Should The Islamic World Apologize For Slavery? - Part One

by Adrian Morgan
31 Mar, 2007
For members of Britain's politically correct establishment, this week has been one of hand wringing and embarrassing gestures of self-abasement. On Saturday, March 24, a procession took place through London, led by the two most senior figures in the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and Archbishop of York, John Sentamu. The event, called the "Walk of Witness" was part of the bicentennial commemoration of Britain's abolishment of slavery. Among the procession was a group that had marched 250 miles from Hull in shackles and chains (pictured). They were released from their manacles by the Archbishop of the West Indies.

On Tuesday March 27, the Queen and Tony Blair took part in a commemorative service at Westminster Abbey. It was exactly 200 years previously that WIlliam Wilberforce, (born in Hull on August 24, 1759) had succeeded in passing an act to abolish the trade in slaves, which did not come into force until January 1, 1808. This act did not see the end of slavery in Britain and its colonies. It was not until August 29, 1833 that the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. Wilberforce had died a month before, on July 29. He had retired from politics in 1825. Wilberforce is celebrated in Michael Apted's new movie "Amazing Grace".

Tuesday's ceremony at Westminster Abbey was interrupted by a man in an African batik shirt, Toyin Agbetu, who shouted his objections to the service. As Archbishop John Sentamu, an African, wryly noted: "I hope the depth of anger he expressed is matched by that he should have towards those African chiefs who grew fat through the capture and sale of their kith and kin for trinkets."

No-one is asking for the descendants of the Oba of Ife or the King of Dahomey to make apologies for their part in slavery. An estimated 10 to 25 million Africans were sent across the Atlantic, shackled together in appalling conditions, destined to lead terrible and squalid lives as slaves. From London alone, 2,704 ships left to pick up slaves and transport them to the New World.

America's slavery officially ended in 1865, even though it led to Civil War. Eight years earlier, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dred Scott that black people could never become citizens of the United States. In February 2007, Virginia officially apologized for its part in slavery, and on Monday this week, Maryland followed suit.

Modern Western nations' involvement in the black slave trade lasted little more than 350 years, yet Islam has been involved in the black slave trade for more than 14 centuries, from the time of its founder. Mohammed owned black slaves, and in countries like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the black slave trade continues. According to Murray Gordon, the amount of black slaves taken by Muslims amounted to 11 million, though this figure is probably an underestimate. While white (and Arab) slave merchants bought and sold black people from the west coast of Africa, Muslim slavers in north Africa also engaged in a trade of white Christians, a trade that politically correct history books conveniently ignore.

There is a line in the Marine Corps Hymn that goes "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli". The last part of this line refers directly to naval engagements from 1804 and 1815, which sought to end the trade in white slaves. Though most of the Christian slaves in North Africa were Europeans, a sizable number were Americans, captured at sea by the notorious Barbary pirates, or corsairs.

For the Barbary corsairs, named after the Barbary ("Berber") coast, trade in white slaves began in earnest in the late 16th century. They came from Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco, all vassal states under the Ottoman Empire, which is why most contemporary accounts refer to the corsairs as "Turks" or "Janissaries" (a type of soldier in the Ottoman empire).

The corsairs first came to prominence in the early 16th century, led by the brothers Barbarossa, who had assumed powers as the first pashas of Algiers. Uruj was beheaded by the Spanish in 1518, but his brother Khair ad-Din (died 1546) succeeded him. Khair ad-Din took control of Nice in southern France in 1543. The Barbarossa brothers led raids on shipping throughout the Mediterranean. Their successors would lead raids far beyond the confines of the Mediterranean coastlines.

One of the most famous individuals captured by the Barbary corsairs was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote. In 1575, the ship he was on, the Sol, was captured by corsairs. For five years he was a captive in Algiers, and on numerous occasions he had tried to escape. Cervantes escaped severe punishment as he bore a letter of recommendation from Don John of Austria, illegitimate brother of the King of Spain. A ransom was made for him, his captors assuming he was of the nobility. This was paid and he was released in 1580.


