THE BLACK SLAVERY HOLOCAUST WITHIN TODAY’S ISLAMOPHOBIA

RONALD SEGAL – ISLAM’S BLACK SLAVES,
THE OTHER DIASPORA –
FARRAR, STRAUSS AND GIROUX, NEW YORK,
2001,
A review
Let’s be clear from the very start. This book is essential on the subject
of slavery and the slave trade, and it is worth all the time you may spend on
it and around it because you will want to check a lot of information it contains.
A preliminary remark would be that the author gathered a lot of information
from many different sources and some of that information is not necessarily
considered standard in the academic world, but Ronald Segal’s point is that
the subject has systematically been sidetracked by some organized silence
that makes the academic world not necessarily trustworthy on that count.
1- Before Islam
My first remark is that he does not spend time on what was before Islam
in the world he is going to speak of, hence in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He
starts very clearly with the official date of the founding of Islam 622 CE and
considers hardly anything before, apart from some detail on Muhammad
before he migrates to Medina. Slavery was a very common fact in the Roman
Empire for one example, but also in most civilizations in the Middle East.
Slavery is clearly codified in the Old Testament for one, and only one,
example. Slavery is extremely limited for Israelis or Jews in Israel. Slavery
massively concerns non-Jews, for example, Arabs as they are called. But let
me quote a few passages:
2
If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve; and in the
seventh he shall go out free for nothing.
3
If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he was
married, then his wife shall go out with him.
4
If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or
daughters, the wife, and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall
go out by himself.
5
And if the servant shall plainly say, ‘I love my master, my wife, and
my children; I will not go out free,’

6
then his master shall bring him unto the judges. He shall also bring
him to the door or unto the doorpost, and his master shall bore his ear
through with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.
7
“And if a man sells his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not
go out as the menservants do.
8
If she pleases not her master who hath betrothed her to himself,
then shall he let her be redeemed. To sell her unto a strange nation he
shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.
9
And if he has betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her
after the manner of daughters.
10
If he takes for himself another wife, her food, her raiment, and her
duty of marriage shall he not diminish.
11
And if he does not do these three unto her, then shall she go out
free, without money.
20
“And if a man smites his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die
under his hand, he shall be surely punished.
21
Notwithstanding, if he continues a day or two, he shall not be
punished; for he is his money. (21st
century King James Version, Exodus
21:2-11 & 21:20-21)
44
Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, whom thou shalt have,
shall be of the heathen who are round about you. From them shall ye
buy bondmen and bondmaids.
45
Moreover of the children of the strangers who sojourn among you,
from them shall ye buy and from their families who are with you, whom
they begot in your land; and they shall be your possession.
46
And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after
you, to inherit them for a possession. They shall be your bondmen for
ever. But over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one
over another with rigor. (Leviticus 25:44-46)
This strict position will slightly change in the New Testament that will
denounce slave traders in general and not only those who sell Jewish slaves
(1Timothy 1:9-10). We have to keep in mind in Islam that Moslems cannot
put in slavery or sold as slaves other Moslems (and non-Moslem slave
traders who sell Moslems as slaves are by principle, enemies of Islam). We
can see a perfect continuation of the Old Testament more than in any way
something new.
2- The origin of slavery, a hypothesis
The hypothesis here should be that slavery, or rather some type of
dependent social organization or division of labor, was invented with the
emergence of agriculture, starting after the Ice Age, when the water started

