Last week, I talked about how Islam advocates slavery,
which means Islam approves of slavery and makes regulations to it in its fundamental scriptures.
Now I want to go into Islam’s history with slavery.
That history is very big, to say the least, so I can obviously not cover everything,
but I want to make you familiar with how the Islamic world was widely involved in slavery,
and mainly the major party to run it.
Let’s go back in history and have a look at one of the biggest slave trades.
According to historians and even fundamental Islamic scriptures,
slavery was quite common in Arabia in Mohammed’s time,
so that Mohammed, the prophet himself, had dozens of male and female slaves
and actively traded slaves
or captured prisoners of war and generously distributed them
as slaves to his warriors.
Because Mohammed was a very generous man. No offense.
Islam didn’t end slavery, although it had the power to do so.
Instead, Islam adopted slavery and regulated it.
When Arabs started conquering their way to Africa,
the importing of slaves from Africa increased gradually,
and when Muslims conquered significant parts of the eastern coast of Africa,
they started actively assimilating slavery as an important part of their economic system.
Historians place the beginning of the Arab Slave Trade to the 7th and 8th centuries,
7 centuries before the Atlantic Slave Trade,
although practically it began much earlier and was, as far as we can see, always there.
The slave trade expanded greatly throughout the next 1000 years
and involved not only black African slaves,
but also Europeans, especially Southern Europeans, and Indians to some extent.
Later it was also not only the Arab Slave Trade,
but a large network of different nations buying and selling slaves.
There weren’t many Arabs among slaves,
but many Arab women were enslaved
and usually sold to other Muslim nations in North Africa.
Women were in general a big part of the slave trade
because Islam has a very popular form of sex slavery.
The end of the slave trade was somewhere in the 20th century.
The Islamic world was the last to officially abolish slavery.
The slave traded lasted around 1200-1300 years or more.
The name “Arab slave trade” is also disputed.
Calling it Arab slave trade seems misleading to some,
because parties involved were far more than just Arabs.
We could also call it bluntly the Islamic or Muslim slave trade
or more generally the Eastern slave trade.
The main victims of the slave trade were black Africans, also called Zanj.
Zanj means basically Blacks, and was used by Arabs,
and later by other Muslims to refer to dark skinned Africans to the south.
Arab views on black Africans were, as we can see in history, not very... bright.
And Mohammed’s language, Mohammed himself, makes that even additionally clear.
In a hadith, he tells his companions to respect everyone who rules over them,
no matter from what group he is,
and then goes on and says,
"even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin”.
Come on, Mohammed. This is so childish.
Another notable record by a Muslim comes from Tunisian Arab called Ibn Khaldun,
whose work Muqaddimah is widely regarded
as forerunner of modern historiography and sociology.
It might be a forerunner, but it’s certainly not sweet.
In his book, Ibn Khaldun describes Sub-Saharan Africans as natural slaves and says,
"the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery,
because Negroes have little that is human
and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals."
It is important to note that Ibn Khaldun is seen as important part
of what people call the Golden Age of Islam.
If you’re not disgusted yet, let’s go on.
As explained in the last episode, Islam doesn’t allow the enslavement of Muslims,
and therefore the main targets of slavery were non-Muslims,
and the easiest target were black Africans who were even more underdeveloped than Arabs,
which means something.
Historical reports show that slavery was an important part of the Islamic hegemony,
as early as in the Rashidun caliphate, more notably in the Umayyad Caliphate,
and more harshly in the Abbasid caliphate.
The first big international agreement to trade slaves
was made during the Rashidun Caliphate under Umar’s reign,
who was the second caliph and a very respected figure in Islam.
When the Rashidun Caliphate conquered Egypt
and considered conquering the region to the south,
but was defeated in a battle,
the Muslims realized that conquering the region would be too difficult for that time,
so they persuaded the Christian Kingdom of Makuria with an agreement called Baqt instead.
According to that agreement, Arabs wouldn’t attack Makuria
and Makuria wouldn’t attack the Muslims,
but Makuria had to send 360 high quality slaves
to the new Muslim Egypt every year.
This agreement was criticized by some Islamic scholars.
Not because it’s a violation of human dignity... What are you thinking?
