Herr Bodminster

The Islamic World is responsible for the largest and longest slave trade in history. The Prophet Muhammad encouraged Muslims to take slaves, especially women and pre-pubescent girls. There are slave markets still operating in Libya (a Muslim country) RIGHT NOW. Raiders swept across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, dragging an estimated 18 million Africans into bondage. Some historians put the toll even higher when you count the countless who died en route – castrated boys bleeding out in desert caravans, women and children perishing under the whip. From the 7th century all the way through to today, entire African regions were bled dry. And it wasn’t merely the actions of a few barbaric extremists. It was scriptural. Slavery was a core feature of Islamic expansion, and jihad fed the slave markets from Baghdad to Zanzibar to Morocco. The Quran repeatedly permits sexual relations with “those whom your right hands possess” – female captives and slaves (Quran 23:5-6, 70:29-30, among others). Muhammad himself took war captives as concubines, including after battles like Banu Mustaliq. Hadiths show him discussing coitus interruptus with female prisoners while they awaited ransom or sale. Female slaves had zero right to refuse their master. Young girls captured in raids – pre-pubescent or not – became legitimate sexual property under the rules of jihad and spoils of war. Islam is the origin of slavery as we know it today. Indeed, the very word “slave” comes from “Slav,” thanks to centuries of Muslim raids on Eastern Europe. And, as of 2026, in Islamic post-Gaddafi Libya, sub-Saharan migrants are still being kidnapped, held in detention centres or open-air sites around Sabha, Tripoli and elsewhere. Islamists are still auctioning off Africans for forced labour, sexual exploitation, or ransom. The United Nations and survivors themselves have detailed the horrors of the modern slave trade: people bought and sold like livestock, tortured, raped, worked to death. Meanwhile, a recent OHCHR reports detailed systematic slavery-like practices, forced prostitution, and a “violent business model” that is entirely normalised under Sharia. If liberals want to demand reparations from anyone, it should be Islam. The selective amnesia is grotesque. We tear down statues, rewrite curricula, and host endless reparations seminars over Western sins that were confronted, fought over (literally, in the case of the American Civil War), abolished through Christian abolitionists and Enlightenment values, and followed by trillions in aid and development. But the Islamic world’s far larger, far longer, ideologically entrenched slave machine? Total silence. No marches on Riyadh or Istanbul. No demands for trillions from Arab states or Turkey. No lectures about “Muslim privilege” in Africa. Black Lives Matter rhetoric evaporates the moment the perpetrators are Muslim raiders, Ottoman slavers, or modern Libyan traffickers. Where is the liberal outrage? The demands for reparations? Do Black lives only matter when the story can be used to bash Europeans and Christians?