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It is a sensitive topic.
It is especially sensitive in the context of racial divisions and prejudices within the United States black Islamic communities.

The myth created here can be explained as: Projecting Islam to the Black Communities of America as the religion of the underprivileged seeking independence and Judaism and Christianity as the religions of colonialism and racism.

Furthermore the Muslim official line of thought, as presented in various publications, identifies Judeo-Christian faiths as white tool of racial oppression and one of the tools to create and maintain the institution of slavery.

Below, I listed several examples of such propaganda:

This black man is our leader (Year 634)

When the Muslims conquered Egypt at the time when Omar ibn al Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) was Khalifa, a Muslim leader who happened to be a black man named Ubaydah ibn Thamit, took a party of the Muslims to meet Muqawqis, the Christian leader of Egypt.

When the Muslims came to Muqawqis, with Ubaydah in the lead, Muqawqis was frightened by the color of his skin.

‘Get this black man away from me and bring someone else,’ he demanded. The Muslims refused. They insisted that Ubaydah was the best among them and was their leader who they obeyed and whose judgment they deferred to. They told Muqawqis that the color of a person does not matter to them. Finally Muqawqis had no choice but talk to the leader of that Muslim delegation.

Marc Lee Raphael
“Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.
“This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the ‘triangular trade’ that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750’s, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760’s, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760’s and early 1770’s dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent.” Jews and Judaism in the United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), p. 14. Raphael is the editor of American Jewish History, the journal of the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. (Source)

 

What was the attitude of the Christian church towards the Negro slave trade? From its inception, Christianity kept its eyes closed to the plight of the slaves. As mentioned earlier, the only reference to the slavery is found in the epistle of St. Paul returning a slave to Philemon to his master. That is all. Ameer Ali rightly comments that Christianity “found slavery a recognised institution of the empire; it adopted the system without any endeavour to mitigate its baneful character, or promote its gradual abolition, or to improve the status of slaves.” (Source)

From this perspective, it is not surprising than that the predominant group among Muslims in the United States are Black –Americans.

Muslims comprise now about 6% of the us population and this group is split roughly into the following:

47% Black Americans

24% Indo-Pakistani

12.4% Arabs

3.6% Iranians

2% Turks

2% South-East Asians

1.6% White Americans

5% All others

While not trying to deny the existence of the slavery and racism among Christians it is necessary to show that the Islamic publications, which are dealing with these issues, try to present them as exclusive to:

a)      The Western culture

b)      Hebrew and Christian religions

It is also a very interesting fact that there are so few publications targeting the American Black audience, which would at least try to counterweight, the Islamic perspective, which is totally false and damaging to the interracial relationship far beyond the US.

It is a well-documented fact that the Old Testament (the Old Testaments is known in Judaism as Written Torah or the Tanakh) and the New Testament recognized the existence of slavery, which was a fact of life in antiquity.

However unlike The Koran those Judeo-Christian scriptures do not see the institution of slavery as God given right nor do they condone it in any way.

The attraction of Christianity among slaves in ancient Rome was spontaneous because of its universal rule of equality in Christ: “..there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all in Christ Jesus.”

It is very different in Islamic tradition.

Allah, through his manifestation – The Koran, brings slavery to life, justifies it and even regulates the mechanics and rules of its existence.

“33:50 - Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty.”

(Allah himself provides slave girls as booty)

“23:5 -   … except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them:…”

(Lawful ownership of slave girls)

 “24:32 And marry those among you who are single and those who are fit among your male slaves and your female slaves; if they are needy,..”

(It regulates breeding of slaves)

“24:33 …. and do not compel your slave girls to prostitution, when they desire to keep chaste, in order to seek the frail good of this world’s life;”

(Indicates how one could get some extra income from female slaves)

The quotes listed above are just samples from the Koran, which provide the insights into the legality of slavery in the Islamic world.

The Hadith provides many more examples from the life of Mohamed and his companions.

According to the Koran all Muslims are entitled to own slaves by purchasing them or as the spoils of war.

While needles cruelty and maltreatment of slaves was discouraged by the Koran, there were not any prescribed penalties for such behaviour.

In fact, the slave had no legal rights at all.

There were several periods in the history of Islamic slavery and slave trade characterized by the way of which the human merchandise was obtained and also the geographical region from which the majority of it came from.

Most of the slaves obtained during the first period came as the spoils of the Jihad limited to the Arabian peninsula but also disobedient dhimmis could be taken into slavery, but since Mohamed forbade enslaving other Muslims and the supply of insubordinate dhimmis became very limited some other means of supply had to be found.

Later, during the second period, when the Islam spread throughout Asia Minor towards Byzantium, Northern Africa, Persia and towards India most of the slaves would come directly as a result booty of this expansion.

