150 of 179 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
who is this guy ?, February 23, 2001
This review is from: Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (Hardcover)
Christian societies were responsible for an engagement to slavery in its most hideous, dehumanizing form. ... Islam has been, by specific spiritual precept and in common practice, relatively humane in its treatment of slaves and its readiness to free them... -Ronald Segal, Author's Preface to Islam's Black Slaves
This truly odd book details the horrors of the enslavement of black Africans in the Islamic world--a traffic in human beings which equaled in volume that of the better known Atlantic slave trade (totaling some 11 million blacks in each case), and which continues to this day, particularly in places like the Sudan--but at the same time seeks to differentiate Islam's treatment of slaves, which is portrayed as relatively enlightened and beneficent, from the harsher treatment of blacks, both slave and free, in the West. Though I had trouble finding much biographical information on Segal, his motivation in this exercise appears to be twofold. First, there's the simple necessity to explain, not merely the absence of racial tension in the modern Islamic world, but also the absence of blacks : where, after all, did the 11 million go ? Why is there no conspicuous black culture in the Middle East ? Second, based on the admittedly sketchy evidence I could find : that Segal, a white South African, was a significant player in the ANC in the late 50s & early 60s and that his prior books include a biography of Trotsky and Race War, which apparently predicted such a war in America, it seems safe to assume that, if not a Marxist, he is at least a Leftist, which would tend to suggest that his exoneration of Islam may be intended to indict the West.
In presenting the history of the African slave trade, Segal perforce has to concede the thorough involvement of Arabs in the capture, sale and transport of black Africans. Likewise, he acknowledges that the Islamic world did make just as extensive use of black slaves as did the West. But he differentiates the treatment of blacks by Muslim captors, suggesting several religious bases for it :
* Islam's unique blend of the religious and the political into a unitary system mitigated against the development of capitalist economies, so that blacks tended to be used in households rather than in heavy manual labor.
* The Koran specifically commands Muslims to treat slaves well and offers inducements in the next world to those who free their slaves.
* While the gender ratio of slaves imported to the West was 2-1 male to female, the exact opposite was true in the Islamic world. This high ratio of household female slaves and a tradition of polygamy and concubinage, led to the use of blacks as sex objects, and in the absence of systemic racism and theories of racial superiority, mixed race offspring tended to be accepted into the household and the subsequent freeing of the children's mothers.
These factors account for the milder treatment of blacks and, in part, for their assimilation into Islamic society. Several other factors help to account for the disappearance of a distinct black populace :
* Males slaves were frequently turned into eunuchs--so obviously they had no offspring.
* Many of the rest were used as soldiers, with resulting low survival rates.
* For unexplained reasons, African slave women imported to the Islamic states had extraordinarily low fertility rates.
* Mortality rates among Islam's black slaves were extremely high, from adverse treatment, disease, and other causes.
In the end, Segal suggests, a combination of death, infertility (naturally occurring and man made) and miscegenation must account for the disappearance of blacks and blackness from the Islamic Middle East.
This brings us to an intriguing question : does the absence of racial tension in the Islamic world necessarily indicate that the experience of black Africans was in fact less horrific than in the West ? Segal kind of glides past the rather important fact that using blacks for sex (heterosexual and homosexual, which he says was prevalent) and making them eunuchs constituted physical assault on a rather massive scale. Nowhere does he refer to the sexual practices as what they really were : rape. Nor is it possible to figure out why he considers the systematic neutering of black males to be less objectionable than the forced physical labor of the American South. The key sentence in the book may be the following :
While slavery in the West was directed to the productive economy, in the Ottoman Empire it was a form of consumption.
I recognize that to some people the worst fate possible is to be treated as a mere cog in the means of production, but I'm uncertain that most of us would agree with Segal that it is better to be an object for consumption. At the point where you have to debate whether cotton picking or sexual degradation was more dehumanizing, I think it's safest to admit that both Islam and the West were responsible for monstrous treatment of innocent peoples and leave it at that.
The secondary issue which arises is : given a choice, and it is admittedly an awful choice, would people choose the suffering they underwent in the West, but emergence with the vibrant and vital black culture we see in America today; or the complete (forced) assimilation that took place in the Islamic world with the resulting annihilation of the race as a race ? I'd suggest the answer to this is very much a subject for debate. We pay frequent lip service to the idea of creating a color blind society, but we all cling pretty fiercely to our respective ethnic heritages. And it's not like you hear Arabs celebrating the fact that they are the product of extensive racial intermingling. The modern Islamic world may very well be to a significant degree the product of those 11 million black slaves, but if it is, they are awfully quiet about that fact, which does not suggest such an enlightened attitude.
It is also difficult to reconcile the continuing Islamic slave trade with the idea of enlightenment. Segal discusses the ongoing traffic in human beings that is occurring even today in places like the Sudan--A. M. Rosenthal wrote a piece for the NY Times several years ago in which he said that there are still tens of thousands of slaves in the Sudan. We have to acknowledge that racial violence continues in the United States, but such incidents are isolated and are met with society wide outrage, Even if, for the sake of argument, we concede that plantation-style slavery was more oppressive for blacks than Islamic slavery, the Christian world would certainly seem to be winning the comparison now, and for the last few decades, at least.
As to Segal's motivation, I can only point to a couple of cryptic remarks as evidence of my theory that he is driven by a dislike of the West. At one point he characterizes the Western economic system as "an ultimate totalitarianism of money" and he elsewhere speaks of capitalism as "the effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit." These assessments, and several similar, and the general tone of the book, betray a general hostility to the organizing principles of Western society. This makes his conclusions about the mild nature of Islamic slavery at least somewhat suspect.
