'Islams Black Slaves' : Ronald Segal 2001
Christian societies were responsible for an engagement to slavery in its most hideous, dehumanizing
form. ... Islam has been, by specific spiritual precept and in common practice, relatively humane in
its treatment of slaves and its readiness to free them...
-Ronald Segal, Author's Preface to Islam's Black Slaves
His comment excuses a serious crime against humanity.
Below is
A REVIEW OF THIS BOOK published in THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Saturday, 23 February 2002
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/islams-black-slaves-by-ronald-segal-751100.html
Islam's Black Slaves, by Ronald Segal (Atlantic Books, 273pp)
Slavery in the Muslim world was often humane, says Justin Wintle - but it could be utterly brutal, too
The Koran is full of instruction. Take, for example, the 66th sura. Mohamed has obviously had a run-in with two of his wives. Although the exact details are withheld, tradition relates that he has reneged on his sworn promise to one of them, Hafsah, to forsake a Coptic slave girl. Hafsah finds out and tells her fellow wife Aishah. Some sort of confrontation follows, whereupon the Prophet retires to his cave to commune with the Archangel Gabriel.
The Koran is full of instruction. Take, for example, the 66th sura. Mohamed has obviously had a run-in with two of his wives. Although the exact details are withheld, tradition relates that he has reneged on his sworn promise to one of them, Hafsah, to forsake a Coptic slave girl. Hafsah finds out and tells her fellow wife Aishah. Some sort of confrontation follows, whereupon the Prophet retires to his cave to commune with the Archangel Gabriel.
"God", says Gabriel in the Penguin translation, "has given you absolution from such oaths." Armed with this authority, Mohamed returns to his wives and reads the riot act. Either they should "turn to God in repentance", or he may divorce them, in which case the Lord "will give him in your place better wives than yourselves, submissive to God and full of faith, obedient, penitent, devout, and given to fasting."
With or without the names of the wives and the identity of the slave girl, this passage would appear to promote several conclusions. 1) In the divine order of things, more than one wife is permitted; 2) even polygamy does not preclude relations with other women; 3) or, at any rate, slave girls; and 4) by inference, slavery itself is condoned.
A cynic might go further. In a climate of many contending deities, such as prevailed in antiquity, the monotheistic idea offered immeasurable advantages, particularly for anyone claiming to be its divinely appointed spokesman – as not just Mohamed but also Moses and Christ doubtless appreciated. This is the Law, and it has befallen me to relay it. It is the Truth, it is non-negotiable, and it can never be altered.
Less cynically, both polygamy and slavery – it is sometimes hard to separate the two – were ingrained in the world Mohamed grew up in; and, as it happens, the Koran is notably progressive for its time and place. Slaves should be well treated, and to free a slave who has converted to Islam is more or less obligatory.
None the less, it's there in black and white: slavery is permissible, presumably for all time. While some female slaves were acquired to perform routine domestic services (washing, cooking, cleaning), others – as also young boys – were procured, or presented as gifts, for their sexual handiness.
Although, in Islam's Black Slaves, Ronald Segal takes note of the various Koranic injunctions regarding slavery, his objective is to examine and establish the historic record from the time of Mohamed until the present, with, as his title intimates, reference to African captives. In this context, Segal's book is a valuable sequel to his previous, and highly regarded, study, The Black Diaspora. He has to explain how it is that the Atlantic slave trade, organised by Europeans, generated a discrete black community in America, while the same has not happened in the Islamic heartlands. The numbers involved were, as far as Segal can interpolate from his own and others' calculations, roughly similar – albeit within vastly different time-spans.
Segal contends that because of the Koranic injunctions, because racism as such was never uppermost in Muslim psychology, and because enslaved blacks had relatively few children among themselves, the 14 million or so Black Africans enslaved by Islam over a period of 1300 years were simply absorbed into Islam.
