
Most Westerners have not troubled to learn this history, and no one is telling them about it. If they did, the entire slavery guiltmongering industry would collapse. And we can’t let that happen, now, can we?
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
References
• Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.
• “Slave Trade Shameful, Blair Says,” BBC News, March 25, 2007.
• Mark Steyn, “The Man Who ‘Murdered’ Slavery: Two Centuries Ago, a British Backbencher Changed an Entire Way of Seeing the World,” McLeans, March 19, 2007.
• John B. O’Connor, “St. Isidore of Seville,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
• Richard Furman, Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of The Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States in a Communication to the Governor of South-Carolina.
• William Lloyd Garrison, speech at Charleston, South Carolina, April 14, 1865.
• Abraham Lincoln, “Reply to Delegation of Baptists on May 30, 1864,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, editor, Vol. VII, Rutgers University Press, 1953.
• Abraham Lincoln, “Story Written for Noah Brooks,” December 6, 1864, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, editor, Vol. VIII, Rutgers University Press, 1953.
• Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.
• Social Justice in Islam.
• Bukhari Hadith, vol. 1, book 2, no. 13.
• The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude.
• The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century.
• Muslim Slave System in Medieval India.
• God’s Rule: Government and Islam.
• White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves.
• The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.
Race and Slavery in the Middle East
• Hilary Andersson, “Born to Be a Slave in Niger,” BBC News, February 11, 2005.
• Barbara Ferguson, “Saudi Gets 27 Years to Life for Enslaving Maid,” Arab News, September 1, 2006.
• “Egyptians Who Enslaved girl, 10, Get U.S. Prison,” Reuters, October 24, 2006.
• “Kuwaiti Diplomat Accused of Domestic Slavery,” ABC7 News, January 17, 2007.
• Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, “Sudan Q & A.”
• Aid to the Church in Need, “Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries 1998 Report: Sudan.”
• Joseph Winter, “No Return for Sudan’s Forgotten Slaves,” BBC News, March 16, 2007.
• Pascal Fletcher, “Slavery Still Exists in Mauritania,” Reuters, March 21, 2007.
I read that chapter in your book. It should be required reading in high schools across not just the United States, but the entire Western World.
February - National Black History Month - Perfect timing to circulate this report.
Once again, thank you, Mr. Spencer.
I think Black History Month in the U.S. (February) is a perfect time to celebrate the role of Christianity in completely changing the Western world paradigm on slavery from acceptance to rejection.
Something for all Christians of every race and nation to be proud of.
As you clearly document, sadly there is no equivalent in the non-Western world.
Here is what they are teaching for black history month
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2008/02/pbs_pan-islamis.html#comments
The idea that it is possible to 'own' another human being, (except at by force or the threat of it),is false and is an example of profound human arrogance, and a great evil. It is the worse kind of materialism, and is only possible by another evil, 'might makes right'. The poor and the weak don't own slaves, they are the slaves.
Plato and Aristotle opposed slavery but they did not try to abolish it. That would have turned the world upside down, with the rich elite of the time, forced to take out the garbage, and pour wine during the orgies, themselves. Without slaves, oh how the mighty have fallen. But fallen from where? The pillar of lies built to keep them from taking out the trash. We still have slavery but we pay them and call them employee's. There is a fine line here, some employers treat workers like slaves, even while paying them. That's because the employer has the slave mentality. He thinks he 'owns', 'his' employees and can say and do as he wants. He is delusional and mentally fragmented. Labor laws and workers rights, come about to protect the employee from falling into a this slavish condition.
Anyone who condones slavery are themselves slaves, to their own mentally fragmented intellect.
Those not so afflicted attempt to end slavery, and rightly so...
Thank you for the stupid generalization that lumps atheists in the same group with liberal pseudo-Christians and the other haters of Western Civilization.
The managers of this site bend over backwards to avoid lumping all Muslims with radical Islam, but think it is OK to make false generalizations about non-believers.
Keep up the good work.
Um, excuse me, duh_swami, but I don't see the connection.
If you don't like your job, quit and find a better one. Perhaps become an employer yourself. It's your choice.
Mr Spencer
Do you know of any Atheist contributions to the abolition of slavery?
The slave trade, as far as I know, was not abolished by Atheists or the Enlightenment philosophies of France, but as we know, by devout Christians, guided by the principles of the New Testament. Quakers and Levellers in England were at the front of this movement. Finally, it was the Royal Navy that put a stop to this trade in humans.
"Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Garrison..."
--- from the article above
Theodore Parker was an American abolitionist and minister (the Higher Criticism later shook his faith -- he had already been having doubts -- but he retained a faith in God) whose sermons against slavery made him as celebrated and influential in his day as William Lloyd Garrison. Parker, who lived in Lexington, was a frequent visitor to Concord, making the same trip, often on foot (but in the opposite direction), that Emerson made when he walked to his own ministry in East Lexington. By force of intellect and personality, he had a great influence on the great men of Concord who, in turn, had an influence in Boston and the rest of America during those decades when Concord not only seemed to be, but was, the intellectual center of this country. There was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and his family, Margaret Fuller, the Hoar family of statesmen (Samuel Hoar, George Frisbie Hoar), and many others (possibly you too find something irresistible about such names as “Ebenezer Hubbard” and “Lemuel Shattuck” and other names to that effect) -- who knew, who listened to, the passionate abolitionist Reverend Theodore Parker.
He grew up, incidentally, on the same farm in southwest Lexington that his grandfather, Captain John Parker, had farmed. Captain John Parker had commanded the Lexington Minutemen during the first battle of the Revolution, and it is Kitson’s idealized statute of Captain Parker that stands at the head of the Battle Green in Lexington today. Nowadays, we are told, no one cares to know much about history. In England, an alarming article tells us, one-quarter of those questioned did not believe that Winston Churchill had been a real person. It is as bad here.
If there is a possibility of reversing this terrible trend, this intellectual degringolade (and it will require a different set of professors, chosen for their flair as teachers), and of reviving interest in, and knowledge of, history, for Americans the period from the Revolution to the Civil War (of Lexington, and then of Concord) might be a good place to start in time. And in space, a good place to start would be the old homestead of the Parkers –the place farmed by Captain Parker, the celebrated commander of the Lexington Minutemen, and then lived in by his grandson, the celebrated abolitionist, Theodore Parker.
One is particularly surprised at how those who have made so much the object of their interest, and in some cases have made their careers, out of the Darfur situation, have carefully avoided examining the role of Islam as justification, and even the prompting, for the organized rape, pillage, and mass murder of black Africans in Darfur by Arabs (that is, those who think of themselves as Arabs). And the same people -- I am thinking of the egregious Nicholas Kristof, who made his name over his reporting (not very good reporting) in Darfur, and his heart-on-sleeve anguish which has also done his career good, or at a higher level, at some of those at the Kennedy School, such as Samantha Power, now a Time columnist, and an adviser to Barack Obama who, much more intelligent than Kristof, recognizes that there is something more involved, yet is always careful to say that it is "Muslims" attacking "Muslims" without ever considering that it is Arabs attacking non-Arab Muslims, as has happened with the mass-murders of the Kurds in the Anfal campaign, or with the assaults and limits on Berber culture that the Arabs have practiced ever since the French left (see the work of Kateb Yacine, see any of the Berber websites). Ms. Power does not want to consider that, just possibly, Islam is a vehicle for Arab imperialism, cultural and linguistic, economic and political. Nor, it appears, does she wish to delve deeper -- possibly by reading and studying, and by meeting with Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- and having the man she advises do so. Instead, if one is to believer certain articles, she appears more exercised about "domestic pressures" that prevent a full-throated reconciliation, or at least a greater "understanding," to be reached between the American government and Muslims. For those "domestic pressures" think Mearsheimer, think Walt.
She's more intelligent than that. She should use her intelligence better, merely by letting it run free.
The world-wide slave trade was largly shut down because of the British control of the sea lanes. However, that was not so in the Arab world. Even King Faisal brought his African slave to Versailles in 1919.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Conference_of_1919
BTW, the shame game artists like to bring up the the "3/5 of all other persons" referenced in the US Constitution, and pretend that it means that Africans were considered to be worth 3/5 of Caucasians. Not so.
Actually the 3/5 article was put in by anti-slavery forces at the constitutional convention. In fact, the Abolitionists did not want the slaves counted at all for House of Representatives or Electoral College purposes until all slaves were free. A compromise was reached in order not to have the convention fall apart. But many Abolitionists (Hamiton, e.g.) were not happy at the compromise. They thought it gave the slave states more power than they deserved. They did not want anyone in slavery counted for representative or Electoral College purposes-though the slaves were counted in the census.
Finally, the issue was settled with guns in 1861.
