Arab Elites’ Racial Slavery Against Africans in Mauritania

“Over the years, the global focus and discourse on slavery has concentrated on the Trans-Atlantic trade that featured American and European merchants. One other trade has however remained largely ignored, and at times has even been treated as a taboo subject, despite being a key component of African history owing to the devastating impact it has had on the continent, its generations and its people’s way of life,” writes the Kenyan journalist Bob Koigi.

The Arab Muslim slave trade, also known as the trans-Saharan trade or Eastern slave trade, is noted as the longest slave trade, having occurred for more than 1,300 years while taking millions of Africans away from their continent to work in foreign lands in the most inhumane conditions.

Koigi further explains:

Male slaves would work as field workers or guards at the harems. To ensure that they never reproduced in case they got intimate with their fellow female slaves, the men and boys were castrated and made eunuchs in a brutal operation by which the majority would lose their lives in the process.

When Muslims conquered much of Africa, indigenous blacks were converted to Islam, either by sword or persuasion. Tragically, the Arab Islamic slavery of Africans is not a thing of the past. It is an ongoing human rights abuse prevalent in some African nations. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a country in northwest Africa, is one of the most pressing cases where racial slavery of Africans is widespread.

The Arabo-Berber rulers of Mauritania still enslave Africans. Blacks are wholly owned, may be given as wedding gifts or loaned out to friends.

Since its independence from France in 1960, Mauritania has been an Islamic republic. The Constitutional Charter of 1985 declares that Islam is the state religion and Sharia is the law of the land.

“Mauritania is consistently ranked as the worst place in the world for slavery, with tens of thousands still trapped in total servitude across the country,” reports Minority Rights Group.

Though slavery has been banned in Mauritania several times, the law has not been enforced and in reality, the practice persists.

The continued existence of the practice of slavery is one of the major problems in the country that causes social division and acrimony, says Minority Rights Group. Anti-slavery activists face harassment and imprisonment.

According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 32 in every thousand people were in modern slavery in Mauritania during 2021. In other words, 149,000 people experienced forced labor or forced marriage in Mauritania. In terms of the prevalence of modern slavery, Mauritania ranks 3rd globally and 2nd within Africa.

Slavery in Mauritania is racial, and descent based. While the enslavers are of Arab-Berber descent, most slaves are of ethnic African descent.

Almost all political and economic power is in the hands of the Arab-Berber elite, which means the majority of society (70%) remains significantly marginalized.

“Mauritania has the highest proportion of hereditary slavery of any country in the world,” writes Stephen J. King, Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

Mauritania has earned the title of slavery’s last stronghold due to the widespread existence of descent-based racial slavery in the country despite successive abolition decrees.

In practice, this is descent-based, chattel slavery that treats human beings as property, with violent enforcement. Modern slavery or “slave-like conditions” prevail for up to 500,000 more. Slavery in Mauritania is also a racial slavery.

Mauritania’s Arabic-speaking Arab-Berber elite, an exclusionary and predatory group that self-identifies as White (Bidan), ruthlessly dominates the country’s state and economy. They represent, at most, 30% of the population. The enslaved are Blacks from within Mauritania’s Arab-Islamic linguistic and cultural sphere (Black Arabs or Sudan).

Blacks freed from slavery, an institution that has lasted many centuries in Mauritania, are called Haratin (Haratin pl. Hartani, male, Hartania female).

Haratin and enslaved Blacks make up 40% of the population. Sometimes the term Haratin refers to both “slaves” and freed Black “slaves.”

In general, all Blacks in Mauritania are referred to as “Abd, ‘Abid” (slave, slaves).

According to the organization Open Doors, “the issue of slavery in the country, which is linked to ethnicity, has also contributed to persecution since proponents of slavery argue that it is sanctioned by Islam.”

According to the US State Department, “some defenders of slavery interpreted texts from the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, the predominant school of Islamic teaching in the country, as justifying the practice.”

The campaign against slavery has triggered a hostile reaction from Islamists in the country, notes Open Doors. “In the context of slavery and the prevalence of a caste system in Mauritania, the current situation is reinforced by and fused with religion [Islam]. Islamic clan leaders are intent on preserving ethnic-racial hierarchy and social order in the country.”

The history of Islam in Africa can be traced back to the early seventh century. It is the first continent that jihadist armies invaded from Southwestern Asia.

Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula during the early 600s CE. Shortly after the death of its prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, Muslim Arab armies began targeting Africa, Europe and Asia for their empire’s expansion. From the Atlantic Ocean through Egypt and Morocco, Islam became a dominant religion in North Africa by the early eighth century. During and in the aftermath of these jihadist campaigns, many Africans were massacred, forced to convert to Islam, or to become slaves.

Islam also arrived in Mauritania in the seventh century. The US State Department explains:

From the 3rd to 7th centuries, the migration of Berber tribes from North Africa displaced the Bafours, the original inhabitants of present-day Mauritania and the ancestors of the Soninke. Continued Arab-Berber migration drove indigenous black Africans south to the Senegal River or enslaved them. By 1076, Islamic warrior monks (Almoravid or Al Murabitun) completed the conquest of southern Mauritania, defeating the ancient Ghana empire. Over the next 500 years, Arabs overcame fierce Berber resistance to dominate Mauritania.

