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Title: Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal ISBN: 0-374-52797-0 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 09 February, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.45 (11 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: who is this guy ?
Comment: Christian societies were responsible for an engagement to slavery in its most hideous, dehumanizing form. ... Islam has been, by specific spiritual precept and in common practice, relatively humane in its treatment of slaves and its readiness to free them... -Ronald Segal, Author's Preface to Islam's Black Slaves
This truly odd book details the horrors of the enslavement of black Africans in the Islamic world--a traffic in human beings which equaled in volume that of the better known Atlantic slave trade (totaling some 11 million blacks in each case), and which continues to this day, particularly in places like the Sudan--but at the same time seeks to differentiate Islam's treatment of slaves, which is portrayed as relatively enlightened and beneficent, from the harsher treatment of blacks, both slave and free, in the West. Though I had trouble finding much biographical information on Segal, his motivation in this exercise appears to be twofold. First, there's the simple necessity to explain, not merely the absence of racial tension in the modern Islamic world, but also the absence of blacks : where, after all, did the 11 million go ? Why is there no conspicuous black culture in the Middle East ? Second, based on the admittedly sketchy evidence I could find : that Segal, a white South African, was a significant player in the ANC in the late 50s & early 60s and that his prior books include a biography of Trotsky and Race War, which apparently predicted such a war in America, it seems safe to assume that, if not a Marxist, he is at least a Leftist, which would tend to suggest that his exoneration of Islam may be intended to indict the West.
In presenting the history of the African slave trade, Segal perforce has to concede the thorough involvement of Arabs in the capture, sale and transport of black Africans. Likewise, he acknowledges that the Islamic world did make just as extensive use of black slaves as did the West. But he differentiates the treatment of blacks by Muslim captors, suggesting several religious bases for it :
* Islam's unique blend of the religious and the political into a unitary system mitigated against the development of capitalist economies, so that blacks tended to be used in households rather than in heavy manual labor.
* The Koran specifically commands Muslims to treat slaves well and offers inducements in the next world to those who free their slaves.
* While the gender ratio of slaves imported to the West was 2-1 male to female, the exact opposite was true in the Islamic world. This high ratio of household female slaves and a tradition of polygamy and concubinage, led to the use of blacks as sex objects, and in the absence of systemic racism and theories of racial superiority, mixed race offspring tended to be accepted into the household and the subsequent freeing of the children's mothers.
These factors account for the milder treatment of blacks and, in part, for their assimilation into Islamic society. Several other factors help to account for the disappearance of a distinct black populace :
* Males slaves were frequently turned into eunuchs--so obviously they had no offspring.
* Many of the rest were used as soldiers, with resulting low survival rates.
* For unexplained reasons, African slave women imported to the Islamic states had extraordinarily low fertility rates.
* Mortality rates among Islam's black slaves were extremely high, from adverse treatment, disease, and other causes.
In the end, Segal suggests, a combination of death, infertility (naturally occurring and man made) and miscegenation must account for the disappearance of blacks and blackness from the Islamic Middle East.
This brings us to an intriguing question : does the absence of racial tension in the Islamic world necessarily indicate that the experience of black Africans was in fact less horrific than in the West ? Segal kind of glides past the rather important fact that using blacks for sex (heterosexual and homosexual, which he says was prevalent) and making them eunuchs constituted physical assault on a rather massive scale. Nowhere does he refer to the sexual practices as what they really were : rape. Nor is it possible to figure out why he considers the systematic neutering of black males to be less objectionable than the forced physical labor of the American South. The key sentence in the book may be the following :
While slavery in the West was directed to the productive economy, in the Ottoman Empire it was a form of consumption.
I recognize that to some people the worst fate possible is to be treated as a mere cog in the means of production, but I'm uncertain that most of us would agree with Segal that it is better to be an object for consumption. At the point where you have to debate whether cotton picking or sexual degradation was more dehumanizing, I think it's safest to admit that both Islam and the West were responsible for monstrous treatment of innocent peoples and leave it at that.
The secondary issue which arises is : given a choice, and it is admittedly an awful choice, would people choose the suffering they underwent in the West, but emergence with the vibrant and vital black culture we see in America today; or the complete (forced) assimilation that took place in the Islamic world with the resulting annihilation of the race as a race ? I'd suggest the answer to this is very much a subject for debate. We pay frequent lip service to the idea of creating a color blind society, but we all cling pretty fiercely to our respective ethnic heritages. And it's not like you hear Arabs celebrating the fact that they are the product of extensive racial intermingling. The modern Islamic world may very well be to a significant degree the product of those 11 million black slaves, but if it is, they are awfully quiet about that fact, which does not suggest such an enlightened attitude.
