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

Islamic SlaverySri Lanka, Egypt and other poor countries to marry young girls from poor families paying handsome amountof money to their parents and take the girls to Saudi Arabia, where they naturally live as nothing but slaves.Revival of slavery in Sudan: Sudan (Nubia) has been the worst victim of Islamic slavery, which struck Sudanvery early: it was forced to send an annual tribute of 400 slaves between 652 and 1276. Since the early days ofIslam, suggests the tenth-century document Hudud al-Alam, Sudan had become a fertile ground for theMuslim slave-hunters and continues to be so till today. John Eibner, who worked on a project for freeingslaves in Sudan in the 1990s, reports the enslavement of black Sudanese women and children—Christian,Animist and even Muslim—by Arab militias and the government-sponsored Popular Defence Force (PDF).The enslaved women were forced to become Muslim and generally used as concubines, while the young boyswere trained to become Jihadis for fighting their coreligionists. He freed 1,783 slaves in 1999, while hisorganization, the Christian Solidarity International, freed 15,447 slaves between 1945 and 1999. 939 Even thecolonial British government (1899–1956) had failed to stop enslavement and slave-trade effectively in Sudan.A 1947 memorandum prepared by the British civil servants noted that, in the late 1920s, ‘an extensive tradein slaves from Ethiopia was unmasked and even today there are occasional kidnappings, and the victims arehurried into the hands of the desert nomads of the far north.’ 940Worse still is the fact that, with the government-sponsored resurgence of Islamism since the 1980s,there has been a revival of violent enslavement in Sudan. In 1983, the Islamist Sudanese government headedby President Jaafar Nimeiry, prodded by the Islamist leader Dr. Hasan al-Turabi, declared unification of theblack Christian- and Animist-dominated Southern Sudan with the Arab-dominated North, abrogating former’slong-standing autonomy. The government also enacted Sharia laws uniformly all over Sudan. The purpose ofthe government was to transform multireligious and multiethnic Sudan into an Arab dominated Muslim statethrough the process of Jihad.In protest, rebels in the dominantly non-Muslim south formed a resistance movement, SudanPeople’s Liberation Army (SPLA), headed by Colonel John Garang. In response, the Islamist governmentstarted arming tribal Arab militias (Baqqara). Armed with automatic weapons, these Arab brigandsspearheaded the government’s war effort against the rebels and their sympathizers. They attacked villageskilling the adult men, abducting the women and children, looting and plundering cows, goats and grain, andburning the rest. There was a brief respite after the Islamist government was overthrown in 1985. The Jihadresumed again after Sadiq al-Mahdi, an Islamist and brother-in-law of al-Turabi, became the Prime Ministerin the 1986 election. The Arab militia raids returned with ‘deliberate killing of tens of thousands of civilians’and ‘the abduction of women and children, who were forced into slavery.’ 941After the coup in 1989, led by al-Turabi and General Umar al-Bashir of the National Islamic Front(NIF), slave-raids by Arab militias became widespread and institutionalized. The authoritarian Islamist regimeof President al-Bashir formed an irregular force, the PDF, for spearheading Jihad against the rebels, and thecommunities sympathetic to them. The worst victim of the PDF raids and slave-hunting has been the Dinkapeople in the Southwest Bahr al-Ghazal states and the Nuba tribes of southern Kordofan region. The Blacks ofthe southern Nuba Mountains, despite being Muslims, were declared apostates in an Islamic fatwa on theaccount of their sympathy for the rebels. The fatwa, according to U.N. special rapporteur Gaspar Biro, read: 942939. Eibner J (1999), My Career Redeeming Slaves, Middle East Quarterly, December Issue940. Henderson KDD (1965) Sudan Republic, Ernest Benn, London, p. 197941. Metz HC ed. (1992) Sudan: A Country Study, Library of Congress, Washington DC, 4th ed., p. 257942. David Littman (1996) The U.N. Finds Slavery in the Sudan, Middle East Quarterly, September Issue266