By
Ralph Peters
Defending Islam in front of our
religious leaders last week, our president not only invoked the Crusades
but seized the opportunity to excoriate the United States for formerly
justifying chattel slavery in Christian terms, his tone suggesting that
chains are rattling still. Indeed, along with the treatment of American
Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot on our past, one that not even
the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in the war ending the “peculiar
institution” washed away (forget that we are the only nation that fought
a civil war to free its slaves).
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
But let us, unlike our president, be honest. The Prophet Mohammed is reputed to have freed dozens of his slaves and to have encouraged his followers to release theirs. But the caliphs who followed the Prophet found that admonition inconvenient. In no time, Islamic jurisprudence produced detailed codes for seizing, keeping, and punishing non-Muslim slaves.
And so began the greatest slave-taking venture in history. Politically correct campus commissars would have us believe that the only men ever enslaved were black and the only slavers were white. Not quite. The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom. At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse.
Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.
As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle. The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.
Muslim pirates plagued the Mediterranean, raiding the lands not occupied by Muslims, to fill their slave markets and man the oars of their galleys — the latter a fate worse than that of plantation hands. Adventurous corsairs even raided coastal England and Ireland, kidnapping the populations of entire towns.
Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves. Others were trained for administrative duties. Indeed, some slaves rose high under both Arabs and Ottomans. But as the soldier-scholar Peter G. Tsouras reminded me, millions of males were castrated to suit the warped values of societies dysfunctional beyond Freud’s darkest dreams.
To be fair, the eunuchs who survived the procedure were valued as harem guards and for other positions of trust. A few became viziers. Nonetheless, one suspects that there was never an abundance of volunteers.
But . . . but this was all long ago, right? “Mais non!” as Secretary Kerry might exclaim. President Obama was absolutely correct when, in the heady, early days of his regime, he proclaimed that Islam had been important to American history since the republic’s founding. He referred, no doubt, to the Barbary pirates, the only Muslim connection from that period. Those North African raiders seized hundreds of American ships over decades, enslaving crews and passengers or, at their most merciful, holding them for ransom. Still, the president was correct that we owe them a debt. The depredations of the Barbary pirates confirmed the need for a peacetime U.S. Navy, the ships of which now dominate the waters the pirates once haunted.
But our first encounter with “violent extremism” in the Muslim world was merely a sideshow in the endless pageant of Islam’s enslavement of others, especially Africans. It’s one of the saddest travesties I know, that some American blacks, yearning for a refreshed identity, created the Black Muslim movement. No religion did greater harm to Africans than Islam. Endless slave caravans crossed the Sahara, while Arab slave ships plied the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, their fetid hulls full of “Zanj.” The Swahili coast of East Africa was a vast exporter of slaves from the interior, while Muslim Berbers, Arabs, and converted blacks looted the savannahs of the Sahel and the West African forests to their south. Even after the European slave trade began to expand, Muslims remained the brokers almost everywhere.
But that was then, right? Nope. Long after Europeans and Americans banned the trade and outlawed slavery, Arabs and other Muslims continued to take black slaves by the hundreds of thousands. In light of his Kenyan ancestry on his father’s side, our president should be more aware of who has tormented Africa since the seventh century, for nigh on 1,400 years (and counting).
Our treasured ally, Saudi Arabia, outlawed slavery only in 1962 — although a mere law didn’t kill the practice. Mauritania had to re-outlaw slavery just a decade ago. And human-rights advocates insist that slavery still exists in states such as Mali, Chad, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa where Islam is dominant.
These days, the new emirs of the Middle East have legalized slavery in the form of guest-worker programs — in which Nepalese or Filipinos are treated little better than the outright slaves of yesterday. Surely our president will want to take all this up with a conclave of Muslim clerics and scholars?
A conservative estimate of the number of human beings enslaved by the Muslim rulers of the greater Middle East and North Africa over those 14 centuries would approach, if not exceed, a hundred million (this is apart from the tens of millions butchered from southeastern Europe to Sindh and the Punjab). White, black, brown — try to imagine the victims — marched south from Polish villages and Hungarian cities, from settlements on the Dnieper and after battles lost on the Danube, hauled across the Indian Ocean in airless hulls or driven through the vastness of the Sahara . . . surely, our president has compassion for them, too, and not just for slaves brought to our shores by those despicable Christians? Surely, “Reverend” Al Sharpton can spare a benediction for the “many millions gone” to the slave markets of the Muslim world?
For all our disagreements on facts and their value, President Obama and I share one aesthetic taste: As a tourist in Muslim lands, I, too, have found the call to prayer beautiful at times. But I wonder how it sounded to those countless millions enslaved by our president’s cherished “religion of peace.”
— Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man, a prize-winning novelist, and, to the dismay of his left-leaning friends, Fox News Strategic Analyst.
We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.
But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.
In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.
But let us, unlike our president, be honest. The Prophet Mohammed is reputed to have freed dozens of his slaves and to have encouraged his followers to release theirs. But the caliphs who followed the Prophet found that admonition inconvenient. In no time, Islamic jurisprudence produced detailed codes for seizing, keeping, and punishing non-Muslim slaves.
