Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society
CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY RELATING TO CHRISTIAN HISTORY Serfdom:
Will Durant observes (The Age of Faith, pp. 552-564):
“The same factors that paved the way for feudalism between the third century and the sixth established it between the sixth and the ninth …
“An institution that had lasted throughout known history appeared inevitable and eternal, even to honest moralists … Pope Gregory I … continued to use hundreds of slaves on the papal estates, and approved laws forbidding slaves to become clerics or marry free Christians. The Church … permitted the enslavement of Moslems and of Europeans not yet converted to Christianity. Thousands of captured Slavs and Saracens were distributed among monasteries as slaves; and slavery on church lands and papal estates continued till the eleventh century. Canon law sometimes estimated the wealth of church lands in slaves rather than in money; like secular law, it considered the slave as a chattel; it forbade church slaves to make wills, and decreed that any peculium or savings of which they died possessed should belong to the Church. The archbishop of Narbonne, in his will of 1149, left his Saracen slaves to the bishop of Beziers. St. Thomas interpreted slavery as one consequence of Adam’s sin … emancipation sometimes proved more difficult on ecclesiastical than on secular properties.
“The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change … Servitude continued…
“Typically the serf tilled a plot of land owned by a lord or baro. … He could be evicted at the owner’s will … it is impossible to calculate the total of serf’s obligations. For late medieval Germany it has been reckoned at two-thirds of produce … stories told how Satan excluded serfs from hell because he could not bear their smell … His (i.e., serf’s) manners were rough and hearty, perhaps gross … he had to survive by being a good animal … He was greedy because poor, cruel because fearful, violent because repressed, churlish because treated as a churl. He was the mainstay of the Church…
“… the Church became the largest landholder in Europe, the greatest of feudal suzerains … her ‘feudalities’, or feudal rights and obligations, became a scandal … Feudalism feudalized the Church.” (Italics, present writer’s).
White Slavery:
Speaking of this institution, assiduously cultivated in Christendom through the beneficence of the Church, Dr. Eric Willams makes the following observations in his Capitalism and Slavery (pp. 12-18):
“The political and civil disturbances in England between 1640 and 1740 augmented the supply of white servants. Political and religious non-conformists paid for their unorthodoxy by transportation, most to the sugar islands … Religious intolerance sent more workers to the plantations. In 1661 Quakers refusing to take the oath for the third time were to be transported; in 1664 transportation … was decreed for the third offence for persons over sixteen assembling in groups of five or more under pretence of religion … The prisoners were granted in batches to favourite courtiers, who made handsome profits from the traffic in which, it is alleged, even the Queen shared. A similar policy was resorted to after the Jacobite rising of the eighteenth century.
“The status of these servants became
progressively worse in the plantation colonies. Servitude … tended to pass into
a property relation which asserted a control of varying extent over the bodies
and liberties of the person during service as if he were a thing. Eddis,
writing on the eve of the Revolution, found the servants groaning ‘beneath a
worse than Egyptian bondage’ … Defoe bluntly stated that the white servant was
a slave.”
Black Slavery:
In his valuable historical document entitled African Glory (Wett & Co., London 1955), Mr. J.C. Degroft Johnson projects the beginnings of the Negro slave trade thus:
“In 1441-42 Antonio Gonsalves and Nuno Tristan passed Cape Blanco on the Saharan coast, and on the return journey called at Rio d’Ouru, or, River of Gold, whence they brought back some gold dust and the slaves. These slaves having been sent by Prince Henry to Pope Martin V, the latter conferred [1] on Portugal the right of possession and sovereignty over all lands that might be discovered between Cape Blanco and India.
“Prince Henry the Navigator, having now received the support of the Church,[2] carried horses on his ships to enable his sailors to hunt down their human prey on the Saharan coast. Great was the rejoicing in Catholic Christian Lisbon as each succeeding batch of African slaves arrived.” (p. 127).