Finally, the book concludes with an epilogue which borders on being a non sequitir, but which actually relates back to several problems with the book; in it he discusses America's Nation of Islam movement. As a threshold matter, it's amusing that this distinctive black Islamic culture resides here, in the evil West, and not in the munificent East. But the real gist of this section of the book is a bizarre harkening back to Segal's prediction of coming race war. He excuses the racism of Black Muslim's as justified by white racism and the anti-Semitism as a mere learned behavior, taken from anti-Semitic whites :
What rage, resentment, and revenge have developed in the Black Muslim movement is a racism to confront racism.
Segal also uses some statistics about the U. S. justice system to conclude that America remains a deeply divided and racist society, one which needs to listen to Louis Farrakhan's message about "the reality of racism." In a few short pages, he manages to wildly overestimate both the problem of race in America and the importance of the Nation of Islam to such a degree that it calls into question his authority on the other topics he's discussed.
In the final analysis, though he has an important and unfairly ignored story to tell, Segal is just too unreliable a narrator to be taken seriously. Having gotten so many of the big issues wrong, how can the reader trust him on the smaller one ? There's probably a good book to be made out of these raw materials : this is not it.
GRADE : D
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Important But Ultimately Unsatisfying, September 8, 2001
This review is from: Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (Hardcover)
Segal has done an impressive job of marshalling important and relatively unknown facts about the eastern slave trade. Unfortunately, he never seems to go anywhere with these facts, or suggest what we are to make of them.
The facts are that Islamic Arabs and Africans ran a significant slave trade for many centuries throughout the Mediterranean, North and East Africa, Arabia, the Middle East, and Northern India. Muslim masters possibly treated their slaves "better" on average than American or other Western colonial masters did, although this seems to have had less to do with religion than with the purposes for which slaves were employed -- as domestics, soldiers and business assistants in the Islamic world, as opposed to agricultural laborers in the West. The process of enslavement was just as cruel, however, whether the destination was the Eastern slave markets or the Atlantic trade. Islam accepted slavery as a fact of life for conquered non-believers (ignoring the fact that many of those enslaved were in fact Muslims) and therefore perhaps had less need than the Christian West to invent a demeaning racist mythology to justify continuing slavery. (As the title indicates, Segal is interested in *black* slaves, and therefore largely ignores the substantial number of Eastern European and Middle Asiatic slaves who were "employed" in the Ottoman and some other Muslim states.) Neverthless, racism did eventually enter the Islamic world, with effects (and slavery) that can still be seen today in places like Sudan and Mauritania.
What should we learn from these facts? The book's title suggests that it is in some way a commentary on Islam, but that point is never really developed in the text. In early chapters, Segal suggests that slavery in the Islamic world was less racially charged than in the West -- but a great deal of his book, particularly the later chapters addressing the contemporary situation in Sudan and Mauritania, contradicts that view. The history of Islamic African and Arab slavery undoubtedly explains a great deal about contemporary issues in Africa and the Middle East, yet the book is too short to really draw out these connections. As others have noted, the final chapter on America's black Muslim movement seems to have little connection with the rest of the book, other than to point out that the Nation of Islam's racist attitude toward whites is incompatible with the Koran (as, of course, is Arab racism toward blacks, and just as white racism is incompatible with Christian doctrine). In sum, lots of information, but little meaningful analysis.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but not a gripping narrative, May 30, 2002
Considering the amount of ink that's been spent on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade, the lack of writing on the Islamic trade is remarkable, so this book certainly fills a gap. There's always going to be that problem though - especially since Sep 11 - about Westerners writing about Islam. We all know about the dangers of orientalism.
Segal is certainly aware of this, and makes it clear that he regards the Atlantic trade as worse than the Islamic trade, citing the generally more systematic racism by the Europeans, and the greater possibilty of assimilation by the Arabs. Unfortunately the result of this determination not to be seen to be orientalist is to make the whole account rather bloodless. We're treated to a dry summation of the facts, with little to tie them together or, frankly, to make them very interesting. It's only in the concluding chapters, dealing with the trade in the nineteenth century, and particularly in the twentieth century, that Segal's account takes off, as, at last freed from looking back over his shoulder at comparable Western crimes, he manages to summon some indignation, and the true horror of slavery becomes clear.
I have to confess that Segal's insistence - at regular intervals - that the Islamic trade was in some ways less horrendous than the Atlantic trade became counter-productive in my case. Was it really that much better? The numbers involved are, as far as anyone can tell, of a similar order of magnitude. The actual transportation, and the treatment of the slaves en route, was equally appalling in both cases. The major difference was to do with the eventual use of the slaves - for domestic or sexual services leading to a predominance of female slaves in the case of the Islamic trade, against the plantation slavery in the West, leading to a predominance of male slaves. In the case of Islam, of course, a significant proportion of the males were castrated, which as Segal makes all too clear as often as not involved slicing off - how shall I put this? - the whole works. Lovely. But these eunuchs could then go on to assume important positions in Islamic society. So that's alright then! I just wonder what the reaction would be if it had been the Europeans who'd done the castrating and concubinage on a regular basis: imagine the outrage, the denunciations of this institutional genital mutilation, this institutional rape, not to mention the library-loads of books there'd be on the psychosexual significance of white males castrating black males and taking black females as concubines.
Ah well......I look forward to the slew of books forthcoming from Islamic scholars on the evils of slavery as practised by their societies, and how we all owe a debt of gratitude to the West for putting an end to this ghastly trade. But then again, maybe I'll have a long wait.
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