Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith

by Robert Spencer

  Slavery, moreover, has been taken for granted throughout Islamic history-as it was in the West until recently. The impetus to end it moved from Christendom into Islam. When the British government in the nineteenth century began pressuring pro-slavery regimes to curtail or end the practice, the reaction from at least one Muslim leader was incredulity. The Sultan of Morocco wrote that "the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam ... up to this day." He said that he was "not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect" and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: "no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.""

  Most slaves in the Islamic world were captured during jihad. This developed into an organized system:

  The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Trans- oxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [non-Islamic regions; see chapter nine] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants."

  Still Slaveholding Today

  In Sudan and Mauritania, the Muslim record on slavery is not a matter of history but of current events.

  The primary reason someone will be enslaved in Sudan is because he or she is a Christian. In this colonial fiction of a country, the Arab Muslims in the north are in the process of stamping out black Christianity in the south by imposing the Sharia over the entire country. The Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights, abolitionist movement founded in 1995, says:

  The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim Black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The Black animist and Christian South remembers many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.'9

  Critics worldwide have denied that slavery exists in Sudan, but there is no doubt for anyone willing to face the hard facts. "In 1996," according to the American Anti-Slavery Group, "after Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, challenged the press to find slavery in Sudan, two reporters from the Baltimore Sun, Gilbert Lewth- waite and Gregory Kane, risked their lives to fly into Southern Sudan to do just that. 1120 They returned with an abundance of evidence, having themselves bought the freedom of a group of young slaves.

  Slave raids are particularly inhuman. The American Anti-Slavery Group also reports:

  Women and children abducted in slave raids are roped by the neck or strapped to animals and then marched north. Along the way, many women and girls are repeatedly gang-raped. Children who will not be silent are shot on the spot. In the north, slaves are either kept by individual militia soldiers or sold in markets. Boys work as livestock herders, forced to sleep with the animals they care for. Some who try to escape have their Achilles tendons cut to hamper their ability to run. Masters typically use women and girls as domestics and concubines, cleaning by day and serving the master sexually by night. Survivors report being called "abeed" ("black slave"), enduring daily beatings, and receiving awful food. Masters also strip slaves of their religious and cultural identities, giving them Arabic names and forcing them to pray as Muslims.21

  One Sudanese Christian slave was James Pareng Alier, who was kidnapped and forced into slavery at the age of twelve. Reports Alier: "I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised Ahmed. They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight." Alier has no idea of his family's whereabouts.22

  Another slave was Francis Bok, a Christian who was abducted in the late i98os from his home village and sold into slavery. He was seven years old at the time. "It was terrible," he recounted. "Men were killed, the women were raped. Everything happened in front of us. It was terrible." He was tied to the side of a donkey to be transported to the place of sale; two girls were tied to the other side. "The girls couldn't stop crying, so the men shot them. After that, I learned to be quiet." He was, as the American Anti-Slavery Group report indicates, beaten every day and called "abeed"-until, after ten years of this, he finally escaped."

  Muslims who grant that Islam's slaveholding record isn't pure have tried to mitigate their religion's bad name in this area by claiming that at least slavery in Islam has never been race-based: no Muslim slaveholder ever taught the execrable doctrine (once common in the West) that blacks were less than human, and therefore born to be slaves.

  Although slavery there was never restricted only to blacks, the Muslim world for centuries imported, captured and purchased black African slaves.24 In Islam, this racial element has not disappeared. According to CASMAS, black slavery persists in Mauritania to this day. "In ancient times slavery was common in Mauritania. It became part of armed conflict between ethnic or political groups. Slavery continued among these populations in Mauritania through the eighth century, coming under Islamic authority. From this point forward, only Black Africans have been enslaved in Mauritania." Nor is slavery an isolated problem. "Antislavery leader Bobacar Messaoud [Messaoud ould Boulkheir]," reports CASMAS, "estimate[s] that nearly half the population [of Mauritania] continues to be either enslaved or in slave-like relationships."25

  Some Muslims also argue that because the slave/master relationship is on the whole much freer, so to speak, than it was in the American South, slavery in Islam should not be tarred with the same moral brush. It is true that in Islam, slaves and masters often marry. They live together in the same house, and a slave may even be wealthier than his master. Slaves must be emancipated under a wide variety of conditions, enumerated in the Qur'an itself.

  BBC correspondent David Hecht traveled to Mauritania and found men married to their slaves and treating them with no undue harshness. "The slave/master relationship is a form of kinship," he explained. "Though slaves are mostly black Africans and masters or `Bidan' have more Arab Berber blood in them, they are all members of the same clans and in some cases the blacks are the chiefs."26 Hecht adds: "In Mauritania there are no plantations, no big mansions on top of the hill." Mauritania's relatively good treatment of slaves follows a Muslim tradition. Slaves in the House of Islam always enjoyed greater social mobility than they did in other cultures. Indeed, in the Mamluk ("possessed one," or "slave") dynasty that ruled Egypt and Syria from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, many rulers rose from slavery.