The southwest of England had been subjected to the predations of Barbary corsairs from the end of the 16th century. In 1617, a fishing fleet from Poole in Dorset had set off for Newfoundland. There, they were besieged by pirates described by survivors as "Turkish", and the majority of the crews were abducted. By 1619, more than 300 ships had been captured off the south coast of Britain. The majority of sailors who had been captured by Barbary pirates were never heard from again.

On March 24, 1620, Owen Phippen (also called Owen Fitzpen was captured by corsairs and held as a slave for seven years until his escape. A memorial stands in St Mary's Church in Truro, Cornwall, erected by the rector, Owen's brother.

By the time Owen Phippen was captured, the population of white slaves in Algiers alone numbered more than 20,000, according to Paul Baepler of the University of Minnesota. A decade later, the figure had risen to 30,000 men and 2,000 women. Sailors were not the only victims of the Barbary slave raiders.

In July 1625, a raiding party of corsairs landed at Mount's Bay in Cornwall, and swept into the parish church where the locals were worshipping. Sixty men, women and children were abducted and carried onto the corsairs' boats. Looe, a small Cornish port, was also attacked, though its inhabitants had tried to hide or flee. 80 men were taken and the village was burned. The mayor of Plymouth reported that "27 ships and 200 persons (were) taken". A second fleet of corsairs arrived soon after the first. The mayor of Plymouth would later record that 1,000 vessels had been destroyed in that summer's raids, and the same number of villagers had been abducted into slavery.

On a moonlit June night in 1631, the inhabitants of the coastal village of Baltimore in County Cork, southwestern Ireland, were asleep, unaware that by daybreak their lives would be changed forever. A small flotilla of boats had sailed into the bay unnoticed. These boats, calledxebec by their crews, had sailed from Sale in Morocco. They bore 230 musketeers, Muslims to a man, and they had come looking for slaves to sell in Algiers.

They had no mercy for any of the town's inhabitants as they burst into homes, setting the crofts alight. When one villager,Thomas Curlew tried to resist, he was hacked to death, and his wife was carried off. All of the elderly villagers were murdered, and by morning, the Barbary corsairs sailed off, carrying with them 130 men, women and children.

The leader of the abductors at Baltimore was himself a former slave. He went under the name of Murad Reis, but originally he came from Harlem in the Netherlands, where he had been known as Jan Jansen or Jan Jansz. After being captured at Lanzarotte in 1618 he became a convert to Islam, and married a Moroccan woman, even though he had left a wife and daughter behind in Harlem. His raids took him far from the Barbary coast. He even raided Iceland in 1627, taking 400 captives into slavery. He became governor of Oualidia in 1640. Many of those who became slaves opted to convert to Islam, though this was no guarantee of freedom from servitude.

According to Robert C. Davis of Ohio State University, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (2004), in 1544 7,000 captives were seized by Algerian corsairs in the Bay of Naples. In 1554, Vieste in Calabria, Italy, was raided and 6,000 people were carried off. In Granada, Spain, 4,000 men, women and children were taken into slavery in 1566.

The traffic in Christian slaves had actually decreased in the 17th century, partly because inhabitants of Mediterranean coastal regions had fled, and partly because the Turkish Ottomans, made cautious after the Battle of Lepanto, were no longer providing support to the corsairs. The Battle of Lepanto took place in 1571 (Cervantes suffered a hand injury in this naval battle) between Ottomans and allied Christian forces. The Ottoman fleet was crushed in this engagement.

In 1645 in what is now Morocco, one man was born into the Alawite dynasty whose sheer brutality and megalomania would demand more and more slaves to achieve his grandiose plans. This man (pictured) was Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif, a direct ancestor of the current King Mohammed VI of Morocco. In 1672, Moulay Ismail had succeeded as ruler after his brother Moulay al-Rashid had fallen from his horse and dashed his brains out. At the time he ascended the throne, 26-year old Moulay Ismail was the governor of Meknes in the north of the country. He decided to remain in Meknes, and to embark on a massive building project, to create the largest and most opulent citadel ever seen. And to fulfill these ambitions, Moulay Ismail needed manpower. His lack of care for his slaves' well-being led to a need for their continual replenishment, and thus he sponsored his own corsairs in their piracy and kidnapping.

