Did y’all know that black slaves was being legally sold in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (the holiest city in Islam) up until the 60s? Ok here’s a thread.

Islam as a faith doesn’t explicitly outlaw the enslavement of people if they’re non-muslim, but does “insure rights for captives” which are arguable in practicality and islamic legality.

Disclaimer:The Arab slave trade definitely predates Islam but the rise of the faith gave Arabs the justification to expand their conquest from the Arabian Peninsula into Africa, The Fertile Cresent/Europe, and Asia.

l& initially the amount of slaves was from a range of races but make no mistake: anti-blackness was always a clear indication of how different slaves/captives were to be treated & priced.

In post-islamic Arabian society, Non-Black slaves are often called Mamluk, meaning ‘Owned/Property’ whereas Black slaves are called ‘Abd which simply means slave .

In Pre-Islamic (prior to 610 c.e.) Arabian society, (Black) African slaves were accessible due to the coastal cities of what is now Saudi Arabia & Yemen being positioned only a small distance away from the Horn of Africa & the Byzantine was a trading Ally.

Also added to this was the fact that Egypt had a northern trading route with Arabia to the rest of the M.E. via the Sinai Peninsula. Bc of this positioning, the majority of Africans enslaved at that time were from what is today Somalia, Kenya, Eritrea, and Ethiopia,

Greater Sudan, and Egypt. And although the pricing of enslaved people varied, generally woman were more expensive because of the demand for wives and concubines, but the majority of African men brought were used for labor.

Now bc of how rare non-black slaves were in times of peace in the Middle East in this era, when Mesopotamians or any other non black war captives/slaves were caught, they fetched a much higher cost bc they were deemed uncommon.

When Islam came to be, Prophet Muhammad nor the Quran never explicitly outlawed the enslavement of anyone but in a way hinted at disapproval regarding it. Bc of this, the freeing of slaves is deemed a “good deed upon the path of piety” in Islam.

Muslims will often cite quotes/verses such as these to show the anti-racist interpretations the faith. But for Arabs (whom at first made, up the majority of the muslim world) there were many loopholes to make the Islamic faith malleable to their own interpretations.

This included the fact that Jihad (defined below) could easily be used to wage war against anyone defined as an “Enemy of Islam”

It was phrase initially reserved for the pagans of preislamic Arabia who actively persecuted & pursued muslims for their “revolutionary & inflammatory beliefs” Beliefs that ironically including that all humans are equal before Allah, the single and ultimate God to muslims.

So as the Medieval Islamic world grew more urbanized and expanded, the demand for labor increased, so did the territory of the muslim world across the northern and eastern coasts of Africa.

Soon it was common to see a scholar or musician who was a black freeman (from any of the coastal afro-muslim frontiers) or a black slave (from further into the continent), either as architects, advisors, guards and rarely even leaders as far as Albania, Afghanistan, and India.

Proselytizing continued by word & by sword as the Arab rulers at the time could literally conquer entire regions under the guise of faith & it was defendable by islamic law.

And it is also at this point that the terms African, Arab, Moor & Muslim started ethnoreligious overlap. For ex. “Moor” although originally relating to Afro-muslims from the northwestern Sahel,

It became the blanket term of all muslims entering Europe regardless of race/ethnicity. As more coastal africans started to accept Islam, the Muslim rulers soon realized that they technically couldn’t capture new black muslims bc they had their own right to freedom under Islam.

This drove demand for slave catching further into the continent to capture more Africans who had yet to become Muslim. It was bc of this conquering of africans that the peak of the golden age of Islam saw unparalleled innovations & technological advancements.

The Arab conquest of Africa granted muslims with the knowledge of ancient libraries like the one in Alexandria and indigenous sciences across the Subsaharan Africa which resulted in Islam penetrating as far as Southern Africa, Guinea, and even the modern day DRC.

And at one point it became normalized for Muslim Africans to keep non-muslim Africans as slaves. Hence the participation of Mali, Niger, Chad, Somalia, Tanzania , Mauritania, Uganda, Kenya, Eritrea Nigeria and many more african countries in the Arab slave trade.

Pictured below (Left to right) is a Bantu slave woman in Somalia (1883), a Somali Slave woman in Yemen (1912), Sultan Bwana Heri was a Zanzibari who benefited greatly from slave trading & warred w/the Omani Sultanate (1890), Hejazi Merchant & his white Circassian slave (1888)

Although it must be added that some of the Muslims who owned slaves in the African continent would be classified today as non-black/non-african, many actually were black africans who also happened to be muslim. And for kingdoms that were muslim but slavery wasn’t popular:

It was the norm for neighboring Muslim kingdoms to raid them and sell other Muslim Africans into slavery. The Muslim Kingdom of Kanem-Borno in modern day Chad, Cameroun, & Nigeria actually sent complaints to Egypt about Muslim slave catchers enslaving other Muslim Freemen.

That is why men like Mansa Musa, although the richest in modern history, had built their wealth and kingdoms primarily by suppling and selling other Africans into slavery. And now slavery is still legally practiced by in the Arab/Muslim world.

So yeah saudi arabia legally had slave up until the 60s. So due to pressure from outside countries, much of the muslim world had to “abolish” but slavery is still very much alive just on the DL bc trafficking humans is illegal.

It survives through traditional, tribal, & Kafala systems.

also this video summarized these points very well.