One branch of my family were slaves in historic Armenia. In a town run by four Turkish clans, one clan acquired an Armenian male slave. Seeing this, and to maintain their status in the town, the other three clans acquired Armenian male slaves. Some time later, one Armenian slave asked his owners for permission to marry, which was granted. He went to an Armenian town and found a wife. The other Armenian slaves in likewise manner later were married. The Armenian families grew in number until the Armenians outnumbered the Turks. This ended in 1915 when the Armenians were mostly killed and a few ended up in Syria, half dead.
"One is particularly surprised at how those who have made so much the object of their interest, and in some cases have made their careers, out of the Darfur situation, have carefully avoided examining the role of Islam as justification, and even the prompting, for the organized rape, pillage, and mass murder of black Africans in Darfur by Arabs (that is, those who think of themselves as Arabs)".-Hugh
Absolutely. And there is no way real Arabs (Semitic Caucasian Saudis, Are-a-fat types, etc.) would accept the African-race-Arab-wannabes in their societies in any large numbers. In Egypt there were actually protests when the Black American Lou Gossett played Sadat in a 1983 TV mini-series-though it's obvious some Egyptians have African-race ancestry. Arabs are quite racist-and very hypocritical about it.
What is amazing is how so many non-Arabs adopt Arab names, etc. and bow to their masters at the gas-station. Islam is an clever tool of Arab imperialism.
If you don't like your job, quit and find a better one. Perhaps become an employer yourself. It's your choice.
Lone Ranger,
Duh_Swami makes some good points, if you disagree with him why not make a rational argument rather than trot out some Rush Limbaughesque slogan which is often very easy to say but not so easy to do. It is true that in this country we have opportunities and advantages unknown in most of the rest of the world. The fact that someone can go from nothing to the head of a major corporation, a superstar athelete, politician, doctor, lawyer or candlestick maker does not mean everyone has the means to do this. Besides simple economics will show that not everyone can sit on top of the hill. There are more millionaires now than ever before but as their numbers increase their purchasing power and status becomes less. Much of success is based on luck and timing. I spoke with the father of a pro athelete who has one son in the NFL and another that has tried out. The other son was possibly better at the position but when he went to try out teams were looking for a certain skill that he wasn't as strong at so he didn't make the team. There were also a number of other good players at the position in the league at that time so he ended up out of football. This is not to infer that people can't or shouldn't try to improve and better themselves but that there aren't always the positions for the number of people who want them. I worked with someone who tried out for a position with a fire department some years back. Over 3500 people tried out and he scored 98% on the test but was still around 400 list because they had over 300 people with a perfect score. Needless to say he didn't get the job.
Um, excuse me, duh_swami, but I don't see the connection.
If you don't like your job, quit and find a better one. Perhaps become an employer yourself. It's your choice.
Posted by: LoneRanger
If you don't like slavery, run away. The fact that you can have an option to escape, sometimes, is
not the issue. It is the mental idea, that it is alright to treat others like crap, because of a deranged idea of ownership, that is the issue, at least to me. What is the difference between having a mean master, or a mean employer?
They are both trying to deprive you of liberty, if even for a short time.
The fact that you can move away from it as a choice, does not alter meanness, or do anything to stop slavery in all its forms. Muslims don't have this choice short of apostasy, they are acknowledged slaves and for the most part have no desire to change it.
The 'connection' is, not this slave owner, or that slavish employer, or this slavery, or that slavery, the 'connection' is the fragmented belief that it is possible to own other people. This is more widespread than you think. My wife, my children, my grand parents, my employees, my, my, my are all illusions of ownership, common to a lot of people. And a lot of people 'act' like they enjoy this ownership. Battering husbands for instance. The Golden Rule is the opposite of this. And most of it is due to the word 'my'. The most selfish, self centered, and often used word in the world.
Swami Muktananda once said, if you want to know how close you are to God, make a list of everything you can put 'my' in front of, my wife, my kids, my car, my dog, my house etc, the shorter the list the closer you are, a long list? Well...
:-)
Spencer should add in his essay about Islam and slavery that at least one million Europeans were enslaved by Muslims:
"for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could easily have been as high as 1,250,000 - this is only just over a tenth of the Africans taken as slaves to the Americas from 1500 to 1800, but a considerable figure nevertheless."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_02.shtml
Will Muslims apologize to the West for enslaving over a million Westerners?
