islamic-jihad-legacy-of-forced-conversion-imperialism-slavery

Islamic Slaverybetween one and two hundred souls. The greater part of these were exterminated or died ofstarvation. 909On the magnitude of the mortality of slaves, writes Segal,‘The arithmetic of the Islamic black slave trade must also not ignore the lives of those men,women and children taken or lost during the procurement, storage and transport. One latenineteenth century writer held that the sale of a single captive for slavery might represent a lossof ten in the population—from defenders killed in attacks on villages, the deaths of women andchildren from related famine and the loss of children, the old and the sick, unable to keep up withtheir captors or killed along the way in hostile encounters, or dying of sheer misery.’ 910Segal collates a number of incidents of slaves being perished in their transportation. 911 Explorer HeinrichBarth recorded that a slave caravan of his friend Bashir, wazir of Bornu, on the way to Mecca duringpilgrimage season lost forty slaves in the course of a single night, killed by severe cold in the mountain. OneBritish explorer came across over 100 human skeletons from a slave caravan en route to Tripoli. The Britishexplorer Richard Lander came across a group of thirty slaves in West Africa, all of them stricken withsmallpox, all bound neck to neck with twisted strips of bullock hide. One caravan from the East African coastwith 3,000 slaves lost two-thirds of its number from starvation, disease and murder. In the Nubian Desert, oneslave caravan of 2,000 slaves literally vanished as every slave had died.Various estimates put the number of black Africans reduced to slavery in the Islamic world fromeleven to thirty-two million. Since 80–90 percent of the captives had perished before reaching theirdestination, it is not difficult to imagine the quantum of human lives lost as a result of the cruel and barbaricinstitution of Islamic slavery. Ronald Segal, despite being sympathetic to Islam, puts the number of enslavedblack Africans at eleven million and admits that well over thirty million of people might have died at thehands of Muslim slave hunters and traders or ended up as slaves in the Muslim world. From the datapresented so far, the institution of Islamic slavery, undoubtedly, has been one of the greatest tragedies tobefall humankind.ABOLITION OF SLAVERY & ISLAMIC RESISTANCESlavery is evidently a divinely-sanctioned institution of Islam; its practice is theoretically binding on theMuslim community at all times. Hence, the campaign for its abolition, quite expectedly, faced staunchresistance in the Muslim world and has not achieved complete success to this day. Slavery still exists inMauritania, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia etc. in one form or another.European nations banned slave-trade in 1815 and Britain abolished slavery altogether and freed allslaves in 1833. During the same century, the Islamic world continued the profession, enslaving two millionBlacks in Africa; another eight million likely perished in the process. This happened despite active efforts byWestern nations to stop slavery in the Muslim world. When India slowly came under the British controlbeginning in 1757, the enslavement of Indian infidels by Muslims eventually ended. In 1843, the East IndiaCompany passed a bill, Indian Slavery Act V, banning slavery, which led to its eventual disappearance. A909. Cameron CVL (1877) Across Africa, Dalty, Isbister & Co., London, Vol. II, p. 137–38910. Segal, p. 62911. Ibid, p. 63–64256