Would this perhaps be the moment to remind the world that the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, once under the rule of the Sultan of Oman, were centers for the Arab slave trade. Slavers from Oman would make Pemba and Zanzibar their headquarters, as they went up and down the coast picking up their human cargo. Scholarly studies of the Arab slave trade note that far more black Africans were taken to Arabia, in a trade that began far before, and lasted long after, the Atlantic slave trade. Black slavery still exists, as is known, in Sudan, Mali, and Mauritania. What is not recognized is that while, officially, Saudi Arabia finally banned slavery in 1961, in fact it continues to this day. A few months ago an ad appeared (in Arabic)n a Saudi provincial paper, offering to trade an aging American Dodge for a girl, preferably Indian (if memory serves). Along with the slavery of blacks deep in the private world of Saudi Arabia (and which is far more difficult to penetrate than the Soviet Union ever was), there is considerable exploitation, amounting to sexual slavery, of girls from India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Cambodia. Not to mention, of course, what at times is akin to a slave trade, given that Gulf Arabs have always regarded the West as not only a funhouse but a brothel. This may seem to be a matter merely of a sordid transaction, but it has far greater significance for the Arabs involved. They regard the West as decadent. They do not see these assorted girls as wretched individuals, who for whatever reasons end up as they do, but rather as "Western girls" whose exploitation, by them, confirms the idea that the West is decadent, that non-Muslims are there to be humiliated, and that a civilization that does not "protect its women" from such abuse by those of another, hostile civilization, is to be despised. This is not understood in the West at all. Indeed, the C.I.A. and other institutions have helped subsidize the Arab taste for Western women; one thinks of the late King Hussein, on his London and New York visits, with revolving teams of high-class callgirls, paid for by the American taxpayer. And, if you sit at a certain vantage-point in Marbella, you can see the boats leaving the Saudi yachts full of the wives and children, and then other boats, bringing quite a few Western women, unloading their titillating cargo at the yachts. If the C.I.A. had any sense, it would be photographing the Saudi royals in action so as to obtain their closer cooperation; the decadence of their lives outruns all Western imaginations. the volving Europeans and North Americans.

And, to return to the point of departure, the Muslim slavers of Zanzibar and Pemba simply were one example of the historical attitude toward non-Muslims that runs, like a theme, through the history of Islam: non-Muslims are, if dhimmis, to be condemned to a permanent status of humiliation and degradation. That attitude has modern avatars; one is the way in which Western or non-Muslim Asian women, in and out of Saudi Arabia,are regarded and often treated. Another, of course, is that behind the veil of such seemingly modern phenomena as the bumiputra system of Malaysia (whereby Hindus and Chinese must make Muslim Malays full partners, even if they do nothing, in every economic enterprise), one can detect the jizya of yore, now in anti-colonialist, "sons-of-the-soil" modern dress.