-Kwame Toure
One Abubakr Ben Ishmael Salahuddin wrote a piece back in 1997 entitled Islam and the African People in which he charges that Afrocentric scholars are biased against Islam. He writes:
But, aside from Asians and Europeans, there is a group who themselves are also interested in the identity of Africa and the African peoples of the world: Africans themselves and the descendants of African peoples scattered around the world. Amongst them are some who deem themselves 'Afrocentrists'. Afrocentrists generally believe in various forms of racial nationalism, ranging from cultural to political. But a very unfortunate attitude has developed amongst some Afrocentric scholars: an apparent undying hatred for Islam, fueled by the misguided belief that the religion of Islam 'enslaved' African people.
Before continuing, it must be stated (and I will hope to demonstrate this in this article) that most Afrocentric scholars traditionally respect and appreciate Islam for its positive impact on the African people. But a small handful of Afrocentric scholars (such as Molefe Asante, William Chancellor, and Dr. Tosef Ben Joachannan(sic)) have bitterly maligned the religion of Islam and labeled it as something 'outside' of the African experience. And what is strange is that despite their small number, their works are somehow receiving more circulation than the majority of Afrocentric scholars who understand the importance of Islam amongst the African family of peoples.
One hesitates to criticise any of the African peoples, scholar or otherwise, because of the tremendous afflictions meted out to the African people over the centuries. But Islam is a religion of truth. And, oppressed or not, these handful of scholars must be taken to task for their distortions. For the future of Africa and the African peoples -- and indeed, the future of all countries -- should and must depend on truth.
To support his thesis he uses the following examples:
1)Additionally, in view of what some Afrocentric scholars claim that African peoples should 'return' to 'their own indigenous African religions', such as Yoruba, it is interesting to note what Cheikh Anta Diop had to say about this:
African religions, more or less forgotten, were in the process of atrophying [dying] and being emptied of their spiritual content, their former deep metaphysics. The jumble of empty forms they had left behind could not compete with Islam on the moral or rational level. And it was on that latter level of rationality that the victory of Islam was most striking. That was the fourth cause of its success. (Ibid, page 166)
Now this would be interesting and perhaps very damaging if the author had been quoted in context. If we read the text from Pre-Colonial Black Africa we find this:
That is what led Dan Fodio to critisize severely all those who, though calling themselves Muslims, continue such practices as libations, offerings, divination, the Kabbala, etc., and even write verses from the Koran in the blood of sacrificial animals. Dan Fodio's text, although rather recent (nineteenth century) reflects a tendency already imperative in the days of the Askias (fifteenth-seventeenth centuries). African religions, more or less forgotten, were in the process of atrophying and being emptied of their spiritual content, their former deep metaphysics. The jumble of empty forms they had left behind could not compete with Islam on the moral or rational level. And it was on that latter level of rationality that the victory of Islam was most striking. That was the fourth cause of its success.
The imperative need for rationality reflected in the writings of Dan Fodio was henceforth better satisfied by Islam than by the dying traditional faiths.
So we see here that Dr. Diop is actually reflecting on the ideas of Dan Fodio. What does Diop think about Islam's affect on Islamicised Africa? From the same text:
Nevertheless, it must be noted that, in the domain of artistic creativity, the Islamized African underwent, for a long time, a throttling, a kind of cultural impoverishment.
The author continues with Diop writing:
He went on to explain precisely why Africans fell in love with the religion of Islam:
The Arabs in these areas, who became great religious leaders, arrived as everywhere else individually and settled in peacefully, they owe their influence and latter acceptance to spiritual and religious virtues. (Ibid, page 102)
Unfortunately the author's own source again contradicts is own point. Writes Diop:
Askia Mohammed was only the lieutenant of Sonni Ali, whos faithh was very lukewarm; his son Baro, who replaced him, refused to embrace Islam. Mohammed became a dissident and insistently urged Baro to convert. Following negotiations which lasted fifty-two days, and were conducted in large part by the scholar Salih Diawara, already allied with the future Askia, the two went to battle. Baro stood firm: there was no question of his embracing Islam
So much for "peaceful." But let us continue with Diop, since the author presumably read the book he quotes, he undoubtedly read the entire chapter Ideological Superstructure: Islam in Black Africa The he read the following:
Only during the Almoravide movement of the first half of the eleventh century did some white people, Berbers, attempt to impose Islam on Black Africa by force of arms...
