For Pa Ali Ceesay et al,
Al-salaamu alaykum wa rahmat-Allaahi wa barakaatuhu (Peace be upon you, and
the mercy of Allaah and His blessings).
Excerpt from Islam's Black Slaves : The Other Black Diaspora
ONE
CONTRASTS
Both Christianity and Islam asserted the unique value of the individual
human being, as created by God for His special purposes. Yet, for their own
special purposes, Christian and Muslim societies long sanctioned the
capture, sale, ownership, and use of men, women, and children from black
Africa. We can never know the extent of the human cost. It is certain that
many millions lost their lives in the warfare and raiding that provided the
captives for slavery. Millions more died in the process of collection,
initial transport, and storage.
The statistics connected with the West's so-called Atlantic Trade, of the
slaves who were loaded onto boats and of the survivors who landed in the
Americas, have been comprehensively researched. Total numbers are now widely
accepted as subject to no more than relatively minor adjustment in the light
of new evidence. Much, too, is known of mortality rates -- from overwork,
undernourishment, and brutal discipline -- in the slave-labor force. The
Atlantic Trade and the plantation economies it fed became such a highly
developed and organized business that ledgers recording the details were
commonly kept.
The Islamic Trade was conducted on a different scale and with a different
impact. Unlike the Atlantic Trade, which began late and grew intensively, it
had begun some eight centuries earlier and, except at certain periods, it
involved lower average annual volumes. The social and cultural importance of
slavery itself was greater than its economic one. Certainly, bankers and
merchants, as individual investors or in partnership enterprises, were
prominently engaged, but only sparse records of their related accountancy
survive. There were also numerous small-scale dealers, with stocks of a few
slaves each, who were likely to have kept any accounts in their heads.
Crucially informing the difference between the two trades was the economic
system involved in each. Historians dispute the degree to which the Atlantic
Trade promoted the development of Western capitalism and its industrial
revolution, primarily in the eighteenth century. But there can be no doubt
of the connection between them. The evidence is plentiful that some of the
huge profits engendered by the trade were invested in the development of
industry, and also that much industry developed in order to supply the trade
goods required for the procurement of slaves in black Africa. Not least,
from the predominant use to which slaves were put, there developed a view of
slaves as essentially units of labor in a productive process that
disregarded or denied their personality.
Slavery in Islam was very different. A system of plantation labor, much like
that which would emerge in the Americas, developed early on, but with such
dire consequences that subsequent engagements were relatively rare and
reduced. Moreover, the need for agricultural labor, in an Islam with large
peasant populations, was nowhere near as acute as in the Americas, where in
some West European colonies, conquest had led to the virtual extermination
of the indigenous peoples from new diseases and forced labor.
Slaves in Islam were directed mainly at the service sector -- concubines and
cooks, porters and soldiers -- with slavery itself primarily a form of
consumption rather than a factor of production. The most telling evidence of
this is found in the gender ratio. The Atlantic Trade shipped overall
roughly two males for every female. Among black slaves traded in Islam
across the centuries, there were roughly two females to every male.
The difference between the two trades was related to the very nature of the
state in Islam, as distinct from that in Western Christendom. Indeed, the
term "Christendom" -- though still useful as a defining difference --
effectively became an anachronism for states whose religious allegiances
increasingly gave place to national preoccupations and the secular
employment of power. In Islam the state itself was essentially an extension
of the religion, without legitimacy or corresponding allegiance beyond this.
Even in the one arguable exception of Iran, whose historical Persian
identity confronted Arab linguistic and political dominance, the
independence it successfully asserted was based on a rival view of the
legitimate succession to leadership of the entire Islamic community.
To a degree unmatched by the various states of Western Christendom, for all
the conflict between Protestant and Catholic, the nature of society in Islam
was informed by reference to the divine will, as communicated in the Koran.
And the Koran dealt in some detail with slaves. That pretensions to piety
might coexist with disregard for the spirit and even the letter of such
details did not preclude their overall influence. Slaves were to be regarded
and treated as people, not simply as possessions.
This is not to romanticize their condition. A slave was a slave for all
that. Owners were endowed with such power over their slaves that few can
have failed to abuse it, more often in trivial but still humiliating, and
sometimes in brutal, ways. Even masters persuaded of their own piety and
benevolence sexually exploited their concubines, without a thought of
whether this constituted a violation of their humanity. In the provision of
eunuchs, indeed, Islamic slavery was scarcely more compassionate than its
Western counterpart; and those who purchased them were the accomplices of
those who provided them. Yet the treatment of slaves in Islam was overall
more benign, in part because the values and attitudes promoted by religion
inhibited the very development of a Western-style capitalism, with its
effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit. So crucial was
the religious dynamic to Islamic society that those who served the faith, by
scholarship or soldiering, enjoyed greater prestige than those who grew rich
by economic enterprise. While trade was accepted as necessary and useful,
enrichment by speculation, or by any other pursuits construed to be in
conflict with the welfare of the community, was not only regarded with
suspicion but might be severely penalized.
