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Islam Reviewed
A RESPONSE TO LOUIS FARRAKHAN'S ANTI-CHRISTIAN PROPAGANDA
By Don Richardson - 1996
ENSLAVED GIRL IS NO MYTH YET THERE'S SILENCE
Thomas Sowell, Stanford, Calif. Daily News, Los Angeles, CA, 02/14/97
"A haunting picture of a thin and forlorn-looking African girl has this
caption under it: "A 12-year old girl, given up as a slave to atone for a crime
by a member of her family, stands at the beck and call of a traditional priest
in Tefle, Ghana." This is not a painting of something that happened long ago.
It is a photograph that appeared in The New York Times of Feb. 2, 1997.
According to local customs, some crimes can only be atoned for by the
family's giving up one of its young virgins for sexual enslavement.
I have not seen a word of comment, much less outrage, from any of
those who cry out so loudly about slavery in centuries past among people
long dead. Not only does slavery persist to this moment in the backwaters of
Ghana, it persists on a larger scale in Sudan and in Mauritania, which has
about 30,000 people still in bondage, often under brutal conditions.
This is Black History Month, but this part of that history is being swept
under the rug. Far more popular are the myths that cater to current psycho-
logical and political needs, like the image of Kunta Kinte in "Roots," puz-
zled by the chains clapped on him - even though slavery was widely known
in the part of Africa from which he came, long before the first white man
appeared on the scene. Challenged by professional historians, Alex Haley's
reply was: "I tried to give my people a myth to live by." No doubt Haley's
intentions were good, but it is the truth that sets you free, not myths.
The most painful of all truths is that slavery existed all over this planet,
among people of every race and color, for thousands of years. Nobody wanted
to be a slave, but that is completely different from saying that they oppose
slavery for others. Slavery was as accepted in Africa as it was in Europe or
Asia, or among the indigenous peoples of the eastern Hemisphere.
Incredibly late in human history, a mass moral revulsion finally set in
against slavery - first in 18th century England and then, during the 19th
century, throughout Western civilization. But only in Western civilization."
Thomas Sowell
___________________________________________________________
ABOUT four years ago CNN's Larry King, on Larry King Live, interviewed
Louis Farrakhan, head of The Nation of Islam. King asked Farrakhan why
he advises Christian Afro-Americans to turn from Christianity to Islam.
Fharrakan replied that Christianity is the religion of those who enslaved
Africans. Islam, he said, has always championed the black race, and thus
deserves the loyalty of Afro-Americans.
Larry King hadn't done his homework. He was unprepared to ask
Farrakhan questions which could have made the interview far more
lively, not to mention embarrassing for Farrakhan.
Around that time my son Paul took a course in African history at Cal
State Fullerton - a course taught by a Muslim professor from Kenya. The
professor leveled the same charge: Christianity consistently abetted the
enslavement of black Africans; Islam traditionally opposed the heinous
practice.
Paul later told me, "As the only Christian in the class, I was embar-
rassed. I didn't know what to say. Was he right?"
Meanwhile more and more Muslim teachers worldwide are
spreading a triumphal claim that a majority of black people in America
have already converted to Islam. Descendants of the very people
Christians took to America as slaves, they assert, have by Allah's mercy
become the means whereby America is at last being drawn to Islam.
The King of Saudi Arabia recently invited Louis Farrakhan to a
palace in the heartland of Islam and gave him a sizeable financial reward
for his success in converting Afro-Americans to Islam. Flashbulbs popped
as Muslim news media prepared to announce Farrakhan's success across
the Islamic world.
Indeed, some black pastors in America have grieved to see an
occasional young black man leave the church to join Farrakhan. The
Nation of Islam continues, meanwhile, to match what Christians have
often done by serving black communities across America with inner city
development projects. Because of the amounts of Muslim oil money
funneled to Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam can often exceed the scale of
Christian humanitarian aid. The Nation of Islam also ingratiates itself to
black communities by its zealous rehabilitation of black men incarcerated
in prisons and by gestures such as paying the legal expenses of the black
men who were accused of beating Reginald Denny in the recent Los
Angeles riots.
Millions of black people in America have long regarded Abraham
Lincoln, a Christian, as a virtual "saint" - a deliverer of the black race.
Louis Farrakhan is not pleased to hear a Christian thus commended. In
his address carried nationwide by CNN on the occasion of "The Million
Man March" in Washington, D. C., Farrakhan sneeringly referred to
Abraham Lincoln as "our supposed deliverer."
