It was inevitable that the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would denounce America for its “racism” – meaning, as far as he was concerned, the entire country should be held responsible for the actions of four policemen, one of whom (according to the autopsy, accidentally) asphyxiated a black man they were attempting to subdue.
The story of Khamenei’s exaggerated and highly selective outrage is at the Jerusalem Post:
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded to the US race protests, tweeting that “if you’re dark-skinned walking in the US, you can’t be sure you’ll be alive in the next few minutes.”
In a tweet appealing to the American Left, Khamenei spoke about the US economic issues and the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd who was choked to death by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“Slavery, said Khamenei, “is one of the tragic events in history. They used to sail ships from the Atlantic Ocean and anchor on the coast of West African countries, such as Gambia and other countries on the continent.”
The Ayatollah seems only to know about the transatlantic slave trade, from Africa to the Americas. He completely ignores the slave trade conducted by Muslim Arabs in East and Central Africa. This slave trade consisted of Arab slavers seizing blacks in the bush and bringing them by slave coffle and then dhow to the Islamic slave markets in Jiddah, Muscat, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and other cities. This Islamic Slave Trade began long before, and ended long after, and claimed many more victims, than the Atlantic Slave Trade that the Supreme Leader focuses on exclusively.
Slavery is part of Islam. Muhammad himself bought, sold, and owned slaves. Since Muhammad was the Perfect Man, and the Model of Conduct, it was impossible to denounce a practice that he clearly engaged in himself. Thus there were no Arab abolitionists, no Muslim William Wilberforces. It was Western pressure that ended Arab slavery. It was the Royal Navy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century patrolled the coasts of Arabia and intercepted dhows carrying slaves. Slavery continued to exist, however, in several Muslim Arab countries in the Middle East until well into the 20th century. And in several African states, even now hundreds of thousands of black slaves have Arab masters.
It was only in 1962 that slavery was officially abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen – and only under terrific Western pressure. Just before abolition, there were half a million black slaves in Saudi Arabia. Despite that abolition, there are still black Africans held in “slave-like conditions,” even if slavery no longer exists officially, in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and some of the sheikdoms of the Gulf. In the Sudan, northern Arabs continued to enslave southern blacks, especially during the Second Sudanese Civil War, until that war ended in 2005, when as many as 200,000 black Africans were finally released from slavery. Arabs continue to this day to keep 600,000 black slaves in Mauritania, 200,000 in Mali, and 43,000 in Niger.
The Arab slave trade was particularly gruesome, for much of it involved castrating black boys in the bush, with the most primitive of implements, in order to supply eunuchs for the Muslim harems. Many of the boys died during the surgery; many others died in the days afterwards from infections, or during the long trek by land and sea to the slave markets of Islam.
The historian Jan Hogedoorn, in his study of what he called The Hideous Trade, estimated the mortality rate for those castrated slaves as high as 80-90%, meaning only 10-20% of those African boys originally seized arrived alive at the slave markets. While the consensus estimate of 28 million black Africans who made it to the Islamic slave markets at first sounds like a lot, over 1300 years (650-1950 A.D.) this amounts to an average of a little more than 20,000 black slaves brought annually from Central and East Africa all the way to those slave markets, which is perfectly plausible.
Assuming, then, the lowest mortality rates for both the castrated boys (80%), and the women and children (20%) enslaved, we arrive at a figure of 68 million Africans originally seized by Arab slavers.
Now compare this with the Atlantic Slave Trade. Between 1525 and 1866, that is the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of those, 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage, to disembark in South America, the Caribbean, and North America. In the Atlantic Slave Trade, no boys were castrated – the slaves were intended for agricultural use – and the mortality rate, for the Middle Passage (the trip across the Atlantic) was far lower, from 10-15%. Nor did slaves in the Atlantic slave trade have to suffer a long trek across the Sahara, or from Central Africa to the Indian Ocean, as did the victims of the Arab slave trade.
This means that the Muslim Arab slave trade involved almost five times as many Africans — 68 million instead of 12.5 million — as did the Atlantic Slave Trade.
The slavers were Arabs, but the slaves they brought from Africa to market were sold not just in Arab lands, but also in Ottoman Turkey, and in Iran. Black slavery in Iran began even before the Islamic era, and continued until the early 20th century. Ayatollah Khamenei surely knows the history of these black slaves of Iranian masters. Why did he not take the occasion, even while deploring the hated American “racists,” to do the handsome thing and deeply, sincerely apologize for the past practice of slavery in Iran?
Instead, we do not hear a syllable of sorrow or remorse from Iran’s Supreme Leader, about the slave trade conducted by, and for Muslims, or about the African slaves held in Iran itself.
It is not just the Arab slave trade that deserves to be more widely known; Arabs and Muslims have been remarkably successful in keeping information about that trade from much of the world. We also need to make known the full extent of Arab (and Islamic) racism.