THE ROOTS OF ARAB RACISM

I know many folks in this city, this nation, this culture get their talking points and wee-sized knowledge bits from the liner notes of the "Best of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Speeches and Gaffs" CD, but one day soon, one hopes, that these same folks will wake up to real history to help prevent the onset of their own destruction.

THE HISTORY OF ARAB oppression of blacks, whether those blacks became nominal Muslims or not, is too long. The history of Arab enslavement of blacks started far earlier, was much more devastating in its effects, and continued much later, than the Atlantic slave trade. A scholar has estimated that because Arabs specialized in seizing young black males for use in harems (contrary to the Western imagination, harems were not just for the rulers), and would castrate their hunted prey in situ in the jungle, the mortality rate among those then taken by slave coffle to the waiting boats that would take them to the slave markets of Islam reached 90%. See "The Hideous Trade" or google that title and "Jihad Watch" for more.

Slavery is legitimate in Islam. Muhammad had slaves. Muhammad is the Perfect Man. Seventh-century Arabia allowed slavery. Seventh-century Arabia provides the Sunnah, the customs and manners that are to be followed. The Arab slave trade went up and down East Africa, with the chief entrepot for the local trade in African blacks being the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, held by the Arab rulers of Oman. The Arabs also went deep into Central Africa, and into West Africa too, while the European slave-traders never managed to penetrate the interior, preferring to remain on the coast of West Africa and having slaves delivered to them by local tribes.

Slavery was not abolished willingly by the Arabs. It was stamped out, rather, by Western powers. There is no Arab William Wilberforce. There never has been a declaration, by any Arab leader, or government, or theological institute, that slavery is always and everywhere morally wrong. And there cannot be such a declaration, because Muslims are hemmed in by the Example of Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, and the practice of the Sunnah. If the French ended Arab enslavement of blacks in much of North Africa, it was the British—the Royal Navy—that helped stamp out the slave trade that continued between Africa and Arabia. This tale is told most fully in J. B. Kelly's "Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880.” But the Arabs still managed, as the British presence on the seas diminished, to resurrect that slave trade, which continued into the 1960s.

In 1962, just before slavery was formally abolished—because Saudi Arabia was not yet rich from oil revenues, it had to succumb to Western pressure—20% at least of the population consisted of black slaves. For more google “Arab slave trade in Africa,” or start here.

It is not surprising that in Dayton, a Muslim girl might have made up a story blaming black men. Nor is it surprising that the Arabs in this congregation want to move from a black neighborhood to a white one. Look at how unwelcome Arabs and Pakistanis have made black Muslims who wish to attend, in any numbers, the same mosques with them. Blacks are seen as fit fodder for conversion to Islam—without really letting potential converts know much about Islam. The proselytizers hold back so much, until their targets are deeply committed and can't easily get out. They do this so as to swell Muslim ranks and perceived (and real) power, but are not so happy for the new converts to actually associate with Arabs and Pakistanis, who find such an association distasteful. Compare that with the welcoming practice of Christian churches, not least among those evangelicals who have become the butt of so much self-assured mockery.

Read it all in Hugh Fitzgerald's latest reportage on the scourge of Islam.