  There may be some truth to Hecht's analysis, although it provoked a furious response from the Mauritanian former slave and antislavery crusader Messaoud ould Boulkheir: "Freedom is not measured in terms of mansions or tents or in terms of sums of money in bank accounts. Freedom is much simpler and is so much more valuable than anything else."27 To suggest otherwise is to echo the arguments of slaveholding Southerners who observed before the Civil War that their slaves had it better than some free blacks in the North. Maybe they did. Yet the abolitionist imperative wasn't based on living conditions, but on a perception of the equality of men before their Creator.

  Of course, very few Muslim countries practice slavery today. Still, as long as it is explicitly sanctioned by the Qur'an and Islamic law, the possibility of slavery remains for any Muslim reformer who wants to enforce total obedience to Allah's Word and "pure" Islam. And this "pure" Islam w
ill continue to grow in influence as long as the crisis in the Muslim world persists. When all is not right in the House of Islam, Muslim militants can lay blame at the feet of moderates who have supposedly offended Allah, and thereby justify the call for a return to hard-line orthodoxy.

  The Quality of Mercy

  The Qur'an is as merciless toward Muslim wrongdoers as it is toward infidels. This is clear from even a cursory examination of the draconian penalties it metes out for various offenses. True, penalties of similar ferocity were not unknown for sinners in Christian Europe; but here again, Christian-based principles regarding the dignity of man ultimately mitigated such harshness. In Islam, however, these punishments are written by the Hand of Allah.

  The penalty for theft is well known: "As for the man or woman who is guilty of theft, cut off their hands to punish them for their crimes. That is the punishment enjoined by God. God is mighty and wise" (Sura 5:38). This is echoed in Islamic law (as reflected in Reliance of the Traveller), which stipulates that the thief's right hand be amputated (forcing the offender thereafter to eat with his left, which is also forbidden), provided that he "has reached puberty; is sane; is acting voluntarily," and steals a certain amount from a place that has taken reasonable security measures. The law also specifies that there must be "no possible confusion ... as to whether he took it by way of theft or for some other rea- son."28 Other limbs are to be amputated for further offenses.

  As for sexual immorality, "the adulterer and the adulteress shall each be given a hundred lashes. Let no pity for them cause you to disobey God, if you truly believe in God and the Last Day; and let their punishment be witnessed by a number of believers" (Sura 24:2). Reliance ofthe Traveller defines "those whose killing is unlawful" as not including "convicted married adulterers," as well as "non-Muslims at war with the Muslims, apostates from Islam," not to mention "pigs, and biting dogs."29 In addition to amputation and lashing, there is imprisonment within the home: "If any of your women commit fornication, call in four witnesses from among yourselves against them; if they testify to their guilt confine them to their houses till death overtakes them or till God finds another way for them" (Sura 4:15).

  Under pressure from strict Muslims, Pakistan adopted laws based on the Sharia in the late seventies. They reflected Islamic law's ferocity:

  Drinking was to be punished by eight stripes. The punishment for illicit sex, for an adult Muslim, was to "be stoned to death at a public place"; for a non-Muslim, a hundred-stripe public whipping, with the possibility of death for rape.30 "The punishment of stoning to death awarded under section 5 or section 6 shall be executed in the following manner namely: Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict as may be available shall start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped." For theft ... the punishment for a first offense was amputation-"carried out by an authorized medical officer"-of the right hand "from the joint of the wrist"' for a second offense, the amputation of the left foot "up to the ankle"; for a third offense, imprisonment for life.31

  The natural human tendency for mercy that God has implanted into the hearts of all people has prevented the letter of the law from being followed in all times and places. In fact, journalist Stephen Schwartz maintains that "for roughly i,ooo years" the letter of the Sharia on punishments like these has been mitigated: "The argument that intentions were more important than conduct, and that, therefore, a sinful act could be viewed as a product of human weakness requiring mercy rather than punishment, triumphed in traditional Islam a long time ago."

  There is some truth to this, even though Schwartz overstates the case when he says that "this is why today the stoning of adulterous women only exists in a minority of Muslim societies. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and `a few other places' no more represent the entire Muslim world than Arizona, Indiana, Idaho, and Texas represent the entire U.S."" Those nations, of course, are crucially important in the House of Islam precisely because of their universally acknowledged fidelity to Islamic principles. Moreover, violent Muslim groups today agitate for their vision of the purity of Islam not only in the countries that Schwartz mentions, but also in Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Kashmir-and, for that matter, the United States.33

  The larger problem, however, is that if this debate over the interpretation of the Sharia had really been "settled in Islam" a thousand years ago, how did Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the rest run off the moderate rails?

