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| "Slave Market" by Jean-Léon Gérôme |
Painted in France in 1866 and titled "Slave Market," the painting "shows a black, apparently Muslim slave trader displaying a naked young woman with much lighter skin to a group of men for examination," probably in North Africa.
Objectively speaking, the "Slave Market" painting in question portrays a reality that has played out countless times over the centuries: African and Middle Eastern Muslims have long targeted European women—so much so as to have enslaved millions of them over the centuries (as copiously documented in my recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, from which the following quotes and statistics are derived).
The Muslim demand for, in the words of one historian, "white-complexioned blondes, with straight hair and blue eyes," traces back to the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, who enticed his followers to wage jihad against neighboring Byzantium by citing its blonde ("yellow") women awaiting them as potential concubines.
For over a millennium afterwards, Islamic caliphates, emirates, and sultanates—of the Arab, Berber, Turkic, and Tatar variety—also coaxed their men to jihad on Europe by citing (and later sexually enslaving) its fair women. Accordingly, because the "Umayyads particularly valued blond or red-haired Franc or Galician women as sexual slaves," Dario Fernandez-Morera writes, "al-Andalus [Islamic Spain] became a center for the trade and distribution of slaves."
Indeed, the insatiable demand for fair women was such that, according to M.A. Khan, an Indian author and former Muslim, it is "impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade, because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world's unceasing demand for the prized white slaves" and "white sex-slaves." Emmet Scott goes further, arguing that "it was the caliphate's demand for European slaves that called forth the Viking phenomenon in the first place."
As for numbers, according to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, "between 1530 and 1780 [alone] there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast," that is, of North Africa, the telling setting of the painting. By 1541, "Algiers teemed with Christian captives [from Europe], and it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion."
With countless sexually enslaved European women—some seized from as far as Denmark and even Iceland—selling for the price of vegetables, little wonder that European observers by the late 1700s noted how "the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion."
Further underscoring the rapacious and relentless drive of the Muslim slave industry, consider this: The United States of America's first war—which it fought before it could even elect its first president—was against these same Islamic slavers. When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams asked Barbary's ambassador why his countrymen were enslaving American sailors, the "ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that ... it was their right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners."
The situation was arguably worse for Eastern Europeans; the slave markets of the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with Slavic flesh that children sold for pennies, "a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse." In Crimea, some three million Slavs were enslaved by the Ottomans' Muslim allies, the Tatars. "The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures," observed a seventeenth century Lithuanian.
Even the details of the "Slave Market" painting/poster, which depicts a nude and fair-skinned female slave being pawed at by potential buyers, echoes reality. Based on a twelfth-century document dealing with slave auctions in Cordoba, Muslim merchants "would put ointments on slave girls of a darker complexion to whiten their faces... ointments were placed on the face and body of black slaves to make them 'prettier.'" Then, the Muslim merchant "dresses them all in transparent clothes" and "tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish manner with the old men and with the timid men among the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire."
You will often, particularly online, hear people say something like this; the African slave trade was a ‘racist, white, patriarchal colonialist institution’, it was the white man’s hatred of the black man that fueled the slave trade.
Now, putting aside the fact that the word ‘slave’ developed from ‘Slav’, the white eastern Europeans who were taken as slaves so often their names became synonymous with the institution of slavery in Europe, this idea that the African slave trade was a ‘white, patriarchal, colonial institution’ is both ahistorical and ridiculous.
Did Colonialists engage in it? Yes. Did racists engage in it? Yes. Did white Europeans start the African slave trade? No.
Long before white Europeans engaged in the African slave trade, Muslims, and prior to that Arab slave traders were heavily involved in running Slaves to and from Africa.
The African slave trade, in all its various forms, existed long before England even existed as a nation, let alone set their sights on the evil trade. How long were these proto-Arabs involved in this trade before this passage? We cannot know, but here we have a clear indication that it has a long history in their culture.
Indeed, sadly this African slave trade still exists today, long after Colonial rule has been removed from the continent. With open slave markets in Libya and other parts of Africa. And we can safely predict, that sadly, it will probably go on for some time yet.
For most of early European history, various European people’s made slaves of each other. Greeks made slaves of other Greeks and non-Greeks, Romans of Thracians, Germans of Slavs, Romans of Celts and Gauls, etc, etc. But regarding our specific topic here, yes, Europeans, got involved in the evils of the African slave trade, and yes it corrupted us for a time. But we also put an end to it in the West.
[The Caldron Pool]
[For a deeper dive into the history of Barbary piracy, click HERE]