In his highly-scholarly work, Capitalism and Slavery, the Christian scholar-statesman of the West Indies, Dr. Eric Williams, projects a historical record which, though it deals mainly with the British slave trade, brings into broad relief the fact that rejoicing in the Negro slave trade was shared by all the Christian Powers capable of participating in the Rape of Black Africa. He says (pp. 35-48, 192, 209):
“With free trade and the increasing demands of the sugar plantations, the volume of the British slave trade rose enormously … The importation into Jamaica from 1700 to 1786 was 610,000, and it has been estimated that the total import of slaves into all the British colonies between 1680 and 1786 was over two million.
“Mutinies and suicides were obviously far more common on slave ships than on other vessels, and the brutal treatment and greater restrictions on the movements of the slaves would doubtless have tended to increase their mortality … The sole aim of the slave merchants was to have their decks ‘well covered with black ones’. It is not uncommon to read of a vessel of 90 tons carrying 414 … The space allotted to each slave on the Atlantic crossing (called the ‘Middle Passage’) measured five feet in length by sixteen inches in breadth. Packed like ‘rows of books on shelves’, as Clarkson said, chained two by two, right leg and left leg, right hand and left hand, each slave had less room than a man in a coffin. It was like the transportation of black cattle, and where sufficient Negroes were not available cattle were taken on. The slave trader’s aim was profit and not the comfort of his victims…
“Prior to 1783, however, all classes in English society presented a united front with regard to the slave trade. The monarchy, the government, the church, and public opinion in general, supported the slave trade…
“The (Christian) Spanish monarchy set the fashion which European royalty followed to the very last. The palace fortresses of Madrid and Toledo were built out of the payment to the Spanish Crown for licences to transport Negroes. One meeting of the two sovereigns of Spain and Portugal was held in 1701 to discuss the arithmetical problem posed by a contract for ten thousand ‘tons’ of Negroes granted the Portuguese. The Spanish queen, Christina, in the middle of the nineteenth century, openly participated in the slave trade to Cuba. The royal court of Portugal, when it moved to Brazil to avoid capture by Napoleon, did not find the slave atmosphere of its colonial territory uncongenial. Louis XIV fully appreciated the importance of the trade to metropolitan France and France overseas. The plans of the Great Elector for Prussian aggrandizement included the African slave trade.
“Hawkins’ slave trading expedition was launched under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth … slave traders held high offices in England. Of The Royal Adventurers trading to Africa in 1667, a list headed by royalty included two elder-men, three dukes, eight earls, seven lords, one countess, and twenty-seven knights.
“The Church also supported slave-trade … Sherlock, later Bishop of London assured the planters that ‘Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel does not make the least difference in civil property’. Neither did it impose any barriers to clerical activity; for his labors with regard to the Asiento, which he helped to draw up as a British plenipotentiary at Utrecht, Bishop Robinson of Bristol was promoted to the see of London. The bells of the Bristol churches pealed merrily on the news of the rejection by Parliament of Wilberforce’s bill for the abolition of the slave trade. The slave trader, John Newton, gave thanks in the Liverpool churches for the success of his last venture before his conversion and implored God’s blessing on his next. He established public worship twice every day on his slaver, not for the slaves but for the crew. ‘I never knew’, he confessed, ‘sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion than in the last two voyages to Guinea’. The famous Cardinal Manning of the nineteenth century was the son of a rich West Indian merchant dealing in slave-grown produce. Many missionaries found it profitable to drive out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. According to the most recent English writer on the slave trade, they ‘considered that the best way in which to remedy abuse of negro slaves was to set the plantation owners a good example by keeping slaves and estates themselves, accomplishing in this practical manner the salvation of the planters and the advancement of their foundations’. The Moravian missionaries in the islands held slaves without hesitation; the Baptists, one historian writes with charming delicacy, would not allow their earlier missionaries to deprecate ownership of slaves.