More pertinently -- will Westerners grow the brains and balls to pose such a question to Muslims?
duh_swami-
There is a lot of truth in what you say. "Go to your tilth" is a good example of an assumption of possession. Tilth is ultivated soil. Maybe some German Muslim will someday write a book called "Mein Tilth".
I acknowledged my ignorance in connecting slavery and employment ... how do I expound on what I don't see as related?
You've made the case they are. Sorry, I don't buy it.
I am wondering why it was southern christians--perhaps the most fervent of american christians--who had the strongest passion for slavery, and why their Christian principles did not prevent them from fighting to keep that institution. At any rate, slavery is quite universal. We can blame the Muslims for warlike behavior and taking over land/people by force, we can blame the Western powers for warlike behavior and taking land/people by force (all those poor indigenous indians which were wiped out with alcohol and germs!) Muslims can play that game too, but the difference is the Enlightenment which the West undergone and which the Muslim world generally hasn't.
Also, I'm wondering if the conditions of Islamic slavery are comparable to that of American slavery. Islamic slavery may have lasted longer...but was it really as bad as American slavery?
I was also going to say that slavery in Islam ended when a slave converted, but wiki informs me:
"Slave status was not affected by conversion to Islam."
Damn. I guess Islam and Christianity are the same in this regard.
I acknowledged my ignorance in connecting slavery and employment ... how do I expound on what I don't see as related?
You've made the case they are. Sorry, I don't buy it.
Perhaps you could start by explaining why you don't buy it? Hilaire Belloc wrote extensively on the topic, describing what he called the "wage slave."
Check out what some Islamic enslavers looked like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hamoud_bin_Mohammed2.JPG
Unlike Islam, Christianity does not encourage slavery; however, the question of slavery as far as Christianity is concerned is the same as Christianity and alcohol; neither are expressly prohibited.
Someone, please, find the appropriate New Testament passage that prohibits slavery.
Betcha can't.
Furthermore, don't let anyone criticize people who lived in the Nineteenth Century for having Nineteenth Century beliefs.
You've made the case they are. Sorry, I don't buy it.
Posted by: LoneRanger
That's ok, I often write this stuff in code.
Even I can't understand it without my secret decoder ring...I have one for sale cheap if you are interested... :-)
"Islamic slavery may have lasted longer...but was it really as bad as American slavery?"
It was much worse.
Islamic slavery not only lasted longer, it was
1) geographically extended over much larger regions, from Spain to India and everywhere in between (including in Eastern Europe and throughout the coasts of Europe even as far north as England and Iceland)
2) it involved millions and millions more than American slavery, even counting South and Central America
3) it involved unspeakable cruelties such as, to take one example out of a turban, mass castration of blacks in Africa (which also led to death by bleeding as many blacks were forced to march to the slave stations after castration).
American slavery was no picnic for the blacks involved, but by and large the slaveowners were rational and needed a work force which would have been impaired by excessive physical cruelty, given that their supply of slaves was not unlimited. But with Muslims, they directly overran and conquered vast territories and had at their disposal hundreds of thousands of humans to enslave -- they didn't have to set up an elaborate Trans-Atlantic shipping process. The Muslims thus could indulge their cruelty with much more abandon, since the number of humans -- or subhumans in this case -- were virtually infinite and one could practically will-nilly torture, rape and kill them without overly depleting the stock. Add in the factor that fanatical evil cruelty is endemic to Islamic culture, and we have a decided "Yes" to ibrahimX's disingenuously innocent question.
Loneranger
I'm afraid it must be going around as I don't see the slavery/employee connection either. I have in fact put your solution for unhappiness in a work place to good use several times...2 week notice. It worked for me and my name isn't Limbaugh.
In the New Testament lies the foundation for the abolition of slavery, it is the concept that all humans are equal under God. See Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11. These verses do not prohibit slavery but were used as justification to make the case that no one race is inferior to another and should not be enslaved.
A basis for the Abolitionist stance was found in the Bible, but there does not appear to be a Sura or a verse in the Quran that can be used to support a similar Islamic opinion. For that reason, slavery cannot be reformed out of Islam as it was with Christianity.
I try to avoid the use of the word never, but in this case I feel safe in saying that Islam will never be reformed from within.
I think you are right Pelayo. As far as I know Jesus never spoke against slavery, other than to say no man can serve two masters. I think the reason why
most Christians would frown on slavery is because of the 'love thy neighbor as you love yourself', ideology. Someone who is actually doing that, would probably not own slaves.