to rise around 12,000 BCE within an important weather change. This slavery
gave the community that benefited from it the mobility it needed to cope with
that new form of social work and social organization: agriculture, cattle
husbandry and subsequent commerce and administration due to non-
autarkic economic activities, not to speak of the building or “urban”
concentration as proved by the site of Gobekli Tepe dating back to 9,500
BCE.
In fact, Segal should have discussed the real status of these early slaves
knowing that anyway the social organization of the rather limited
communities of hunters-gatherers was not freedom really because there
must have been a strict division of labor to take care of the children for three
if not more years, and then hunting required some strict planning and
coordination of all the hunters. Gathering was more relaxed as for an activity
but there were a lot of predators, so gathering must have been organized
collectively too, and any lack of work intensity or work efficiency might mean
less to eat for the community, thus creating pressure on the gatherers. The
concept of personal freedom could not exist really and the shift to the
agricultural division of labor implied some kind of hierarchical organization
and authority that must have taken time to be devised, so that slavery might
have been very slow to appear per se.
The defensive or offensive war slavery was another thing. Military action
was compulsory, and prisoners became slaves, or were at least attached to
the victors. But at the same time, we have to consider the practice among
American Indians, for example the Powhatans in what was going to become
Virginia. The fighting male prisoners were used in two different ways: some
became the ritualistic victims of some celebration, and some became the
“slaves” of the families of the dead warriors. In fact, they were integrated in
the families. Both fates were accepted as normal. We have to keep in mind
that human sacrifice was a normal fact in these old times in many forms, for
example gladiators in Rome.
3- For a real historical perspective
That’s what is missing in the book, a real historical perspective that
would explain at the beginning of Islam that the practice of slavery all over
the known world was so wide that Muhammad could not even think of going
against it, just like Abraham did not reject having a son from his Arab slave
servant and obeying God’s order to sacrifice either Ishmael or Isaac.
The book though insists on the rejection of slavery by principle that
Muhammad expressed along with some recommendation about treating
slaves properly, but we must keep in mind the harem was not invented by
Muhammad, nor by Islam. Can we think Abraham was in love with his Arab
slave servant? Of course not, at least not with the meaning we give to the

word today, and anyway he had at least two women in his life, his wife and
his Arab slave servant. The book is clear though about Muhammad
recommending good treatment of slaves, manumission for slaves,
miscegenation with slaves and the exoneration of Muslims from slavery. But
the book also shows that this seems to be without any direct consequences
in reality, though he also gives several testimonies about the way slaves
were treated and it comes to the simple idea that on their way from the
catchment zone to their destination, that is to say, the slave market, hence
in the hands of the merchants, conditions were squalid and inhuman. The
book does not seem to consider these merchants were anxious to bring as
many slaves as possible to the slave market clearly saying that the profits
were so high that they could have very high death tolls, though the book is
not very clear about these. When arrived in their owners’ homes the slaves
were then treated quite correctly, most of the time.
4- Women-oriented slavery
He insists on the fact that a majority of these slaves were women. A clear
difference with the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in America since in
Mexico parity between men and women was only reached at the end of the
17th
century, more than two centuries after the first slaves were brought there.
These slaves were used as home servants or concubines in the harem as
for women; as house servants as for both women and men with the special
case of eunuchs in the harem; and as outdoor servants as for men. He also
insists on the fact that many men were used as business employees by their
owners. Slavery was mostly an urban phenomenon, with only a small portion
of slaves used in plantations or on agricultural estates.
There he is misguided about Spain and America, and it is important to
insist on this point. Spain had slaves under Islam of course, but the practice
was kept after the Reconquista and the noble families had many slaves in
Spain long before Christopher Columbus who himself was in Africa in 1483
and took part in the nascent (European controlled) slave trade from the west
coast of Africa to Spain. We can even consider the Spaniards kept the in-
coming routes of before the Reconquista from the Maghreb or along the
western African coast. The book does not explore this problem. It is capital
because in Mexico, Hispaniola and Cuba the Spanish noble families will
move with their black slaves and slavery was an urban phenomenon too and
dominant as such in Mexico.
5- The Catholic Church
Even if slaves were imported later on to work on plantations, when the
Native Americans on the various islands had been totally wiped out, Cortez
himself in Mexico had a more positive view of this plantation industry and he

