Black Muslim Academic: Islamic Slavery Devastating — and Ignored
by Selwyn Duke
TheNewAmerican.com
Thursday, 07 November 2019
When Americans hear the word “slavery,” they generally think of the U.S. variety formally made illegal in 1865. But a type of slavery that has been practiced for 13 centuries straight — continuing to this day — is largely ignored, complains Senegalese academic Tidiane N’Diaye.
Professor N’Diaye, a black Muslim anthropologist and specialist in African civilizations, points out that Arab-Muslim enslavement has affected far more individuals than did the transatlantic slave trade, 17 million vs. 6 to 11 million, respectively. It also has been more brutal.
The blind eye turned to Arab-Muslim slavery was epitomized well by former French justice minister Christiane Taubira, a black woman who once said, “It is not necessary to mention the Arab-Muslim slave trade too much so that young Arabs do not have to carry all the weight of the crimes perpetuated by the Arabs,” American Thinker related Sunday.
Interestingly, there’s little concern about the “weight” Western youngsters may have to carry due to incessant talk about the transatlantic slave trade. And this double standard is apparent even in Africa, said N’Diaye in a February interview. It’s a result of religious solidarity, he explained, as there are “between 500 and 600 million Muslims” on the continent today, and this “is why most African or other historians have restricted the scope of their research on [the] slave trade to that practiced by Western nations.”
But N’Diaye is an exception. Citing his book The Veiled Genocide as a source, American Thinker writes that while the Western slave trade “over two and a half centuries may have been an attack on human dignity that was widely denounced and commemorated, it is useful to demonstrate historically the Islamic origin of the slave trade in question. And let us not lose sight of the fact that the enslavement of blacks dates back 10 centuries to the arrival of the conquerors of Allah in Africa.”
“Thus, in 652, the warlord Abdullah ben [sic] Said imposed on the Sudanese an agreement for the permanent delivery of slaves, which has grown over the centuries,” the site continues.
In fact, not only does this continue, but Africa is now again the “epicenter” of modern slavery, Quartz reported last year, with an estimated 9.2 million people in bondage.
In fairness, not all these victims are enslaved by Muslims (though many are), and African slavery didn’t begin with the Islamic invasions. After all, “‘Slavery was part of various African cultures, and in many African societies there were no prisons, so when they captured people, they sold them, especially to the north,’” DW.com related this summer, quoting Abdulazizi Lodhi, a professor of Swahili and African linguistics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.
The Rest…HERE