Part II

The experiences of those who became Muslim slaves are best described by those who later managed to escape. One such individual was Joseph Pitts of Exeter, Devon. In 1678 when he was 15 years of age, he was captured as his boat left the estuary of the river Exe. Sold at Algiers, he spent 15 years as a slave. His first master was violent and cruel, but he later was sold to a more benign patron. Pitts had taken the route of conversion to Islam, and after accompanying his second owner on a trip to Mecca, he was freed. In 1704, his account of his experiences was published, under the title: A true and faithful account of the religion and manners of the Mahommetans. An edition from 1731 included an early illustration of the Ka'aba at Mecca.

In 1662, an account of life as a slave in Algiers came from a Flemish captive, Emanuel d'Aranda. He wrote that on September 12, 1640 he had been sold in an Algiers slave market which was customarily used to sell Christians. Aranda became a galley slave of the pasha ordey of Algiers. He described Algiers as the place "where the miseries of Slavery have consum'd the lives of six hundred thousand Christians, since the year 1536, at which time Cheredin Barberossa brought it under his own power."

In the year that Aranda's account was published, an outbreak of plague killed off at least a third of the 30,000 inhabitants of the slave pens of Algiers. Plague continued to break out in the cities every few years - killing half the 750 slaves of Tripoli in 1675.

European governments sought to buy off the rulers of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, and thus encouraged continuation of the trade. In 1640, a group of 3,000 British seamen who were slaves in Algiers sent a petition to the British government, which described their conditions, "withal suffering much hunger, with many blows on our bare bodies with which their cruelty many (not being able to undergo) have been forced to turn to their Mahomotest sect and devilish paganism."

In 1643, the British parliament ruled that "collections should be made in the several churches within the City of London and Westminster and the borough of Southwark." Three years later, Britain sent Edmund Cason to ransom back slaves in Algiers. Cason found at least 750 British slaves, but claimed that far more had "turned Turkes through beatings and hard usage". Cason could afford to ransom only 244 slaves.

Parishes around Britain raised money to pay for hostages - Burford, Oxfordshire raised 8 pounds and 2 shillings in March 1680. Other parishes in the same county raised funds In the same year, Begbroke parish raised seven shillings and eight pence "For the release of Mary Ackland, Margaret Courtney, Andrew Malpas and Thomas Owsley." Parish records from Eynsham, Oxfordshire, state that in August 1680, 108 villagers gathered the sum of one pound and 12 shillings "towards the African Brief".

Though European governments paid ransoms and made treaties with the leaders of the Barbary regencies, the treaties were rarely honored, and the predations did not stop. In the second half of the 17th century, plundering of coastal villages lessened, but ships continued to be targets. In 1645, the first ship from the American colonies was captured by xebec, a fourteen-gun vessel from Massachusetts.

Slaves were subjected to cruel punishments, such as the widely practiced bastinado. Here an individual was held upside down, while the soles of his bare feet were beaten till raw. In February 1661, Samuel Pepys recorded tales of this punishment in Algiers, which he had heard from sea captains in a London tavern. Bastinado was a common punishment under the Ottomans (pictured), officially disappearing only with the demise of their Empire in 1924. Slaves would be beaten as an inducement to become Muslim. Some slaves were forcibly circumcised, even if they had not converted. Converts were subjected to this operation publicly, though conversion did not guarantee freedom. As Joseph Pitts noted: "I have known some that have continued slaves many years after they have turned Turks, nay, some even to their dying day."

When Moulay Ismail came to power in Morocco in 1672, the country was still a regency of the Ottoman Empire. In 1679, 1682 and from 1695 - 1696 Moulay Ismail fought the Ottomans, finally gaining official independence. From the port of Salé, his corsairs would travel far and wide, looking for captives and booty.

Moulay Ismail embarked on ever more complex building plans at Meknes. He was inspired by tales of the palace at Versailles, constructed since 1668 by Louis XIV of France. The French king had good relations with the sultan, based on their common enmity with Spain. Louis sent military instructors to Morocco, but this did not prevent Moulay Ismail filling his slave-pens with Frenchmen caught at sea. These joined Dutch, Norwegian, English, colonial American, Spanish and Irish captives.

