My previous article “America the Forgiven” resulted in a tirade from certain American sites which I will not go into here. But the reason for this article is that out of all the nonsense I read on these sites there were two recurring accusations which I think should be discussed by both Saudis and the international community.
One is the accusation that the Arabs were the ones who sold the Africans into slavery to the Europeans. The other is Saudi Arabia’s late abolition of slavery in comparison to America and nearly every other country in the world.
As for the first accusation, I do not deny that Arab slave traders sold Africans as well as Europeans, Caucasians, Indians, Malays and any other race they could lay their hands on. The Africans too traded in slaves, as did every other race since the beginning of history.
However, my point in reference to slave trading in America is that since its inception slavery has been a social phenomenon resulting from economic upheavals and wars. But it became a racial phenomenon creating a first among many firsts for that country, whereby if you were of Negroid extraction then you automatically became a slave. A Negro was born for only one reason — to serve, to be a beast of burden. He was to live and die a slave, marry only a slave and breed a race of slaves. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from. If you were black then you were a slave in the eyes of the Americans.
Slaves in other civilizations could be white, black or Chinese. They could be scientists or government functionaries. In the Muslim countries slaves were poets and scholars producing great literary and scientific works. They were mystics and saints, sultans and pashas. Nearly all the Ottoman sultans were born of mothers who were slaves, and these women themselves wielded great powers in the state. The mothers of the Muslim sultans came from all races. The mother of the Ottoman Mahmoud the Reformer was French. The mothers of the Fatimid caliphs were black. Egypt was ruled by slaves for six centuries.
As for Saudi Arabia’s slaves, they shared the same food, clothes and homes as their owners and many of them became rulers of vast regions in the land and were active in the running of the state.
Now, we come to the second accusation, which is Saudi Arabia’s late abolition of slavery. Slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in 1962. I personally would love it if slavery had never existed, but it did and still does in many parts of the world both in its classic and its modern form, but that is a subject for another article.
If slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished in 1962, that is because Saudi Arabia did not exist as a modern state before 1932, which means it took thirty years after its creation to end slavery, and that without a civil war. Even though at the time Saudi Arabia was suffering economically, it still went ahead with the eradication of slavery, which must have added to its economic troubles. After the end of slavery in Saudi Arabia its slave population became an integral part of Saudi society, benefiting as fully from all the rights of citizenship as other Saudis. They went to the same schools and universities. They lived and traded in the same neighborhoods without the discrimination the blacks had suffered in America.
The American experience was different. In order for the Americans to abolish slavery they had to go though a civil war which remains until this day the bloodiest war America has fought and the one in which it suffered the most casualties. Even after the success of the abolitionists in America, the suffering of the blacks didn’t end. They were discriminated against in every way, barred from living in the same neighborhood as the whites, prevented from attending the same schools and universities or sharing the same seat on a bus or a water fountain with white Americans, until they ended up imprisoned in ghettos in their own country. Up until the sixties the blacks in America were still living on the sufferance of the whites, and were it not for the inevitable explosion of the black population in America they might still have been suffering from this apartheid life. Even today the blacks are victims of a more subtle discrimination in America. When the blacks constitute only 20 percent of the American population yet make up 90 percent of the prison population there, doesn’t this beg the question: When will the blacks be truly free and equal in America?
— Reem Mohammed Al-Faisal is a Saudi photographer. She is based in Jeddah.
