Sultan Knish
The slow collapse of Dubai, a desert mirage built on oil money, human misery and the greed of Western businesses, reminds us once again of the fate of all slave economies in the end. But for all the skyscrapers in Dubai, the glittering avenues built by slave labor and the abundance of luxury American and European automobiles-- the story of Dubai and Saudi Arabia is very much an old story in a Muslim Middle East, of fat prosperous sheiks clutching their ill gotten gains to themselves and ruling over harems and companies of slaves, until the end comes.
Like Muslim Brotherhood derived terrorists using the latest Web 2.0 social media as part of a quest to drive humanity back into the dark ages, the Gulf States are a very old story with the external gilt and glitz of modernity. While the Muslim world may employ the tools and utilities of the 21st century, even mimic its terminology, it has never left its own dark ages... and its dominant religious and social movements are all geared toward making sure that it never does. And while above the skyscrapers gleam in Dubai's night sky, below are the armies of foreign workers, some prosperous Western Dhimmis driving luxury cars who come to do all the higher labor that the native Emiratis lack the ability or will to do, and outnumbering them are the labor gangs of Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern workers who erect the edifices designed by Western architects to fool Western investors into believing that the backward totalitarian sheikdom is actually a modern free republic.
As with any fairy tale, behind the glamour lies an ugly truth. A truth that goes back to the dates back to Mohammed. That stretches from slave caravans to slave ships. From England to America and through Turkey to Russia, the roots of slavery can be found in the Muslim slave trade.
The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth)... Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa, Elikia M’bokolo
The silent genocide is little spoken of, because it is an inconvenient interruption of the modern liberal historical narrative in which industrialized European powers exploited the unfortunate peoples of what is now the Third World. But Muslim slavery was indeed a genocide, one that stretched on for a thousand years of horror, misery and cruelty. That helped lead into the European era of slavery as well... but what is often forgotten is that before Europeans were slaveholders, they along with Africans, were slaves of Islam.
Many centuries before European slave ships began raiding African coasts, Muslim slave ships were raiding European coasts and sending their armies deep into the heart of Europe. While it is European slavery that is best known, it is Muslim slavery that came long before it and lasted long after it into the present day. The guest workers who labor on Dubai's mirage of skyscrapers and luxuries die by the thousands with no civil or human rights, cheated out of wages, imprisoned at a whim and viewed as subhuman by their Emirati masters-- are the latest extension of a tradition of Muslim slavery stretching for over a millennium.
Without slavery it is likely that Islam would have never survived long enough to become the worldwide menace that it is today. Mohammed, himself a slaveowner, exploited slavery to gain power in two ways.
First, Mohammed attracted men to join his cause by allowing them to raid caravans and towns, seizing goods and carrying off men, women and children into slavery. The men would be sold to labor, the women would be raped and then perhaps taken as concubines or forcibly married, as Mohammed himself did on more than one occasion. The children would be raised in slavery.
By treating non-Muslims as subhuman property, Mohammed was able to create an important financial incentive for men to join him in his wars to conquer the region-- as well as demonstrating to those who refused to convert and join him just what would happen to them and their families if they refused to bow to him. By invalidating the marriages of captured women, Mohammed simultaneously legalizing both rape and adultery under the banner of Islam.
Back when Mohammed was essentially running a biker gang with a religion, his dehumanization of non-Muslims turned anyone who had not become a Muslim into human loot to satisfy their greed and appetites. Had Mohammed not done this, he would have ended up as nothing more than another nomad cultist with delusions of grandeur. But by trading in human chattel, his religion gained "followers" who wanted loot and slaves, more than they wanted "Allah".
Second, Mohammed promised freedom to slaves who came to join him. This allowed him to expand the ranks of his followers further, while posturing as morally being opposed to slavery. This cynical maneuver in which Mohammed and his followers turned non-Muslims into slavery, yet promised freedom to slaves who agreed to become Muslims is often cited by Muslims who are looking to promote Mohammed as being opposed to slavery.
In fact Mohammed very much favored slavery, he simply understood that turning his army into a magnet for escaped slaves whom he could transform into free men through his omnipotent religious impramptur, would swell his ranks and diminish those of his enemies. Mohammed himself owned slaves, and raped and abused them. And today slavery remains far more widespread in the Muslim world, while it has become extinct in Christian and Jewish countries.