The sultan ruled through fear. Francois Pidou de Saint-Olon was a French ambassador at Meknes. He wrote in 1694 that during his 21-day stay, he counted up to 47 people who had been slaughtered on Moulay Ismail's orders. Pidou said that in the first two decades of his reign, the sultan had killed 20,000 people.

Moulay Ismail constructed massive stables, held up by sandstone columns, designed to house 12,000 horses. Pidou wrote: "He did not even have the decency to present himself before me at the last audience that he granted me, being seated on a horse at the gate of his stables and having his sleeves still bearing the blood of his two principal blacks, whom he had just executed with sword blows."

Moulay Ismail had a personal guard made up of black slaves, who had been taken from sub-Saharan Africa when aged about 11. These were called bukhari, as they were made to swear their allegiance to the sultan over a copy of the Hadiths of Sahih Bukhari. His slave-soldiers were raised to be fiercely loyal. In later years, as Moulay Ismail became toothless and dribbling, his falling sputum was caught in handkerchiefs by these black courtiers.

The tradition of allowing slaves to gain some status while remaining in servitude was a common practice of the Ottomans. Janissaries were soldier-slaves who had some power and rank, but were not free. The Ottomans had inherited this tradition from the earlier Abbasid Empire, where slave-soldiers were called Mamluks. In the 9th century these had been soldiers captured in Central Asia, but eventually these were drawn from captive or bought children aged 12 to 14. Mamluks ruled Egypt from 1250 until their conquest by the Ottomans in the 16th century. Moulay Ismail's elite bukhari were inheritors of a long Islamic tradition.

It was customary for the Ottomans and their predecessors to have eunuchs who guarded the harems. These too held some status within court hierarchy. Often these were black slaves who had been bought or captured before puberty. For the most part, these had all of their genitals removed while children. Moulay Ismail, like other sultans, had an extensive harem to maintain. According to Francois Pidou, the harem contained 500 concubines.

In 1715, an eleven-year old boy from Penryn in Cornwall made his first sea voyage on the Francis, where his uncle was captain. The small vessel with a crew of only six was bound for Genoa, Italy Near the Straits of Gibraltar the boat was attacked by corsairs, and 11-year old Thomas Pellow and the crew were taken to Salé . Moulay Ismail was seventy when the crew of the Francis was captured. His age did not prevent him from being able to lop off the head of a courtier or a stable hand with a single stroke of his scimitar. If the sultan woke up in a murderous mood, he would wear yellow clothing. Courtiers would become especially obsequious when Moulay Ismail appeared in yellow robes. At least two people were sawn in two on the sultan's orders.

Thomas Pellow's experiences have been documented by Giles Milton in White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves. Pellow was separated from his uncle and set to work polishing armor in the underground arsenal at Meknes, before becoming a slave of Moulay es-Sfa. This man, a favored son of the sultan, tried to get the boy to convert and, when that failed, he ordered young Pellow to undergo bastinado and beatings. The treatment was repeated for months until Pellow broke and "turned Turk".

Pellow was young enough to learn Arabic fluently, and this ability would lead him to become of value to the sultan, as a translator when ambassadors and emissaries arrived to negotiate captives. He became a guard of the outer harem and even a slave-soldier. He was given a wife, by whom he had a daughter. Moulay Ismail died in 1727, and the power struggle for succession led to national strife. Pellow's wife and daughter died, and he remained a slave. Strangely, one of his last duties was to act as a slaver, bringing Africans from Senegal to Morocco. Pellow was not to escape until 1737, after 23 years of being a slave.

Moulay Ismail's building works were extensive. Walled gardens with mosques surrounded his ever-growing palace complex. Ornate gateways faced travelers to Meknes, and the castellated ramparts encircled the city, all built with slave labor. During his reign, numerous treaties to release slaves were made with European governments, but Moulay Ismail took their bribes and rarely delivered slaves.