According to Ibn Khaldun, when the number of disciples had reached one thousand, Yassin said to them:
A thousand men cannot easily be beaten; therefore must we now work at remaining steadfast in holding to the truth and forcing, if need be, everyone to recognize it. Let us leave this place and fulfill the task imposed upon us.
The Almoravides besieged Aoudaghast and Ghana. This is the only time that white troops attempted to impose Islam through violence...
The second period of Islamization was marked by the conversion of the people, whether through automatic imitation of their chiefs, or through some violent ation of these chiefs, sometimes going beyond their borders and becoming veritable holy wars: All such holy wars were conducted by Black chiefs. The King of the town of Silla, in the eleventh century was already waging holy war against the inhabitants of Kalenfu, as had Askia Mohammed against the Mossi emperor Nasere...
The last (not in order) argument of the author is:
During the period of our study, from the third to the seventeenth centuries, not one conquest was ever launched by way of the Nile...Nor was there ever an Arab conquest of Mozambique or any other East African country. (Ibid, page 101)
Why is that? Chancellor Williams (apparently on the authors $*it list) discusses that at great length in chapter 5 of his book, The Destruction of Black Civilization. In summary, Arabs were unable to get to those areas in Africa because of black resistance to the warfare being conducted against them. It is entirely possible that had the Muslims at that time not wasted talent and energy trying to expand the Umma, That area of the world would have been better able to resist the onslaught of the West. BUt that is a different subject for another time.
So let us dismiss the authors argument as wholly false, that Islam was propagated in Africa by soley peaceful means. Let us also agree that the author has taken Dr. Diops work completely out of context.
The Author moves onto Edward Wilmost Blyden:
A man who, in some respects, looms larger than Cheikh Anta Diop in the world of Afrocentricity is Edward Wilmot Blyden. He lived in the 19th century and is called 'The Father of Afrocentrism' by Afrocentric scholars. Listen to what he said:
Mohammedanism [Islam] found its Negro converts at home in a state of freedom and independence of the teachers who brought it to them. When it was offered to them they were at liberty to choose for themselves. The Arab missionaries, whom we have met in the interior, go about without 'purse or script', and disseminate their religion by quietly teaching the Qur'an. The native missionaries -- Mandingoes and Foulahs -- unite with the propagation of their faith active trading. Wherever they go, they produce the impression that they are not preachers only, but traders... And in this way, silently and unobtrusively, they are causing princes to become obedient disciples and zealous propagators of Islam. These converts, as a general thing, become Muslims from choice and conviction... (Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, by Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden)
'These converts, as a general thing, become Muslims from choice and conviction...' - Does that sound like Islam was forced down the throats of Africans? To the contrary, they were impressed by the practical examples of Islam and its moral code of conduct that stood before them. Blyden's words are very important because he was on the continent of Africa before the Europeans colonised Africa. He witnessed the spread of Islam in Africa in the 1800's. It is also worthy of note to see how Blyden contrasts Christianity and Islam:
Christianity, on the other hand, came to the Negro as a slave, or at least as a subject race in a foreign land. Along with the Christian teaching, he and his children received lessons of their utter and permanent inferiority and sub-ordination to their instructors, to whom they stood in the relations of chattels...owing to the physical, mental and social pressure under which the Africans received these influences of Christianity, their development was necessarily partial and one-sided, cramped and abnormal. (Ibid, pages 12-13)
I don't have Blydens work so I can't check it. However, given that the previous work sited by the author was taken out of context, I would not be surprised if Blyden was too taken out of context. Even if he wasn't, the work of Diop as quoted above simply contradicts Blyden's commentary. One of the issues with some scholars is that they are so focused n Europe that they romanticize about other peoples oppressed by Europeans. The other problem with the Blyden quote is that it is outside of the historical context that Diop provides. To go to say Mouritania now, which is a wholly Muslim country, one would not expect to se Jihads since those opposed to Islam have long since been either killed or have left of their own volition. Thus Blyden's commentary does not negate the writings of Diop. In many ways the comment is irrelevant to the real topic at hand.
