Islam and Slavery - Good together
A tip of the turban 
to Dymphna at Gates of Vienna for pointing us to this Power Point Presentation (1) on the Early Native Americans Muslims. One of her readers says this presentation was given at an Islamic school in New Jersey.
The presentation conveniently ignores the fact that Islam institutionalized slavery:
Answering-Islam.org,
SLAVERY IN ISLAMHowever, few people in the west know about Islam and slavery. Most would be surprised that Islam authorizes the taking of slaves as spoils of war. From the days that Muhammad drew his sword to rob and conquer non-Muslims to this very day, Muslims have been taking non-Muslims, and even other black Muslims, as slaves.
Muslims were enslaving black Africans long before any slave ships sailed for the New World. Muslims were taking and making slaves all over the lands they had conquered. Later, when slave ships were loaded with black slaves, often, a Muslim slave broker had the human cargo all ready to go. American slavers rarely had to go into inland to capture slaves, they were already waiting there, courtesy of some Muslim ruler, and/or slave broker! In many cases, if the black slaves were not sent to the New World, they were sent to the Mideast to be enslaved by Arabs, or kept by other black Muslims as slaves.
But, one may interject, isn't all this just a relic of the past? Hasn't Islam, now in modern times, rejected slavery as a barbaric remnant from a more primitive era?
For an answer, please read this caption at Flickr for the photo above:
Many of the rally's participants were amazed to learn that slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia until 1962. Within a decade of America's Civil War, the Ottomans had banned slavery and dhimmitude throughout the Empire. Just as in the U.S. it was the South, i.e. Arabia, which rose up and fought a civil war against Istanbul, in the same way that the American south went to war against Abraham Lincoln's government. Tragically, in the Ottoman civil war, the southern slavers (ARABS) won. The Ottoman Empire dropped its demands for emancipation in Arabia. Yes, the slave masters won the right to hold slaves, and that right was only abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962. Sudan's Arab colonizers have never given up their right to hold and traffic in slaves.
OK,OK, you say, just one country [70% Sunni] that happens to be run by Muslims is still dabbling in the slave trade, so what, that doesn't prove anything.
It isn't one country, from WIKI [stats in brackets are mine]:
- In Mauritania [100% Muslim] alone it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved, many of them used as bonded labour.
- In Niger [80% Muslim], slavery is also a current phenomenon; a Nigerien study has found that more than 800,000 people are still slaves, almost 8% of the population.
- In Chad [53% Muslim], the UN reports children being sold to Arab herdsmen in Chad. As part of a new identity imposed on them the herdsman "...change their name, forbid them to speak in their native dialect, ban them from conversing with people from their own ethnic group and make them adopt Islam as their religion."
- In Nigeria [50% Muslim] ,... children are kidnapped or purchased for $20 - $70 each by slavers in poorer states, such as Benin and Togo, and sold into slavery in sex dens or as unpaid domestic servants for $350.00 each.
- In Mali [90% Muslim], The Malian government denies that slavery exists, however, the slavery in Timbuktu is obvious. Slavery (sometimes called indentured servitude) still continues with some Tuaregs holding Bella people. [for those of you who are not familiar with Tauregs - they take their Islam in the most primitive and brutal version possible]
So go ahead, Muslim teachers and educators, refurbish your past history, remove references to the holocaust and the great contributions of Jews throughout the centuries. Keep dwelling on the glorious past when your sword ruled over most of the world; but don't pretend that Islam is a religion like Christianity or Judaism. We see it for the terror-political system it really is. That is why slavery still exists in Islamic countries: Islam cannot accept change. What is really amusing is that blacks think that there is no racism in Islam.
Frontline Fellowship
The End of Islam... the claim that "there is no racism in Islam, we are all one…" is a blatant lie. From the very inception of Islam, and for its entire history, Muslims have made up the largest numbers of slave traders and engaged in the greatest slave trading campaigns in history. Even today, slavery continues in many parts of the Muslim world. Just about the only places in the world today where you will still find slavery practised are in the Muslim world.
Islam's present day barbarism is well documented, one merely has to google or look up Islamic Slavery in Amazon.
ENDNOTES
(1): The PowerPoint Presentation is no longer found at http://www.alhamraacademy.org/multimedia/MuslimHistory_files/frame.htm ; however there are still many websites that push this view, usually citing the work of Professor Barry Fell, who many scholars dismiss as an amateur, pointing out his lack of formal training in ancient scripts and languages [Wiki]:
Fountain Magazine, Islam and Muslims in America before Columbus
Research conducted in the West during the twentieth century has proven the existence of Muslims on the American mainland approximately seven centuries before Christopher Columbus. Similarly, archeological excavations, linguistic, and philological analyses of languages and settlement names in the region, the fact that coins, household tools and other utensils were discovered there that were similar to those of the Abbasids in the eighth and ninth centuries are all justifications of the theory that Muslims, beginning from 650 CE, made their way to the continent for settlement, during which time they erected mosques and schools, leaving a prolonged impact on the natives, i.e. American Indians.
The Islamic sources carry no information as regards Muslim settlement in America, although research undertaken by Professor Barry Fell of Harvard University confirms that Muslims reached the continent at the time of Uthman, the third Caliph, concomitantly indicating the significant possibility that some of the Companions could have arrived there as well.