Of all these slave routes, the "slave trade" in its purest form, i.e. the European Atlantic trade, attracts most attention and gives rise to most debate. The Atlantic trade is the least poorly documented to date, but this is not the only reason. More significantly, it was directed at Africans only, whereas the Muslim countries enslaved both Blacks and Whites.
The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa, Elikia M’bokolo
While the European slavery was more labor oriented, with racial justifications used to maintain a slave economy-- Muslim slavery has traditionally been more luxury oriented. The Europeans may have seen slavery as a convenient means of production, Muslims traditionally saw slaves as a luxury in and of themselves. That is why slavery in the European world was more limited to developing economies with a labor shortage and high transportation costs such as the Americas, while in the Muslim world it is traditionally the most prosperous countries with a surplus of the wealthy who collected the most slaves.
The Zanj Rebellion in 9th century Iraq in which half a million slaves rebelled against the Muslim Empire of the Abbasid Caliphate virtually prefigures the state of affairs in present day Dubai and Saudi Arabia. And indeed Dubai and Saudi Arabia may well face the same if enough of their abused workers ever turn a riot into an outright uprising, that will likely have to be crushed with borrowed US troops acting on behalf of the Saudis and Emiratis.
Unlike European slavery where the number of slaves related to production, Muslim slavery places no limits on slavery because it is as much a luxury as a means of production. That is also why slavery became extinct in European colonies, as much on economic as on moral grounds, but can never go extinct in the Muslim world, because the moral grounds and personal example for the maintenance of slavery was provided by Mohammed himself, and Muslim slavery is not rooted exclusively in the rationale of production, but in the sense of Muslim superiority.
Slavery may be odious in the free world, but the Muslim world is by no means free. And the social nature of an un-free world is a world of masters and slaves. In a society of masters and slaves, the best way to demonstrate your freedom is by owning slaves.
While the prosperous citizens of a free nation demonstrate their accomplishment through hard work, in a master-slave society the prosperous demonstrate their prosperity through public laziness and self-indulgence. In a master-slave society, freedom means the freedom to do nothing, the freedom to have a slave do it for you instead. And that is Dubai, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in a nutshell... in which foreign workers make up much of the population and do everything. A Briton to manage your investments, an American to pump your oil, a Filipino maid for your second wife to boss around, a Ukranian to include in your harem and a Thai to work at your construction site. That is a Muslim's idea of paradise and the dream of Dubai. It is the mindset behind Muslim slavery and it is why Muslim slavery continues into the present day.
One cannot reform Islam, without first reforming Muslims. Yet where does one begin reforming the culture of slavery, the ethos of the master and slave that is so deeply embedded into Islam that it in fact is Islam? Muslims describe themselves as the Slaves of Allah, because that is the deepest form of loyalty they can imagine.
Islam is the Master-Slave dynamic of the Middle East writ large into a religion, with Muslims viewing themselves as the slaves of Allah, and everyone else as their slaves. Within Islam, the higher status Saudis who style themselves the keepers of Mecca and the birthplace of Mohammed, feel free to enslave other Arab Muslims. Arab Muslims in turn enslave African and Asian Muslims, whom they consider racially inferior. And these in turn move to Europe where they view Europeans and other resident non-Muslims as inferior to them, as slaves.
Islam in short is nothing more than slavery in religious form, relying on the sort of crude punishments you would dispense to a slave, and the sort of crude rewards you would offer to a slave-- namely the chance to enslave and abuse others, and sample forbidden luxuries. Islam is a religion of slavery for a religion of slaves.
It is no wonder then that the modern day Jihad in built on slavery, funded by the royal families of the Gulf States, using the oil revenues produced by the oil pumps that they would never sully their own fat fingers with, with the aim of destroying and enslaving the civilized world that stands between them and world power. The Wahhabi mosques rising up across the world, their minarets and crescents, are the banners of a worldwide call to slavery. For mankind to fall to its knees and bow toward Saudi Arabia, to the Masters of Mecca, the paymasters of Al Queda and a thousand other Muslim terrorist groups around the world all clamoring for their own states and territories as part of a new Muslim Empire.
The question is will we dare to resist them?
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