The writer then moves on to WEB DuBois:
W.E.B. Dubois is one of the most important African-Americans in their history and in American history in general. His name is also known over the entire world as one of the greatest men of our age, and he was an influence to many men and woman of all races and countries all over the globe. His works are studied to this day in America and in the schools of Europe. Let us see what he has to say about Islam:
In this whole story of the so-called 'Arab slave trade' the truth has been strangely twisted. (The World and Africa, page 68)
Dubois further says,
Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne were intellectual centers, and at the University of Sankore gathered thousands of students of law, literature, grammar, geography and surgery...From this Africa a new cultural impulse entered Europe and became the Renaissance. (Ibid, pp. 211 & 223).
Contrast the above praise of the religion of Islam with his observations on Church-Christianity:
Modern slavery was created by Christians, it was continued by Christians, it was in some respects more barbarous than anything the world had yet seen, and its worst features were to be witnessed in countries that were most ostentatious in their parade of Christianity. (Ibid, page 44)
Not much here. Let us look at The World and Africa On the first quote we find that DuBois' complete statement on the matter is not quite what is presented:
In Africa anew and supplementary means of control, developed by means of the Arab trade in ivory, led to exploration and eventual annexation under the pretense of attacking slavery. In this whole story of the so-called "Arab slave trade" the truth has been strangely twisted. Arab slave raiding was in the beginning, and largely to the end, a secondary result of the British and American slavery and slave trade and specifically was based on American demand for ivory. The Arabs had by the nineteenth century driven back the Portugese opposite Zanzibar and had developed two profitable products of trade: ivory and slaves.
So although the author want's to make it seem as if DuBois was saying that somehow slavery was either non-existant in the Islamic world or something else. I'm not sure, but it is clear from the writing that Arabs and Muslims were in fact involved with slave trading which, really is no different from any other group in Africa that shamefully, took part. Of course the author and others would like to fall back and make the claim that Muslim slavery was different from European (Christian) slavery. This is true but then that's really a lame excuse. What does DuBois say about conversion? Along with notes about voluntary conversions he writes:
Sidjilmessa, the last town in Lower Morocco toward the desert, was founded in 757 by a Negro who ruled over Berber inhabitants. Indeed, many towns in the Sudan and the desert were thus ruled and felt no incoongruity in this arrangement. They say, to be sure, that the Moores destroyed Howdaghost because it paid tribute to the black town of Ghana, but this was because the town was heathen and not because it was black.
So it is clear that even as DuBois had correctly noted the bararity of the European in Africa, he also was well aware of the affects, both negative and positive, of Islam in Africa. Furthermore he provides the author no basis for a claim that DuBois was contrary to the ideology of Afrocentrism.
The author continues quoting J.A. Rogers:
J. A. Rogers
J. A. Rogers was one of the most prolific authors in African-American history. He wrote volumes upon volumes of books on African-American life and African-American history, his most well-known being Sex and Race, in which he demonstrated that many of the so-called 'pure white' kings, princes, and queens of Europe were of mixed racial origin. His books are sold to this very day all over America. Listen to what this great Afrocentric scholar said about Islam:
In short, the Negro was discriminated against in no phase of Mohammedan life oil the ground of color alone. Islam was the greatest and freest of all great melting pots. (Sex and Race, p. 108)
If Islam had been so harmful to African people, would not this incredibly gifted and prolific scholar have revealed this to the African peoples of the world? He was a man of world-class scholarship who was a genius of world history and the history of the African diaspora.
I do not have the text in question so I'll critique the statement as it stands: Clearly, as the evidence that I've given above, whether Islam or Muslims discriminate by color is really moot. What Muslims have been shown to do, vis-a-vis Africa, is discriminate on the basis of belief. So we substitute one type of discrimination for another and then say "see we are better than the Christian!" Again, this is one of the major pitfalls of those who's adherence or conversion to non-Christian religions fall into. They are so focused on the sins of the European that they willfully neglect the due diligence and research into the issues of the religions to which they convert to.
