OVO

Robert Spencer: Hitchens simply cannot be this stupid [LINK-ZUM]

Hitchens reflects the popular view, which is that the onus for slavery is squarely on the West. [... however...] Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: "Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution." The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attache of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh's Virginia home. One of the women remarked: "I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave." Slavery is still practiced openly today in two Muslim countries, Sudan and Mauritania. [...] There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well - notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn't abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

[Article continues at link. It was the secularization of Christianity, and not Christianity, that ended the open slave trade in the West. The Bible contains exactly no admonishments to slave owners or the slave trade. As Christianity accomodated the advances of secular morals, it moved away from slavery. It is the resistance of Islam to secularization that keeps the open slave trade alive in the Muslim world. The Quran does contain some admonishments to slave owners and the slave trade, but it also contains support for the slave trade. The secularization of Islam will swing the Muslim world away from slavery, and the lack of secularization will keep it in place. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: christianity, islam, slavery

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