Hencredible Casanova 
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RE: Demographic change in Europe
(09-07-2013 08:55 PM)Vronsky Wrote: (09-07-2013 11:33 AM)Hencredible Casanova Wrote: (09-07-2013 09:15 AM)mikado Wrote: After these decades, things started to get worse. Spreading the religion by violence, practizing slavery, they returned to their previous roots. They came in Africa, brutalized people and sold them ( this was far worse than the "classic" slave trade made by Europe).
Not even close.
Quote:Unlike the European slave trade, the Arab slave trade was not an important feature of Arab economies and it predominantly targeted women, who became members of harems and whose children were full heirs to their father's names, legacies and fortunes, without regard to their physical features. The enslaved were not bought and sold as chattel the way we understand the slave trade here, but were captured in warfare, or kidnapped outright and hauled across the Sahara.
Race was not a defining line and enslaved peoples were not locked into a single fate, but had opportunity for upward mobility though various means, including bearing children or conversion to Islam. No-one knows the true numbers of how many African women were enslaved by Arabs, but one need only look at ourselves to see the shadows of these African mothers who gave birth to us and lost their African identities.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion...07286.html
You can see in many Arabs varying types of looks that suggests ancestry from Africa and other parts of the world. Keep in mind Arabs also enslaved millions of people from Europe during the Arab Slave Trade. Slavery was a common feature in the Middle Ages during the expansion of Islam.
That article wants to simultaneously acknowledge the Arab slave trade of Africans while at the same time minimizing it, which is a pity as the Arab slave trade was brutal.
First of all Arab slave trade of Africans lasted 3 times as long as the Western one. 1300 years to 400 years. In places like Saudi Arabia, it only ended in the 1960s and that was due to pressure from the US and Britain. In places like Mauritania, Sudan, Dubai and the Gulf states it still exists in one form or another. Hell, even the Arabic word for "black" is the same as "slave".
During the Arab slave trade, millions of African men, the ones that did not die during the journey, were castrated to be eunuchs and the women were used for domestic service or as concubines.
Islam does condone slavery, although sects like the Sufis and the Druze (small sect found only in Lebanon and Syria) outright condemn it. The Wahabis and Salafists, who are the most fundamentalists (i.e. adhere to the letter of the Koran and the hadiths) don't have much of an issue with it because there are justifications and allowances for it in the religion, especially since Mohammed practiced slavery himself.
Mohammed traded in slaves and in his military conquests turned the defeated men into slaves (if not outright kill them) and the women into sex slaves. The expression "we have made lawful for you all those that your right hand possesses" is understood to enshrine the right for Muslim men to have sex with female slaves.
No doubt, the West was evil in setting up and trading in slaves. Although people would like to deny it, slavery contributed to the prosperity of the US and its position as a modern day powerhouse. Natchez, Mississippi was the wealthiest place in the entire US in 1860 with more millionaires per capita than any other place, all due to slavery and slave trading.
However, the West ALWAYS had vocal opponents to slavery and, due to the Enlightenment and Christianity (religion of slaves), had the morality and the capacity for self-reflection, including the economic acknowledgement that slavery kills enterprise, to end the practice of slavery.
Arabs barely acknowledge their slave trade and when they do, it is with a lot of equivocation and false equivalencies.
The principal takeaway from the Al Jazeera article - an Arab news organization (full disclosure) - is the bold parts of the following excerpt:
Quote:[the Arab slave trade] predominantly targeted women, who became members of harems andwhose children were full heirs to their father's names, legacies and fortunes, without regard to their physical features. The enslaved were not bought and sold as chattel the way we understand the slave trade here, but were captured in warfare, or kidnapped outright and hauled across the Sahara.
Race was not a defining line and enslaved peoples were not locked into a single fate, but had opportunity for upward mobility though various means, including bearing children or conversion to Islam. No-one knows the true numbers of how many African women were enslaved by Arabs, but one need only look at ourselves to see the shadows of these African mothers who gave birth to us and lost their African identities.
The word for slave in Arabic is (Abd or Abeed). It's irrespective of skin color and can refer to whites, blacks, etc. The word for black is Aswad.
As I've said, you can see the manifestations of the Arab slave trade legacy in the many shades, skin tones, hair textures of modern Arabs, particularly those in the Arabian peninsula and North Africa.
Prime example is a guy like Anwar Sadat, the former Egyptian President who famously made peace with the Israelis. Nubian roots (from Sudan) on his mother's side. Clearly a man with Sub-Saharan ancestry, yet still became president of the most populous and influential Arab nation.