The author continues with Dr. Walter Rodney:
As in other parts of the world, literacy in Africa was connected with religion, so that in Islamic countries it was a Koranic education...Moslem education was particularly extensive at the primary level, and it was also available at the secondary and university levels. In Egypt there was the Al-Azhar University, in Morocco the university of Fez, and in Mall the University of Timbuktu -- all testimony to the standard of education achieved in Africa before the colonial intrusion. (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, page 240)
This Afrocentric Marxist scholar and hard-nosed Pan-Africanist, in the above reference, praises the high level of university education made available by Muslims to the African people before the Christian colonisation of Africa. If Islam had been so detrimental to African people, would this great Pan-Africanist Marxist social, political, and economic analyst have praised Islam for its role in uplifting the African peoples?
Contrast the above praise of Islam with Rodney's appraisal of the role of Christianity amongst African people:
Christianity tried sporadically and ambivalently to make an impact on some parts of the continent. But most of the few missionaries in places like the Congo, Angola, and Upper Guinea concentrated on blessing Africans as they were about the be launched across the Atlantic into slavery...Elsewhere, there flourished Islam and other religions which had nothing to do with European trade. (Ibid, p. 114)
Again, we should note that the author is dependent upon the existance of Fez, Timbuktu and other centers of learning as proof that Islam had no ill effects in Africa. This is a bogus argument since anyone could say that European technology and medicine also had positive effects on Africa and therefore colonialism was a good thing. No one would put forward such an argument since there is much documentation as to the horrors of European contact in Africa. But lets look at Walter Rodney's writing. It is easy to read a title "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" which we here at Garvey's Ghost recommend, but we also know that Walter Rodney produced another text entitled A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800:
In the population movements south and south-west of the Futa Djalon, the Mande people who played the most significant role were not the Mandingas but the Susus. Living on the Faleme, they were part of the Empire of Ghana when the Almoravids invaded. They subsiquently took up the struggle against the Berbers and the Islamicized Saracoles, and achieved power in the Susu (Sosso) empire in the twelfth century. It was in 1233 that they suffered defeat at the hands of the Mandingas, and numbers of Sussus fled to the west.
later her states:
when attempts at Islamicization were made, population dislocations resulted.
Thus we have a clear case of:
A) the foreigness of Islam to Africa
B) The disruption Islam had on the populations of West Africa.
How then does Walter Rodney support the author's case against Afrocentrists who are supposedly "Anti-Islam"? Yet Rodney's scholarship would sink the author's claims even further as Rodney writes:
Yet firearms were slow in penetrating into the hinterland. The great Jihad or Holy War of the Futa Djalon was evidently begun in 1726 with weapons of local manufacture; and the first clear-cut instance of European arms being sought in a determined manner by groups in the interior occured in 1757, when a Muslim chief cut his way to the coast at the Scarcies estuary, selling all who came into his hands for powder and guns.
Further, discussing what is now northern Nigeria:
Furthermore, Muslim Fulas must have arrived in Futa Djalon long before 1694, and had been indulging in peaceful proselytization, especially among their Fula brethren. Thus, by 1726, when the Holy War was proclaimed, peaceful penetration had proceeded long and successfully enough to allow the struggle to advance to a new level, that of military combat.
A considerable number of Djalonkes were displaced, many taking refuge among their cousins, the Susus. Susus of the Pongo recall that 'there arrived from the Futa Jallon district people whome the Peuhls [Fulas] call Yalunkas...They told them that the yellow Peuhls of Futa Jallon had made war on them and that they had wanted to convert them to their feitsh called "Allah."