To the very end the Bishop of Exeter retained his 655 slaves, for whom he received over £12,700 compensation in 1833 … Quaker non-conformity did not extend to the slave trade. In 1756 there were eighty-four Quakers listed as members of the Company trading to Africa, among them the Barclay and Baring families. Slave dealing was one of the most lucrative investments of English as of American Quakers, and the name of a slaver, The Willing Quaker, reported from Boston at Sierra Leone in 1793, symbolizes the approval with which the slave trade was regarded in Quaker circles … An inscription to Foster Cunliffe (a Liverpool slave trader) in St. Peter’s Church describes him thus: ‘a Christian devout and exemplary in the exercise of every private and public duty, friend to mercy, patron to distress, an enemy only to vice and sloth, he lived esteemed by all who knew him … and died lamented by the wise and good’…
“… It was held in 1677 that ‘Negroes being usually bought and sold among merchants, so merchandise, and also being infidels, there might be property in them’. In 1729 the Attorney General ruled that baptism did not bestow freedom or make any alteration in the temporal condition of the slaves; in addition the slave did not become free by being brought to England … So eminent an authority as Sir William Blackstone held that ‘with respect to any right the master may have lawfully acquired to the perpetual service of John or Thomas, this will remain exactly in the same state of subjection for life’, in England or elsewhere.
“The barbarous removal of the Negroes from Africa continued for at least twenty-five years after 1833, to the sugar plantations of Brazil and Cuba.
“… What was characteristic of British capitalism was typical also of capitalism in France. Gaston-Martin writes: ‘There was not a single great shipowner at Nantes who, between 1714 and 1789, did not buy and sell slaves … it is almost as certain that none would have become what he was if he had not sold slaves’.”
We may close this most brutal tale of heinous crimes against humanity with the observations of Professor Emil Torday who, lecturing at Geneva in 1931 under the auspices of the ‘Society for the Protection of Children of Africa’, said:[3]
“This, too, is an age of propaganda. We excel our ancestors only in system and organisation; they lied as fluently and as brazenly. Central Africa was a territory of peace and happy civilisation. Traders travelled hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from one side of the vast continent to the other without molestation; the stranger was always an honoured guest to the African. The tribal wars from which the European pirates claimed to deliver the people were mere sham-fights; it was a great battle when half a dozen men perished on a battlefield. Some may question the use of the word ‘pirates’ but it must be admitted that even the mode employed by Sir John Hawkins to procure his first stock of slaves for the new world was worse than that of an accredited pirate.
“Pierre de Vaissiers gives us the incident of a captain who poisoned his human cargo when held up by calms or adverse winds. Another killed some of his slaves to feed the others with the flesh of their slaughtered friends.
“It is little wonder, then, that slaves died not only from physical ill-treatment, but also from grief, rage, and despair. Some undertook hunger strikes; some undid their chains and hurled themselves on the crew in futile attempts at insurrection. In order to combat the grief and melancholy among the slaves it became the custom to have them on deck once a day and force them to dance, but even in these cases many a slave took the opportunity to jump overboard, uttering cries of triumph as he cleared the vessel and disappeared below the surface. There are indeed limits to the degradation which the human spirit will endure.
“… The slaves were forced into crowded canoes and taken to the ships, where the use of whips and spears compelled them to climb reeling and trembling up the swaying rope-ladders…
“… It is difficult to determine accurately the extent of the depopulation of Africa occasioned by the slave trade. One French historian quoted by Utting says it is not exaggeration to say that 100,000,000 people were lost to Africa as a result of it. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent Afro-Asian historian, also believes that Africa lost about 100,000,000 souls as a result of the slave trade.
“Next it must be stressed that many died in the slave wars … Whitened skeletons littered the slave routes as if to blaze a trail for others to follow. Such was the carnage. Between 1690 and 1820 Jamaica alone received no fewer than 800,000 slaves; yet in 1820 only 340,000 slaved existed in the island. Think of the numerous West Indies islands, under the domination of so many European countries, think of the United States of America, of Canada, of Mexico and of the South American Republics, which have large Negro populations even today, and then picture those blacks who perished in Africa before the journey to the new world had really begun; think of those who perished during the Middle Passage; then again consider of those who fell dead as a result of the slave whips; and let us reflect on the lot of those sick, injured, and aged slaves who were cast adrift to die of hunger and starvation. Finally, let us remember that band of brave Negro men and women, particularly the Koromantee Negroes, who found the state of bondage insufferable and who died at the stake in the cause of liberty.”
[1] What a gift, and what a reward, and what a holiness!
[2] Mark the role of the Church in blessing the Rape of Black Africa!
[3] Quoted by J. C. Degroft Johnson, op. cit., pp. 153-165.
to be continued . . . . .
Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times