was the first one to use water-power to work his first cane sugar mill, which
sounds normal since in Europe water mills – and wind mills – had done all
sorts of mechanical tasks since the 10th
century on the advice and guidance
of Benedictines. Segal reduces thus the vision of slavery in America
exclusively to the English practice starting in 1619 and the arrival of the first
African slaves in Virginia till the end of it in 1863-1865. That enables him not
to study the role of the Spanish and French Catholic churches that more or
less tolerated slavery without ever condoning it entirely, which the protestant
and Anglican churches did not do at all. In fact the position of the Catholic
Church defined in the 15th
century was insisting strongly on the religious right
(and duty) for the male (and female) slaves to get married and have a normal
Christian family life, and on the duty if not obligation for the slave owners to
encourage this matrimonial perspective and provide the slaves with normal
conditions for the spouses to fulfill it, including towards the children that could
not be taken away from the mother, at least in their childhood (which would
run up to 12 or 13 at least and puberty). This implied that the mostly male
(more than 60-70%) black slave population married local Indian women,
though statistics have not yet been calculated. A situation that will be
marginal within the English slavery context.
6- European slaves
He opposes white slaves from Europe, though the book lacks much
detail on that side (he could of course not know the book by Robert C. Davis
published in 2004, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the
Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800), to black slaves from
Africa. At the same time when white Christian Europeans were no longer
available the Moslem world did very well without. It would be interesting to
remember John Smith, the founder of Jamestown and Virginia, who was a
war slave when captured by the Ottomans in Central Europe before escaping
and then becoming a contract-holder in the first expedition to Virginia in 1607.
He never gave any real detail but the whole episode does not seem to have
been that dramatic to him, but essentially how could he be a militant for
individual freedom when slavery was the good side of being made a prisoner
in a war, when we know that these wars against the Ottomans were the
scene of atrocious facts like the systematic impaling of prisoners on the
European side by the famous Count Dracula, and probably quite a few more.
We too often look at the past with our eyes and not with the eyes of an
historian. What about the famous drawings by Goya on the Disasters of War?
Not to speak of the Inquisition, both the older one against the Cathars, and
the more recent one in Spain and then Mexico.
In such a context I do not see how a majority of people, or even no more
than a few isolated voices could be heard speaking against such atrocities,

and slavery among them, especially when it was “humanely” performed like
when in the Mali Empire the Charter of Kurukan Fuga in 1235 was devised
by Moslem Sundiata after his victory over the animist Sossos, saying among
other things that the slave owner owned the slave but not his bag, meaning
the slave had some private territory, his bag.
7- Historical evolution
In fact the book is becoming really fascinating when Segal starts
studying how this practice changed little by little from a war custom according
to which all prisoners are made slaves, or even some fake war raids with the
only objective of making prisoners to turn them into slaves later on, to a
systematic commerce and industry practiced by merchants who only saw a
way for them to get rich fast, even if 50% of the captives died along the way.
Then he studies the routes and the complicities they needed including in
black Africa where some tribal chiefs protected their own tribes by selling
away the members of other tribes. When we know the minority Tutsis were
the dominant tribe over the majority Hutus in Rwanda in all those centuries
when that slave trade developed in Eastern and Central Africa, we can
understand that the potent recollection during these centuries of being the
cattle of the dominant minority can still pervert the minds of the descendants
of this exploited majority. This slave trade came to an end in Eastern Africa
only late in the 19th
century, if not in the first half of the 20th
century.
The routes and types of trades are clearly stated. Trans-Saharan from
the sub-Saharan Sudan from Mali to Ethiopia either to Morocco, or to Libya
or to Egypt; from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean across the whole
sub-Saharan corridor; across the Red Sea to Arabia and beyond to the
Middle East; up along the Eastern coast of Africa from Mombasa to the Red
Sea and the Persian Gulf and then Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and India, at times
even farther. Plantation slaves are rare, but they are important in Zanzibar or
on the coast where they cultivated cloves, among other exportable produces.
The worst case in that trade was eunuchs. European eunuchs were only
deprived of their testicles, but African eunuchs were deprived of both their
testicles and their penis, “level with the abdomen castration” as they said.
The death toll was extremely high though we do not have much data on the
subject.
8- Human cost
We can only have tentative evaluation of how many people were
captured and ended up in slavery, with already a great difference between
the two figures, an even greater difference would appear if we could assess
the targeted population before and after the raid, due to the death rate of the
mostly collateral casualties of the raids in the surrounding population,

