Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (17 page)

Influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, Anglo-Saxon philanthropists such as William Wilberforce (1759-1833) created the abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth century to free slaves and end the slave trade. The forces of slavery soon found determined foes throughout the West, especially the British Empire, which banned the slave trade in 1807 and employed the might of the British Navy to fight it.
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Before it plunged into a civil war partly sparked by revulsion at the slave trade, the United States waged two naval wars against the Barbary pirates in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. In 1816, the British and the Dutch navies shelled Algiers to dissuade it from attacking non-Muslim vessels and to force it to free Christian slaves. In 1830, with wide Western support, France decided to invade, occupy, colonize, and annex Algeria in order to exterminate piracy in the Mediterranean.

Western abolitionist pressure forced the Ottoman Empire to shut down the slave market in Istanbul, the world’s largest. It was officially closed in 1847, but it simply moved underground, where it endured with the tacit permission of the Ottoman authorities.
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Ottoman slavery ended only after the empire was abolished and Atatürk established the secular Turkish state.

When the British colonized Sudan in the late nineteenth century, they cracked down on the slave trade and put a stop to the widespread castration of black youths by Arabs. Despite their best efforts, however, the British never could completely eradicate Arab slave dealing, which resumed immediately after Sudan’s decolonization in 1956.
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In the early 1960s, author Sean O’Callaghan toured slave markets throughout the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. In Djibouti he saw ten naked boys “and I saw with horror that five had been castrated. The [slave dealer] said that usually 10 per cent of the boys are castrated, being purchased by Saudi homosexuals, or by Yemenis, who own harems.”
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In Yemen, O’Callaghan witnessed a girl being punished for attempting to escape from the harem. “Punishment was administered by a eunuch, a huge powerful Negro who seemed to enjoy his task. 70 lashes were given.... The eunuch often has his penis removed as well as his testicles.”
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In Saudi Arabia, O’Callaghan visited a slave auction in the supposedly holy city of Mecca. “As the next slave was led in, a murmur of excitement went up among the buyers.... He was a slender boy of about 12 years old with beautiful classical Arab features.... There is an old saying among the Bedouin: A goat for use, a girl for enjoyment, but a boy for ecstasy.”
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The fact that pedophilia is widely condoned in Islamic culture is unsurprising, considering Muhammad had sex with Aisha when she was nine. And the prophet’s example has been followed long after his death, as O’Callaghan discovered. “We tell the girls from a very early age that they are made for love,” a Djibouti slave dealer told him. “At age nine we let them practice with each other, and a year later with the boys.”
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Slavery still persists today across the Islamic world, especially in the former French colonies of Islamic West Africa. The French were unable to snuff out the institution, and the post-colonial regimes were clearly unwilling to do so. Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1981, but it still exists, with slaves regarded as “domesticated animals.”
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In Chad, children abducted by Islamic raiders are forced to abandon their native language and Christian religion for Arabic and Islam.
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In Niger, almost 8 percent of the population is estimated to be slaves.
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In Mali, a reporter for the National Geographic Society bought two slaves in 2002 in order to free them.
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Overall, slavery is so prevalent today that slaves are now cheaper than ever before in history. Dr. Kevin Bales, an expert on modern slavery, calculated that the enslaved fieldworker who cost the equivalent of $40,000 in 1850 costs on average less than $100 today, with some as cheap as $5 or $10.
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Many Americans may not know that some of their fellow countrymen today are former slaves—not descendants of slaves, but former slaves themselves. Take Sudanese-born Simon Deng, a lifeguard at Coney Island. Born in 1957 in a Christian village of southern Sudan, Deng spent several years as a slave before escaping to America. “When I was nine years old, my village was raided by Arab troops in the pay of Khartoum,” he recalls. “As we ran into the bush to escape I watched as childhood friends were shot dead and the old and the weak who were unable to run were burned alive in their huts. I was abducted and given to an Arab family as a ‘gift.’... I lived as a slave for several years. I was beaten time and time again for no reason at all—even the whim of my ‘master’s’ children could produce these beatings. I was subjected to harsh labor and indignities of every sort.”
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It’s unlikely slavery will disappear from the Islamic world in our lifetimes, if ever. It’s an intrinsic part of Islam sanctioned by Muhammad himself. As Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body, proclaimed in 2003, “Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain [as] long there is Islam.”
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In Islam’s petro-states, foreign guest workers ranging from
au pairs
to manual laborers often work in slave-like conditions. Consider this report on Saudi Arabia from the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report of June 2011:

Saudi Arabia is a destination country for men and women subjected to forced labor.... Men and women from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and many other countries voluntarily travel to Saudi Arabia as domestic servants or other low-skilled laborers, but some subsequently face conditions indicative of involuntary servitude, including nonpayment of wages, long working hours without rest, deprivation of food, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and restrictions on movement, such as the withholding of passports or confinement to the workplace. Recent reports of abuse include the driving of nails into a domestic worker’s body.