Thomas Pellow had been fortunate compared to those who were forced to work on the buildings of Meknes. These were fed insufficient rations, with moldy flour used to create bread. As well as being worked to exhaustion, they were forced to sleep in quarters which would flood in winter. Safety for workers was not a consideration for Moulay Ismail and many were crushed in accidents. In 1755, much of the building work of the sultan was destroyed in a massive earthquake. Two years later a new leader, Sidi Mohammed, ascended to the Moroccan throne. This ruler appeared more conciliatory to Western demands, and the Salé corsairs gradually went out of business.

In the late 18th century, numerous peace treaties were made between Morocco and governments from Europe, with the US signing such a treaty in 1786. In 1784 the US Congress had appropriated $80,000 to send as a tribute to the Barbary corsairs, who still operated from Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers. Thomas Jefferson, US minister to France, was outraged that money should be paid to brigands, arguing that paying off pirates would only encourage more piracy.

In 1801, Tripoli demanded that the US pay a tribute of $225,000, followed by an annual payment of $25,000. Jefferson had been inaugurated as president on March 4. He refused to pay. In May, the pasha of Tripoli declared war. In late October 1803, the US frigate Philadelphia was taken in Tripoli harbor, with its captain and crew held as hostages. Such state-sponsored terrorism, which had gone on for centuries, drew a fierce response. Between 1803 and 1804, Commodore Edward Preble bombarded Tripoli five times. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a bold enterprise on February 16, 1804. The USS Philadelphia was captured and burned, and though fired upon, not a man was lost from the US side. On June 4, 1805, Tripoli signed a peace treaty with the US.

The dey of Algiers was still demanding that the US pay $60,000 for each of its American hostages. The payments continued until 1815, when Stephen Decatur and William Bainbridge led naval attacks against Algiers. In May 1815, Decatur succeeded in the freeing of US captives at Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli.

Finally in 1816 the British, who like other European nations had paid ransoms to Barbary "terrorists" for centuries, formed a coalition with the Netherlands. Under the leadership of Lord Exmouth, a fleet arrived at Algiers in late August. They launched a full-scale attack on Algiers harbor and city. Within 24 hours, cannon fire had destroyed most of the Algerian fleet and much of the city. Omar Bashaw, the dey of Algiers, capitulated. The remaining 1,642 slaves were freed, and soon Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco announced that they too had officially abandoned slavery. Lord Exmouth was from the same family that had sired Thomas Pellow a century earlier.

The rule of the Barbary corsairs was finally over. But the proponents of Islamic slavery, which had lasted since the time of Mohammed, had no intentions of going away quietly.

Part III

The white slavery of the Barbary corsairs ended only when the perpetrators were subjected to the threat of the firepower of a military assault. Though xebecs no longer captured Western ships and their crews, slavery still continued. James Richardson (1809-1851) was a British traveler and diplomat. He noted in 1850 that in Tripoli and Tunis, caravans were continually arriving with new black slaves for their Muslim masters. As he followed the slave routes southward, he saw numerous small piles of stones, which he was told were grave markers left by women slaves for their children who had died on the caravan journey.

Richardson would later discover in Zinder, Niger, that many of the black slaves transported to the Barbary states were themselves Muslim. In "Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa"(Ch 12) he wrote: "I am very sorry to hear of the iniquitous manner in which slaves are captured for the supply of the north at this present time. It appears that, now all these populations are Muslims, it is difficult to get up the war-cry of "Kafers!" - "Infidels!" What is then done? The sultan of a province foments a quarrel with a town or village belonging to himself, and then goes out and carries off all the people into slavery."

Richardson also traveled to Morocco, which was ruled by Moulay Ismail's descendant, Moulay Abderrahmane (sultan from 1822 to 1859). Richardson wrote that in one particular year, 10,000 black slaves had been imported into Morocco, but the usual annual traffic was about half that number. He wrote: "No Jew or Christian is permitted to buy or hold a slave in this country. Government possesses many slaves, and people hire them out by the day from the authorities. The ordinary price of a good slave is eighty dollars. Boys, at the age of nine or ten years, sell the best; female slaves do not fetch so much as male slaves, unless of extraordinary beauty."