And lastly:
No one challenged the fact that Jihad was the greatest recruiter of slaves in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The only point at issue was the light in which the connection was projected. John Matthews, as spokesman for Liverpool interests, stressed that cpatives who were purchased by European schips were mainly the result of Muslim wars of religion. Beyond this superficial observation he was not prepared to go, because it was orthodoz pro-slavery propaganda that captives were victims of African wars whose origins and development were quite connected with the slave trade. However, not long after Matthews wrote, Thomas Watt penetrated to Timbo and reported that he was told by the Almami's deputy 'with a shocking degree of openess, that the sole objects of their wars was to procure slaves, as they could not obtain European goods without slaves, and they could not get slaves without fighting for them.' Watt added that 'their religion affords them an apology for this horrible injustice, by permitting them to destroy all infidels, a term which seems to include all their neighbours'. A close analysis of the activities of the Fulas and their cohorts leaves no doubt that Watt was accurate both in reporting his information and in his conclusions.
If there was ever more damning evidence that the apparent need to prosyletise Islam in Africa by Arabs first and Blacks after, lead not only to the destruction of African societies but also to the direct involvement in the Christian Atlantic slave trade.
The author goes on to discuss the Pope and other irrelevant material but then continues to quote DuBois:
History shows that a very small clique of gangster Arabs became involved in the slave trade centuries after the Europeans had been involved in the slave trade for several centuries. The involvement of this these Arabs had its beginning and ending in the 19th century.
The participation of this tiny minority was nothing compared to the massive and centuries-long participation played by the European Christians. In fact, W.E.B Dubois, on page 68 of his book, The World and Africa said that the tiny gangster Arab participation was a 'secondary result' of the American and British slave trade. He says that it was 'based on American demand for ivory'. So these rogue and immoral Arabs were nothing more than a fluke amongst the many pious Arabs who brought Islam south of the Sahara, and who treated the African people as equals, and whom the African people warmly welcomed as their brothers. These are the facts of history.
I think we have discussed enough of DuBois , Rodney and Diop to have clearly shown that the author is merely trying to dupe the reader. In fact this mis-handling of the facts continues with the following statement:
Sometimes the best medicine is the medicine that tastes the worst. This can also be the case with truth. Truth can be a difficult and painful thing. But this pain can also be the best elixir for a suffering soul.
The painful fact of history reveals the following: That while the African people of the diaspora certainly are brothers and sisters genetically, the fact is that the tribes of the coastal areas were intimately involved as slavers against their own people. This is the truth. Of course, this activity was wholly inspired by Europeans.
The Europeans had been looking for allies against the Muslims, and they found them in the coastal tribes of West Africa. These coastal tribes strongly participated in the slave trade along with the European slavers. But it was the African Muslims who lived further within the interior of Africa -- inland around the Niger and Chad rivers in the regions of Timbuktu, Jenne and Gao -- who fought against this trade and who actually provided sanctuary for those Africans of the coast who would run inland to the African Muslims for protection against the European slavers and some of their own brothers who had, unfortunately, become slavers. Many Afrocentrists are so embittered with the European slavery that they want to paint African people as a perfect group of human beings who were merely victims of the 'white man and Arab's' greed. They hate to admit the truth of what both European scholars and honest Afrocentric scholars know: that Africans themselves were intimately involved in the horrid slave trade. As Basil Davidson explains:
We have demonstrated this to be wholly untrue. We have clearly demonstrated that the author's own sources disprove this claim. It is convenient that the author would like to magically de-Islamize the African Muslims who were involved with the slave trade. This is a common practice in many Muslim circles where behavoir of a certain group of Muslims, shown to be morally bankrupt, are suddenly de-Islamicized and the conflicts they create deemed something done with their own people or some similar excuse. This no doubt plays well in the Mosque, but does not stand up to real inquiry. That said, it has always been admitted by Afrocentrists and other honest about African history, that non-Muslims were involved in the atlantic slave trade. This understanding is necessary for a true understanding of how the Ma'afa occured.
