Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Paperback)
by Bernard Lewis (Author) "In 1842 the British Consul General in Morocco, as part of his government's worldwide endeavor to bring about the abolition of slavery or at least..."
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Book Description
From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions and others, examining the history of slavery in law, social thought, and practice over the last two millenia. With 24 rare and intriguing full-color illustrations, this fascinating study describes the Middle East's culture of slavery and the evolution of racial prejudice. Lewis demonstrates how nineteenth century Europeans mythologized the region as a racial utopia in debating American slavery. Islam, in fact, clearly teaches non-discrimination, but Lewis shows that prejudice often won out over pious sentiments, as he examines how Africans were treated, depicted, and thought of from antiquity to the twentieth century. "If my color were pink, women would love me/But the Lord has marred me with blackness," lamented a black slave poet in Arabia over a millennium ago--and Lewis deftly draws from these lines and others the nuances of racial relations over time. Islam, he finds, restricted enslavement and greatly improved the lot of slaves--who included, until the early twentieth century, some whites--while blacks occasionally rose to power and renown. But abuses ring throughout the written and visual record, from the horrors of capture to the castration and high mortality which, along with other causes, have left few blacks in many Middle Eastern lands, despite centuries of importing African slaves. Race and Slavery in the Middle East illuminates the legacy of slavery in the region where it lasted longest, from the days of warrior slaves and palace eunuchs and concubines to the final drive for abolition. Illustrated with outstanding reproductions of striking artwork, it casts a new light on this critical part of the world, and on the nature and interrelation of slavery and racial prejudice.

Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (Paperback)
by Ronald Segal (Author)

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Designed as a companion volume to Segal's The Black Diaspora, which traced the movements of blacks in the Western Hemisphere from the Atlantic slave trade to the present, this book undertakes the formidable task of recounting the dispersion of black Africans in Asia and the Middle East, most of which was forced by the Islamic slave trade. "In Islam, slavery was never the moral, political, and economic issue that it was in the West, so there are fewer sources about its history," notes Segal, the founding editor of the Penguin African Library and the author of 14 other books. Still, he pieces together a compelling drama of conquests and conversions, beginning with an illuminating chapter about the differences between the Atlantic and Islamic trades: the Islamic trade began some eight centuries before the Atlantic one, and preferred women slaves over men. His account then moves from early Islam, when laws did not subject slaves to any special racial discrimination, into the 19th century, when the process of enslaving blacks came to involve violence and brutality on a gigantic scale. Segal also discusses the extension of the Islamic trade into China, India and Spain, the role of the Ottoman Empire, slavery in Iran and Libya, and the effect of European colonization, which he argues "preserved the force if not the face of old subjugations." A preliminary dig in a little-explored area, this book has a rough-hewn quality about it; scholars may find it too general, even if it provides seeds for further study. General readers, however, will find much that is new, particularly in the early chapters, where Segal trains his eye on the part slaves played in the development of the high civilization attained by imperial Islam.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
Segal (The Black Diaspora: Five Centureis of the Black Experience Outside Africa), founding editor of the Penguin African Library, has written an overview of black slavery in the Islamic world from its beginnings to modern Sudan and Morocco. Relying primarily on secondary sources, the author explores Islamic slavery in China, India, the Middle East, and Africa and focuses on the differences between Islamic and Western slavery. He notes that while most slaves in the Americas were male and worked as agricultural laborers, in Islam female black slaves outnumbered males, and most slaves worked as servants. Segal concludes his study with an interesting epilog on the Black Muslim faith in the United States. Though it breaks little new ground, this book is an essential survey that serves as a helpful introduction to the topic. Recommended for public and academic libraries.DA.O. Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Barnett: China's males: looking for war in all the wrong places

By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, tom@thomaspmbarnett.com
March 11, 2007

Strategists prefer to project, futurists love to extrapolate, and demographers will tell you their data are pure destiny. But, just like history, the future tends to repeat itself by consistently delaying our dreams (my long-overdue flying car) while constantly denying our doomsdays (remember overpopulation or the impending ice age?).
Humanity confounds us prognosticators primarily by being so inventively responsive to all the grand challenges that we so deterministically throw its way. Nowhere will we witness such innovation more in coming decades than in China, slated by confident futurists - take your pick - for both world domination and suicidal self-destruction.