It is also difficult to reconcile the continuing Islamic slave trade with the idea of enlightenment. Segal discusses the ongoing traffic in human beings that is occurring even today in places like the Sudan--A. M. Rosenthal wrote a piece for the NY Times several years ago in which he said that there are still tens of thousands of slaves in the Sudan. We have to acknowledge that racial violence continues in the United States, but such incidents are isolated and are met with society wide outrage, Even if, for the sake of argument, we concede that plantation-style slavery was more oppressive for blacks than Islamic slavery, the Christian world would certainly seem to be winning the comparison now, and for the last few decades, at least.
As to Segal's motivation, I can only point to a couple of cryptic remarks as evidence of my theory that he is driven by a dislike of the West. At one point he characterizes the Western economic system as "an ultimate totalitarianism of money" and he elsewhere speaks of capitalism as "the effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit." These assessments, and several similar, and the general tone of the book, betray a general hostility to the organizing principles of Western society. This makes his conclusions about the mild nature of Islamic slavery at least somewhat suspect.
Finally, the book concludes with an epilogue which borders on being a non sequitir, but which actually relates back to several problems with the book; in it he discusses America's Nation of Islam movement. As a threshold matter, it's amusing that this distinctive black Islamic culture resides here, in the evil West, and not in the munificent East. But the real gist of this section of the book is a bizarre harkening back to Segal's prediction of coming race war. He excuses the racism of Black Muslim's as justified by white racism and the anti-Semitism as a mere learned behavior, taken from anti-Semitic whites :
What rage, resentment, and revenge have developed in the Black Muslim movement is a racism to confront racism.
Segal also uses some statistics about the U. S. justice system to conclude that America remains a deeply divided and racist society, one which needs to listen to Louis Farrakhan's message about "the reality of racism." In a few short pages, he manages to wildly overestimate both the problem of race in America and the importance of the Nation of Islam to such a degree that it calls into question his authority on the other topics he's discussed.
In the final analysis, though he has an important and unfairly ignored story to tell, Segal is just too unreliable a narrator to be taken seriously. Having gotten so many of the big issues wrong, how can the reader trust him on the smaller one ? There's probably a good book to be made out of these raw materials : this is not it.
GRADE : D
Rating: 4
Summary: A good account of an unknown tragedy
Comment: This book is highly problematic. As has been noted this book seems to endorse and defend the Islamic slave trade as the author argues it was more 'humane' then the western version while at the same time this book explores the roots of Islams obsession with Slavery.
What's clear from this book is that Islam invented the African slave trade and introduced it to the West. The West had taken slaves in battle but had never penetrated Africa as slave traders for the purposes of money. Islam send thousands of Arabs deep into the hearts of Africa to get as many slaves as possible. This book details how most of the slaves sought were female which would be used for the sexual recreation of Muslim men. The African women that became pregnant were punished and the children were murdered. The male African slaves were frequently used as soldiers or killed and thus there is relatively little African culture in the Arab countries that imported more then 11 million or more African slaves from 500AD onwards up to this day.
The author tries to argue that these slaves were more humanely treated because they were not used to work fields as the slaves in the West were. But its not clear how its more humane to treat young African women as sexual slaves for mere enjoyment, only to murder them at age 25 then it is to keep slaves for most of their natural life working on a farm and procreating. Few if any of Islams African slaves were allowed to mate with eachother and have offspring this is why little African culture is apparent in Islamic countries today throughout the former Ottoman empire.
This book is essential for the west to understand that Islam was a slave loving and slave holding culture, one that in many ways mirrored the western obsession with human trade. It is an interesting book. This is essential reading for understanding the dark side of Islamic societies and the obsession that Arabs had in the slave trade. The slave trade exists to this day in the Sudan and Africa where Arab gangs raid villages, stealing women and children to be sold as slaves to rich Saudis for sexual pleasure and house work. Not much has changed in 1500 years in Saudi Arabia, and this book is a good primer on the basis for slavery in Islamic society, a basis that the author claims comes from the Koran exhorting Muslims to treat slaves well but to import them vigorously.