And so began the greatest slave-taking venture in history. Politically correct campus commissars would have us believe that the only men ever enslaved were black and the only slavers were white. Not quite. The first slave-labor plantations on an industrial scale were in not the Mississippi Delta but the Mesopotamian Delta, around Basra during the Arab “Golden Age.” For centuries, millions of blacks from Africa and brown-skinned captives from the subcontinent were put to work in conditions that led, in the late ninth century, to the greatest slave revolt known to historians, the 15-year Revolt of the Zanj (East African blacks), the scale of which eclipsed the better-known Spartacus uprising against Rome or the Haitian struggle for freedom. At its peak, perhaps a half-million slaves, impoverished Arabs and Bedouins, repeatedly defeated the sultan’s armies. At the climax of the uprising, Basra was obliterated amid a regional apocalypse.
Slaves thereafter were more strictly disciplined and dispersed, but the institution boomed throughout Islam’s realms. Compared to the mega-mall slave markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Cairo, Tunis, and Bakhchisaray, and, later, of Timbuktu and Istanbul, the slave pens of Charleston and New Orleans were country stores.
As the Ottoman claw choked one third of Europe, the enslavement of Africans continued unabated, but the real prizes now had white skins (blonde females and pretty boys were especially prized). Each of the literally hundreds of Ottoman and Tartar invasions and slave-taking raids into the Balkans, Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even Russia herded thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners southward in vast drives of human cattle. The Eurasian steppes and the Balkan mountain passes shone white with the bones of millions of captives who did not survive the journey.
Muslim pirates plagued the Mediterranean, raiding the lands not occupied by Muslims, to fill their slave markets and man the oars of their galleys — the latter a fate worse than that of plantation hands. Adventurous corsairs even raided coastal England and Ireland, kidnapping the populations of entire towns.
Apologists for Islam — and they are legion — claim that Muslim rule over conquered peoples was enlightened, that conquered Christians and Jews had only to pay the dhimmi tax and everything was fine. Tell that tale over the graves of the Balkan and Greek families forced to send their fittest, finest sons to the Sublime Porte of the sultan to be brought up as Muslims. The strongest young boys trained as janissaries, Ottoman shock troops, to make war on the frontiers against Christians and take more slaves. Others were trained for administrative duties. Indeed, some slaves rose high under both Arabs and Ottomans. But as the soldier-scholar Peter G. Tsouras reminded me, millions of males were castrated to suit the warped values of societies dysfunctional beyond Freud’s darkest dreams.
To be fair, the eunuchs who survived the procedure were valued as harem guards and for other positions of trust. A few became viziers. Nonetheless, one suspects that there was never an abundance of volunteers.
But . . . but this was all long ago, right? “Mais non!” as Secretary Kerry might exclaim. President Obama was absolutely correct when, in the heady, early days of his regime, he proclaimed that Islam had been important to American history since the republic’s founding. He referred, no doubt, to the Barbary pirates, the only Muslim connection from that period. Those North African raiders seized hundreds of American ships over decades, enslaving crews and passengers or, at their most merciful, holding them for ransom. Still, the president was correct that we owe them a debt. The depredations of the Barbary pirates confirmed the need for a peacetime U.S. Navy, the ships of which now dominate the waters the pirates once haunted.
But our first encounter with “violent extremism” in the Muslim world was merely a sideshow in the endless pageant of Islam’s enslavement of others, especially Africans. It’s one of the saddest travesties I know, that some American blacks, yearning for a refreshed identity, created the Black Muslim movement. No religion did greater harm to Africans than Islam. Endless slave caravans crossed the Sahara, while Arab slave ships plied the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, their fetid hulls full of “Zanj.” The Swahili coast of East Africa was a vast exporter of slaves from the interior, while Muslim Berbers, Arabs, and converted blacks looted the savannahs of the Sahel and the West African forests to their south. Even after the European slave trade began to expand, Muslims remained the brokers almost everywhere.
But that was then, right? Nope. Long after Europeans and Americans banned the trade and outlawed slavery, Arabs and other Muslims continued to take black slaves by the hundreds of thousands. In light of his Kenyan ancestry on his father’s side, our president should be more aware of who has tormented Africa since the seventh century, for nigh on 1,400 years (and counting).
Our treasured ally, Saudi Arabia, outlawed slavery only in 1962 — although a mere law didn’t kill the practice. Mauritania had to re-outlaw slavery just a decade ago. And human-rights advocates insist that slavery still exists in states such as Mali, Chad, Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa where Islam is dominant.
These days, the new emirs of the Middle East have legalized slavery in the form of guest-worker programs — in which Nepalese or Filipinos are treated little better than the outright slaves of yesterday. Surely our president will want to take all this up with a conclave of Muslim clerics and scholars?
A conservative estimate of the number of human beings enslaved by the Muslim rulers of the greater Middle East and North Africa over those 14 centuries would approach, if not exceed, a hundred million (this is apart from the tens of millions butchered from southeastern Europe to Sindh and the Punjab). White, black, brown — try to imagine the victims — marched south from Polish villages and Hungarian cities, from settlements on the Dnieper and after battles lost on the Danube, hauled across the Indian Ocean in airless hulls or driven through the vastness of the Sahara . . . surely, our president has compassion for them, too, and not just for slaves brought to our shores by those despicable Christians? Surely, “Reverend” Al Sharpton can spare a benediction for the “many millions gone” to the slave markets of the Muslim world?
For all our disagreements on facts and their value, President Obama and I share one aesthetic taste: As a tourist in Muslim lands, I, too, have found the call to prayer beautiful at times. But I wonder how it sounded to those countless millions enslaved by our president’s cherished “religion of peace.”
— Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man, a prize-winning novelist, and, to the dismay of his left-leaning friends, Fox News Strategic Analyst.
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