... Women, primarily from Asian and African countries, were believed to have been forced into prostitution in Saudi Arabia; others were reportedly kidnapped and forced into prostitution after running away from abusive employers.... Saudi Arabia made limited progress in protecting victims, but its overall efforts remained inadequate during the reporting period.... As a result, many victims of trafficking are likely punished for acts committed as a result of being trafficked. Under Saudi law, foreign workers may be detained, deported, or in some cases, corporally punished for running away from their employers.... Women arrested for prostitution offenses face prosecution and, if convicted, imprisonment or corporal punishment, even if they are victims of trafficking.
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Although the international media rarely reports on the plight of these poor souls, some journalists took note when south Asian workers in Dubai, UAE, went on strike and even rioted in March 2006 and October 2007. The strikes provoked some rare reporting on the conditions these workers endure: they toil twelve hours a day for $4, often in hazardous conditions with a high risk of injury and death, as they build the city’s skyscrapers, luxury homes, shopping malls, artificial islands, indoor ski resorts, and airport terminals. Dubai’s “guest workers” are housed in dismal conditions, their pay is often withheld, and their employers sometimes confiscate or “lose” their passports to stop them from returning home.
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Western countries are increasingly confronted with this kind of exploitation on their own soil. In 2004, a Saudi couple in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested for keeping a 24-year-old Indonesian woman as their slave. For four years, when the woman was not working, the couple kept her locked in an unheated basement with just a mattress. When she was allowed out of her hovel, she had to cook, clean, care for the children, perform sex acts on her master, and was sometimes loaned out to other families.
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In July 2008, Belgian police liberated fourteen girls kept as slaves for eight months by an Arab royal family who had rented an entire floor of a luxury hotel in Brussels. The royals had confiscated the passports of their slaves—who came from the Philippines, India, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Morocco, and Syria—upon their arrival in Belgium. Police intervened after four girls attempted to escape; three of them were captured by their masters’ security staff, but the fourth managed to alert the authorities.

Though most of the fifty-three rooms on the hotel floor were empty, the slaves had to sleep on the hallway floor. They were given almost nothing to eat and frequently burned their hands bringing their masters hot coffee, which they had to carry in cups without saucers.
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In February 2010, Bandar Abdulaziz, the servant of another royal Arab family, was found strangled to death in a hotel in central London.
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Eight months later, a British court convicted an Arab prince of the murder. Britain’s
Guardian
reported, “The court had heard that the murder of Abdulaziz was the final act in a ‘deeply abusive’ master-servant relationship in which the prince carried out frequent attacks on his aide ‘for his own personal gratification.’ Jurors were told that by the early hours of 15 February, Abdulaziz was so worn down and injured—having suffered a ‘cauliflower’ ear and swollen eye from previous assaults—that he let [the prince] kill him without a fight.”
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A former top London hotelier told the
Sunday Times
that the crime reminded him of a disturbing event a few years earlier: “Soon after a relative of the king of Saudi Arabia took over the sixth floor... a man working in the loading bay called me to say that there was a Moroccan girl curled up in a ball underneath the desk in a nearby office.... In broken English the girl told me she had been travelling round the world with the Saudi prince for the past two years and was the personal slave of a princess [who] had whipped her.... When she lifted her blouse to show me her back, it was like a scene from a horror movie. There were five or six long slashes and underneath the wounds were old scars.”
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Slavery has always existed in Islamic societies and it continues to exist in many Islamic nations today. Islam does not and
cannot
apologize for slavery, nor can it abolish the institution, because the Koran allows the faithful to enslave their enemies.
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Moreover, the Koran condones sex slavery by granting men sexual access to “what their right hands possess” (meaning female captives or slaves) and to “the slave girls whom Allah has given you as booty.”
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Thus, admitting that slavery is morally wrong would be tantamount to acknowledging the fallibility of the Koran, which is impossible since Allah himself supposedly wrote it.

Moreover, Muhammad, the perfect man whose example all Muslims must follow, was a slave trader who owned many slaves, including female concubines such as Mary the Copt. He bought some of them, received others as presents, and seized still others as war booty. Some he kept, some he sold, and some, such as Mary’s sister Shirin, he gave to others as gifts. When a woman told Muhammad she had freed her slave girl, he told her she would have been better rewarded if she had given the girl to one of her uncles.
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