Lastly, the author pulls out Basil Davidson (who's books are recommended reading by GG):
Contrast the above with Mr. Davidson's observations on the role of Arabs in the slave trade:
Some European writers, possibly out of an understandable but quite unhistorical conviction that 'Europe should not bear all the blame,' have tended to equate the Asian-Arab trade with the European trade, or even to portray the first as much larger than the second...This argument will not bear examination. There is not a shred of evidence that the Indian Ocean trade ever carried, or could have carried, a tithe of the slaves that were taken across the Atlantic...The clinching fact is that the eastern world...never knew an economic situation which could have used captive labor on the scale of the Caribbean and American mines and plantations. [Ibid, p. 80]
Well this is kind of logical. If one looks at Arabia and the Sahara one would immediatly note that it was clearly environmentally impossible for such industries to have taken root. Sand is a poor place to grow sugar cane and tobacco. But what of the eastern slave trade? Was slavery a part of the Muslim world? If we read the work of Bernard Lewis' Race and Slavery in the Middle East we find the following:
The Qur'an, like the Old and the New Testaments, assumes the existence of slavery. It regulates the practice of the institution and thus implicitly accepts it. The Prophet Muhammad and those of his Companions who could afford it themselves owned slaves; some of them acquired more by conquest. But Qur'anic legislation, subsequently confirmed and elaborated in the Holy Law, brought two major changes to ancient slavery which were to have far-reaching effects. One of these was the presumption of freedom; the other, the ban on the enslavement of free persons except in strictly defined circumstances...
Though slavery was maintained, the Islamic dispensation enormously improved the position of the Arabian slave, who was now no longer merely a chattel but was also a human being with a certain religious and hence a social status and with certain quasi-legal rights. The early caliphs who ruled the Islamic community after the death of the Prophet also introduced some further reforms of a humanitarian tendency. The enslavement of free Muslims was soon discouraged and eventually prohibited. It was made unlawful for a freeman to sell himself or his children into slavery, and it was no longer permitted for freemen to be enslaved for either debt or crime, as was usual in the Roman world and, despite attempts at reform, in parts of Christian Europe until at least the sixteenth century. It became a fundamental principle of Islamic jurisprudence that the natural condition, and therefore the presumed status, of mankind was freedom, just as the basic rule concerning actions is permittedness: what is not expressly forbidden is permitted; whoever is not known to be a slave is free. This rule was not always strictly observed. Rebels and heretics were sometimes denounced as infidels or, worse, apostates, and reduced to slavery, as were the victims of some Muslim rulers in Africa, who proclaimed jihad against their neighbors, without looking closely at their religious beliefs, so as to provide legal cover for their enslavement. But by and large, and certainly in the central lands of Islam, under regimes of high civilization, the rule was honored, and free subjects of the state, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were protected from unlawful enslavement...
Within the Islamic frontiers, Islam spread rapidly among the populations of the newly acquired territories, and even those who remained faithful to their old religions and lived as protected persons (dhimmis) under Muslim rule could not, if free, be legally enslaved unless they had violated the terms of the dhimma, the contract governing their status, as for example by rebelling against Muslim rule or helping the enemies of the Muslim state or, according to some authorities, by withholding pa'yment of the Kharaj or the Jizya, the taxes due from dhimmls to the Muslim state.
[Note: This part about the enslavability of Dhimmis is very relevant to the problem in West Africa. I hold that if Islam had not had a "convenient" excuse to enslave people, the Atlantic slave trade as we know it probably would not have occured. As we know it.)]
A slave could marry, but only by consent of the master. Theoretically, a male slave could marry a free woman, but this was discouraged and in practice prohibited. A master could not marry his own slave woman unless he first freed her. Islamic law provides a number of ways in which a slave could be set free. One was manumission, accomplished by a formal declaration on the part of the master and recorded in a certificate which was given to the liberated slave. The manumission of a slave included the offspring of that slave, and the jurists specify that if there is any uncertainty about an act of manumission, the slave has the benefit of the doubt. Another method is a written agreement by which the master grants liberty in return for a fixed sum. Once such an agreement has been concluded, the master no longer has the right to dispose of his slave, whether by sale or gift. The slave is still subject to certain legal disabilities, but in most respects is virtually free. Such an agreement, once entered into, may be terminated by the slave but not by the master. Children born to the slave after the entry into force of the contract are born free. The master may bind himself to liberate a slave at some specified future time. He may also bind his heirs to liberate a slave after his death. The law schools differ somewhat on the rules regarding this kind of liberation.
The astute among us will note that this is really no different from that of the US slave population. Africans could purchase their freedom, marry with permission of their masters, etc. Thus in some cases Islamic slavery was not much different from that which we saw in early America, sans plantations.