I'm going way out on a limb here and predicting that China will neither rule the world nor self-immolate but simply grow stronger while growing more open, both out of necessity (connectivity requires code) and fundamental confidence (rising income does that).

Internally, China faces many formidable challenges and will somehow manage them all, finessing each in that manner we so often describe as "inscrutable."

That doesn't mean bad things won't happen to China because they will. It just means China will muddle through where it must and break through where it can.

Let me give you an example.

In Chinese society, there is a growing and historically large imbalance between males and females caused by the government's successful efforts to slow down population growth through the one-child policy.

This is not surprising, given that most of China is still rural and such traditional communities favor boys over girls for their labor capacity.

Over time, demographers predict that China will face upwards of 40 million males unable to find mates.

This has led some Western academics to boldly predict the increased likelihood of Chinese military aggression as the government is forced to "burn off" all those excess males through wars of conquest. If not, internal tumult must surely follow.

Here are four solid reasons why that feared scenario will not come to pass.

First, China becomes majority urban sometime around 2020.

As part of that historic shift (the country is undergoing the biggest migration in human history), women will delay both marriage and childbirth.

This will create a two-fold effect: (1) The preference for boys will wane (in modern societies, females are far more likely to care for aging parents) and (2) increased infertility will push desperate couples toward adoption, inevitably choking off China's current flow of baby girls put up for international adoption (the restrictions on which are already tightening).

Second, a number of the excess males will be long gone before this predicted crisis can unfold. The bulk would logically be found in the rural countryside, except many won't.

A certain portion will disappear into urban centers for better jobs and better lives (more on that next), while the truly desperate will simply vanish, sneaking out of the country as economic refugees, invariably to nations without such a sex imbalance. So where there's a will, there's always a way.

Third, overseas tourism is booming in China - both inward and outward. It's predicted that, by 2020, as many as 100 million middle-class and above Chinese travelers will annually venture outside. So, yeah, many of these lonely guys will travel abroad and you know marry abroad.

Just up and marry a foreigner? Certainly we can't expect xenophobic Chinese males to sink so low?

Well, middle-aged Tokyo salaried men, unable to find partners their age, are already doing just that, with their tastes running toward imported Chinese brides (not exactly helpful). Ditto for surplus bachelors in South Korea, except they're going for Vietnamese weddings. Such foreign affairs now account for one out of seven new marriages in South Korea - no longer the "hermit kingdom."

Finally, as for those Chinese males who simply cannot get lucky, there still stands the Confucian responsibility of caring for the elderly. So today's "little emperors," as spoiled single sons are derisively called, become tomorrow's heavily burdened caregivers.

The Chinese call this scenario the 4-2-1 problem - as in, four grandparents, two parents and just one son to support them all in their retirement.

You want a real tragedy? Look at all the elders left to fend for themselves in the countryside in coming years, more than 150 million without much of a safety net.

Will that unfolding tragedy then lead to China's downfall?

Hmm, that is a column for another day.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

From www.danielpipes.org | Original blog posting available at: www.danielpipes.org/blog/324

Daniel Pipes' Weblog
Reuel Gerecht: Militant Islam is the Answer?
September 12, 2004

I have admired the writings of Reuel Gerecht since he first surfaced as the pseudonymous Edward Shirley, praising his 1997 book, Know Thine Enemy, as a "quite brilliant spy's report." But even there I disagreed with his policy conclusions and I do again these days.

Gerecht has been quoted two days running in the Washington Post on the way the United States can defeat its enemies:

Sept. 11: "Bin Laden-ism can only be gutted by fundamentalists" such as the Muslim Brethren, he said. As U.S. officials promote democracy in Muslim countries, "it's inevitable the U.S. will engage the fundamentalists" because of their popularity in those societies.

