Slavery in Islam – A Look at the Facts:
INTRODUCTION:
Islam likes to charge apostate (counterfeit) so called Christianity with condoning and practicing slavery which of course they did, but turns away from the fact that Islam practiced slavery including Muhammad (pbuh) himself and parts of Islam still practice slavery. Of course, this is hypocritical on the part of Islam marking it as a dishonest false religion that is like an Ostrich who hides its head in sand if it does not want to see something.
It is the only major religion who still practices slavery, this taking place in Africa to day in Sudan and elsewhere. In fact, this situation is very bad in the Darfur section of the Sudan where not only is slavery practiced by members of Islam, but rape by those who are Muslims.
Let’s look at the facts today:
SLAVERY – THE FACTS WITHIN ISLAM:
Now let’s look at the facts as presented in an encyclopedia.
<<<”The major juristic schools of Islam have historically accepted the institution of slavery[1]; however, in modern time this has become a contentious issue Muhammad and those of his companions who could afford it themselves owned slaves, and some of them acquired more by conquest[stealing them.]. However, the Islamic dispensation enormously improved the position of the Arabian slave through the reforms of a humanitarian tendency both at the time of Muhammad and the later early caliphs. In Islamic law, the topic of Islam and slavery is covered at great length. The legal legislations brought two major changes to the practice of slavery inherited from antiquity, from pagan Rome, and from Byzantium, which were to have far-reaching effects. Bernard Lewis considers these reforms to be the cause of the vast improvements in the practice of slavery in Muslim lands. The reforms also seriously limited the supply of new slaves.
The Qur'an considers emancipation of a slave to be a meritorious deed, or as a condition of repentance for certain sins[but does not require their emancipation]. The Qur'an and Hadith contain numerous passages supporting this view. Muslim jurists considered slavery to be an exceptional circumstance, with the basic assumption of freedom until proven otherwise. Furthermore, as opposed to pre-Islamic slavery, enslavement was limited to two scenarios: capture in war[stealing.], or birth to slave parents (birth to parents where one was free and the other not so would render the offspring free)[sounds like typical slavery].
Slavery in Islam does not have racial or color component, although this ideal has not always been put into practice. Nevertheless, historically, black slaves could rise to important positions in Muslim nations. In early Islamic Arabia, Slaves were often African blacks from across the Red Sea, but by expansion of the Islamic empire in later times, slaves could be Berbers from North Africa, Slavs from Europe, Turks from Central Asia, or Circassians from the Caucasus. The majority of slaves throughout the history of Arabia were, however, of African origin. The Arab slave trade was most active in eastern Africa, although by the end of the 19th century such activity had reached a significantly low ebb. The slavery in the Arab World in the 19th century has been documented by Dr. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, an Arabist and a scholar of Indonesian affairs, who had visited Mecca during his journey in the Hijaz. He states in his book Mohammedanism that "Slaves in the Arab world are generally not that different from servants and workers in Europe” and that their masters “handled them with a genial humanity that made their lot no worse - perhaps better, as more secure - than that of a factory worker in nineteenth-century Europe."
It was in the early 20th century (post World War I) that slavery gradually became outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, [b] largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France [/b](although the extent to which it died out and/or flared up again is disputed).” [source - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]>>>.
Also, researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) said the following:
<<<” WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.
In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.
Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.
Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan).
“Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.”
Davis said it is useful to compare this Mediterranean slavery to the Atlantic slave trade that brought black Africans to the Americas. Over the course of four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas. But from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas, according to Davis….
“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” he said.
Pirates (called corsairs)[members of Islam] from cities along the Barbary Coast in north Africa – cities such as Tunis and Algiers – would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact of these attacks were devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. [b]At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior.[/b]
Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of the 17th century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers.[Islam should return these to England, but has failed to do so or pay England.].
Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 other American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793.
Davis said the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.
The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.
Davis said another reason that Mediterranean slavery has been ignored or minimized has been that there have not been good estimates of the total number of people enslaved. People of the time – both Europeans and the Barbary Coast slave owners – did not keep detailed, trustworthy records of the number of slaves. In contrast, there are extensive records that document the number of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves….
“The only way I could come up with hard numbers is to turn the whole problem upside down – figure out how many slaves they would have to capture to maintain a certain level,” he said. “It is not the best way to make population estimates, but it is the only way with the limited records available.”…
The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast. Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America….
Davis said his findings suggest that this invisible slavery of European Christians deserves more attention from scholars. “We have lost the sense of how large enslavement could loom for those who lived around the Mediterranean and the threat they were under,” he said. “Slaves were still slaves, whether they are black or white, and whether they suffered in America or North Africa.”[source – Research, Ohio State University by Jeff Grabmeier]>>>.
CONCLUSION:
Both apostate (counterfeit) so called Christians and Muslims starting with Muhammad (pbuh) himself were equally guilty with respect the slave trade, yet members point a finger at apostate (counterfeit) Christians without realizing three fingers, maybe four, are pointing back at themselves. This is dishonest hypocrisy on the part of Islam.
Your Friend in Christ Iris89
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