How should Christians, especially black pastors, respond? They may
want to begin by reading The Encyclopedia Britannica's piece on the
history of slavery. There we learn that "slave" in English derives form the
word "Slav." The Romans, in a time when slavery was practiced
worldwide, brought captives from Slavic Europe and sold them as slaves
in the Roman Empire. Procedures for caravanning safely over the
formidable Sahara to bring slaves from distant, unmapped black Africa
were still unperfected.
After Islam spread across North Africa in the 600's, Muslim entrepre-
neurs in the 700's charted routes from oasis to oasis and proved that if
large numbers of slaves were brought from below the Sahara, enough
would survive to assure a profit.
Slaver caravans from Muslim regions now known as Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt struck out on dire southward journeys.
For practical reasons Muslim slavers themselves did not raid for slaves
among the northernmost black tribes such as the Hausa and the Fulani.
Instead they coerced the Hausa, Fulani and others to be the ones who
actually dirtied their hands as slave raiders. Muslims needed only to
supply the most northerly black tribes with the chains, manacles and
swords they needed to efficiently kidnap people from tribes living further
south.
Muslim slave traders paid the northernmost black tribes a wholesale
price for those seized. Slaves surviving the long march to North African
cities were sold there at retail prices.
Other Muslim slavers from Arabia and Egypt sailed down the East
African cost and formed a slave-gathering base on an island called
Zanzibar. Equipping mainland black tribes adjacent to Zanzibar as slave
raiders, they too saw their profits grow.
Muslim slavers soon brought teachers of the Koran to convert, not
just any subSaharan black tribe, but only those that agreed to kidnap and
sell their neighbors to the south. Islam thus established itself along the
4,000-mile southern edge of the Sahara form Senegal to Somalia, and
among coastal tribes near Zanzibar. Question! Why did Islam not spread
much, much further across subSaharan Africa? Alas, this is where the
Encyclopedia Britannica.s otherwise excellent history of slavery falters. It
fails to even ask, let alone answer, such an intriguing question.
Understandably, Islamic missionaries brought to subSaharan Africa
by Muslim slavers could not convert more southerly African tribes.
People harried by Muslim-induced slave raids were far from eager to
convert to the religion of the raiders. Muslims who ventured to victim-
ized tribes, even for peaceful purposes, would meet vengeance. Further,
Islamic law forbids Muslims to enslave Muslims, hence converting tribes
which were the source of slaves would interfere with slave-trading
profits.
Christians in Europe thus unwittingly granted Islam a 1000-year
head start in altering the destiny of subSaharan Africans. Yet Muslim
missionaries, by siding with Muslim slavers instead of opposing them,
forfeited the enviable advantage that 1000-year head start afforded. Had
they opposed slavery instead of condoning it, Muslim missionaries could
have spread Islam all the way from the Sahara to Africa's southern tip.
Teaching the Koran, building Mosques and founding Islamic schools with
not a hint of contest from Christians, they could have Islamicized an
entire continent.
Christian missionaries, arriving belatedly in the early 1800's, would
have had to struggle to win even a tiny beachhead anywhere in black
Africa. Planting churches in Zimbabwe and Zululand would have been
as difficult as planting churches in Algeria and Libya.
Muslims in those days little dreamed that a later century would
bring scores of woefully late but zealous Christian missionaries from
Europe and America to the very tribes Muslim missionaries had
consigned as prey for Muslim slavers. Had such a premonition crossed
Muslim minds, Islam might have ended its complicity with the slave
trade industry. All of black Africa as far as Cape Good Hope would then
have been Islamicized with relative ease centuries before the first
Christian incursion.
Instead, though they arrived ruefully late in black African history, a
relative handful of Christian missionaries have caused 250 million black
Africans in subSaharan Africa to be categorized today as Christian! Yes,
Christian missionaries consistently opposed slavery everywhere they
encountered it. In Uganda, David Livingstone often found himself
looking into the muskets of Muslim slavers who were incensed at a
Christian who urged them to end something they had been doing with
impunity for a millennium.
But on the coast of Nigeria, Mary Slessor found herself opposing her
fellow-Europeans who were slavers. Let us now turn to the matter of
Christian involvement in the slave trade. The Encyclopedia Britannica
names Roman Catholics from Spain and Portugal as first among
Christians to take slaves form black Africa, beginning in the 1600's. Ill-
advisedly following the by then 900-year-old bad example of Muslims
across North Africa, Spanish and Portugese slavers, not needing to brave
the Sahara, sailed around the great bulge of West Africa, seeking slaves.
