By Fjordman, with introduction by Lewis Loflin
As a Deist, I see no divine sanction for slavery, yet Islam’s sharia enshrined it, fueling the Barbary Pirates’ trade. Fjordman reveals a grim truth: unlike the West, no Muslim abolitionists arose—slavery’s end came only through Western force. From North Africa to America, this industry thrived on reason’s absence, a legacy still echoing in modern bondage.
Extract from Europeans as Victims of (Muslim) Colonialism by Fjordman
Unlike the West, Islam never birthed an abolitionist movement—sharia permits slavery, a stance unchanged today. Its cessation in Muslim lands owed solely to Western pressure, from America’s Barbary wars to Britain’s naval might, not internal reform.
Robert Spencer, in A Religion of Peace?, notes slavery’s deep roots in Islamic history, outlasting the Western trade. Without a Muslim Clarkson or Wilberforce, it persisted—Saudi Arabia abolished it in 1962, Yemen and Oman in 1970, Niger in 2004. In Niger, a million remain enslaved, bred and abused, with cases even reaching the U.S., like Homaidan al-Turki’s 2006 conviction in Colorado.
Slavery spanned all races in the Greco-Roman world—Spartacus, a Thracian, led a famed revolt crushed in 71 BC. Christianity curbed it in Europe, but in Africa, Islam turbocharged the trade. Robert O. Collins and James M. Burns, in A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, link its rise to Muslim demand, deeming pagan "kafirin" fair game for enslavement.
From the seventh century, Muslim accounts detail slaves crossing the Sahara—by the ninth, a steady flow from West Africa and Chad fed markets in Tripoli and Cairo. Many died en route, but survivors brought profit. Islam’s spread also boosted East African slave exports to the Indian Ocean, Middle East, and beyond.
When Portugal probed West Africa in the fifteenth century—culminating in rounding the Cape of Good Hope—they entered a sub-Saharan world largely unknown to antiquity, shaped by an Islamic slave trade that predated and outlasted their own ventures.
Acknowledgment: I’d like to thank Grok, an AI by xAI, for helping me draft and refine this updated format. The original content remains Fjordman’s, with my introduction and edits.