That together with belief and observance of the Golden Rule, would tend to eliminate the idea of slavery. I don't know this for a fact, but maybe
the reason that Christianity seems to be making no statement against Christian slavery, is because it is not necessary. There were/are people who participated in slavery, who call themselves Christians, but I doubt the validity of that claim...
Duh_swami, the Old Testament is loaded with verses that condone slavery.
God even puts a value on a slave:
Exodus Ch 21, v 32 - If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull must be stoned.
There are also plenty of pro-slavery verses in Leviticus.
In "Luke" Jesus even heals a Roman soldier's slave without freeing that slave or even criticizing the owner for having a slave.
If a Roman Centurion had had his slave healed, that tale would have spread through the Roman Army and eventually Pilate himself would have most likely heard about it. But, that is a subject suitable only for another forum.
A brief outline.
http://www.christianaction.org.za/articles_ca/2004-4-TheScourgeofSlavery.htm
The figures of 10.7 million for the transatlantic slave trade over roughly 300 years, and 17 million for the Islamic slave trade over 1400 years are somewhat misleading.
Firstly, they were bought, not enslaved, by the Europeans. Mute point, maybe; but the figure should be added to the Islamic slave trade.
Secondly, 17 million (I've read 28 million) were those that survived the capture; it is estimated that 90% of those captured died either in the process itself or in the transport. The death toll is approximately 112 million.
Comparatively, 10% of the transatlantic slaves died in transport.
Then there were the African males castrated to watch over the muslim harems; most of whom died in that process.
The Islamic slaves were primarily destined for sex slavery and for military service. The transatlantic slaves were destined for agricultural work. The children of slaves in the Islamic world were usually killed. Which explains why there is no significant people of African background in Arabic Islamic countries.
This is the most under studied area of history.
The super majority of slaves sent to the Americas were bound to toil in the cotton fields of North America and the cane fields of the Carribean. A few, very few as a percentage, learned to be blacksmiths, farriers, wheelwrights, carpenters, and other trades. Some women slaves were cooks housekeepers and nannies. The portrayal of Scarlet O'hara's nanny, later maid servant, by Hattie McDaniel was not far from the truth.
When the last slave state outlawed slave importation, actually before the Civil War, the North American slave population was self-perpetuating. By 1850, at least, it became no longer necessary to import slaves to the US.
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade ended primarily because new slaves from Africa were not needed.
pelayo -
The fundamental difference between Islam and Biblical religion is this: in Islam despotism-slavery dominator-dominated is THE paradigm for ALL relationships: the relationship between humanity and the divine, between the ruler and the ruled, between men and women, parents and children, muslims and non-muslims. The popular Muslim name Abdullah means, literally, 'slave of allah'. No complaints or questions permitted. Ayaan Hirsi Ali pointed that out very strongly in an interview; Tawfiq Hamid explains that 'thinking' F-K-R is proverbially equated with K-F-R, 'unbelief'.
Whereas for Judaism, the archetypal event, the cataclysm that shapes Jewish religious consciousness and the self-identity of the House of Israel, is the Exodus - the going forth from slavery into freedom. It is possible to read Exodus, Joshua, Judges, as a ruthlessly honest study of how very difficult it is to 'de-program' people who have been warped by centuries of slavery, and transform them into responsible, free agents. The negro slaves who cottoned on to the Exodus story knew what they were doing!
(And check out Deuteronomy 23: 15-16: "If a slave [presumably escaping from a foreign Gentile master] has taken refuge with you [i.e. in the Land, among the people of Israel] DO NOT HAND HIM OVER TO HIS MASTER. Let him live among you wherever he likes. Do not oppress him". I am sure the 19th century abolitionists who ran the 'underground railroad' for escaping slaves, knew all about *that* verse!).
As YHWH freed the Israelites, so Israel is in those verses imagined as a land of freedom for escaping Gentile slaves. Sudanese people today flee from Arab Muslim-dominated Egypt - where they are abused, denied pay for their labour, and cursed as 'abd', 'blackslave' - into Israel, because there they are treated as humans.
Some of the elements in the Passover seder - Jewish posters could explain it better than I can - are specifically intended to emphasise the fact that the participants are no longer slaves, but free.
Christians record that Yeshua at the Passover seder with his friends - speaking as the Living Word of YHWH - says "I call you now no longer slaves. No slave knows all his master does. I call you friends...".