Sept. 12: "It's hard to hand over individual authority to people who are illiberal. What you have to realize is that the objective is to defeat bin Ladenism and you have to start the evolution. Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s." Transitions away from authoritarian regimes are messy and volatile but "Let it roll," Gerecht says.

Don't walk away. It's part of the process. It's trying to ensure the system is sufficiently open that fundamentalists burn themselves out. You have to rob bin Ladenism of that virulent elixir. If we don't go in that direction, we know all other roads go back to 9/11. You want in a Machiavellian way to have fundamentalists do the dirty work. You want them to take care of the people who slaughtered the children [in Beslan, Russia]. The only way to do that is to have them compete in the political system. It may come off the rails for a while in some places, but even if it does, you will be better off. You don't want fundamentalists to take states by coups d'êtat.

This is, from my perspective, a curious and unsatisfactory analysis, especially the statement that "Moderate Muslims are not the answer."

My signature statement since 9/11 has been that "Militant Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution." To which Gerecht effectively replies "Militant Islam is the problem and militant Islam is the solution," with a less extreme form defeating the more extreme form. This brings to mind the ideas of David F. Forte that won brief attention in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and to which my reply works for Gerecht's analysis as well:

Whereas Professor Forte sees the problem as a small group of active terrorists in al Qaeda; I see the entire fundamentalist movement constituting the problem. … To me, every fundamentalist Muslim, no matter how peaceable in his own behavior, is part of a murderous movement and is thus, in some fashion, a foot soldier in the war that bin Laden has launched against civilization. …

This difference between Professor Forte's and my views has immense policy implications. He can cheerfully advise Washington to work with the huge majority of Muslims to isolate a tiny fringe of violent ideologues. I grimly tell the policymakers that the problem is not just the miniscule element he points to but the much larger one of fundamentalists, which I estimate at 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim population.

In response to the above critique, Gerecht writes me that he has prepared a 20,000-words analysis of this very issue, with the working title "The Islamic Paradox." He also notes that he does not believe in "engaging" fundamentalists, even though the Sept. 11 quote in the Post suggests that. "Fundamentalists are not pragmatists, at least not in that sense." (September 12, 2004)

June 23, 2005 update: I wrote a column today in response to that 20,000-word analysis today at "Radical Islam as Its Own Antidote."

From www.danielpipes.org | Original blog posting available at: www.danielpipes.org/blog/324

March 11, 2007

Taliban Threaten to Kill Italian Journalist: Report
By REUTERS
Filed at 4:04 a.m. ET

KABUL (Reuters) - A senior Taliban commander has threatened to kill an Italian reporter accused of spying if the Italian government does not meet the group's demands, a Pakistan-based news agency reported.

In return for the release of La Repubblica journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, the Taliban have demanded the withdrawal of Italian troops from Afghanistan and the release of three Taliban spokesmen.

Mullah Dadullah, a Taliban commander whose fighters are believed to be holding the Italian, said they would kill Mastrogiacomo if the demands were not met by Friday.

``If our demands aren't met, we'll slaughter the journalist on the seventh day from today,'' Dadullah told private Afghan Islamic Press on Saturday.

The Taliban earlier said they would release Mastrogiacomo, held on Monday on charges of spying for British troops, if he proved his innocence.

But a Taliban spokesman later said they had changed their mind after Italian lower house of parliament on Thursday voted in favor of keeping 1,900 Italian troops in Afghanistan.

The Taliban often execute Afghans they accuse of spying, hanging or shooting them in the head or slitting their throats.

The Italian government has called on the kidnappers to provide evidence that Mastrogiacomo is alive before any talks for his release can start.

Mastrogiacomo was picked up in the lawless southern province of Helmand on Monday along with two Afghan colleagues. The Taliban said he had confessed to spying for British troops.

La Repubblica denied the reporter was a spy and said the Karachi-born man had been writing for them since 1980 and had been reporting from Afghanistan since February 28.

Italian journalist Gabriele Torsello was kidnapped in Helmand in October and held for three weeks before being released unharmed.

A crew working for al Jazeera television -- three Afghans and a Briton -- were held overnight last month while traveling from neighboring Kandahar to Helmand.

Copyright 2007 Reuters Ltd.