The Forgotten Slaves: 1400 Years of Muslim Enslavement

While much documentation is known of the American slave trade, the Muslim enslavement of Africans (and Europeans) encompassing
the last 1400 years has been hushed up. This remarkable documentary films shows the story historians have neglected.

Do South American cultures agonize over the whole issue (politically) as we have here? Europeans, Asians? Is it our unique Judeo-Christian foundation and independence that make it different here?

Well, MARY, our Lord's mother, is a unique feature of our Bible and of most faiths. Women don't SEEM to form an important part of other cultures' faiths.
Yes, there is an occasional empress and queen here and there, but mostly non-Judaic/Christian societies put women rather low on the totem pole. Even the well-to-do Chinese women had their feet bound so they would have "lily" feet.

Europeans are our "mother-race," so to speak, as we got our Judaic/Christian values from them.

Africans? I don't know enough about them to say anything here. We do have a Nigerian priest in our parish. Northern Africa leans to Islam.

Mexcio, Central and South America are nominally Christian-Catholic. Who knows how many people practice the faith in their hearts and lives.

Asia? I never read where there were many women involved in the faiths there. I taught yoga for decades but Hinduism is way too ~~wacky~~ ~~complicated~~ ~~god-soaked~~ -- never mind. I only taught yoga for its effects on strengthening, stretching, breathing and relaxing.
I ALWAYS told my students that if they wanted some faith and dogma about Hinduism from me, they were NOT getting it. There were PLENTY of books they could read on Hinduism.

I think that MARY is unique as the mother of our Savior.

Judaism had MANY women of faith and importance so our legacy from them is invaluable, as they were the seeds of Jesus.

You are right from my study of the slavery issue. The majority of the black slaves went South and were consumed in the sugar plantations and mines. Most didn’t survive. Here, while by today’s standards they were brutalized, then they were valuable property and kept like the economic value they represented.

If they had gone to the Southern hemisphere most would have died. If they had stayed in Africa they would have gone to the Muslim traders, or been killed by their mostly black captors.

The British stopped most of the slave trade in the 1820’s when they controlled the sea. The white enlightenment ended slavery in the new world.

Slavery can’t be viewed in the light of today’s morals and culture. It’s gone and we’re well rid of it here and in the rest of the developed world, but it was practiced and accepted for millennia.

In a few days we’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s day and he was a slave for a good part of his youth.

The East African slave trade, as well as the white slave trade in Europe, are dark chapters in human history that don’t have public advocacy groups and history months - despite accounting for millions more individuals sold into bondage than was the case with the Atlantic slave trade.

During the dark ages Eastern Europeans were sold in droves to the Muslim world, sometimes with the explicit support of European rulers. In terms of hard numbers, I recall reading studies that estimated that more Europeans were sold into slavery than were Africans in the Atlantic slave trade.

The European slave trade was quite lucrative for the leaders willing to turn a blind-eye to it. There were slave-trade routes across Europe that brought Eastern European slaves all across the continent and down to Spain so they could be sold to the Muslim rulers of that nation, many a French and Holy Roman ruler lined his pockets with the gold from the slave trade. Some of the banker-elites and their families of middle-ages Europe got their start hauling “white gold” from the western world to the eastern.

As a matter of fact, that’s where we get the word “Slave” from. Slavs. If the name of your entire people becomes a loan-word to describe human bondage, then you’d think at least future generations would have some conception of what happened in the brutal past.

Later on Turks and Barbary pirates raided mainland Europe, in same cases launching slave raids on Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Baltimore for instance. An entire village in Ireland was carried off into slavery in the mid 1600’s. While the Puritans were industriously cutting civilization out of the North American wilderness, North African pirates were carrying off entire communities in the British Isles.

And then there’s the East African slave trade... a curious fact of North American slavery is that our slave population actually increased over time after the importation of slaves was stopped. That’s virtually unheard of historically, slave populations as a rule don’t reproduce, let alone reproduce above the replacement rate. The life of a British or French-owned slave on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean or on the coast of South America were incredibly short - Bermuda for example, if I recall correctly off the top of my head, imported nearly a million slaves from 1700 until 1800, yet the population of that island never reached 100,000, IIRC. A few years in a tropical sugar plantation is about all a body is good for.

Then there’s the case of British Guiana, which used both African slaves and Irish convicts - as an interesting mental exercise, which of those two groups of human cattle do you think had the higher survival rate? The slaves that actually cost the plantation owners money, which they had an investment to recoup from, or the Irish? If you were an evil slave-owning bastard, which of the two groups would YOU choose for the most grinding and deadly labors on your sugar plantation? Which would get the most nourishing food, and what limited medicine you’d care to throw their way?

The East African slave trade was of this general character, nasty, brutal, and eventually resulting in few if any “former slaves” to make up a significant portion of future demographics.

As a matter of fact, the cotton plantations of Egypt experienced a huge boom, and a concurrent increase in the slave population, due to the disruption in cotton exports caused by the American Civil War. For every slave we fought and bled to free here, economic incentive created more slaves in the Muslim world.

Then there are the elements of the East African slave trade that are uniquely Islamic. Part of the demand for African slaves in the Muslim world was the result of the need for eunuchs. You see, harems needed guards to keep out adventurous young men, and you don’t want the fox guarding the henhouse, so rich Muslims bought hoards of young black boys in order to castrate them. If I recall correctly the “operation” had a very high fatality rate, something like a tenth of those put under the Muslim knife survived. I recall reading the account of an observer from the United States, sometime in the late 1700’s or early 1800’s, describing the process he observed in North Africa for creating eunuchs. The genitalia were sliced off, a grass reed was shoved up into what was left of the urinary tract as a sort of catheter, the bleeding wound was cauterized with heated lead shot, and the gaping mess was dressed with a bandage. I don’t think you’ll see that depicted in any Hollywood guilt-trip blockbusters.

What is truly sad is that the history of human savagery here is conveniently covered up or whitewashed in the west. It’s not politically expedient to dig into some old wounds, especially when many of those you would advocate for died without leaving descendants. More depressingly it’s politically convenient to turn a blind eye to some of humanities greatest evils.

Excellent comment! A few points to add:

The Barbary pirates raided as far as Iceland!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Abductions

The entire coastland of southern Europe was largely depopulated throughout the MIddle Ages and early modern periods due to Muslim longshore raids. It has been suggested this was a significant contributor to the eventual rise of northern Europe in comparison.

It is estimated that from 1530 to 1780 1M to 1.5M Europeans were enslaved by the Barbary corsairs. To this we can add perhaps 2M in the same period from what are now Ukraine, Poland, Russia and elsewhere in eastern Europe. So 3.5M in this period.

Seems reasonable to me to double this for the entire period of 700 to 1800. The earlier period was much longer, but then populations were also much smaller. This gives us perhaps 7M whites enslaved by Muslims.

Compare this to perhaps 12M Africans shipped across the Atlantic and a similar total for the Muslim slave trade from Africa.

So we have perhaps 7M whites vs. 25M blacks enslaved total.

With regard to the similar totals for the Atlantic vs. Muslim slave trade from Africa it should be noted that the Muslim trade start much earlier and lasted a few decades longer. However, it never reached anything close to the volume of the Atlantic trade at its peak.

People obsess about the horrible conditions of the Atlantic trade, but the Muslim trade across the Sahara had a much higher death rate.

http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/193802

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