freediver wrote on Mar 18
th, 2012 at 7:30am:
Did slavery increase or decrease under Islam while the empire was still growing?
Slavery has been a feature of nearly all civilisation until fairly recently, whether they be Muslim, Judais, Christian or pagan.
In the Roman Empire, 25% of the population was enlaved. Scholars estimate that in the Italian peninsular itself, the percentage was higher at a around 35%. In the city of Rome there were a staggering 400,000 slaves out of a population of about 1 million. During the Roman millenium 100 million people were captured or sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean and its hinterlands
In Christian England, in 1086, the Domesday Book records that nearly 10% of the English population were slaves.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting the kings of Spain and Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens (Muslims), pagans and any other "unbelievers"" to perpetual slavery, legitimizing the slave trade as a result of war.
Approximately 10–20% of the rural population of Carolingian Europe consisted of slaves.
In Russia, there were 23 million slaves as late as 1861.
By 1552 black African slaves made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon.
The profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
An estimated 12 million Africans arrived in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The usual estimate is that about 15 per cent of slaves died during the voyage.
According to the 1860 U.S. census, 393,975 individuals, representing 8% of all US families, owned 3,950,528 slaves.
freediver wrote on Mar 18
th, 2012 at 7:30am:
Why did it take foreign interference to finally rid the middle east of legalised slavery - something that Islam could not achieve in 1400 years?
You imply that somehow the West is virtuous and has abolished slavery. The fact is that there are more slaves today than at any other time in history; 27 million - many of whom are sex slaves being prostituted out in Western countries like Australia.
We have seen the way of the Europeans. Serbian Christians sytematically raping thousands of Muslim Bosnians. Russians gangraping 2 million German women at the end of WWII encouraged by Stalin. German Christians forcing Jewish women into sex slavery under the nazi regime. The Us has a histroy of slavery and sex slavery too. The US continues to rape prisoners of war at there concentration camps in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Kandahar. Today there sex-slaves in Australia prostituted out to mine workers in remote areas. Sex slavery of Aboriginal women existed in Australian too - I suggest you read the Drovers Boy to get an idea.
So don't try and be cute and pretend that the West has somehow abolished slavery.
freediver wrote on Mar 18
th, 2012 at 7:30am:
Why is it that Muslims such as yourself still aspire for a world with legalised slavery, including legalised sex slavery?
Once again you are lying Freediver. I do not want slavery for humanity. I want them to have freedom.
"Sex slavery" as is understood in the modern use of the word is not allowed in islam.