In central and east Africa, the medical missionary David Livingstone (1813 - 1873) would witness at first hand the abuses of the Muslim slave trade. On his second journey to the interior, he encountered a Muslim slave caravan in Malawi, a region he described as where "Satan has his Seat". He wrote that "two of the women had been shot the day before for attempting to untie the thongs. One woman had her infant's brains knocked out because she could not carry her load and a man was dispatched with an axe because he had broken down with fatigue."

The Muslim slave trade in central and eastern Africa had gone on for centuries. A slave market in Zabid, Yemen, is depicted in a painting from 1237 (pictured). A hub of this trade would become based on the island of Zanzibar, which in the 18th century had seen an increase in its traffic. By 1800, more than 8,000 African slaves annually passed through Zanzibar slave market, based at Stonetown.

One Muslim slave trader, Tippu Tip (Hemedi bin Muhammad el Marjebi) was born in Zanzibar in 1837, himself the grandson of an African slave. He established a base west of Lake Tanganyika, helped by Africans of the Nyamwezi and Msiri tribes, and thence exported slaves to Stonetown for sale. In 1873, the British threatened to bombard Zanzibar, and its slave trade was officially ended. The Arab slave trade had been draining Africa since the 9th century.

Traditionally, Islam has never condemned slavery. As Murray Gordon states of traditional Arab scholars; "No moral opprobrium has clung to slavery since it was sanctioned by the Koran and enjoyed an undisputed place in Arab society."
According to Bernard Lewis, author of Race and Slavery in the Middle East: "Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes - from West Africa across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia, from Chad across the desert to Libya, from East Africa down the Nile to Egypt, and across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Turkish slaves from the steppe-lands were marketed in Samarkand and other Muslim Central Asian cities and from there exported to Iran, the Fertile Crescent, and beyond. Caucasians, of increasing importance in the later centuries, were brought from the land bridge between the Black Sea and the Caspian and were marketed mainly in Aleppo and Mosul."

Slavery is advocated in the Koran. Though Mohammed states that freeing slaves gains merit, he made no prohibitions against acquiring slaves. Women and girl slaves could be gained as "booty" in raids. Sura 33, verse 50 states: "Prophet, we have made lawful for you.... the slave-girls whom God has given you as booty." These could be raped at will by Muslims who in no way contradicted the Koran - Suras 23:1 and 70:22 state that it is lawful to have sex with slave girls. The Hadiths are filled with references to slaves owned by Mohammed and his associates. Inone Hadith Mohammed intervened to reverse one man's emancipation of six slaves. By casting lots, Mohammed denied freedom to four of them.

With such a poor example set by the founder of Islam, it is no wonder that Muslim countries were slow to forbid slavery. The Ottoman Empire abolished slavery in stages, beginning in 1847, when trading in slaves was banned in the Persian Gulf. Women slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire as late as 1908. Slavery continued after the Ottoman Empire was crushed in 1924. Qatar did not abolish slavery until 1952. Yemen and Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, and Mauritania did not officially abolish slavery until 1980.

In 1990, an Islamic "declaration of human rights" was signed in Cairo, even though "freedoms" are only allowed if they do not contradict Sharia law. Article 11 a of the declaration reads: "Human beings are born free, and no one has the right to enslave, humiliate, oppress or exploit them, and there can be no subjugation but to God the Most-High."

Despite this lame attempt to declare rights for all, Muslim slavery continued, following the tradition of Islam's founder. Mauritania had practiced slavery for centuries, particularly when it was part of the empire of Moorish rulers such as Moulay Ismail. Declarations of Islamic human rights have had little influence here, where Arab elites still believe they have the right to enslave Africans.

The Atlantic slave trade exacted a high death toll, but in the West, male slaves were encouraged to reproduce. In the Islamic world, though Islam forbids castration, black male slaves were frequently subjected to this brutal operation. A. B. Wylde, a British consul in Egypt,noted in the 1880s that there were 500 eunuchs in Cairo. He believed that 199 out of 200 people who were castrated did not survive, and suggested that the 500 Cairo eunuchs represented "100,000 Soudanese" who had been killed. Whyte was over-estimating the death-rate, but certainly more people subjected to the operation died than survived. Eunuchs could gain status in Muslim societies, but their rights to procreate had been denied. As late as 1903 the Ottoman ruling family owned 194 eunuchs, and 35 of these had positions of "seniority".

