Child Slavery in Islamic Countries

While tens of thousands of adults are also victims of Arab slavers, many people only first took notice of the Arab slave trade in children when reports of enslaved child camel jockeys emerged from Persian Gulf countries. A 2004 HBO documentary on the subject was especially responsible for making Americans aware of this modern-day barbarism. These boys, who were sold by poor parents hoping their offspring would some day experience a better life, were primarily from South Asia. But instead of a life of dignity and meaningful work, they wound up in the Middle East where they were made to race camels for their Arab masters. Beaten and often sexually abused, they were all kept undernourished, so that the camels would have less weight to carry.

"As many as 6,000 child camel jockeys…languished in hidden slavery on ozbah farms, where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down," wrote E. Benjamin Skinner in his book, A Crime So Monstrous.

When investigating in the 1990s the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of black Africans in Mauritania by Arab-Berber masters, African-American author Samuel Cotton was stunned to discover that African children were still being kidnapped by Arabs traveling with camels carrying big baskets. The child, usually playing alone, would suddenly be snatched from its play and placed in one such basket, after which its new owners hurried away. The children, he was told, are sometimes found later "hundreds of miles away as slaves."

Also during his investigation, which was summarized in his highly informative book Silent Terror: A Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery, Cotton was told there was "still a huge trafficking in slaves going on between Mauritania and the United Arab Emirates."

But it is not only non-Arab children who are Arab child slave trade victims. An Egyptian newspaper, referring to a 2008 UNICEF report, stated Egyptian children are being bought and sold for about $3,000 for "domestic work and farming, among other things." This trade in children is so extensive in Egypt, organizations are "employing brokers, and even operating their own web sites.

"Many are also sent to the Gulf States, with orphanages being a major supplier," the story further reports.

Even from a country as far way as the Philippines children are trafficked to the Middle East. In 2008, for example, 34 minors between the ages of 14 and 16 were rescued at Manila airport by social workers as they were about to depart on fake passports for unnamed Middle Eastern countries. Again, war and poverty played a role in these young people's desperation. They were from refugees camps in the war-torn southern island of Mindanao where an insurgency is raging between government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

While most civilized people nowadays recoil in horror from the idea of slavery, especially when it involves children, many fundamentalist Middle Eastern Muslims do not. In fact, they view the psychological death and destruction of innocent lives as their legal right. Under sharia law, which rules the Sudan and the Gulf States, Muslims are legally allowed to own slaves. Bernard Lewis, the eminent scholar of Islam, writes "…the institution of slavery is not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Sharia law." Another reason for this inhuman sense of entitlement is that the prophet Muhammad was also a slave owner, setting the example for the fundamentalists.

Besides a codified religious supremacy, there is also the element of racial superiority behind the hideous practice of Arab slavery, especially when it concerns black Africans. Arab racism is at the roots of Islamic slavery that has seen 14 million black Africans enslaved and sold around the Islamic world from the seventh to the twentieth century.

Unfortunately for its victims, the abolition of Arab slavery will be difficult to even initiate -- especially when the international community remains deafeningly silent about it. The case of Dr. Abu Zayd, a Cairo University professor and Islamic theologian, amply illustrates the problem. When Zayd contended that "keeping slave girls and taxing non-Muslims" was contrary to Islam, an Egyptian sharia court forcibly divorced him from his wife and declared him an apostate. He later had to flee to Europe to escape Islamic extremists who wanted to kill him because of his apostate status.

Slavery was only abolished in Saudi Arabia and other states of the Arabian Peninsula in the early 1960s, so one cannot expect an institution that has existed for centuries to be done away any time soon. For example, the widow of the emir of Abu Dhabi and her four daughters were caught living in Brussels in 2008 with 20 slaves who they were mistreating. And Dubai is the center for the region's sex industry that Skinner calls "a place of slavery for women." Promised jobs, thousands of women full of hope arrive there from Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia annually only to have their passports taken away immediately upon arrival and to be forced into prostitution.

One Gulf State Arab woman, a former candidate for Kuwait's parliament, does not even hide the fact there should be sex slaves for Arab men and claims sheikhs and muftis she spoke with in Mecca sanctioned this. As a result, Salwa al-Mutairi wants non-Muslim women captured in war made available to Muslim men, so that the men can be "protected from adultery." She affirmed: "For example, in the Chechnya war, surely there are female Russian captives. So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait…I don't see any problem in this."

