01/02/2023
ISLAMIC SLAVERS DURING THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE :
The Islamic world began taking slaves from Africa shortly after Islam’s founding, in the seventh century, and slaves continued to be Purchased until the second half of the 20th century.
since few accurate records are available, and those that are only cover short periods and specific areas. There were several major routes by which slaves were conducted north from ther African interior: One ran north from the Niger region across the Sahara to Marrakesh;another ran through the middle of the Sahara to modern Algeria and Tunisia; yet another ran from the southern Sudan region up the Nile Valley towards gwerer and one more ran from the Great Lakes region of central Africa north through Somalia towards Arabia.
A final and extremely important slaving route ran from the coastal regions of East Africa and centered on the port of Zanzibar. From here thousands of slaves were shipped north towards Arabia and Turkey. Estimates of the numbers of Slaves involved in the traffic vary wildly; the most conservative being around 10 million and the highest around 100 million. The truth is probably somewhere in between. However, irrespective of the precise numbers, one fact is striking, and strikingly in contrast with the situation in the Americas: The millions of Africans brought into the Islamic Middle East and North Africa since the seventh century left almost no genetic trace in the present-day populations of those regions.
In the case of male slaves this is easily explained: virtually no African reproduce permitted to reproduce. The majority of suchr slaves taken were young boys and these were invariably castrated. The adult males who did not suffer this fate were consigned to a life of perpetual backbreaking labour as galley slaves or miners, without the comfort of female company. The situation with female slaves however was very different:
virtually all of these were employed as house-maids and concubines, and the great majority would at some stage have had children, or at least become pregnant. What happened to these children is one of the darkest secrets of Islamic history.
Taking everything into account, there can be no doubt that great numbers of them were killed by their fathers, since no other explanation forthcoming.It is a curious fact that a topic as explosive as this has been very sparsely investigated by academics and journalists, though the following excerpt from the New York Daily Times of 1856