![[Image: 090928030745_Anwar%20Sadat.jpg]](http://www.digtriad.com/images/640/360/2/assetpool/images/090928030745_Anwar%20Sadat.jpg)
The Prophet Muhammad even sent some his closest family members, including his daughter Ruqayya and her husband, to the Ethiopian Christian kingdom of Axum for protection when he was facing persecution from the Quraish clan (Axum had ruled over parts of Saudi Arabia and Yemen). Even after Axum's king passed away, Muhammad told his followers, "Leave the Abyssinians (Ethiopians) in peace, as long as they do not take the offensive." He was no doubt a military man and Islam was spread largely by the sword, but the effects of slavery in antiquity (which occurred everywhere in Africa, including by Africans) are not even a drop in the bucket to the modern day legacy of the transatlantic chattel slave trade.
The effect of the Atlantic slave trade was the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility which involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among people of today. It constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility.
In other words, it introduced the notion of race, which most scholars agree was a recent invention born after American slavery.
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04...-02-09.htm
Quote:ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF RACE
by Audrey Smedley
Anthropology Newsletter, November 1997
Contemporary scholars agree that "race" was a recent invention and that it was essentially a folk idea, not a product of scientific research and discovery. This is not new to anthropologists. Since the 1940s when Ashley Montagu argued against the use of the term "race" in science, a growing number of scholars in many disciplines have declared that the real meaning of race in American society has to do with social realities, quite distinct from physical variations in the human species. I argue that race was institutionalized beginning in the 18th century as a worldview, a set of culturally created attitudes and beliefs about human group differences.
Slavery and the Coming of Africans
Race and its ideology about human differences arose out of the context of African slavery. But many peoples throughout history have been enslaved without the imposition of racial ideology. When we look at 17th century colonial America before the enactment of laws legitimizing slavery only for Africans and their descendants (after 1660), several facts become clear.
1). The first people that the English tried to enslave and place on plantations were the Irish with whom they had had hostile relations since the 13th century.
2) Some Englishmen had proposed laws enslaving the poor in England and in the colonies to force them to work indefinitely.
3) Most of the slaves on English plantations in Barbados and Jamaica were Irish and Indians.
4) Many historians point out that African servants and bonded indentured white servants were treated much the same way. They often joined together, as in the case of Bacon's Rebellion (1676) to oppose the strict and oppressive laws of the colonial government.
In the latter part of the 17th century the demand for labor grew enormously. It had become clear that neither Irishmen nor Indians made good slaves. More than that, the real threats to social order were the poor freed whites who demanded lands and privileges that the upper class colonial governments refused. Some colonial leaders argued that turning to African labor provided a buffer against the masses of poor whites.
Until the 18th century the image of Africans was generally positive. They were farmers and cattle-breeders; they had industries, arts and crafts, governments and commerce. In addition, Africans had immunities to Old World diseases. They were better laborers and they had nowhere to escape to once transplanted to the New World. The colonists themselves came to believe that they could not survive without Africans.
When some Englishmen entered slave trading directly, it became clear that many of the English public had misgivings about slave-trading and re-creating slavery on English soil. It was an era when the ideals of equality, justice, democracy, and human rights were becoming dominant features of Western political philosophy. Those involved in the trade rationalized their actions by arguing that the Africans were heathens after all, and it was a Christian duty to save their souls. By the early part of the 18th century, the institution was fully established for Africans and their descendants. Large numbers of slaves flooded the southern colonies and even some northern ones. Sometimes they outnumbered whites, and the laws governing slavery became increasingly harsher.
A New Social Identity
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the image of Africans began to change dramatically. The major catalyst for this transformation was the rise of a powerful antislavery movement that expanded and strengthened during the Revolutionary Era both in Europe and in the United States. As a consequence proslavery forces found it necessary to develop new arguments for defending the institution. Focusing on physical differences, they turned to the notion of the natural inferiority of Africans and thus their God-given suitability for slavery. Such arguments became more frequent and strident from the end of the eighteenth century on, and the characterizations of Africans became more negative.
From here we see the structuring of the ideological components of "race." The term "race," which had been a classificatory term like "type," or "kind," but with ambiguous meaning, became more widely used in the eighteenth century, and crystallized into a distinct reference for Africans, Indians and Europeans. By focusing on the physical and status differences between the conquered and enslaved peoples, and Europeans, the emerging ideology linked the socio-political status and physical traits together and created a new form of social identity. Proslavery leaders among the colonists formulated a new ideology that merged all Europeans together, rich and poor, and fashioned a social system of ranked physically distinct groups. The model for "race" and "races" was the Great Chain of Being or Scale of Nature (Scala Naturae), a semi-scientific theory of a natural hierarchy of all living things, derived from classical Greek writings. The physical features of different groups became markers or symbols of their status on this scale, and thus justified their positions within the social system. Race ideology proclaimed that the social, spiritual, moral, and intellectual inequality of different groups was, like their physical traits, natural, innate, inherited, and unalterable.