This is not to say that Arab suprematism has not been a feature of Islamic history. But Arab slave-owners, who were the chief beneficiaries of the African slave trade, made no distinction between children born to their Arab wives and those born to slave women.
Indeed, children whose mothers were slaves but whose fathers were masters could expect to grow up as free Muslims who might themselves become slave-holders. Over several generations, their African provenance was diffused within the larger population.
This fits in with a wider view of Islamic slavery adumbrated by Segal. Because of the clan-ism which endured not just among Arabs, but also other Middle Eastern peoples, slaves were of particular value since – paradoxically – their loyalty could be counted upon. So it was that slaves often rose to high civil and military positions, whether in the early Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, or in the much later Ottoman empire.
Regarded in this light, Islamic slavery was even a salutary institution, furnishing captives opportunities to acquire wealth and prestige which might otherwise have eluded them. It was only the strong-armed objections of white powers in the later 19th century, Britain chief among them, which led first to a reduction, and then eradication, of slavery in central Islam. At present, formal slavery persists only in Mauritania and Sudan.
It would be unlike Segal, one of the leading white veterans of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, to swallow such moral relativism whole, and nor does he. As regards black enslavement, particularly in the 19th century, the institution was demonstrably brutal. There were three aspects to this.
First, alongside slavery, eunuchry too was instituted to safeguard the master's harem. Secondly, there were the harems themselves. And thirdly, whereas non-black slaves were generally acquired through warfare more or less legitimised by the Koran, Africa was increasingly treated otherwise.
Muslim slavers foraged ever deeper into the continent's interior to supply the notorious slave-markets of Zanzibar and other centres. The result was lavish inhumanity. Well into the 20th century, black women became the victims of paradigmatic rape, and boys were involuntarily castrated, not by the hundreds, but the thousands and tens of thousands. Often, to obtain their human chattels, Muslim slavers exterminated entire clusters of villages. Many were killed; and many others died in the gruelling cross-desert slave caravans.
All this Segal presents with admirable detachment, acknowledging that for Islam the African slave-trade became a grey area as it expanded. How black slaves were procured was contrary to Islamic law, even if their ownership and use was not.
Only in the epilogue does his rage surface, and then it is targeted at the Black Muslim movement in America, and the outspoken Louis Farrakhan. If Farrakhan knew the history of Islam in relation to the history of his own people, Segal implies, then he must have pursued a different tack. This is a curious coda, designed perhaps to inflame debate in the US. That aside, Islam's Black Slaves is a courageous offering at a sensitive moment.
Unlike its Western counterpart, which beheld in the African an instrument of productive plantation labour, Islamic slavery – Segal tells us – sought consumption and service. While this helps to explain the different trajectories of two different cultures, it also explains why the ratio between male and female black slave imports was starkly contrasted. For America, the proportion was 2:1. For Islam, it was 1:2.
Justin Wintle is general editor of the forthcoming 'Rough Guide Chronicles' of global history
> Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 14:46:16 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: ARAB-ISLAM IN AFRICA
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> FYI
>
> 'Islams Black Slaves' : Ronald Segal 2001
> Historical look at this subject.
>
> Ingrid
>
>
>
> On Sat, December 25, 2010 12:50 pm, Marika Sherwood wrote:
> > Arthur wrote that 'Muslim engagement in African enslavement has lasted
> > over 1,200 years, and there is evidence that it continues today.' But
> > nominally Christian Europe is much involved in current forms of slavery -
> > all that Anti-Slavery is struggling against. In my limited knowledge, most
> > often Muslims used the enslaved in the military, as household servants and
> > concubines; and as carriers on trading journeys which could have been as
> > onerous as plantation labour. But they could rise in the ranks, both in
> > the military and in 'social' life and in some societies did became free
> > members of the family that originally enslaved them.
> >
> >
> >
> > There are many mentions of slavery on a book I've just finished reading,
> > quoting from original sources:
> >
> >
> >
> > Marq de Villiers & Sheila Hirtle, Timbuktu (2007)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Marika
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