  They did so because the letter of the Qur'an, as well as the Sharia, constantly wars against moderating interpretations. Thus when the Ayatollah Khomeini's "Islamic judge," Ayatollah Khalkhalli, took power in Kurdistan after Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979, a bloodbath followed. Reports V. S. Naipaul:

  In no time, moving swiftly from place to place in the August heat, he had sentenced forty-five people to death. He had studied for thirty-five years and was never at a loss for an Islamic judgment. When in one Kurdish town the family of a prisoner complained that three of the prisoner's teeth had been removed and his eyes gouged out, Khalkhalli ordered a similar punishment for the torturer. Three of the man's teeth were torn out on the spot. The aggrieved family then relented, pardoned the offender, and let him keep his eyes.34

  The aggrieved family wasn't alone in its horrified reaction to such brutality. Throughout the House of Islam, the heart struggles against the harshness of these dictates. Naipaul reports that even in Iran, "just after the revolution there had been public whippings, as part of the revived Islamic way, but the effect on the public hadn't been good." The Iranian driver who chauffeured Naipaul during his days in Tehran explained that "people didn't like the man doing the whipping. It became hard on him afterwards."31

  Similarly, a recent Muslim translation of the Qur'an that inserts parenthetical explanatory phrases right into the text renders one of the pertinent verses this way: "Strike the fornicatress and adulteress and the fornicator and adulterer on the body of each one of them a hundred times. (This is the extreme limit,) ..."36 But if this cautionary note that the hundred lashes are an "extreme limit" is actually suggested by the Arabic text, it has been missed by other translators.

  Because they are founded on the Qur'an, these legal measures are not an exotic element of Muslim tradition, like the burning of heretics in medieval Christianity. On the contrary, they will forever be part of authentic Islam as long as the Qur'an is revered as the perfect Word of Allah. Harsh penalties are still very much in force wherever "pure" Islam holds sway, such as in Saudi Arabia, where, according to an Amnesty International report for 2000,

  At least 123 people were executed and there was an alarming increase in the number of amputations.... There were 34 reported cases of amputations during 2000, seven of which were cross amputations (of the right hand and left foot). Flogging continued to be frequently imposed for a wide range of offences. In August,'Abdel Mo'ti `Abdel Rahman Mohammad, an Egyptian national, was reported to have had his left eye surgically removed as punishment ordered by a court in Medina after he had been found guilty of throwing acid in the face of a compatriot and damaging his left eye.37

  This is the "pure Islam" of the Taliban, of Saudi Arabia, and of everywhere the Sharia holds sway-the Islam that cuts off the hands of thieves, crushes homosexuals under brick walls, stones adulterers and executes converts to Christianity. This is what Islam means in practice, as Naipaul put it in summing up the Islamic bona fides of Khomeini's Iran: "The government had ordered civil servants to break off every day and say their prayers. It had legislated for Koranic punishments like whipping and stoning to death. It was talking of levying a Koranic tax, to be paid out to the poor as alms" (emphasis added).38

  The Case of Nigeria

  In the ongoing and convulsive battle over the implementation of Islamic law in several states of Nigeria, Sharia supporters have assured Christian Nig
erians that separate, non-Islamic courts will be established for them. However, the fierce resistance to the Sharia they are putting up suggests that they may not consider this promise entirely genuine.

  Reliance of the Traveller provides a hint as to why. Within a series of precise regulations governing the conduct of non-Muslims living in Muslim lands, this manual of Shafi'i and Sunni orthodoxy dictates that Jews and Christians are to be punished "for committing adultery or theft, though not for drunkenness."39 It specifies that a thief's right hand should be amputated "whether he is a Muslim, non-Muslim subject of the Islamic state, or someone who has left Islam."40 (Of course, someone who has left Islam, according to the same legal corpus, also deserves the death penalty for apostasy.)

  Under Islamic law, non-Muslims living in Muslim lands are also governed by a quite specific set of rules, which we'll examine more closely later on. If the Sharia is to be implemented fully, then must not these laws be implemented for the non-Muslim minority as well?

  What's more, all over Nigeria the institution of the Sharia has been accompanied by violence. After all, as the Ayatollah Khomeini said, "Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword!"41 Nigerian Muslims have clashed repeatedly with Christians over the Sharia. In late December 2001, gunmen shot dead the Nigerian justice minister and attorney general, Bola Ige, who according to a Reuters report "appeared to be heading for a showdown with Muslim Sharia courts in Nigeria's north after threatening to intervene to save the life of a mother sentenced to death by stoning for having sex outside marriage. 1141