Al-Mutairi's despicable utterances came only a week after a Muslim preacher announced that, since Islam allows Muslims to buy and sell conquered infidel women, "When I want a sex-slave, I go to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her."

The combination of Islam’s anti-black racism and its hatred for all non-Muslims was unleashed on Africa through raids and invasions from the 7th century on. Tribal hatreds and wars are a legacy of Islam’s slave trade where certain tribes "converted" and enslaved other tribes. Africa has been decimated; it’s social fabric, people and cultures destroyed. The barbarity of Islam has impacted severely on many, inhibiting development, equality, freedom and tolerance. Islamic slavery was so integrated into African society that many struggle with freedom -- many remain enslaved even today. Jihad slavery, allowed under sharia, is an effective weapon of Islamization.

Using the information available on the slave trade, and the survival rate of those in transit to slave markets, estimates suggest 140 million to possibly 180 million black Africans were directly affected (Scourge 2004). Add to that those slaughtered in battles to obtain slaves or perishing later as a result of the destruction of the tribe, food or shelter.

Europe became involved in the slave trade from 1519-1815 -- i.e., Portuguese, Dutch, French often selling slaves on to the Spanish. Briton became involved in the slave trade in the 17th century but outlawed the slave trade in 1807. The International Treaty of Europe, signed by all the European powers in 1815, included abolition of the slave trade. Punishments in Briton for involvement in the slave trade moved from 14 years hard labor in 1810 to death in 1825 (Khan 2009, p. 324). A Parliamentary decree in 1833 set ALL slaves in the British Empire free. This was followed by France in 1848, then the Dutch and the new United States in 1865.

Sookhdeo, (2007, p. 250) notes that over 1,700,000 black slaves were exported by Arabs across the trans-Saharan route during 900-1100. During the same time some 10,000 PER YEAR (i.e., another 2 million in 200 hundred years) were shipped across the Red sea and Indian Ocean to India and Islamic Asia (i.e., about 4 million in 200 years alone...).

By the Middle Ages, the Arab word "abd" was in general use to denote a black slave while the word "mamluk" referred to a white slave. Even as late as the 19th Century, it was noted that in Mecca "there are few families that do not keep slaves. They all keep mistresses in common with their lawful wives" (Scourge 2004).

It is estimated that 10.5-11 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic. 95% went to Portuguese, Spanish and French "possessions" in South and Central America (1519-1815). Only 5% ended up in what became the United States. According to The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas, approximately 4 million (35.4%) went to Portuguese controlled Brazil; 2.5 million (22.1%) to the Spanish nations of South and Central America; 2 million (17.7%) to the British West Indies (mostly Jamaica); 1.6 million (14.1%) to French West Indies; half a million (4.4%) to Dutch West Indies and half a million (4.4%) to North America (starting in the 1520s) (Scourge 2004, Khan 2009, p. 324). (Why does the U.S. get the blame and accept the shame of slavery?)

Despite "speculation" that a "sizable percentage of slaves possessed at least some knowledge of Islam", Wikipedia is hard pressed to name more than a few Muslims arriving in America. One arrived in central America as a "slave of Spain" and was enslaved by Indians before escaping (YES, Indians practiced slavery pre-white settlers, see Scourge, Spencer); one returned to Africa after a few years; one converted to Christianity; and one actually practiced Islam with a tiny group (LINK).

This is not surprising, nor is the statement that some had a "knowledge of Islam" as Islam was responsible for the enslavement of black people so many would know just what Islam meant for them! As Muslims including black Muslims, were the enslavers, one would expect few slaves to be Muslim though some may have converted en route to save their life. The superior white Arabs or Afro-Arabs today enslave inferior black people (Christians, Animists, or Muslim) in the Sudan.

8) Racism: Where are the expected huge populations of black people in the middle-east? While many black men were castrated, the Muslim male was free to enjoy the black females but what happened to the offspring? Were little girls raped, damaging their reproductive organs so they couldn’t reproduce or were they infected and rendered sterile or were the children killed at birth or used as slaves who were castrated or forced into the military or otherwise died without reproducing?

The Atlantic slave trade regarded slaves as valuable assets whose life and progeny should be preserved....in the Muslim world slaves were cheap, readily available, and dispensable (Trifkovic 2002).

