THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

In The Mosques Are Our Barracks: Will Turkey Join the European Union? I wrote:

One facet of Islam is its involvement in slavery. Muhammad himself both took slaves and advocated the taking of slaves by his followers: ‘Go and take any slave girl’. This practice was not confined to medieval Arabia, but continued for centuries and is persistent to this day; ISIS takes slaves, to cite an extreme example.

The Arab slave trade continued from the 7^th century to the 20^th century. The trade involved slave markets and the slaves were mostly captured from Africa, although there were also slaves taken from Europe. Slaves were sent across the Indian Ocean, including via the Sultanate of Zanzibar, as well as to the Middle East. Zanzibar was East Africa’s main trading port for slaves in the 19^th century; the Omani Arabs traded an estimated 50,000 per year. David Livingstone estimated that around 80,000 Africans died each year on their way to the Zanzibar slave markets. It is believed that around 80 per cent, if not more, of the African slaves taken by the Arabs, died in transit. Nubia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and East Africa were the main sources of slaves.

As recently as the 1950s, slaves accompanied the Qatari sheikhs visiting London, even to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Saudi Arabia and Yemen only ended slavery in 1962 and Mauritania in 1980.

It is estimated that between one million and 1.25 million European slaves were captured by the Barbary corsairs between the 16^th and 19^th centuries from coastal areas in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, Ireland and even Iceland; they were also seized from ships that were attacked by pirates. The Barbary corsairs were vassals of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, other slave raiders enslaved some Europeans, such as those from Morocco.

The European countries lost thousands of ships, and stretches of coastal regions of Spain and Italy were abandoned due to pirate attacks that lasted until the 19^th century. Raiders from Muslim Spain raided the Christian kingdoms. For example, in 1189 in a raid on Lisbon, 3,000 females and children were captured, and in 1191, an attack on Silves netted another 3,000 Christians as slaves.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams travelled to London to meet an envoy from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman and challenged him about to what right he had to capture slaves. Abdrahaman replied that the ‘right’ was ‘founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise’.

The power of the Barbary pirates was smashed after two Barbary wars at the start of the 19^th century, when the US, British, French and Dutch navies took the offensive. An Anglo-Dutch attack on Algiers in 1816 destroyed much of the Barbary fleet and the pirates agreed to stop enslaving European Christians. The Barbary slave raids finally ended in the 1830s when the French conquered Algiers and established colonial rule. The Ottoman Empire established direct rule over Tripoli.

In 1769, in the last major Tartar raid, 20,000 Russians and Poles were captured and taken to Muslim countries, in particular, those part of the Ottoman Empire, to be sold as slaves. The Crimean Khanate of Tartars was a major source of slaves for the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East up to the 18^th century. The Tartars invaded Poland and Russia in search of booty and slaves. An estimated 2.5 million slaves from the Black Sea area were sent to Istanbul between 1450 and 1700.

The Ottoman Empire had special slave markets called ‘Esir’ or ‘Yesir’ in most towns and cities. Slaves were paraded naked and inspected by potential buyers. A Portuguese missionary, João dos Santos, reported that some Somali slave traders had a ‘custom to sew up their females, especially their slaves being young to make them unable for conception, which makes these slaves sell dearer, both for their chastitie, and for better confidence which their masters put in them’. Although the Italian colonial administration abolished slavery in Somalia at the beginning of the 20^th century, the practice continued into the 1930s. In neighbouring Ethiopia, eunuchs were traded. Eunuchs had a high price as they served in the harems.

The Arab slave trade pre-dated the trans-Atlantic slave trade by around 700 years. The Muslim possession of slaves in Islamic southern Spain and Morocco was subsequently copied by the Portuguese and Spanish traders as they explored West Africa. From the end of the 15^th century until the mid-19^th century, the trans-Atlantic slave trade is estimated to have transported around 10 million African slaves, with another two million believed to have died in the crossing. Unlike the Muslim slave-traders, the Europeans bought their slaves. The mainly male slaves were mostly put to work on plantations. The slaves were allowed to marry and their descendants make up a sizeable proportion of the present-day populations of the Americas, including the Caribbean.

By comparison, the majority of slaves taken by Muslims were females and young boys. The females were used as sex slaves or housemaids, and were placed in harems either for sex or to act as attendants; the young boys were castrated, although some 60 per cent died in the act. Some male slaves were traded, mainly to be used as galley slaves, and some were used in the army. The calipha in Baghdad in the 10^th century reportedly had 7,000 black eunuchs and 4,000 white eunuchs in his palace.

It is believed the Muslims traded up to 100 million African slaves (one estimate puts the figure at 180 million, although other estimates are lower), and the death rates during transportation were far higher. While the trans-Atlantic slave trade spanned three centuries, the Arab slave trade lasted fourteen centuries and, in some parts of the Muslim world continues to this day (most obviously in ISIS-controlled territory, and there are also, for example, reports of the slave trade continuing in The Sudan). Of tragic importance is that, despite the preponderance of female slaves trafficked, there is the absence of their descendants today. While the male slaves were castrated or put to work where they could not reproduce, many female slaves were used for sex at a time when there was not contraception so the only explanation for their lack of offspring is the practice of infanticide on a genocidal scale. An article in the New York Daily Times, dated 6 August 1856, entitled, ‘Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women – Infanticide in Turkey’, stated: ‘In Constantinople it is evident that there is a very large number of negresses living and having habitual intercourse with their Turkish masters – yet it is a rare thing to see a mulatto (someone of mixed Negro-Caucasian race). What becomes of the progeny of such intercourse? I have no hesitation in saying that it is got rid of by infanticide and that there is hardly a family in Stanboul where infanticide is not practised in such cases as a mere matter of course, and without the least remorse or dread.’ Furthermore, once the sex slaves reached a certain age, they faced the prospect of being disowned by their masters and left to fend for themselves or die; reports of desperate women begging on the streets of cities across the Muslim world is evidence of this cruelty.