Jihad Slavery

Thursday, October 23rd, 2003

Jihad Slavery describes an episode from the modern slave trade in Sudan:

That day, the Catholic boy nicknamed Piol, for rain, lost his childhood and world to the murahaliin. After torching the nearby villages and slaying their inhabitants, 20 light-skinned Juur horsemen charged into Nyamlell. They severed the heads of all Dinka men with single sword strokes, left them rolling in the blood-soaked market dust and stole off Piol’s older friends Abuk, Kwol and Nyabol in different directions. A rifleman permanently silenced a crying girl with a bullet to her head. A swordsman more “mercifully” sliced off her sister’s leg at the thigh like the branch of a small tree. Francis tried to flee. Terror squelched his cries. He was halted at gunpoint, grabbed and slung astride a small saddle, crafted specifically to carry abducted children, and ridden far north.

This is not a new phenomenon of course.

Islam captured and enslaved probably millions of children — under the Seljuks and Ottomans, over 500 years, in Greece, Serbia, North Africa, India and over 1,400 years of Islamic history wherever Islam reigned. This would explain the surreal quality reverberating through this moving Drina passage:
It was already the sixth year since the last collection of this tribute of blood, and so this time the choice had been easy and rich; The necessary number of healthy, bright and good looking lads between ten and fifteen years old had been found without difficulty, even though many parents had hidden their children in the forest, taught them how to appear half-witted, clothed them in rags and let them get filthy, to avoid the aga’s choice. Some went so far as to maim their own children, cutting off one of their fingers with an ax….A little way behind the last horses in that strange convoy straggled, disheveled and exhausted, many parents and relatives of those children who were being carried away forever to a foreign world, where they would be circumcised, become Turkish, and forgetting their faith, their country and their origin, would pass their lives in the ranks of the janissaries or in some other, higher, service of the Empire. They were for the most part women, mothers, grandmothers and sisters of the stolen children. When they came too close, the aga’s horsemen would drive them away with whips, urging their horses at them with loud cries to Allah….. The mothers were especially persistent and hard to restrain. Some would rush forward not looking where they were going with bare breasts and disheveled hair, forgetting everything about them, wailing and lamenting as at a burial, while others almost out of their minds moaned as if their wounds were being torn by birth pangs, and blinded with tears, ran right onto the horsemen’s whips and replied to every blow with the fruitless question: “Where are you taking him? Why are you taking him from me?”

Where many went, their mothers would not like to have known: Throughout Islamic history, boys’ darkest use was as eunuchs. Islamic trade in castrated male slaves persisted until Europe pressured the Ottomans to stop in the 19th century. But from the 8th century onward, writes historian Jan Hagendorn, supplies came from “foreigners,” stolen and forced under the knife at long distances from their final markets — to limit transportation costs to the 10% or so who survived.

“Exports” came primarily from central and eastern European forest areas the Muslims called “Bilad as-Saqaaliba,” (or “slave country,”); central Asian steppes called “Bilad al-Attak” (or “Turks’ country,”); and eventually, most prominently, savannahs and wooded fringes south of the Sahara, called country of the blacks or “Bilad as-Sudan.”

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