The University of Michigan’s Black Student Union (BSU) has resigned from the anti-Zionist student group on campus—the Tahrir Coalition—citing what it described as “pervasive” anti-black discrimination fostered by its Arab leadership.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Rather than going into the mistreatment of blacks by Arabs today at the University of Michigan, let us regress to a brief history of the Arabs trafficking of black African slaves. This part of world history was likely not taught to many of us and was so much more extensive—in time, in space, and in number of victims—than the transatlantic Slave Trade that receives almost all of the world’s attention.
Over 28 million Africans have been enslaved in the moslem world throughout the past fourteen centuries. Yes, much has been written concerning the transatlantic slave trade, however, surprisingly little attention has been given to the Islamic slave trade across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean.
The Arab slave trade in East and Central Africa began in the late seventh century. We know this because there are records of the earliest slave revolts by Africans in what is present-day southern Iraq, dating from 689-90 and 694, both quickly suppressed.
The Zanj revolt of 869-883—‘Zanj’ being the word the Arabs used to describe black Africans—in southern Iraq was a much bigger rebellion. It lasted fourteen years, and took a great effort by the Arabs to put down. The slaves who revolted had been used in backbreaking work as agricultural labor, forced to remove nitrous topsoil to create arable land, and treated brutally by their Arab masters. The Zanj Rebellion, what conditions prompted it, and what murderous methods were used by the Arabs to suppress the revolt by the black slaves, deserves to be widely known.
The Arab trade in African slaves began much earlier than the Atlantic trade—the seventh rather than the fifteenth century—and it also lasted longer. There were no Arab abolitionists. After all, Muhammad himself bought, sold, and owned slaves, and Muhammad remains “the Perfect Man” and “Model of Conduct.”
Western pressure alone ended Arab slavery. It was the Royal Navy that patrolled the coasts of Arabia and intercepted dhows carrying slaves. Slavery continued to exist, however, in several moslem Arab countries well into the twentieth century.
Though officially banned in Mauritania in 1961 and again in 1981, it still continues to this day, with 600,000 black slaves held by Arabs. In Saudi Arabia, as recently as the 1950s, 500,000 black Africans, or 20% of Saudi Arabia’s population, were held as slaves. It was only in 1962 that slavery was officially abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and in Oman as late as 1970—and only under terrific Western pressure. In the Sudan (before the creation of South Sudan in 2005), northern Arabs continued to enslave southern blacks during the Second Sudanese Civil War, with as many as 200,000 black Africans taken into slavery.
And today, despite formally abolishing slavery, Arabs still enslave blacks in three states in northwestern Africa—in Mali 200,000, in Mauritania 600,000, according to a 2017 estimate by the BBC, and in Niger 43,000. Yet the West remains indifferent to this continuing horror; the UN says nothing about it; black Americans simply do not know about it.
Historians have estimated the number of blacks who were seized by Arab slavers in Africa, and how many of them—women, children, and castrated boys—made it alive during those 1300 years to the Islamic slave markets. It turns out that about 28 million black Africans—a consensus estimate—were brought—either walked across the Sahara in slave coffles to the slave markets of North Africa and Egypt, or by dhow across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean—to the slave markets of Arabia and the Gulf.
The Arab slave trade was particularly gruesome, for much of it involved castrating black boys in the bush, with the most primitive of implements, in order to supply eunuchs for the moslem harems.
Many of the boys died during the surgery; many others died in the days afterwards from infections, or during the long trek by land or sea to the Islamic slave markets.
The historian Jan Hogedoorn, in his study of what he called The Hideous Trade, estimated:
[T]he mortality rate for those castrated slaves as high as 80-90%, meaning only 10-20% of those African boys originally seized arrived alive at the slave markets.
While the consensus estimate of 28 million black Africans who made it to the Islamic slave markets at first sounds like a lot, over 1300 years (650-1950 A.D.) this amounts to an average of a little more than 20,000 black slaves brought annually from Central and East Africa all the way to those slave markets, which is perfectly plausible.
Ten facts about the Arab slave trade:
1. The Number of People Enslaved
Although a hotly debated topic, some historians believe over 20 million enslaved Africans alone had been delivered through the trans-Saharan route alone to the Islamic world.
Dr. John Alembellah Azumah estimates in his 2001 book The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa:
[O]ver 80 million more black people died over that route.
2. Arab Enslavers Practiced Genetic Warfare
The Arab slave trade typically dealt in the sale of castrated male slaves. Black boys between the age of 8 and 12 had their scrotums and penises completely amputated to prevent them from reproducing. About six of every 10 boys bled to death during the procedure, according to some sources, but the high price brought by eunuchs on the market made the practice profitable.