In Brazil and the U.S. today there are large populations of black people as most slaves could marry and have families. They have equal rights and freedoms as others and are found across all areas of life. In the U.S. black people are revered as TV and film stars, sports stars, politicians, academics, doctors, lawyers, trades people, chefs, writers and musicians etc. They can reach the highest levels of government.

Racism against black people was evident in both situations but in the west efforts are made to overcome racism against all people (black, white, Asian, Indian etc). Anti-black racism is still evident in the Arab Islamic world following the example of Mohammad.

The first Africans in the British colonies were temporarily indentured servants like many white colonists. Eventually, economic incentives lead to African-American slavery and the legitimating racism (Keener). However, there were still free black communities composed of ordinary, free black immigrants and offspring and freed slaves. 6 people from the free black community served on the first Board of Managers of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833-1870) whose membership in 1840 ranged from 150,000-200,000. It disbanded following the Civil War and the full emancipation of slaves. The American Colonization society founded in 1817 purchased and freed slaves then transported freed slaves and free born black people back to Africa -- Liberia (Encyclopaedia Britannica: ready reference and Index Vol. I Printed in USA 1982).

What is also seldom remembered is that many black Americans in the 19th Century owned slaves. According to the United States census of 1830, in just the one town of Charleston, South Carolina, 407 black Americans owned slaves themselves (Scourge 2004). Obviously black people had rights and could become prosperous, and own other black people as slaves. Black religious and business leaders, men and women, were part of the abolitionist movement.

The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers (Spencer, 2008).

9) Muslims in general and Muslim Arabs in particular, deny their huge involvement and complicity in the African slave trade and the full support of slavery in Islamic text and Mohammad’s example. Islam did not "improve" slavery in the sense of making it nicer, on the contrary, it religiously ordained this inhumanity and gave slaves and their sexual (and physical) abuse as a right, a mercy, booty for the Muslim male! Islam’s practices and laws rendered society more barbaric than in the distant past. Remember many earlier religions demanded kindness to slaves. Neither Buddha nor Yeshua the Messiah were slave owners or traders. Manumission of slaves where slaves paid for their freedom or were simply emancipated as a voluntary act of their masters was practiced even a thousand years pre-Islam. Even Islamic text tells us people treated slaves well and manumitted them before Islam. Allah’s prophet Mohammad was a slave owner and trader who handed females to friends and sexually abused captured females. Allah made certain people slaves. Slavery provided great wealth and is an integral part of Islamic civilization.

Western Christian text and thought and ideals of freedom and equality stopped slavery. Under western pressure the Ottomans and Egypt attempted to suppress slavery but this was resisted as anti-Islamic and contrary to sharia. In 1960, African Muslims going on the Hajj still took slaves to sell in Saudi Arabia (Khan 2009, p. 345).

10) Islam’s black slave trade continues in the 21st century. Colonial control halted slavery but today, in "independent" nations under Islam, racism and slavery re-emerge e.g., Mauritania and the Sudan where Afro-Arabs/Arabs attack and enslave black Africans who are regarded as inferior.

Niger, supposedly "abolished" slavery in 2004 but the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. "Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals" (Spencer, 2008).

Winston Churchill served in the Sudan and in 1899 wrote:

"All [of the Arab Muslim tribes of the Sudan] without exception, were hunters of men. To the great slave markets of Jeddah a continual stream of negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic...Thus the situation in the Sudan may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was increasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them..." (Bostom 2005, p. 89).

Nothing has changed! Sudan set strict sharia in place in 1983 and a 1992 fatwa justified a military onslaught against non-Muslims. Reports and testimonies show slavery, gang rape, sadism, beating, forced conversion to Islam and genocide via slaughter, enslavement, poverty and starvation as food goes only to Muslims. Islamic scholars openly admit slavery is lawful for "prisoners of war" (infidels) and for the sexual propagation of slaves for their owner (Trifkovic 2002 pp. 176-179). Hundreds of thousands are involved (Islam and Slavery 2007, Spencer 2008).

Repressive Islamic rule is still being spread into the South Sudan despite some "separation." Darfur in the North and other "black" areas continue to suffer. Any criticism of policy or human rights abuse is considered blasphemy against Islam (Ye’Or 2002, pp. 204-207, 396-397).

The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids "were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005....According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border -- many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan....Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue" (Spencer, 2008).