Rating: 3
Summary: average
Comment: This is a decent study, but I feel the author lacks some key knowledge regarding the context of the institution of slavery as it is defined in Islam. In order to clearly define what the institution of slavery is in Islam we must first draw the distinctions between the two forms of slavery that mankind has reverted to. The first is called domestic slavery, which is not too dissimilar from indentured servitude, or the wage-slaves of today. The second is chattel slavery, in which the slave is not human but property, and the treatment of such is that of animals. We are all familiar with chattel slavery, it was practiced by the early Americans and contributed greatly to American super-power status. To understand why slavery was a tolerated institution in Islam we must examine the practice of slavery during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. This form of slavery can be categorized as domestic slavery because it operated in conjunction with the class or status of the people. Wealthy members of well-off tribes usually took in slaves, who sold themselves into slavery, or became slaves out of indebtedness, and provided for them their basic necessities. In return the slave would service his or her owner for their own upkeep. Note that this was not based on race or ethnicity. We have reports that there were Arab slaves, African slaves and even Roman slaves in Arabia during the time of the Prophet. We can see that domestic slavery was a tolerated institution because there was a serious lack of developed infrastructure to accommodate the well-being of the lower class. That is not to say that once a person became a slave that they were treated as equals. The Prophet legislated a series of laws which were aimed at establishing equality and humanity between slave and master. Some of these include: the slave must be fed and clothed in the same manner as the master feeds and clothes himself, you cannot hurt the slave or administer physical punishments, the slave cannot be over-worked, or given tasks that are too difficult unless the owner helps them in this regard, the slave has the right to buy their freedom, and so on. The Prophet also established a law forbidding the enslavement of free people, which is what constitutes chattel slavery. Another form of permissible slavery in Islam is that captives of war were taken as domestic slaves. This was a means of indoctrinating them into the society and providing for their needs. This is a practice that differs greatly from other ancient armies which sought vengeance against their enemies families by slaughtering them. Domestic slavery was still a temporary institution because of the treatment it is dealt in the Qur'an and in the sayings of the Prophet which basically maintain that the institution is a tolerated evil because there is no other alternative. This is why modern Muslim jurists and thinkers declare that even domestic slavery is no longer permissible in Islam. This of course would require a progressive methodology of interpretation, but this conclusion is generally accepted by contemporary Muslims because the social order has changed and most regions where Muslims live have some internal development and central government which is responsible for an economy which in turn produces job markets.
Now we turn to the slave trade in Africa. Barnard Lewis in his book "Race and Slavery in the Middle East" maintains that African tribes, who had a history of engaging in chattel slavery against defeated tribes, came into the fold of Islam as the religion spread West. These tribes continued in their customary wars against other tribes, only this time they called it jihad (holy war, or as it is called today, just war) and identified themselves with a larger religious movement which extended all the way to central Asia. These North African tribes (the problem of this phenomena is still felt today in the 30 year civil war in Sudan) then sold massive amounts of chattel slaves in slave-markets in the Middle East. So we can see how the institution transformed from domestic slavery to chattel slavery. It is important to make this distinction because the author has titles his book "Islam's Black Slaves". Thus implying that the trade of chattel slaves based upon ethnicity was permitted in the religion of Islam as defined by its founder, the Prophet.
The factual content of this book is accurate as far as I can tell, but I find conflict with the authors treatment. The context in which these tragedies occurred cannot be easily identified in his book. While I didn't know the details of the black slaves under Ottoman rule, I generally approached the book with pre-existing knowledge of the foundation of slavery and why it existed in every known society since the dawn of man. We realize that transgressions did occur on a large scale within the Middle East with the dawn of African slave markets, but this does not indicate that these slaves were the result of Islam. Instead they indicate that they were the result of a deliberate circumvention, sometimes by opportunistic Muslim jurists, of the principals of law dictated by the Prophet. I learned some minor pesky details about the institution under Ottoman rule, and how this phenomena developed, but I feel that more attention needs to be given, as historians, to the context of this phenomena. I wonder if it is possible that we, as human beings, will one day regard wage-slavery as a cruel and abominable institution...
Sorry if I sounded like an appologist, and forgive me for my run-on sentences. thanks for reading.
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Title: Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry by Bernard Lewis ISBN: 0195053265 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa by Ronald Segal ISBN: 0374113963 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas by Sylviane A. Diouf ISBN: 0814719058 Publisher: New York University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives by Paul Baepler ISBN: 0226034046 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America by Michael A. II Hoffman ISBN: 0929903056 Publisher: Wiswell Ruffin House Pub. Date: 01 June, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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