Since enrichment brought such obvious rewards, from the purchase of
pleasures to the means of exercising or extending power, there were
inevitably those more attracted to amassing riches than to devout
self-denials whose rewards in another world required death as well as delay.
In the business of this world, the advantages of enterprise were widely
recognized. But the conditions for related capital accumulation on a
socially transforming scale were largely absent.
It was no accident that in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, charitable
foundations were a prime source of investment capital but spent most of
their income on building mosques, establishing or subsidizing schools, and
contributing to social welfare; that wealth so often went into the purchase
of property rather than into productive assets; and that foreign goods were
permitted to compete so damagingly with domestic production because their
relative cheapness served the needs of the poor in the community.
Of some significance, too, was the absence of primogeniture as the principle
of inheritance. The distribution of estates among the family members of the
deceased, in conformity with Koranic precepts, might well have been both
fair and compassionate. In contrast to the practice of primogeniture in the
West, however, it did little to secure the concentration of wealth and its
related investment. Moreover, Muslims tended to respect the prohibition of
usury in the Old Testament, while in the West, Jews, often barred from other
forms of economic enterprise, and increasingly Christians, tended to ignore
it. In short, far from pursuing the development of an economic system that
promoted the depersonalization of slave labor, Islamic influence was
responsible for impeding it.
Such influence also successfully confronted the emergence of racism as a
form of institutionalized discrimination, because the Koran expressly
condemned racism along with tribalism and nationalism. In the West, economic
enterprise and the advance of the secular state promoted each other, to mock
such spiritual messages as that the meek should inherit the earth. The slave
system was so incompatible not only with the teachings of Christianity but
with the decent sensibilities of the less devout that they required some
rationalization to sustain them. The Bible was scrutinized to find support,
however specious, for a divine curse on blacks; and science was perverted to
support a biological case for their enslavement.
Christianity did come to play a crucial part in the opposition led by
Britain, first to the slave trade and then to slavery itself. Most of the
leading abolitionists took the teachings of their religion seriously. Yet it
is doubtful that they would have succeeded without support from industrial
capitalists. The workshop of the world had outgrown the value of slave-labor
colonies whose land, exploited to relative impoverishment, now produced
high-cost sugar, while other slave labor colonies produced an abundance of
low-cost sugar from still richly productive land.
The cry for "free trade" was also one for a level competitiveness of "free
labor" that would enable Britain to sustain her industrial leadership and
extend its scope to new markets, including an Africa rescued from pillage
for the achievement of such prosperity as would afford a much greater demand
for British goods. By the time this combination of moral and economic
campaigns captured the state, so that British financial, diplomatic, and
naval power came to be deployed in their cause, the days of the Atlantic
slave trade and then of slavery itself in the West were numbered.
Yet racism vigorously survived the end of slavery. If old habits die hard,
racism would already have been old enough to take an unconscionable time
dying. But there were reasons why it thrived rather than declined. The
colonial powers, engaged in extending their rule across most of the world,
found a pretext in the concept of "the white man's burden' " with its
corresponding presumption of the cultural and even biological inferiority of
blacks and others of color.
Within the metropolitan societies, there were many whites at the lower
social levels who found comfort or consolation in asserting their racial
superiority to blacks. In the late nineteenth century and for much of the
twentieth, white workers, particularly in the United States with its large
black population, found in racism a cause with which to confront the
competition for jobs from blacks now free to sell their labor. Racial
segregation, written into law or so secured by custom as to have hardly less
force, took elaborate form.
Neither law nor custom had precluded miscegenation during slavery, even in
the South of the United States. But with the notable exception of Brazil --
where the lack of sufficient white immigrants had long allowed a selective
merging by mulattos into a pragmatic whiteness -- those descended from such
unions were no less barred than were blacks from social assimilation with
whites. And they remained so under the reinvigorated regime of racism after
slavery.
Copyright © 2001 Ronald Segal
With the very best of good wishes,
Musa Amadu Pembo
Glasgow,
Scotland
UK.
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Da’wah is to convey the message with wisdom and with good words. We should
give the noble and positive message of Islam. We should try to emphasize
more commonalities and explain the difference without getting into
theological arguments and without claiming the superiority of one position
over the other. There is a great interest among the people to know about
Islam and we should do our best to give the right message.
May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous
Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May
Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .
We ask Allaah the Most High, the All-Powerful, to teach us that which will
benefit us, and to benefit us by that which we learn. May Allaah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala grant blessings and peace to our Prophet Muhammad and his family
and
companions..Amen.
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