Christian Solidarity International freed 15,447 slaves between 1945-1999 (Khan 2009, p. 347). Christians working with local authorities, churches and inter-ethnic peace committees have worked throughout the 20-21st century to release slaves e.g., 267 released in February/March 2009 (CSI 2009).

Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1980 but the practice continues with an estimated 200,000 men, women and children bought and sold like cattle and used as domestics, shepherds and farmhands (Bostom 2005, p. 92).

Thousands of Haratines ("black moors" -- i.e., initially black slaves of the Berbers "white Moors") remain slaves -- "aside from the shantytowns and a strip of land along the Senegal River, virtually all blacks are slaves and they are more than half the population" (Keener). In June 2006, Mauritania’s president claimed he would fight the slavery in his country (Sookhdeo 2007; p. 167).

A report in LeVie (French magazine, no. 2562 6/10/94), states that 45,000 young black Africans a year are still kidnapped and reduced to slavery as servants in the Gulf States (Persian Gulf) and Middle East. This continues in the 21st century.

African and Indian slaves continue to be found in Iran (Bostom Jihad, p. 92).

Child slavery continues in the Emirates -- Dubai’s rulers have been charged with 30,000 counts of child slavery. Laborers and domestic workers have passports confiscated and face appalling conditions as virtual slaves.

Domestic "slaves" are found across the Islamic world most of which only outwardly banned slavery in the late 20th century or early 21st century. Post 1962, Saudi Arabia alone was estimated to contain a quarter of a million slaves (Keener).

The slaves of Muslims have been discovered in Britain and the U.S.

Many other cases occur e.g., Saudi’s in Britain and the U.S.! (Khan 2009, p. 349-350).

Make no mistake, as Islam revives so do the sacred Islamic institutions of jihad (till all the religion is Allah's), dhimmitude and slavery. This is the core of Islam and the basis of relations with others. This is the world view expounded in their text and shown in the fine example of a slave-trading, raping and thieving Mohammad whose cruelty to slaves and hatred of black people has been noted.

It’s long past time that the far greater practice of slavery by Islam was acknowledged. The West/Christians/British/Americans/French...are unique in being the only group to stand against slavery that had existed for thousands of years across cultures.

If the west is abused for its short period of slavery, how much more condemnation and compensation is required from Islam?

When I see African refugees and immigrants here dressed in Arabic white robes, following white-Arab supremacist Islam, chanting prayers in Arabic, or even worse, an aboriginal woman wrapped head-to-toe in the heat of Northern Australia, I know there is something very wrong. And what’s wrong is that our universities, schools, politicians and even religious leaders don’t tell the truth about Islam and its horror history. Islam’s black slave trade is only half the story for they also took white/European slaves and slaves from Asia stretching into India, Indonesian and Malaysia.

The statistics and reports are based on log books from the African slave ports, ships logs, travelers reports, eyewitness accounts etc., cited in The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa by John Alimbillah Azumah’ presented on YouTube as "Islam and Slavery" from inthenameofallah.org. Statistics are also obtained from other references.

1) Amuni, O.K Dr. The African Slave Trade (Nigerian Department of Foreign Languages, Lagos State University, Lagos, Nigeria. Brazil 10-14 Nov.2008 (a propaganda piece for Islam dressed as "research.")

2) Bostom, A. G. The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of the Non-Muslims. Prometheus Books. New York. 2005.

3) CSI: 267 Southern Sudanese Slaves Liberated. 11/3/09. Christian Solidarity International.

4) Islam and Slavery 2007

5) Keener, C. Christianity, Islam and Slavery.

6) Khan, M. A. Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism and Slavery. iUniverse, Bloomington, IN. 2009.

7) O’Neill. Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization. Felibri publications. 2009.

8) Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. In Arabic with facing English Text, commentary and appendices edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller Al-Misri, Ahmad ibn Naqib; Amana publications Maryland USA 1994.

9) Sookhdeo, P. Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam. Isaac Publishing. 2007.

10) Spencer, R. Slavery, Christianity, and Islam 4/2/2008.

11) The Scourge of Slavery vol. 4 2004 )

12) Trifkovic, S. The Sword of the Prophet.’ Regina Orthodox Press, Inc. 2002.

13) Ye’or, Bat. Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2002.

14) Islamic text on line or ALIMCDRom.

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