Later some other European nations and eventually the southern
American colonies joined the evil practice. The northern colonies and
Canada, my own home country, refused to legalize slavery and even
gave sanctuary to slaves fleeing from the southern colonies.
An important question must be asked: which group among the
actual slave-owning societies first began to manifest twinges of con-
science over the horrors of slavery - Christian slave-owning societies or
Muslim slave-owning societies?
Slavery was not declared illegal in Saudi Arabia, the main guardian
of Islamic purity, until 1965. Nor was slavery declared illegal in Muslim
Sudan until 1991. Six years ago, a Time cover story entitled .Slavery in
the Twentieth Century. documented slavery as a nominally illegal but
still common practice across Muslim areas of Saharan Africa. Reader's
Digest, in its March 1996 issue, published an article entitled "Slavery's
Shameful Return to Africa." It focuses on Muslim enslavement of several
thousand black Christians in the Southern Sudan. African Rights, based
at 11 Marshalsea Road, London SE1 1EP England, recently published a
book entitled "Facing Genocide: the Nuba of Sudan." Slavery is one of
the weapons of that genocide.
Most recently, The Economist (9/21/1996) published a piece entitled
-The Flourishing Business Of Slavery.. I quote:
-The American embassy in Sudan acknowledges as "credible,"
reports that (Christian) Dinka and Nuba children from southern
Sudan are being sold on into Libya. London based Christian
Solidarity International has ransomed 20 Sudanese slaves. The
going rate for a woman is 5 cows.
"The Sudanese government flatly denies that slavery exists
there. It is lying. Evidence from human rights organizations,
exiles, traders and former slaves is overwhelming. Louis
Farrakhan...occasional guest of the Libyan and Sudanese
governments, has rebuffed assertions of slavery in Sudan as
Zionist claptrap. Last March, he challenged journalists to go to
Sudan and find it. Two reporters from the Baltimore Sun did just
that and published their findings in June, sparking a lively
debate among black Americans about how they - and black
Muslims in particular - should respond to the plight of enslaved
black Africans."
Why do Muslim nations "renounce" slavery nominally and then
deny its existence when it persists? Quite obviously they are disinterested
in the moral issue. Two persuasions have proved effective: 1. Muslim
governments sensitive to international peer pressure from predominantly
Christian nations in Europe and the Americas had to "end" slavery, at
least on paper, or be viewed as barbarian. 2. Muslim nations indifferent
to world opinion still may have a reason given in an item boxed with The
Economist article quoted above: "To appease western aid donors"!
What caused many Christians, on the other hand, to refuse to own
slaves even when other Christians justified their crime? What caused
slavery-opposing Christians to take the lead in mounting a determined
effort to see all slaves set free?
Successive Christian reform movements in northern Europe, coupled
with a series of Christian renewals in America, finally inspired many
Christians to apply an already acknowledged but under-taught Biblical
idea to the problem of slavery. That was the belief that God created all
men in His own image, and thus has endowed them with "certain
inalienable rights" which must be respected as surely as God must be
obeyed.
William Wilberforce, James Chamberlain and Abraham Lincoln were
three among many aroused Christians who strove tenaciously until
slavery was abolished in Great Britain, all British colonies and the
southern United States. Their cause was aided by several hundred
Christian missionaries. Arriving among that large majority of black
Africans who by design had been left as non-Muslims, Christian mission-
aries not only opposed slavery in Africa itself but also bombarded public
opinion across Europe and America with letters graphically describing
the brutality of both Muslim and Christian slave-gathering. The hymn
"Amazing Grace" was penned by one slave trader who renounced his
former ways as criminal even if "legal." His recounting of slaver cruelty
also helped arouse public opinion in Christian countries.
In the United States, southern insistence on condoning slavery and
northern determination to abolish it triggered a bloody civil war that
killed 600,000 white men and wounded 2 million others. This century's
10-year war in South Vietnam took 56,000 American lives, yet 53,000
Americans died at Gettysburg - in just one three-day Civil War battle!
Some may object that the northern colonies should have insisted on
the abolition of slavery at the time of the union in 1776. Had they done
so, the southern states would have refused to join the union. They would
have formed a separate sovereign state, in which case there would have
been no federal government with a legal right to take southern states to
task later.
Let us dare to ask a question the Encyclopedia Britannica tactfully
avoids: In which Muslim nation has there been even a minor civil
disturbance of conscience over slavery, let alone a civil war? Not one.
Surely some Muslims wealthy enough to own slaves have declined on
principle to buy them. Yet there seems no record of any entire commu-
nity or sect within Islam that has - prior to this century - opposed slavery
and actively worked for its abolition.
