Slavery: lessons from history

Even American merchant-ships and their crew suffered horrible Barbary depredations and enslavements. Prior to independence, Britain negotiated the release of captured American ship-crews whenever possible by paying a heavy ransom. After 1776, America signed treaties with Barbary States for securing safety of her ships by paying a hefty “tribute”.

To placate Muslims in his recent Cairo speech, President Obama touted this humiliating treaty on America’s part as a respectful past relationship between Islam and America. As demand for higher ransoms and depredations of US ships continued, America had to engage in a difficult war to stop the enslavement of Americans in North Africa. Putting an end to the continued enslavement of Europeans was a major reason behind France’s invasion of Morocco in 1830.

It’s noteworthy that the Europeans, Obama’s exclusive target of condemnation for slavery, were subjected to Islamic enslavement for some eight centuries, before they themselves embarked on the practice of the widely condemned trans-Atlantic slave-trade.

Moreover, even in the European slave-trade in Africa, it was Muslims - the well-established masters of slave-hunting, -breeding and -trading for many centuries - who supplied more than 80 per cent of the slaves to European traders, who then purchased and transported them.

What is accurate about Obama’s statement about slavery in Ghana is that European slavery was “where the journey of much of African-American experience began”. The cruel aspect aside, it left a positive end of some kind: the Black Diaspora in the new world are definitely more fortunate today than their left-behind brethren.

But there was another African slave-journey lasting longer and larger in magnitude that began with the Arab Muslim invasion of Africa in the 7 and 8th centuries. And it has left behind no residue whatsoever: an extermination of humans in huge numbers - thanks to universal castration of black male-slaves destined for Islamic markets.

The inhumanity of Islamic castration of African men wasn’t the robbing of their most natural identity and endowment, i.e. their manhood, alone, but the mortality associated with castration of about 75 per cent. Overall the mortality-rate of black slaves headed to the Islamic world, from procurement to reaching the destination, was as high as 90 per cent: their mortality in transportation by Europeans to the New World was about 10 per cent.

Obama’s condemnation of European-Christian slavery, a horror chapter in history, is laudable, but his exclusion of Islam, a partner in the same crime, is not. It does gross injustice to those unfortunate souls who suffered. Those souls include millions of Christian Europeans, the ones who are his sole target of condemnation.

European slavery has been thoroughly condemned by all and sundry - Europeans, non-Europeans, Christians or Muslims, scholars or laymen. And despite, Europe’s role in its abolition and from where slavery has been effectively abolished, anti-slavery campaigners have longed called on today’s Europeans to assume responsibility and take concrete actions, such as reparations, to combat slavery’s destructive legacy. But Islam - whose role in slavery is bigger and more tragic - remains thoroughly untouched as if Islam and its followers were/are untouched by the vice of slavery.

In fact, some Islamic countries (Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have continued practising slavery to this day, while Sudan has intensified its trade in recent decades. Some 600,000 souls in Mauritania remain shackled in slavery with no hope for liberation in sight, while tens of thousands of Christians, Animists and Muslims have been kidnapped and reduced to slavery in Sudan since Islamists came to power in 1985 (Khan, Islamic Jihad, p. 347-49).