because immediate execution or delayed death from starvation and wounds;
but also due to the heavy number of casualties in the transportation of the
captives, or the extremely high death rate of the total castration boys and
young teenagers were submitted to; and not to mention the death toll after
arrival because of the weather change. This very mortiferous and death-
inflicting situation explains why there are so few descendants: they died like
flies in many ways and their position was not favorable to procreation.
Marriage was not an obligation in any way and most women were used as
concubines, which implied that the children who could be born from such
unions were not exactly always wanted and welcome.
9- The end of slavery
The book probably becomes better when Segal speaks of the slow and
long process to abolish this slave trade that has not yet been completely
terminated. The English were those who did the greatest effort to end that
practice through negotiations, treaties and commercial pressure. They
hesitated at first and managed to get the trade itself banned, a ban through
which it was always easy for the slave traders to wiggle, before
understanding they had to ban slavery itself. Internationally slavery was
totally banned by the United Nations only in 1948. But yet it survives even in
Sudan where the partition of the country was supposed to put a stop to the
enslaving of Southern Christians by Northern Moslems. We all know what is
happening right now in Nigeria where several hundred girls have been
kidnapped by Boko Haram to prevent their education and to sell them into
slavery. On that level of modern forms of slavery, I will personally regret he
does not have a word for the several hundred million Dalits in India. Here is
a recent article on the subject.
Dalit means "trampled upon" and refers to people who are treated
as "untouchables" in caste-entrenched India. Dalits are a mixed
population, living all over the country, speaking a variety of languages
and practicing numerous religions.
The Constitution of India bans discrimination based on caste, but
prejudice and discrimination toward Dalits remains rampant. The
majority of Dalits have menial jobs such as scavenging, and they live
segregated from people in upper castes.
Such maltreatment became more prevalent after federal legislation
enacted in 1950 enabled discrimination against Christian Dalits. The law
made Hindu Dalits eligible for free education and set quotas for
government jobs and seats in legislatures to improve their status. While
the privileges were extended to Sikh Dalits in 1956 and to Buddhist
Dalits in 1990, they are still denied to Muslim and Christian Dalits.

(Anto Akkara, “Dalit Christians Debut New Strategy in India
Election,” World Watch Monitor, [posted 5/12/2014 07:47 pm], accessed
June 20, 2014,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/may/dalit-christians-
debut-new-strategy-india-election-icsp.html?paging=off)
On the other hand, the French were easily convinced that they had to
get to a compromise. It is this compromise that explains today what
happened in Mauritania after their independence. The white Arab or Berber
Muslims systematically expelled the blacks from Mauritania, on the simple
principle that made them consider Blacks as inferior. That was a case of
ethnic cleansing that would not have happened if slavery had been banned
and actually suppressed by the French colonists, which was not the case.
French colonists often considered they did not have to do anything against
traditional practices as long as they did not hamper their interests. It was the
same principle that made them blind to the excision of women that was
considered as a custom they did not want to interfere with.
10- A never-ending battle
Altogether the book more or less estimates that the transatlantic slave
trade cost about the same amount of victims and casualties as the slave
trade towards the Moslem countries, though the author mentions but did not
insist on the fact that the former lasted only three centuries whereas the latter
lasted thirteen centuries, which means the former was a lot more intensive
annually. Moreover, the book states but does not insist enough on the fact
that in the 19th
century, after the transatlantic slave trade was terminated,
after slavery itself was finally abolished in French colonies and the USA, the
slave trade towards Moslem countries amplified tremendously leading in
Eastern Africa and Central Africa to the absolute extermination by death or
by deportation of entire villages, at times entire areas. But we have to keep
in mind the battle is hardly finished. There are still many million slaves in the
world and first of all the Dalits and all the sex slaves who are necessarily
young with practices that vary from work slavery to prostitution which is more
a dependence of the prostitutes or hustlers on their pimps rather than sex
slavery to their masters.
As a conclusion I could say the shortcomings of the book are the result
of the very object it targets that locks the author up in a historical period and
a geographical zone that do not enable the capture of the subject from a
global point of view, and particularly in an historical perspective that does not
retrospectively project our own values and ideas onto the past. We cannot
judge the inhumane practices of the previous centuries with the supposedly
humane values of our own time. That kills the historical perspective we need
to understand how humanity came to invent such evils and how humankind

