The Forgotten Slaves: 1400 Years of Muslim Enslavement
Clarion Project ^ | March 9, 2014 | Staff
Posted on Sunday, March 09, 2014 6:29:47 PM by lbryce
While much documentation is known of the American slave trade, the Muslim enslavement of Africans (and Europeans) encompassing
the last 1400 years has been hushed up. This remarkable documentary films shows the story historians have neglected.
New York Times:October 27, 2007:Today’s Hidden Slave Trade
TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Click to Add Topic
KEYWORDS: arabslavetrade; godsgravesglyphs; Click to Add Keyword
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According to a UN Report, today in the 21st Century there are more slaves in the current era than there ever was.Yet when the evils of 'slavery' are brought up more often than not the correlation between slavery and that of the American South is one that is bitterly decried by convention being accompanied by wringing hands, self-flagellation, guilt, Crimes against humanity, belief by descendants of slaves who are far and wide removed from terrible institution that it as making demands from those who have long ago perished along with slavery itself, that is used merely as a ludicrous prop for those who misguidedly, even deliberately look for ways to capitalize on tragedy they have had absolutely no part in.
Yet America, has made amends with the past for sure, in many innumerable, various ways.
In the Arabic language even before Muhammad, the word Slave/ Abd was - and still is - associated with BLACK AFRICANS.
Slave/Abd is still Synonymous with Blacks
Islam’s Role in Slavery
While filling my car with gasoline possibly derived from Middle Eastern oil, I spotted a billboard for a local clothing store called US ARABIA. Though the sign’s head-swaddled male and female models appear to be Caucasian, palefaces are scant in the area around this gas station, so I’ll presume the ad is targeted at an overwhelmingly black local population.
At the local Dunkin’ Donuts and Walgreens, I’ve noticed a surge of Georgia-born blacks in Muslim apparel. The festive Afro-nationalist dashikis so popular among American blacks twenty years ago have been replaced with what seems like a dress rehearsal for the global caliphate.
Although Islam and black nationalism share a flame-belching, sword-swinging hatred for Western Civ, it’s an odd pairing when you consider history. American blacks who dump Christianity and shack up with Islam seem to think they’re flipping the bird at the creed that enslaved their ancestors, but they’re only swapping it for a religion that has enslaved their ancestors for far longer.
The idea of collective historical guilt is often wielded as a psychological weapon, and civilizations that allow themselves to be inoculated with the Guilt Germ can be conquered without a shot being fired. Islamic apologists and Western oikophobes scoff and spit and snort that anyone would dare draw equivalencies between the transatlantic and the Arab slave trades, yet the historical record laughs in their faces.
How Many Slaves Landed in the US?
How many were taken to the United States during the entire history of the slave trade?
Perhaps you, like me, were raised essentially to think of the slave experience primarily in terms of our black ancestors here in the United States. In other words, slavery was primarily about us, right, from Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Richard Allen, all the way to Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. Think of this as an instance of what we might think of as African-American exceptionalism. (In other words, if it's in "the black Experience," it's got to be about black Americans.) Well, think again.
The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial "gold standard" in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.
And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage.
In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone! Some scholars estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans ended up in the United States after touching down in the Caribbean first, so that would bring the total to approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade.
Incredibly, most of the 42 million members of the African-American community descend from this tiny group of less than half a million Africans. And I, for one, find this amazing. |