The Mauritanian Thirty-Year War (1644-74) was the unsuccessful final Berber effort to repel the Maqil Arab invaders led by the Beni Hassan tribe. The descendants of Beni Hassan warriors became the upper stratum of Moorish society. Berbers retained influence by producing the majority of the region’s Marabouts — those who preserve and teach Islamic tradition. Hassaniya, a mainly oral, Berber-influenced Arabic dialect that derives its name from the Beni Hassan tribe, became the dominant language among the largely nomadic population. Aristocrat and servant castes developed, yielding “white” (aristocracy) and “black” Moors (the enslaved indigenous class).

Tidiane N’Diaye, a Franco-Senegalese author and anthropologist, writes in his book “The Veiled Genocide”:

The Arabs raided sub-Saharan Africa for thirteen centuries without interruption. Most of the millions of men they deported have disappeared as a result of inhumane treatment. This painful page in the history of black people has apparently not been completely turned.

Liberty Mukomo, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies, explains:

The practice of castration on black male slaves in the most inhumane manner altered an entire generation as these men could not reproduce. The Arab masters sired children with the black female slaves. This devastation by the men saw those who survived committing suicide. This development explains the modern black Arabs who are still trapped by history.

Dr Andrew Bostom notes that the mass, ongoing chattel slavery of blacks by the ruling Arabo-Berber Muslims in Mauritania is an Islamic tradition:

From the advent of Islam, through the present era, Muhammad’s sacralized behaviors have engendered jihad chattel and sexual slavery on a massive scale.

Indeed, the enduring scale and scope of Islamic slavery in Africa exceeded the far better known Western trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. Quantitative estimates of 10.5 million have been calculated for the trans-Atlantic slave trade during the 16^th through the end of the 19^th century. Professor Ralph Austen’s working figure for the composite of the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean traffic generated by the Islamic slave trade out of Africa, from 650 through 1905, is 17 million. In addition, the horrific plight of those enslaved animist peoples drawn from the savannah and northern forest belts of western and central Africa for the trans-Saharan trade, equaled the sufferings experienced by the tragic victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade…

Modern historian Jan Hogendorn’s analysis of eunuch slavery notes that Islamdom, uniquely, captured these slaves via predatory raids on non-Muslim populations, alone—and then gelded them—whereas eunuch slaves in China were almost exclusively Chinese procured locally. Extending his assessment into the early 20^th century, Hogendorn adds that when sub-Saharan African blacks became the major source of eunuchs, undergoing simultaneous total removal of both testicles and the penis, death rates due to hemorrhage, sepsis, and renal failure, per French physician Richard Millant’s 1908 study, remained 90%.

Dr. Bostom also quotes the 14^th century North African Maliki jurist, and renowned Muslim historian-sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, and the eminent 15^th century Maliki legist al-Wansharisi.

Khaldun opined, ‘the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,’ while al-Wansharisi averred slavery was a justified affliction for those who did not abide Islam’s prophet or law, and thus warrant “humiliation”…

Mainstream, authoritative contemporary sanction for the persistence of chattel slavery in Mauritania, and ISIS’s jihad sex slavery, has been provided, respectively, by a leading Saudi government cleric, and author of the Kingdom’s Islamic religious education curriculum, and a female professor at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam. Saudi Sheik Al-Fawzan proclaimed in 2003, “Slavery is part of jihad and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.” Consistent with the call to put Mauritanian anti-slavery activist Abeid to death as an “apostate,” Al-Fawzan added those Muslims who contend Islam is against slavery should be declared apostates, citing Koran 4:89, which states, “But if they turn from Islam, take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them” — a verse whose classical and modern glosses sanction killing those Muslims who forsake Islam. During a September 12, 2014 television appearance discussing “fatwas,” Suad Saleh, a woman Professor of Theology at Al-Azhar, outlined the Islamic law concept of “those whom you own.” She maintained that Muslims who capture women in jihad wars may enslave them as property, and sexual objects,
“In order to humiliate them.”

Meanwhile, Biram Dah Abeid, an anti-slavery activist and politician from Mauritania, has exposed how Islamic scholars in his country are complicit in the ongoing, mass slavery. He founded the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA-Mauritania). On November 11, 2014, Abeid and 16 fellow activists were arrested while taking part in protests against ongoing impunity for slaveholders in the country.

Dr Bostom reported:

Intrepid Mauritanian anti-slavery activist Biram Abeid has openly condemned what he terms the majority of his country’s ulama—religious scholars—whose fatwas perpetuate the practice of Islamic slavery. At a protest rally in 2012, Abeid burned texts of Malik b. Anas, 8^th century founder of the Maliki school of jurisprudence—the predominant school of Sunni Muslim Islamic law in Mauritania—that upheld slavery and the brutal treatment of slaves. Perhaps Abeid destroyed Malik’s comment which decried a Muslim for breaking his “binding oath that he will beat his young slave and then not beat[ing] him.”

Abeid’s dramatic 2012 act of protest led to his arrest, amid a storm of demonstrations against him, with even Mauritania’s president, Mohamed Abdel Aziz, calling for Abeid to be judged per the Sharia, and killed as an apostate. Only after international pressure was Abeid spared execution, and released. However Abeid was arrested again for protesting the continued practice of Islamic slavery in Mauritania during November 2014.

In 2018, Abeid was released from prison after charges against him were withdrawn.

Throughout the centuries, millions of Africans are estimated to have been enslaved by Muslim Arabs. So why has there been so much silence, even censorship, surrounding this issue that has devastated an entire continent?

It is time for the international community to shed light on this most dehumanizing practice and help liberate the African slaves in Mauritania.

Uzay Bulut is a Turkey-born journalist formerly based in Ankara.