Yet Farrakhan gives the northern states no credit for their costly
stand. He tars all Christians as abettors of slavery while conspiratorially
hiding Islam's 900-year head start in the enslavement of black Africans.
He ignores North African and Arabian Muslim responsibility for seducing
not all, but some Christian nations, into following their vile example.
There is one more point: Nearly 30 million descendants of slaves
brought to America live in America today. Yet vastly greater numbers of
blacks were taken as slaves to Muslim North Africa and the Middle East
over a much longer time. Why do we not find perhaps 100 to 300
million of their descendants living in North Africa and the Middle East
today?
Some Blacks across sub-Saharan Africa remember the reason. It is a
reason the Encyclopedia Britannica overlooks: Muslim slavers commonly
castrated black males lest they pose a sexual threat to Muslim women in
North Africa and Arabia. Those who are descended from black slaves,
like Mauritania's 1 million Haratin, tend to be descended from black
female slaves sexually exploited by Arab masters, not from male and
female black slaves.
Muslim slave owners saw no need to breed slaves. The supply was
plentiful. Prices were reasonable. So they inhumanely denied their male
slaves not only wages and freedom, but even worse, the rights of
marriage, sex and parenting.
While Time, Readers Digest and The Economist have exposed at least
the most recent links between Islamic governments and the practice of
slavery, another widely read periodical largely fails to balance in its
historical reports on slavery. Every few years, National Geographic
publishes another major article on the Euro-American slave trade. Are
the Geographic editors unaware that for every slave taken from black
Africa by Christians, at lest twenty were abducted by Muslims? Yet the
Islamic slave trade hides unnoticed.
Now, ironically, Muslim teachers across West Africa combine
National Geographic articles on Christian involvement in slavery with
Islamic anti-Christian diatribes. They use Farrakhan's "spin" to turn
Africans against Christianity in the very nations where Muslims began to
enslave black Africans nine centuries before Christians became involved,
and where Christian missionaries help turn the tide against both Muslim
and Christian enslavement!
Bear in mind that several generations have passed since the British
and other European colonial powers banished both European and
Muslim slave-trading from sub-Saharan nations such as Nigeria, Ghana
and Cameroon. Non-Muslim people in such areas remained illiterate
prior to European colonial intervention, so they had no written record of
their own pre-colonial history - until Muslim scholars gave them a record
with Islamic villainy erased and Christians alone featured as slavers.
Lessons taught repeatedly in school soon seem more real than a memory
of long-dead great grandad's tales of a curse coming not only by ship
from the west, but also by caravan from the north.
In the interest of fairness, the Encyclopedia Britannica invited a few
Muslim scholars to contribute to its history of slavery. Unable to present
facts to improve Islam.s bad image in that history, they nevertheless got
in one parting shot in the parting paragraph. Acknowledging that
Muslims owned slaves, they added a claim that Muslim slave owners
rarely forced their slaves to do hard physical labor out-of-doors. Christian
slave owners on plantations in the southern states, on the other hand,
forced their slaves to "tote that barge and lift that bale" in any kind of
weather.
Lack of massive irrigation projects rendered North Africa and Arabia
incapable of supporting large cotton plantations in previous centuries.
Groves of date palms near oases were probably the largest agricultural
enterprises. If vast fields of cotton could have been planted across North
Africa and the Middle East, who believes sympathy would have kept
Muslim slave owners from sending their chattels outdoors to do the
harder kind of labor?
My son Paul, armed with the above insights, returned to Cal State
Fullerton the next week. He spoke up in the next African history class
taught by the Muslim professor. Very politely he corrected the one-sided
view of the history of slavery the professor had given. Cornered and
awed, the professor acknowledged Islam's long precedent in the history
of slavery. Then he repeated the same closing comment that the Muslim
contributors had added in the Britannica's closing paragraph: Muslims
did not force their slaves to perform hard outdoor labor. Instead they
assigned only menial household tasks to them. Paul was ready with an
answer on that as well!
In summary, Christianity's record regarding black African human
rights, in spite of horrifying chapters, still far outshines Islam's record on
the same. Let Africans, Afro-Americans and Christians everywhere give
answer to Mr. Farrakhan's propaganda.
Islam has no hymn like "Amazing Grace," but we do. Let us sing it
reverently, as a deeply-felt testimony from our hearts. Let us rejoice
because that amazing grace enabled many who follow Jesus to alleviate
the suffering of millions who perhaps would still be slaves today, had not
that grace moved within our ranks.