...but because it was an obstacle to the expansion of Islam,
since the Muslims had a treaty with Makuria now and couldn’t invade it in future.
The agreement lasted over 600 years
and continued under all the other caliphates that ruled Egypt.
It was clearly approved of by the Islamic powers.
But the use of slaves was not limited to that region.
They were also sent in big numbers to Eastern lands,
through India even to Southeast Asia and China.
Speaking of India, the Umayyad Caliphate enslaved thousands of Indian people
during its campaigns in India
and made big contributions
to expanding the demographic diversity and numbers of slaves.
Slaves were also under very harsh conditions under the Umayyads,
because the Umayyad Caliphate had a hierarchical worldview of Arab supremacy,
placing even Non-Arab Muslims below Arabs.
You can only imagine how Non-Muslims and slaves were treated.
It was also the Umayyad caliphate and Islam that brought major slavery to India.
Before, it was there, but slavery was not big in India.
Islam brought it there.
The Umayyads also enslaved Europeans
and enabled the enslavement of South Europeans
under future Muslim rulers in North Africa and Spain, or Iberia.
Slaves were captured from Italy, Southern France, the Iberian Peninsula,
and later even at coastlines of the British Isles, Iceland and other places.
The Umayyads also openly discouraged the conversion of so-called “slave nations” to Islam,
because actively converting them would be an obstacle to enslaving them,
and slaves becoming Muslims would give them more rights to free themselves from slavery,
which would damage the cause.
The Abbasids imported big numbers of slaves as military forces or as cheap labor.
We can even see this in a historical rebellion called the Zanj Rebellion,
the rebellion of black people.
Led by an unknown man called Ali ibn Muhammad,
who gathered myriads of black slaves, it was one of the largest,
most destructive rebellions in the region ever.
The historical background and circumstances of the rebellion show us
that slaves were in extremely poor and harsh conditions
under the Islamic caliphate
and were very often mistreated by society and their masters.
The rebellion was one of many rebellions under the Abbasid caliphate,
but since slaves and blacks were treated poorly,
very high numbers of slaves and other black people joined this rebellion.
It was eventually crushed by the Abbasid forces and ended with a death toll
that is estimated to be between more than 500k to 2.5 Million.
This rebellion didn’t end slavery. It only weakened the Abbasid caliphate temporarily.
In the following centuries, slavery was always upheld
and a big part of the Abbasid Caliphate’s social structure.
The Turkish Seljuks and the Ottoman Empire, or Caliphate, also maintained slavery,
although Seljuks were formerly slaves themselves.
The same was the case under the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt.
Mamluk means basically slave.
The Mamluk rulers were former slaves, but they maintained slavery widely under their own rule.
Because slavery was a big part of Islamic society. It couldn’t be just dismissed.
Especially the Ottoman Empire used slavery widely,
but in the Empire,
slaves were rather domestic servants instead of labor force.
What the Ottoman Empire also did
was to expand the demographics of slavery further.
Raiding Europeans and Caucasians and enslaving captured people
became a common practice.
Barbary pirates under the Ottomans made big raids
and captured people from coastlines to bring them back as slaves.
Especially children and women that were captured were very valuable,
because as noted in history,
unlike in the European Atlantic Slave Trade, in the Islamic slave trade,
female slaves were in high demand and children in even higher demands.
You have surely heard of famous Ottoman Harems.
Those harems were full of sex slaves.
Sex-slavery was very common in the Ottoman Empire,
and the Ottoman Empire had the biggest harems.
Black slaves in the Ottoman Empire served in harems,
while white slaves were in administrative positions.
Ottomans also captured young Christian boys
and raised them with Islamic,
Ottoman indoctrination and turned them into a feared class of soldiers.
The Janissaries.
Janissaries were the elite military force of the Ottoman Empire.
They were children of Christians, kidnapped by the Ottoman Empire
or taken from families that were unable to pay the Jizya tax,
forcibly raised under Islam,
forbidden to create families and subjected to absolute loyalty to the Ottoman government.
Slavery was so big in the Ottoman Empire,
that 1/5 of the population in 1609 were slaves.
There is more to all the slaves, especially under the Ottomans.
You almost thought I wasn’t going to mention it, right?
Another very big difference between the European Atlantic Slave Trade
and the Islamic one was castration.