Islamic apologists make claims that Islam has no racism, even though Mohammed himself said that an Ethiopian slave could have a head that "looks like a raisin". According to Bernard Lewis (page 38 the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406) wrote: "The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and their proximity to the animal stage."

Such attitudes still exist in Mauritania and also Sudan, where Arab elites enslave black people from the Dinka and the Shilluk tribes who live in southern Sudan. Since 1983 when the northern government engaged in a war with the south of Sudan, slavery cases proliferated. Simon Deng had been a Shilluk child slave, abducted to live in northern Sudan by an Arab. In May 2006 he went on a fact-finding mission to southern Sudan. He said that "villages are still being burnt, women are still being raped, and people are being sold into slavery." Mr. Deng now lives as a US citizen in New York.

Another Sudanese-born black man who is now a US citizen is Francis Bok. He came from a Catholic family in a Dinka village. In 1986, when aged seven, he was abducted by Arabs from the north who decapitated adults at a local market and stole the children. For ten years Mr. Bok was a slave in a Muslim household - forced to convert to Islam - until he ran away. Some Dinka slaves who do not convert to Islam have had their Achilles tendons cut.

In 2000, a UNICEF representative estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 children were still slaves in Sudan. The Dinka Committee in 2001 claimed that 14,000 children have been abducted since 1983. In Sudan, as elsewhere, child slaves are subjected to cruel punishments.

In February 2006 as part of the Sudanese government's peace deal with the south, initiated by the late John Garang with US assistance, 163 former slaves were repatriated back to the south. Not all slaves are children. One, Abuk Ater, was already a married adult when she was abducted by an Arab militia. She was also raped. For 20 years she endured slavery until being repatriated.

In Mauritania, though some black Moors own slaves, racism is also involved in Muslim slavery. In 1987, a purge took place on black officers in the police and army. In 1989, 60,000 blacks were deported into Senegal at gunpoint. Many of the slaves in Mauritania are born into slavery.

One male slave told the BBC in 2004: "I don't know how I became a slave. I was just born one. My family were slaves. We did all the hard work for our master and all we received in return was beatings."

Though slavery has been officially illegal in Mauritania since 1981, no real punishments were enacted upon slave-owners, allowing the trade to flourish It was only in 2003 that owning a slave was made punishable with a fine or prison sentence. A year later, no one had been convicted under this law, and the slavery was allowed to continue.



One escaped Mauritanian woman slave said: "I was tied up all night and all day. They only untied me so I could do my chores. In the end I could barely move my limbs. All those years, and I don't even own a goat. They raped me often. At night, when everyone was asleep, they came for me and I couldn't stop them. If I had been free I would never have let this happen to me. My master is the father of my first child, my master's son is the father of my second child and my baby girl's father was my master's nephew."

The notion of a Muslim man being sanctioned by the Koran to rape his female slaves still has echoes in the way guest workers are treated in Saudi Arabia. Though beyond the scope of this article, I urge you to read the harrowing account by a Filipino woman I know, who became a virtual slave to her Saudi employer, an imam who repeatedly raped her. Similarly, the trade in young children, abducted or bought in Pakistan and Bangladesh, who became camel-jockeys in the United Arab Emirates, is an example of modern Muslim slavery.

The archbishops in Britain may apologize for slavery, as may the US states of Virginia and Maryland. But is any representative of Islam prepared to apologize for 14 centuries of slavery? In 2003, it was revealed that a Saudi Sheik, Saleh Al-Fawzan, said: "Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam."

The Sheikh, who belongs to the Council of Religious Edicts and Research and is an imam in Riyadh, also authored Saudi textbooks which were sent to Saudi-funded schools around the world, including the United States.

Slavery is intrinsically a part of Islam, and to deny it is to contradict the supposed wisdom of Mohammed, the founder of Islam. Much as I would love to see the luminaries of CAIR apologize for Islam's long history of slavery and subjugation, I think that day will be a long time coming. For many of Islam's public representatives, being Muslim means never having to say you're sorry.

http://www.islam-watch.org/AdrianMor...ry-Apology.htm