Ronald Segal in his 2002 book Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, wrote:
The calipha in Baghdad at the beginning of the 10th Century had 7,000 black eunuchs and 4,000 white eunuchs in his palace.
3. Arab Slave Trade Inspired Arab Racism toward Blacks
Arab is not a racial classification; an Arab is almost like an American in that people classified as Arab today could be Caucasian (white people), Asiatic or even Arabized Africans. In the beginning there was some level of mutual respect between the Blacks and the lighter-skinned Arabs. However, as Islam and the demand for enslaved Blacks grew, so did racism toward Africans.
As casual association with Black skin and slave began to be established, racist attitudes towards Blacks began to manifest in Arabic language and literature. The word for slave—abid—became a colloquialism for African. Other words, such as haratin, express social inferiority of Africans.
4. Arab Enslavers Targeted Women for Rape
The eastern Arab slave trade dealt primarily with African women, maintaining a ratio of two women for each man. These women and young girls were used by Arabs and other Asians as concubines and menials.
A moslem slaveholder was entitled by law to the sexual enjoyment of his slave women. Filling the harems of wealthy Arabs, African women bore them a host of children.
This abuse of African women continude for nearly 1,200 years.
5. Arab Slave Trade Ushered in The European Slave Trade
The Arab slave trade in the 19th century was economically tied to the European trade of Africans. New opportunities of exploitation were provided by the transatlantic slave trade and this sent Arab slavers into overdrive.
The Portuguese (on the Swahili coast) profited directly and were responsible for a boom in the Arab trade. Meanwhile on the West African coast, the Portuguese found [moslem] merchants entrenched along the African.
6. The Arab Slave Trade Sparked One of The Largest Slave Rebellions in History
The Zanj Rebellion [see above].
[S]everal thousand East African Zanj people [were brought] into southern Iraq to drain the salt marshes in the east. [H]eavy slave labor, minimal subsistence, [and] harsh treatment sparked an uprising that grew to involve over 500,000 enslaved and free men who were imported from across the [moslem] empire.
7. Arab Enslavers Avoided Teaching Islam to Blacks to Justify Enslaving Them
According to some historians, Islam prohibited freeborn [moslems] from being enslaved, so it was not in the interest for Arab slavers to convert enslaved Africans to the religion.
Still, if an African converted to Islam he was not guaranteed freedom nor did it confer freedom to their children. Only children of slaves or non-[moslem] prisoners of war could become slaves, never a freeborn [moslem].
8. The Time Period
The Arab slave trade was the longest yet least discussed of the two major slave trades. It began in seventh century as Arabs and other Asians poured into northern and eastern Africa under the banner of Islam. The Arab trade of Blacks in Southeast Africa predates the European transatlantic slave trade by 700 years.
9. The Arab Slave Trade Allowed More Upward Mobility Than the European Slave Trade
Upward mobility within the ranks of Arab slaves was not rare. Tariq ibn Ziyad—who conquered Spain and whom Gibraltar was named after—was a slave of the emir of Ifriqiya, Musa bin Nusayr, who gave him his freedom and appointed him a general in his army.
Son of an enslaved Ethiopian mother, Antarah ibn Shaddād, also known as Antar, was an Afro-Arabic man who was originally born into slavery. He eventually became a well-known poet and warrior. Extremely courageous in battle, historians have dubbed him the ‘father of knighthood … [and] chivalry’ and ‘the king of heroes.’
This kind of upward mobility did not occur in the European slavery system.
10. Arab Slave Trade Not Limited to Africa or Skin Color
One of the biggest differences between the Arab slave trade and European slaving was that the Arabs drew slaves from all racial groups. During the eighth and ninth centuries of the Fatimid Caliphate, most of the slaves were Europeans (called Saqaliba), captured along European coasts and during wars.
Aside from those of African origins, people from a wide variety of regions were forced into Arab slavery, including Mediterranean people; Persians; people from the Caucasus mountain regions (such as Georgia, Armenia and Circassia) and parts of Central Asia and Scandinavia; English, Dutch and Irish; and Berbers from North Africa.
Final thoughts: History lesson aside, a Black Student Union and an anti-Zionist student group—the Tahrir Coalition—on campus at the University of Michigan is not surprising, but still an unpleasantry, to say the least.
The U of M had long been known as a place of great learning—call me old fashioned—but a Black Student Union and an Arab-led anti-Zionist coalition should not be tolerated.
The Take Back of our schools must occur along with the Take Back of our Constitutional Republic.