The Ottoman Empire didn’t want to put up with sexually active men
working for them in their own homes,
which is why most slaves were castrated from childhood.
But this is not a practice that belonged only to the Ottoman Empire.
That practice came into the Ottoman Empire from Islamic Rule and Arabs.
Even in early Islamic history, imported slaves were mostly castrated,
who underwent this barbaric practice in their childhood,
so they could serve as eunuchs and wouldn’t need sexual goals and trouble.
To be fair, this practice was not started by the Muslims,
but the Muslim world was the biggest customer of castrated black or white slaves.
They were in such high demand, that everyone paid more for a castrated slave,
which increased the castration of slaves before their import.
Therefore, the Islamic World started actively castrating captured slaves as well,
since sexual segregation is very important in Islam and men without penises apparently came handy.
It is reported that the Abbasid caliphate had 7000 black
and 4000 white castrated slaves only serving the palace in the 10th century.
And it is estimated
that the MAJORITY of slaves in the entire Arab Slave Trade,
for over 13 centuries, were castrated,
meaning they had their testicles and penis completely removed,
which was a dangerous practice.
It is reported that most slaves died during the castration,
but castrated slaves were so valuable that the masters of the Islamic world
and their suppliers never stopped this practice
until the 20th century.
Slavery went on wherever Islam arrived.
It was part of the economic system in North Africa,
the Middle East, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and widely in Asia.
And the Islamic world abolished slavery after everyone else,
only under heavy pressure of the West.
Slavery even boomed once again in the Islamic world
when Europe abandoned slavery in the 19th century,
and the enslavement of Africans declined only when Europeans colonized
and scrambled Africa, again, in the 19th century.
In fact, it is recorded that the Ottoman Empire
still sold masses of slaves in the 20th century before it collapsed.
In Countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Qatar,
it was still widely ongoing until half a century ago.
In Sudan and Mauritania, it was going on for much longer.
In fact, the last country to officially abolish slavery
was Mauritania in 1981,
only 37 years ago,
and unofficially it is still ongoing in Mauritania, in Sudan,
there have been reports of slaves being sold through open auctions
in Libya only years ago,
and there are experience reports of slaves from the Gulf countries.
Mauritania was even so arbitrary
that it criminalized slavery only in 2007.
11 years ago.
Another important detail to mention
is that the infamous European Atlantic Slave Trade was inspired
by slavery that was already ongoing in Africa and Asia.
And Muslim nations were directly involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
It is proven that Muslim nations contributed greatly to the Atlantic Slave Trade,
and so did Sub-Saharan African nations. Why wouldn’t they.
The Europeans came as amateurs
while the Islamic world were already masters of slavery.
Yet we are only talking about Europeans and slavery.
As we can see, slavery was a big part of society and economy
in the Islamic world throughout history.
It was there before the West and it ended after the West,
due to Western pressure,
and is partially it is still ongoing.
It was also more fatal than the Atlantic Slave Trade,
harsher against women and children,
and racism was a strong factor in it.
So was religious supremacy --- Islamic supremacy.
It is unbelievable that we’re not talking about this today,
when the Islamic world should come together,
face its past, admit everything,
and apologize for the atrocities.
After all of this, how can anyone come and say
that the history of Islam was peaceful
and equal for everyone?
After all of this, think about groups
like the Nation of Islam
that advocated conversion to Islam
because the evil white Christian man enslaved them.
Movements advocating such ideas
were either deceitful or completely ignorant
about their history.
This was a rather short, but comprehensive summary
of the history of slavery in the Muslim world.
I can’t possibly talk about everything
because I would be taking too much of your time,
but I would encourage everyone to research this
and to work on this history,
so that we can let more people know about these atrocities
committed by a very big religious group
that has ironically
recently started to describe its religion as peaceful.
If you think a religion
that advocates slavery is peaceful,
then go ahead and call it so.
If you think mainly black castrated people
traded in open squares
in the capitals of big empires is an example of peace,
go ahead and call it so.
I will certainly not agree with that,
and I will be here to give you more and more reasons
why I won’t do that.
Islam is not a religion of peace
and never has been and never will be.
Thanks for watching!
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We’ll see each other in another video.
Have a nice day and stay away from Islam.