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Slaves in Saudi Arabia

Jul 27, 2004 7:10 am By Robert Spencer

A report from a Muslim, Naeem Mohaiemen, in the Daily Star (thanks to Nicolei):

On July 15, Human Rights Watch issued a report on the condition of Foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. The revelation that “Guest Workers” are systematically abused in Saudi Arabia should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with that region’s history. What a shame that it took Sarah Whitson, executive director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division, to finally speak the unpalatable truth. “We found men and women in conditions resembling slavery,” said Whitson in the press conference announcing their findings. The report described “the pervasive abuses foreign workers endure…the abysmal and exploitative labor conditions many workers face, and the utter failure of the justice system to provide redress.” The real question is this — why did the Islamic world not uncover these human rights abuses, so close to the holy city of Mecca?

Based on interviews taken in Bangladesh, India and the Philippines, HRW found abysmal and exploitative labor practices, wanton rape of women workers, and beheading of guest workers accused of crimes without proper legal process. Anyone who has visited Saudi Arabia knows the racism with which ordinary Saudis treats the brown and black-skinned masses that come for Hajj. Like hundreds of Bangladeshis every year, my parents endured these indignities during their recent pilgrimage. When he returned from Mecca, my father told me, “To them, we will always be miskeen (beggar). Doesn’t matter what we do, or where we come from. They see our skin and don’t need to see more.” If this is how pilgrims are treated, imagine how much worse is the plight of the “Guest Worker.” Yet, we Muslims remain silent on these abuses — after all the Saudis are the keepers of Islam’s holiest site, so they cannot possibly be racist!

How appropriate as well that HRW used the phrase “slavery” to describe conditions inside the desert kingdom. Saudi Arabia was in fact one of the last nation-states to abolish slavery. Along with Yemen, the Saudis only abolished slavery in 1962. Prior to that, the Islamic world’s experience with slavery was extremely problematic. Muslims once led the rest of the world in science, culture and human emancipation. The positive examples are numerous and often-repeated. However, the advances brought about in the early days of the Islamic Caliphate ossified, with very little innovation or re-interpretation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries….

The Muslim world is sliding backwards into medievalism, and it is time for reformers to speak openly and bravely. There is a cancer that is eating away at our soul — a disease marked by paranoia, double standards and virulent racism. While we are in full-throated cry against abuses in Iraq and Palestine, we stay completely silent when it is Muslims who are the abusers (of both non-Muslims and Muslims).

How else to explain our outpouring of sympathy for the Bosnian genocide, but our complete silence on the ongoing genocide in Sudan? In that country’s civil war between the Arab Muslim North, and the black Christian and Animist South, 2 million people have been killed to date. In a BBC profile of the hundreds of black Africans who have been raped by pro-government Janjaweed Arab militia, one victim described the attackers: “They called me Abeid (slave in Arabic).”

Shame on the Muslim world for staying silent!

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