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If you really believe that slavery is evil, then you must believe that it is evil no matter who practices it. (Unlike, say, American Muslim ‘academic’ Jonathan A C Brown, who openly defends Islamic slavery.) It’s also incumbent on you to know just what the hell you’re talking about.
Unfortunately, a great many Western moderns don’t know what they hell they’re talking about. Thanks to 12 years of public schooling, a significant percentage of college students today literally think that ‘America invented slavery’. Britons are not much better, routinely castigating their country, despite the fact that it was a concerted military and economic by the British Empire that ultimately mostly eradicated slavery from much of the globe where it had been practised for millennia.
If you believe (as too many ‘educated’ young Westerners clearly do) the endless parade of Hollywood blockbusters, school curricula, museums and corporate atonement rituals, the Atlantic slave trade was history’s unique and unforgivable sin. Reparations demanded, statues toppled and Western civilisation put on eternal trial. Yet, the Arab slave trade, despite being longer (indeed, still not fully stamped out), arguably deadlier and still airbrushed from polite conversation, barely rates a footnote.
But the numbers don’t lie, even if the narrative does. The European trade across the Atlantic lasted roughly 350 years and transported an estimated 12–13 million Africans to the Americas. Brutal? Undeniably. But the Arab-Muslim slave trade ran for over 1,300 years, from the seventh century deep into the 19th and, in places, the 20th. Estimates range from 10 to 18 million Africans alone, with millions more Europeans, Slavs, Persians and Indians swept into the same machine. The very word slave derives from Slav.
The real horror lies in what happened after capture. While Americans are obsessively familiar with the horrors of antebellum slavery, they are completely unaware of how even that pales into the horrors of the Arab-Muslim slave trade. When a typical American leftist objected that, if the Arabs were such large-scale slavers, why isn’t there a significant black population in the Arab world today, as there is in America, the answer is as simple as it is horrible: unlike the American South, Arabs made brutally certain that their black slaves couldn’t breed.
In the Atlantic trade, enslaved Africans formed families, reproduced and built descendant populations numbering tens of millions today. Under the Arab system, systematic castration of males, exhaustion through labour, deliberate prevention of family formation and absorption into households left almost no traceable lineage. This wasn’t mere exploitation. It was demographic erasure on an industrial scale. Eunuchs guarded harems, boys died in droves from the knife and women were concubines until they were discarded. Survival rates were catastrophic.
Geographically, the Arab trade sprawled from East Africa across the Sahara, Red Sea and Indian Ocean to the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Zanzibar’s slave markets, the castrations of young boys in the Sudan, the relentless raids deep into Africa: these were not hidden chapters but central features of Islamic expansion for centuries. Indeed, for many Arab and African potentates, vast slave possessions were bragging rights, not a badge of shame.
(Ironically, the great civil rights icon, boxer Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, spurned the name of a white man who literally took a bullet to end slavery and proudly adopted the name of an Arab ruler who personally enslaved tens of thousands of black Africans – and killed many more.)
European powers, whatever their earlier sins, turned against the trade. Britain deployed the Royal Navy to suppress it. The United States, France and others followed. By contrast, Arab and Muslim societies clung to the practice. Saudi Arabia and Oman only officially abolished slavery in the 1960s. Mauritania waited until 1981 to outlaw it and didn’t criminalise the practice until 2007. Reports of lingering slavery in parts of the Sahel and Yemen still surface today. The Islamic State, and Islamic militants in Libya, infamously ran open slave markets.
Yet where is the outrage? No Hollywood epics. No UN resolutions. No endless guilt seminars in Western universities. The Atlantic trade is a moral cudgel against the West. The Arab trade is an inconvenient truth best left unspoken, especially by those quick to lecture us about ‘decolonisation’ while ignoring the far longer colonial and slaving history of the Islamic world.
This selective amnesia exposes the double standard at the rotten heart of modern identity politics. Slavery was a universal human evil: practised by Africans against Africans, Arabs against everyone in reach, Ottomans against Slavs and Europeans, and yes, Europeans against Africans. If it is a crime against humanity, judge it by consistent standards. The fact that only the Western chapter draws perpetual global fury tells you everything. It was never really about slavery. It was always about power, guilt and the delegitimisation of Western civilisation.
Australians, of all people, should reject this intellectual dishonesty. Our own forebears – convict, free settler and Anzac alike – built a nation founded on a simple principle enunciated by the first governor of the NSW colony, Arthur Phillip:
“The laws of this country (England) will of course be introduced in New South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment his majesty’s forces take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves.”
The past is littered with slavery. Only one civilisation spent blood and treasure to end the trade and then spent the next two centuries beating itself up about it. That same civilisation is now expected to apologise forever while others airbrush their far longer record. Enough.