During, the third period, which was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, most of the slaves were obtained from raids into neighbouring countries and African and Asian frontiers.

This is when the slave trade became a major industry in the Islamic world and was imported by the West into the “New World”.

The geographical regions from most of the slaves were recruited included mostly the frontier countries of Eastern Europe with Balkans and Caucasus, India and Africa.
During this period of time the Tartars from the Crimean raided villages of Russia, Ukraine and Poland and year after year from the end of the 15th until the end of 18th century tens of thousands of young slaves were carried off and sold on the markets of the Ottoman Empire.
From the Balkans, taken over by the victorious Islam by the end of the 15Th century, and the Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire took its supply of young boys, who after forced separation from their dhimmi families, were converted to Islam and trained to become the elite Ottoman infantry, the janissaries.

The slaves from India, although not uncommon, did not usually reach the Middle East and served their local Islamic masters.

The slave trade from Africa started in the middle of the 7th century and it survives today mainly in Sudan and in Mauritania.

Arab dealers, who monopolized the African slave trade, initially delivered the African slaves to the Spaniards and Portuguese for the American colonies.
It was a terrible and despicable practice.
The quotation below comes from an interview by Suzie Hansen with Ronald Segal the author of  “Islam’s black slaves”: (Source)

The Atlantic slave trade exclusively used black slaves or agricultural labor on plantations. It started in a very small way in 1450 and ended in the middle of the 19th century. It was the basic labor supply for the plantations in the Americas since the indigenous people had been all but wiped out by a combination of imported diseases and forced labor. The number of slaves who landed alive in the Americas — it was an important aspect in the development of capitalism, so the numbers are fairly accurate and organized by merchant banks and investors with stock market quotations — was something like 10,600,000. Slaves became so cheap that it was more profitable to work them to death and buy new ones than to try to keep your labor supply alive. For example, some of the mortality rates in San Domingue — which became, after the only successful slave revolution in history, Haiti — were quite staggering.
The slave trade in Islam was seriously different. It began in the middle of the seventh century and survives today in Mauritania and Sudan. With the Islamic slave trade, we’re talking of 14 centuries rather than four.
Whereas the gender ratio of slaves in the Atlantic trade was two males to every female, in the Islamic trade, it was two females to every male. Very large numbers of slaves were used for domestic purposes. Concubinage was for those who could afford it and there was no disrepute attached to having women as sexual objects. In fact, they married them. Some harems could be enormous. One ruler had 14,000 concubines. In one respect, women slaves were a status symbol. I hate to say it this way, but it’s comparable to the way people in the West collect motorcars.
The male slaves were used for the more exacting physical jobs in homes and palaces: porters, messengers, and doorkeepers. In various places, from Islamic Spain to Egypt to Libya, there were black slaves used as soldiers. In Morocco, there was a whole generation of black slaves who became the army of Morocco, in which the young boys were bought at the age of 10 or 11 and trained in horse handling and military skills of various kinds. Young female slaves were instructed in household crafts and were then provided with resources to buy a home and get married.
Most of the black male slaves were castrated to prevent them from having undesirable relationship with female slaves, which could result in “damaging of property”.

Strictly speaking, in Islam, castration was against the law. I don’t think it was in the Koran, I think it was a hadith — a saying attributed to the prophets — which says he who castrates a slave will himself be castrated. But they got around this as people do. One contrivance was to buy already castrated slaves. Another was to employ those who were not Muslims to perform the operation. But then even these contrivances came to be abandoned and dealers would perform the operation themselves along the route. The mortality rates were absolutely huge.

To be technical, there was a crucial difference between white eunuchs and black eunuchs. White eunuchs were made by the removal of testicles. Black eunuchs were made by what was called “level with the abdomen.” Eunuchs were guardians of the harem [because] if they were castrated “level with the abdomen,” there was no risk of their damaging any of the property in the harem.

 

In some places in Africa (mostly sub-Saharan Africa) the slavery still exists under a hidden form, which is sometimes misunderstood by the observers from the West.

Contrary to the myth that Islam is a religion free from racial prejudice, slavery in the Moslem world has been, and remains, brutally racist in character. 
In Mauritania and Sudan where the ruling black kings co-operated with Arabs, converted to Islam and supplied their Arab masters with slaves from their neighbouring territories.
Over some period of time this part of the black population of these areas, became mostly Muslim and to some extend through intermarriages thought of themselves as Arabic.
The use of the word “black” among these people is the highest insult as they identify it with their non-Muslim “cousins” – potential slaves.

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Readings:
Lewis, B., The Middle East, A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, New York, 1995
Lewis, B., Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1994
Trifcovic, S., The Sword of the Prophet, Regina Oxford Press, 2002
Amnesty International report on Mauritania, October 1990

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