From: "Salil Tripathi" <salil61-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Ludicrous assumptions - as usual!
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 12:04:57 +0000




This is from Saturday's The Guardian:


In the service of the Sultan

Fiachra Gibbons on an unsavoury chapter of Islamic history revealed in 
Islam's Black Slaves by Ronald Segal

Fiachra Gibbons
Guardian

Saturday April 6, 2002


Islam's Black Slaves: A History of Africa's Other Black Diaspora
Ronald Segal
241pp, Atlantic Books, £20

At a time when the United States, crusading Christianity's last outpost, is 
again mounting its mangy charger, along comes another book documenting a 
dark, half-forgotten and deeply unsavoury aspect of Islam. Until Ronald 
Segal, author of the excellent and similarly panoramic survey of the 
Atlantic slave trade, The Black Diaspora, began to pick at the scars Arab 
raiders and their black African outriders left on large parts of the 
continent over 14 centuries, this had been one of the great untold stories.

You can find the descendants of Islam's black slaves even now, in places as 
diverse and surreal as suburban Greece, the badlands of Iran, southern Iraq, 
or in the paddy fields that still run up to the back doors of the hotels of 
tourist Turkey - and everywhere they share the same look of confusion and 
abandonment of those left on the high-water mark of retreating emirates and 
empires.

Unlike the millions of west Africans who were crammed on to coffin ships 
bound for plantations in the Americas, those dragged through the Sahara or 
down to the Indian ocean at Zanzibar were mostly women. Zanzibar was a black 
Belsen, a clearing house of shackled humanity, where the stench of death was 
masked by the cloves on which the island's Omani emirs built a great trading 
empire.

Without a nascent industrial complex to feed, many of the men were castrated 
for domestic service or drafted into slave armies that emptied the lands 
around the great lakes of their peoples. One in 10, by some estimates, 
survived the trek from the interior. By the mid-19th century, when east 
African slave magnates - many of them the free sons of Arab slavers and 
their black concubines - ran out of infidels and animists to enslave, they, 
and the expanding black Islamic empires that supplied them, circumvented the 
scruples set out in the Koran and carried off their own on the flimsiest of 
criminal pretexts.

Slaves were the luxury goods the Islamic world seemed unable to wean itself 
off, despite hectoring from a self-righteous west that had embraced 
emancipation just as mechanisation had rendered slavery obsolete. Like 
horses and gold, slaves conferred status, and the most opulent households 
had thousands. When he died in 1870, one Arab official of the black state of 
Bornu on the shores of Lake Chad had several thousand slaves to complement 
his stable of 1,000 stallions.

Despite the unconscionable cruelty of a practice that continues to this day 
in Mauritania - where a third of the population may still be in bonds - and 
to some extent lingers in Sudan also, there is little in this book to feed 
the new mood of Islamophobia. For if slaves were to have had the luxury of 
choice between the sugar cane plantations of the West Indies or domestic 
service in Arabia or Istanbul - which, let's be clear, they didn't - a 
Muslim master was more often the lesser of the two evils.

It was common custom for slaves to be freed, and in the Ottoman empire in 
particular, where slaves often held the great offices of state, several 
sultans were the sons of women brought to the Topkapi's multinational harem 
in chains. In fact, the Ottomans preferred to sire their heirs from among 
their slaves and subject peoples, lest rival Turkic houses get a sniff of 
power through dynastic marriage. Being a slave of the Sultan was not a 
stigma, but a position so exalted, if often tenuous (strangulation by bow 
string awaited the uppity), that many free- and high-born Muslims offered 
their sons.

The chief black eunuch - there were plenty of white ones, too, from the 
Balkans and the Caucasus - was a key figure in the imperial household, at 
times so powerful that his role was indistinguishable from that of 
chancellor of the exchequer. Which is all very exotic and makes for great 
yarns, but Segal is always careful to rein himself back from orientalist 
flights of fancy. For every black eunuch held in profound respect by the 
Turks, a thousand more were thrown, bleeding and mutilated, to the tides of 
Zanzibar.

There is much to be angry about in this book - and not just in the actions 
of the Arab and sub-Saharan slavers, but in the Islamic scholars today who 
seek to wish away or deny altogether the existence of this other black 
diaspora. Yet there is no anger in Segal's dry, though never dull, writing: 
just a hard, underlying core of conviction. Segal was a banned person in 
South Africa, and left for exile in London with Oliver Tambo in 1960. He is 
also a white man with Jewish roots, which makes him doubly suspect for many 
black Muslims in the US, to whom this book, you feel, is about as welcome as 
a Klezmer band at Eid.

Segal is clearly writing with one eye cast back worriedly towards the US, 
which is a pity. He devotes the closing chapter to a condensed history of 
the Nation of Islam, and its varying attempts to meld some kind of à la 
carte Islam to the black American experience. It is an obvious and probably 
inevitable epilogue. But America is not the world, although it fools the 
best of us at times.

It seems churlish to nit-pick, but for all its great strengths, the 
travelling for this book has mainly been done in libraries. We don't meet a 
single living being. Segal's great achievement has been to open up a 
difficult and neglected subject. His book is a Russian doll, with many other 
books inside it; those stories, the stories of the descendants of the 
Islamic slave diaspora, await their tellers.





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