Thus was created the only slave system in the world that became exclusively "racial." By limiting perpetual servitude to Africans and their descendants, colonists were proclaiming that blacks would forever be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. By keeping blacks, Indians and whites socially and spatially separated and enforcing endogamous mating, they were making sure that visible physical differences would be preserved as the premier insignia of unequal social statuses. From its inception separateness and inequality was what "race" was all about. The attributes of inferior race status came to be applied to free blacks as well as slaves. In this way, "race" was configured as an autonomous new mechanism of social differentiation that transcended the slave condition and persisted as a form of social identity long after slavery ended.
Humans as Property
American slavery was unique in another way; that is, how North American slave-owners resolved the age-old dilemma of all slave systems. Slaves are both persons and things----human beings and property. How do you treat a human being as both person and property? And what should take precedence, the human rights of the slave or the property rights of the master? American laws made clear that property was more sacred than people, and the property rights of masters overshadowed the human rights of slaves. Said Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the famous Dred Scott case of 1857, "Negroes were seen only as property; they were never thought of or spoken of except as property" and "(thus) were not intended by the framers of the Constitution to be accorded citizenship rights."
In order to transform people solely into property, you must minimize those qualities that make them human. Literature of the early nineteenth century began to portray "the negro" as a savage in even stronger terms than those that had been used for the Irish two centuries earlier. This was a major transformation in thought about who Africans were. Historian George Fredrickson states explicitly that "before 1830 open assertions of permanent black inferiority were exceedingly rare" (The Black Image in the White Mind, 1987). By mid-century, the ideology of "negro inferiority" dominated both popular and scholarly thought.
Science and the Justification for "Races"
What is so striking about the American experience in creating such an extreme conception of human differences was the role played by scientists and scholars in legitimizing the folk ideas. Scholarly writers began attempting to prove scientifically that "the Negro" was a different and lower kind of human being. The first published materials arguing from a scientific perspective that "negroes" were a separate species from white men appeared in the last decade of the eighteenth century. They argued that Negroes were either a product of degeneration from that first creation, or descendants of a separate creation altogether.
American intellectuals appropriated, and rigidified, the categories of human groups established by European scholars during the eighteenth century, but ignored Blumenbach's caution that human groups blend insensibly into one another, so that it is impossible to place precise boundaries around them.
When Dr. Samuel Morton in the 1830s initiated the field of craniometry, the first school of American anthropology, proponents of race ideology received the most powerful scientific support yet. Measuring the insides of crania collected from many populations, he offered "evidence" that the Negro had a smaller brain than whites, with Indians in-between. Morton is also famous for his involvement in a major scientific controversy over creation.
The very existence of a scientific debate over whether blacks and whites were products of a single creation, or of multiple creations, especially in a society dominated by Biblical explanations, seems anomalous. It indicates that the differences between "races" had been so magnified and exaggerated that popular consciousness had already widely accepted the idea of blacks being a different and inferior species of humans. Justice Taney's decision reflected this, declaring, "the negro is a different order of being." Thus slave-owners' rights to their "property" were upheld in law by appeal to the newly invented identity of peoples from Africa.
Scientists collaborated in confirming popular beliefs, and publications appeared on a regular basis providing the "proof" that comforted the white public. That some social leaders were conscious of their role in giving credibility to the invented myths is manifest in statements such as that found in the Charleston Medical Journal after Dr. Morton's death. It states, "We can only say that we of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race" (emphasis added). George Gliddon, co-editor of a famous scientific book Types of Mankind, (1854) which argued that Negroes were closer to apes than to humans and ranked all other groups between whites and Negroes, sent a copy of the book to a famous southern politician, saying that he was sure the south would appreciate the powerful support that this book gave for its "peculiar institution" (slavery). Like another famous tome (The Bell Curve, 1995) this was an 800-page book whose first edition sold out immediately; it went through nine other editions before the end of the century. What it said about the inferiority of blacks became widely known, even by those who could not read it.
During discussions in the U.S. Senate on the future of "the negro" after slavery, James Henry Hammond proclaimed in 1858 "somebody has to be the mudsills of society, to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life." Negroes were destined to be the mudsills. This was to be their place, one consciously created for them by a society whose cultural values now made it impossible to assimilate them. In the many decades since the Civil War, white society made giant strides to "keep the negro in his place." Public policies and the customs and practices of millions of Americans expressed this racial worldview throughout the twentieth century.
These are some of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the racial worldview in North America. Race ideology was a mechanism justifying what had already been established as unequal social groups; it was from its inception, and is today, about who should have access to privilege, power, status, and wealth, and who should not. As a useful political ideology for conquerors, it spread into colonial situations around the world. It was promulgated in the latter half of the 19th century by some Europeans against other Europeans and reached its most extreme development in the twentieth century Nazi holocaust.
All anthropologists should understand that "race" has no intrinsic relationship to human biological diversity, that such diversity is a natural product of primarily evolutionary forces while "race" is a social invention.
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