When Americans hear the word “slavery,” they generally think of the U.S. variety formally made illegal in 1865. But a type of slavery that has been practiced for 13 centuries straight — continuing to this day — is largely ignored, complains Senegalese academic Tidiane N’Diaye.
Professor N’Diaye, a black Muslim anthropologist and specialist in African civilizations, points out that Arab-Muslim enslavement has affected far more individuals than did the transatlantic slave trade, 17 million vs. 6 to 11 million, respectively. It also has been more brutal.
The blind eye turned to Arab-Muslim slavery was epitomized well by former French justice minister Christiane Taubira, a black woman who once said, “It is not necessary to mention the Arab-Muslim slave trade too much so that young Arabs do not have to carry all the weight of the crimes perpetuated by the Arabs,” American Thinker related Sunday.
Interestingly, there’s little concern about the “weight” Western youngsters may have to carry due to incessant talk about the transatlantic slave trade. And this double standard is apparent even in Africa, said N’Diaye in a February interview. It’s a result of religious solidarity, he explained, as there are “between 500 and 600 million Muslims” on the continent today, and this “is why most African or other historians have restricted the scope of their research on [the] slave trade to that practiced by Western nations.”
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But N’Diaye is an exception. Citing his book The Veiled Genocide as a source, American Thinker writes that while the Western slave trade “over two and a half centuries may have been an attack on human dignity that was widely denounced and commemorated, it is useful to demonstrate historically the Islamic origin of the slave trade in question. And let us not lose sight of the fact that the enslavement of blacks dates back 10 centuries to the arrival of the conquerors of Allah in Africa.”
“Thus, in 652, the warlord Abdullah ben [sic] Said imposed on the Sudanese an agreement for the permanent delivery of slaves, which has grown over the centuries,” the site continues.
In fact, not only does this continue, but Africa is now again the “epicenter” of modern slavery, Quartz reported last year, with an estimated 9.2 million people in bondage.
In fairness, not all these victims are enslaved by Muslims (though many are), and African slavery didn’t begin with the Islamic invasions. After all, “‘Slavery was part of various African cultures, and in many African societies there were no prisons, so when they captured people, they sold them, especially to the north,’” DW.com related this summer, quoting Abdulazizi Lodhi, a professor of Swahili and African linguistics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.
“‘In East Africa, the main participants in the slave trade were the tribal Africans themselves, and the Arabs were most active in exporting,’” the site continued. Lodhi also claims that the Arabs “bought nine out of ten slaves from African slavers.”
In reality, slavery is one of the world’s oldest institutions, having been practiced virtually everywhere since time immemorial. So while the American education system portrays it as “a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition … it was more like the common cold — a fact of life,” wrote columnist Mark Steyn in 2007.
(Note, too, that it could be a frightening fact of life for Europeans, as a study indicated that 1 million to 1.25 million of them were enslaved by Muslim corsairs from the 16th to 18th centuries.)
“The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome,” Steyn continued. “It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers” (non-Europeans).
Steyn then quoted author Eric Metaxas: “Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.”
That is, until the West imagined it and became the first civilization in world history to end it.
In fact, even “during the slave trade and slavery, there were Enlightenment philosophers, like the Abbe Grégoire or even Montesquieu, who took the defense of the blacks,” N’Diaye noted in February. In contrast, in “the Arab-Muslim world, the intellectuals most respected, like Ibn Khaldoun, were also obscurantists and claimed that the ‘Negroes’ were animals,” the professor continued. This attitude has survived through the ages in the “spirit of Arab Muslims in general,” he adds.
As Sudanese Muslim Nesrine Malik put it in 2008, using her own upbringing as an example, “The word ‘abd,’ although strictly meaning “slave” or “servant” [in Arabic], became synonymous with negritude.”
And today, Islamic slave markets flourish — notably in Libya — and now facilitate their flesh-trading with high-tech aid, having a presence on Instagram and other applications.
Thus is it tragically ironic that Western youths are now enslaved — by revisionist lies that cause them to view their great civilization not with pride, but prejudice.
Photo: huseyintuncer / iStock / Getty Images Plus
