History of slavery in the Muslim world

"the pressure to abolish slavery generally came from some combination of European colonial powers and economic and demographic shifts. A few Muslim clerics, such as one writing in the mid-nineteenth-century Arabian peninsula, opposed abolition on the grounds that slavery was accepted in religious texts. Similarly, one scholar argues “that slavery enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy in Ottoman society. That legitimacy derived from Islamic sanction,” among other factors. Although abolition did eventually occur, there was not a strong internally developed critique of slaveholding based on religious principles."

"In the Orient slavery has never been regarded in the same way as in the West. Oriental slavery is such as one sees in the Holy Scriptures; the slave inherits from his master, he marries his daughter. Most of the pashas have been slaves; so also were a large number of grand viziers, all the Mamelukes, Ali-Bey and Mourad-Bey. They have begun by fulfilling the menial functions within their master's house, and have risen through their merit or by favour. In the West on the other hand, the slave was always beneath the domestic; his was the lowest rank."

"The Islamic doctrine of slavery was closely linked with the doctrine of the inescapable struggle between believers and unbelievers… and Pagans were routinely sold into slavery if they had the misfortune of being captured by Muslims."

"In the heartlands of Islam, from Saudi mansions to ISIS dungeons, there are still slaves, laboring, beaten, bought, sold, raped and disposed of in Mohammed's name."

"In Hindustan British rule has abolished slavery, but it nevertheless exists in noble families, where the slaves seem willingly to assent to their condition of bondage."

"In one of the sad paradoxes of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside, the Islamic empire."

"Polytheists and idolaters were seen primarily as sources of slaves, to be imported into the Islamic world and molded-in Islamic ways, and, since they possessed no religion of their own worth the mention, as natural recruits for Islam."

"The summer is already far advanced in this part of the world; and, for some miles round Adrianople, the whole ground is laid out in gardens, and the banks of the rivers are set with rows of fruit trees, under which all the most considerable Turks divert themselves every evening; not with walking, that is not one of their pleasures, but a set party of them choose out a green spot, where the shade is very thick, and there they spread a carpet, on which they sit drinking their coffee, and are generally attended by some slave with a fine voice, or that plays on some instrument."

"Meanwhile, the religious zeal of Christians and Moslems had helped to revive and spread a form of servitude once justified primarily by the ancient laws of war. Members of each faith looked upon the other as infidels, and hence each felt doubly entitled to make slaves of the other when taken as captives. Moors captured in North Africa and in the Spanish peninsula were held in bondage in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. Christian prisoners suffered the same fate in the lands of Islam. Christians and Moslems alike believed it just to hold heathens in servitude, and both found victims among the Negroes of Africa. Their operations were facilitated by the fact that slavery already existed among the Negro tribes and that native dealers were often willing participants in the trade in human flesh. The Christian purchasers liked to think of themselves as the agents of civilization and the true religion. The native traders were less philosophical about their business."

"So what was abolitionism in such contexts? Can we at all use here this loaded, essentially foreign, term in a meaningful, historical sense ? Should we bother to ? True, some historians might find it worthwhile to study lone abolitionist voices in an otherwise solid anti-abolition discourse. But then, some historians would always insist that the unrepresentative is important in and of itself, regardless of its social and political significance. Even if we examine with good intentions the scant evidence that Clarence-Smith himself provides in his book, we cannot but conclude how very few and very far between such voices indeed were. Considered within the huge dimensions of the Islamic World and the extended period of time allowed by the author for these voices to have emerged, the phenomenon appears so marginal and ephemeral that it cannot possibly deserve to be called a "sentiment", let alone constitute a Subversive current' or be described as a Movement'. Why, then, we may ask, does Clarence-Smith insist on this unpromising line of investigation and rather forced research agenda.... Also, if scholars were to undertake, in earnest and honesty, extensive studies of anti-enslavement manifestations in Islamic societies, their work would most probably reinforce the kind of negative view of ' Islam' that Clarence-Smith is so eager to revise and reconstruct."

"To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility ..."

"19 June 1866 – We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become anyone's property if she recovered."

"26 June 1866 – ... We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path: a group of men stood about a hundred yards off on one side, and another of the women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer."

"27 June 1866 – To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found many slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their masters from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young."

"The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves. ... Twenty one were unchained, as now safe; however all ran away at once; but eight with many others still in chains, died in three days after the crossing. They described their only pain in the heart, and placed the hand correctly on the spot, though many think the organ stands high up in the breast-bone."

"And if my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian slavery should lead to the suppression of the East Coast slave trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together."