Continuing:
As we have seen, the slave population was recruited in four main ways: by capture, tribute, offspring, and purchase.
Capture: In the early centuries of Islam, during the period of the conquest and expansion, this was the most important source. With the stabilization of the frontier, the numbers recruited in this way diminished, and eventually provided only a very small proportion of slave requirements. Frontier warfare and naval raiding yielded some captives, but these were relatively few and were usually exchanged. In later centuries, warfare in Africa or India supplied some slaves by capture. With the spread of Islam, and the acceptance of dhimml status by increasing numbers of non-Muslims, the possibilities for recruitment by capture were severely restricted.
Tribute: Slaves sometimes formed part of the tribute required from vassal states beyond the Islamic frontiers. The first such treaty ever made, that of the year 31 of the Hijra (= 652 A.D.), with the black king of Nubia, included an annual levy of slaves to be provided from Nubia. This may indeed have been the reason why Nuhia was for a long time not conquered. The stipulated delivery of some hundreds of male and female slaves, later supplemented by elephants, giraffes, and other wild beasts, continued at least until the twelfth century, when it was disrupted by a series of bitter wars between the Muslim rulers of Egypt and the Christian kings of Nubia. Similar agreements, providing for the delivery of a tribute of slaves, were imposed by the early Arab conquerors on neighboring princes in Iran and Central Asia, but were of briefer duration.
Offspring: The recruitment of the slave population by natural increase seems to have been small and, right through to modern times, insufficient to maintain numbers. This is in striking contrast with conditions in the New World, where the slave population increased very rapidly. Several factors contributed to this difference, perhaps the most important being that the slave population in the Islamic Middle East was constantly drained by the liberation of slaves -- sometimes as an act of piety, most commonly through the recognition and liberation, by a freeman, of his own offspring by a slave mother. There were also other reasons for the low natural increase of the slave population in the Islamic world. [GG note: Oh? Sex with a slave woman? Sounds familiar.]They include
* 1. Castration. A fair proportion of male slaves were imported as eunuchs and thus precluded from having offspring. Among these were many who otherwise, by the wealth and power which they acquired, might have founded families .
* 2. Another group of slaves who rose to positions of great power, the military slaves, were normally liberated at some stage in their career, and their offspring were therefore free and not slaves.
* 3. In general, only the lower orders of slaves -- menial, domestic, and manual workers -- remained in the condition of servitude and transmitted that condition to their descendants. There were not many such descendants -- casual mating was not permitted and marriage was not encouraged.
* 4. There was a high death toll among all classes of slaves, including great military commanders as well as humble menials. Slaves came mainly from remote places, and, lacking immunities, died in large numbers from endemic as well as epidemic diseases. As late as the nineteenth century, Wes ern travelers in North Africa and Egypt noted the high death rate among imported black slaves.
Purchase: This came to be by far the most important means for the legal acquisition of new slaves. Slaves were purchased on the frontiers of the Islamic world and then imported to the major centers, where there were slave markets from which they were widely distributed. In one of the sad paradoxes of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside, the Islamic empire. In the Roman world, the slave population was occasionally recruited from outside, when a new territory was conquered or a barbarian invasion repelled, but mostly, slaves came from internal sources. This was not possible in the Islamic empire, where, although slavery was maintained, enslavement was banned. The result was an increasingly massive importation of slaves from the outside. Like enslavement, mutilation was forbidden by Islamic law. The great numbers of eunuchs needed to preserve the sanctity of palaces, homes, and some holy places had to be imported from outside or, as often happened, "manufactured" at the frontier. In medieval and Ottoman times the two main sources of eunuchs were Slavs and Ethiopians (Habash, a term which commonly included all the peoples of the Horn of Africa). Eunuchs were also recruited among Greeks (Rum), West Africans (Takrurl, pl. Takarina), Indians, and occasionally West Europeans.
