Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

THE BLACK SLAVERY HOLOCAUST WITHIN TODAY’S ISLAMOPHOBIA

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/the-black-slavery-holocaust-within-todays-islamophobia-ac3b4b0f4ce0

Four books, four reviews, only one perspective here: our Islamophobic world is trying to erase or hide the Trans-Atlantic slavetrade by developing the practice under the control of Islam, starting then in the 7th century. But slavery started with the development of agriculture around 12-10,000 BCE, little before, none before the Ice Age Peak (19,000 BCE). Why? The scapegoat policy so common in the West is becoming the scape-Muslim, at times reduced to scape-Arab, hatred.

THE BOOKS:

Ronald Segal – Islam’s Black Slaves, The Other Diaspora – Farrar, Strauss And Giroux, New York, 2001,

Post Traumatic Slave/Slavery Syndrome/Disorder

Murray Gordon – Slavery In The Arab World – 1987 – 1989

Jacques Heers – Les Negriers En Terre D’islam, Viième-Xvième Siecle– Perrin 2003-2007

Short conclusions.

   

As a conclusion I could say the shortcomings of the book are the result of the very object it targets that locks the author up in a historical period and a geographical zone that do not enable the capture of the subject from a global point of view, and particularly in an historical perspective that does not retrospectively project our own values and ideas onto the past. We cannot judge the inhumane practices of the previous centuries with the supposedly humane values of our own time. That kills the historical perspective we need to understand how humanity came to invent such evils and how humankind has managed to get mostly out of them. The book though cannot be considered as anti-Islam, though by locking its subject into the sole case of Islam, it my appear as such. It is absolutely indispensable to widen the approach and consider slavery is an invention and practice that was universal at some time and that was customarily used by all societies, no matter which, in various and varied forms.

   

And the Black descendants in the United States of African slaves in America are blazing the trail and showing the way. And we can easily think of Post Traumatic Colonial Syndrome/Disorder, or Post Traumatic Feudal Syndrome/Disorder, or Post Traumatic Proletarian Syndrome/Disorder, or any other Post Traumatic Syndrome/Disorder after any traumatic even in the history of the world, a country, or a collective human entity.

   

He could have shown the enormous improvement, but he could have shown that the status of these colonized people was closer to that of serfs in medieval times, hence it was some kind of feudalism, and it is this feudalism that explains the failure of colonization, along with the inerasable traces and wounds of the millennia of slave trade for outside countries and slavery in the local countries. That would of course have made relative the hypocrisy of all leaders of the Muslim countries that used slavery and the slave trade because the Europeans were just as hypocritical since it was their interest to stop the slave trade and slavery to develop colonial feudalism.

An important book though the circularity of its composition makes it difficult to read.

            

FOUR

. Cependant évitons de faire de l’Islam le centre d’une approche de l’esclavage dans l’humanité. Ce serait une erreur, qui plus est franchement raciste. Je ne dirai rien sur l’insistance sur le rôle de quelques Juifs dans ce livre concernant la pratique commerciale de l’esclavage. Il y eut des Juifs, comme il y eut aussi beaucoup d’autres personnes de toutes nationalités ou religions. Le fait que certains étaient juifs ne saurait être un argument contre les Juifs en général, ce qui relèverait de l’antisémitisme. Le livre n’est pas clair sur ce point.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Africa,  *  History of Slavery,  *  Colonialism,  *  Islamic Studies,  *  Hypocrisy

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 4:04 AM