So the Jew Yeshua takes that very strong theme that is already there in Judaism - Abraham as 'friend of God' [Isaiah 41:8], bargaining with God for Sodom and Gomorrha; Jacob wrestling with the angel of the divine presence ("I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved' [Genesis 32: 30]); God talking to Moses 'face to face, as a man talks with his friend' [Exodus 33: 11] (see Moses bargaining with God for the Israelites, after the Golden Calf episode - Exodus 32: 7-14) - and affirms it as a major paradigm of the divine-human relationship.
Any society that tries to take this seriously; any society that is asked to contemplate, at the centre of its religious life, the example of the master/ teacher Yeshua washing his friends' feet (a slave's or servant's job); or, in Luke 20: 25-28 telling them, "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. BUT IT SHALL NOT BE SO AMONG YOU: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant; even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life as a ransom for many", is going to find itself inhabited by a restless energy that perpetually queries and destabilises despotism and makes a nonsense of slavery.
The contempt for manual labour that one finds in slave societies - whether Muslim or Greco-Roman - is absent from the Hebrew scriptures. Christianity is founded by Yeshua the carpenter and Shaul/ Paul the tentmaker, so Christians cannot consistently share the contempt felt by the pagan aristocrat, toward the manual worker or artisan.
In Judaism, Abraham walking with God, Jacob wrestling with God, Moses talking with - and arguing back to! - God, are paradigms of partnership, human agency and human dignity vis a vis God.
Christianity takes that paradigm of partnership and - audaciously - sees it operating within godself.
Islam is revolted by the very idea of a 'partner' for God, be it Jacob wrestling the angel, Job's agonised questioning, or Yeshua calling God 'Father'; the divine despotism must be absolute and unquestioned. Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it in a nutshell: "Where I come from, in Islam, the only concept of God is you submit to Him and you obey His commands, no quarreling allowed. Quarreling or even asking questions means you raise yourself to the same level as Him, and in Islam that’s the worst sin you can commit [i.e. shirk, assigning a partner or equal, to god]".
pelayo - look up the icon, 'the hospitality of Abraham'. The three angels who visit Abraham, are imagined by a 15th century Russian icon-painter, as analogous to - a foreshadowing of - the Trinity. It is an endless equal open conversation of Love: and the fourth side of the table is open toward the viewer, an implicit invitation to every comer to sit down and enter into that conversation.
If the despot-slave paradigm is rejected from the religious sphere, then in the end it cannot consistently be sustained in the temporal sphere. Likewise: attempt to consistently practise the Golden Rule, and in the long run, so long as you are forced to recognise the humanity and spiritual life of the slave or serf (which, as Spencer pointed out, the medieval church consistently did) you will end up having to abandon slavery.
(Read Tom Cahill, 'How the Irish Saved [western latin] Civilisation' - you will see how, once Christianity took root, a classic slave-taking slave-holding head-hunting human-sacrificing Celtic warrior society essentially ceased to practise slavery, headhunting and human sacrifice.)
Over time - yes, a long time - Jews and Christians have rejected slavery, despite verses in their scriptures that appear to accept slavery; and they did it from within, by recognising other principles within those same scriptures as having priority. NO OTHER culture or civilisation has even imagined such a move.
Modern advocates of slavery tried to get around the barriers, by arguing on pseudo-scientific grounds that this or that group 'wasn't really human', ergo, mass murder and/or enslavement were OK; Christians dug in their toes against such folks and just kept on insisting that if it looks human, if it talks, laughs and cries, it IS human. (See "Trial at Valladolid").
Final note: have a look at Jacques Ellul, "The Ethics of Freedom". You might find it interesting.
Apologies for a long discussion.
We really need some fully-trained rabbis and priests to help out with this one!
dumbledoresarmy quoted a central New Testament passage that works against slavery and has led over the centuries toward a slowly increasing understanding of liberty and equality. Said dumbledoresarmy:
Exactly.
ibrahimX
Before the civil war the North was more religious than the South. Northern Puritan descendants and Quakers led the abolitionist cause and Northern states abolished slavery in the years after the American revolution.
Why doesn't Robert mention William Gervase Clarence-Smith's "Islam and the Abolition of Slavery" in his article?
From the book description on Amazon:
"The revisionist Islam that emerged from the 18th century was divided. "Fundamentalists" stressed the literal truth of the founding texts of Islam, and thus found it difficult to abandon slavery completely. "Modernists,' appealing to the spirit rather than to the letter of scripture, spawned the most radical opponents of slavery, notably Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the Islamic William Wilberforce."