Quick review & background:
Ancient slavery has its roots deep in our past, stemming
from humanity’s fallen self-centered nature.
God created humankind free, yet slavery is found earlier than the time
of the Biblical Abraham. Many ancient
nations despised manual labor and consigned it to slaves. Many of these were prisoners taken in
conquests of various kingdoms. All
ancient civilizations were built on slave labor—Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt,
Greece, Rome, the ancient civilizations of Central America, and the great
kingdoms of Africa. In Grace, ¾ the
population of Athens were slaves. In
Roman society, a rich man “needed” at least two slaves to carry him to the
circus, but eight to ten usually went along just to impress people. The more powerful Romans had staffs of over a
thousand slaves, and some emperors had 20,000 or more. In the Greek and Roman world, human beings
had no intrinsic value. Their value was
only as citizens of the state, and only a small minority qualified as
such.
Decline of slavery with the spread of Christianity
This began to change with the advent of Christianity. The teachings and example of Jesus “pulled
the rug” from under the basic supporting premises of slavery. When people of means began to become
Christians, many of them used their wealth for the relief of the poor and
suffering, and the liberation of slaves by Christians became common in the
Roman Empire, especially on Easter Sunday.
Gradually the vise of slavery began to be loosened and slavery all but
disappeared from the civilizations touched by Rome, leaving only “Slavic” names
to remind some that they were once slave populations.
Islam reintroduces slavery
With the advent of Islam, all that began to regress
quickly. Part of this was because
Muslims naturally followed the example of their founder, who both traded in
slaves and owned slaves himself. Since
his example is paramount in Muslim thinking, slavery has always been deeply
ingrained in Muslim tradition. Perhaps
this was best said by Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of the Senior Council of
Clerics in Saudi Arabia. He said,
“Slavery is a part of Islam and whoever wants it abolished is an infidel.”
Part of this was also because of the teaching of the
Qur’an. According to its teachings,
masters were permitted to enjoy their female slaves, and it is justified to
enslave “infidels” and their children.
In Islamic vocabulary, that included (and still includes) Christians,
Jews, and anyone who does not submit to Islam.
A few years back, I watched a TV program that purported to
be historical. The man was easily
identifiable as a Muslim apologist. He
poo-pooed the idea of Islamic slavery, an extensive trade in African slaves
that pre-dated transatlantic slavery. He
asked, “If all these slaves were sold into Europe and the Middle East, where
are they today?” The answer was
easy. I’m sure he must have known it,
historian that he was. I think he was
just counting on the idea that not many others would know it.
The reason there are not many descendants of the African slaves
traded by Muslims is that they had a practice of stopping at certain cities in
the Sahara as the slave caravans passed through, where most males were
castrated. Such “eunuchs” brought the
highest prices, but sadly only 1/10 to 1/30 of them survived the ordeal. In general, Islamic slavery had very high
death rates. It is estimated that 80%
died on the long, harsh march through the Sahara. Others were killed in battle, for Muslim
rulers conscripted male slaves into their armies as young as ten years
old. Although many modern historians
choose to ignore that part of the history of slavery, in fact Islam dominated
the African slave trade from the 7th to the 15th
centuries—a period of 800 years, much longer than the later transatlantic slave
trade existed.
Not all Islamic slavery (sometimes called by the fuzzy name
Arab slavery) exported slaves to the Middle East and Europe. In the Muslim Songhay Kingdom in West Africa,
for example, non-Muslims were enslaved and used in agriculture. Over time they became “vassal peasants” but
they were still little different from slaves & formed the bulk of the
population.
Of course, Muslims slavers, like the transatlantic slavers
who followed them, did not enslave blacks totally on their own. As it was in Europe before the advent of
Christianity, many African tribes had their own slaves, often prisoners of war
from intertribal fighting. For example,
the Nupe of northern Nigeria, the Ibo of southeastern Nigeria, the Ashanti of
Ghana, and Dahomey of Benin all used slave labor in agriculture and other forms
of manual labor. In some cases, defeated
kings were required to pay tributes of slaves annually. Some were sacrificed in the “annual office”
to renew the power of the king, while others worked for the royal family and the elite class. This played into the hands of slave traders,
for the kings were happy to sell some of their slaves first to the Muslim
traders, and later to the transatlantic traders.
Today, a huge emphasis has been placed on the transatlantic
trade that began in 1519 in Europe, when Emperor Charles V brought slaves from
Africa, and in America in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves in
Virginia. This is natural, for it is the
history of the vast majority of African-Americans. It also affected more people, because the
need for virtually free labor to produce southern cotton swelled the demand for
slaves beyond all previous numbers. It
is unfortunate, however, that we have largely forgotten what preceded the
transatlantic trade. The Islamic trade
of the 800 years before was not as large, but lasted longer and was in some
ways even more cruel and deadly.