The slave population of the Islamic world was recruited from many lands. In the earliest days, slaves came principally from the newly conquered countries -- from the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, from Iran and North Africa, from Central Asia, India, and Spain. Most of these slaves had a cultural level at least as high as that of their Arab masters, and by conversion and manumission they were rapidly absorbed into the general population. As the supply of slaves by conquest and capture diminished, the needs of the slave market were met, more and more, by importation from beyond the frontier. Small numbers of slaves were brought from India, China, Southeast Asia, and the Byzantine Empire, most of them specialists and technicians of one kind or another. The vast majority of unskilled slaves, however, came from the lands immediately north and south of the Islamic world -- whites from Europe and the Eurasian steppes, blacks from Africa south of the Sahara. Among white Europeans and black Africans alike, there was no lack of enterprising merchants and middlemen, eager to share in this profitable trade, who were willing to capture or kidnap their neighbors and deliver them, as slaves, to a ready and expanding market. In Europe there was also an important trade in slaves, Muslim, Jewish, pagan, and even Orthodox Christian, recruited by capture and bought for mainly domestic use...
Deprived of most of their sources of white slaves, the Ottomans turned more and more to Africa, which in the course of the nineteenth century came to provide the overwhelming majority of slaves used in Muslim countries from Morocco to Asia. According to a German report published in 1860,
"the black slaves, at that time, were recruited mainly by raiding and kidnapping from Sennaar, Kordofan, Darfur, Nubia, and other places in inner Africa; the white mostly through voluntary sale on the part of their relatives in the independent lands of the Caucasus (Lesghi, Daghestani, and Georgian women, rarely men). Those offered for sale were already previously of servile status or were slave children by birth."
The common view of Islamic slavery as primarily domestic and military may therefore reflect the bias of our documentation rather than the reality. There are occasional references, however, to large gangs of slaves, mostly black, employed in agriculture, in the mines, and in such special tasks as the drainage of marshes. Some, less fortunate, were hired out by their owners for piecework. These working slaves had a much harder life. The most unfortunate of all were those engaged in agricultural and other manual work and large-scale enterprises, such as for example the Zanj slaves used to drain the salt flats of southern Iraq, and the blacks employed in the salt mines of the Sahara and the gold mines of Nubia. These were herded in large settlements and worked in gangs. Large landowners, or crown lands, often employed thousands of such slaves. While domestic and commercial slaves were relatively well-off, these lived and died in wretchedness. Of the Saharan salt mines it is said that no slave lived there for more than five years. The cultivation of cotton and sugar, which the Arabs brought from the East across North Africa and into Spain, most probably entailed some kind of plantation system. Certainly, the earliest relevant Ottoman records show the extensive use of slave labor in the state-maintained rice plantations. Some such system, for cultivation of cotton and sugar, was taken across North Africa into Spain and perhaps beyond. While economic slave labor was mainly male, slave women were sometimes also exploited economically. The pre-lslamic practice of hiring out female slaves as prostitutes is expressly forbidden by Islamic law but appears to have survived nonetheless.
This document can be found here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html
It is pretty clear here that not only was slavery an integral part of the Islamic world, but even plantations and gang labour did exist.
It is clear that Abubakr Ben Ishmael Salahuddin (the author) really does not know what he is talking about. It is saddening as well as alarming that perhaps millions of people have been fed his revisionist history of Islam and now we have to waste time refuting his (and no doubt his many cohorts) misinformation.
Let me be clear, many people in Africa were involved with the enslavement of their own people, Muslim and non-Muslim. Furthermore, it is easy to criticize the European and the Christian because their sins are front and center and well documented. It is harder to turn the critical eye on our own sacred cows and honestly deal with the issues of our chosen or inherited beliefs. If you are an African or Black Muslim reading this, do not take this as an attack on your belief but rather as an opportunity to be more clear as to what has been done in the name of Islam and an opportunity to reflect on who and what you are associated with. Will you do what had been done before and put your religion before your people? if you hear similar nonsense taught at your Mosque or study circle will you stand up and say that it is wrong (as I did when I was a Christian?)? Or will you simply trade one imperial culture for another one and await the time when you can be a part of the ruling party and oppress your non-believing neighbors as had been done before?
Ase-O!
[note: I sent the original post to Molefi Asante since he was mentioned. I haven't received a reply.
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