has managed to get mostly out of them. The book though cannot be
considered as anti-Islam, though by locking its subject into the sole case of
Islam, it my appear as such. It is absolutely indispensable to widen the
approach and consider slavery is an invention and practice that was
universal at some time and that was customarily used by all societies, no
matter which, in various and varied forms.
POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE/SLAVERY
SYNDROME/DISORDER
We are going to examine two books dealing with what is called today the
Post Traumatic Slave or Slavery Syndrome or Disorder (PTSS or PTSD) in
sociology or psychology in the USA concerning the descendants of African
slaves.
First, Post traumatic Slavery Disorder by Sekou Mims (M.Ed., MCW),
Larry Higginbottom (MSW, LCSW), and Omar Reid (Psy.D), published by
Pyramid Builders, Inc., Dorchester, Massachusetts, no date available,
probably beginning of the 21st
century, available at
http://www.pyramidbuilders.org/pdfs/PTSD_Manuscript.pdf, accessed
August 11, 2014.
Second, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, America’s legacy of enduring
injury and healing by Dr Joy Degruy, published by Joy Degruy Publications
Inc., Portland, Oregon, 2005.
I./ Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder
This book conveys a track-blazing barrier-breaking inspirational
philosophy directly implemented in the real world. The book is the production
of three authors, all greatly qualified in their fields, who are endowing the
Nation of Islam with a policy, a program and an objective: to liberate African
Americans, the descendants of the slaves of the past, from the trauma this
slave experience planted in their minds over more than 383 years (that
duration dates the book to the year 2002):

1. 246 years of slavery from 1619 (first slaves in Virginia) to 1865 (full
abolition of slavery).
2. 100 years of Jim Crowism and segregation, and then Civil Rights
Movement from 1865 to 1965 (Civil Rights Act, 1964, Voting Rights Act
1965).
3. Since then, inclusion in democracy.
The book is explicit about how the African deportees (80 millions of them
died in the deportation and slavery that followed their capture) were
transformed into slaves following the teaching of Willie Lynch in 1712. The
book is clear about the necessity to face history and the reality of this savage
period of slavery at an early age. In fact, trying to forget, to avoid speaking
of it is a symptom of the PTSlaveryS they are speaking of. Here are the words
of Willie Lynch:
“Take the meanest and most restless nigger, strip him of his clothes
in front of the remaining male niggers, the female, the nigger infant, tar
and feather him, tie each leg to a different horse in opposite directions,
set him fire and beat both horse to pull him apart in front of the remaining
niggers. The next step is to take a bullwhip and beat the remaining nigger
male to the point of death in front of the female and the infant. Don’t kill
him, but put the fear of God in him, for he can be useful for future
breeding. . . We reversed nature by burning and pulling one civilized
nigger apart and bull whipping the other to the point of death – all in her
presence.” 1
And to echo this bleak description that is the starting point of the making
of a slave according to Willie Lynch, we could keep in mind the song Another
Man Done Gone, as the same treatment under Jim Crowism and
segregation that vastly developed the practice of lynching.
“Another man done gone, He had a long chain on, They hung him
in a tree, They let his children see, When he was hangin' dead, The
captain turn his head, He's from the county farm, I didn't know his name,
Another man done gone.” 2
1
The Willie Lynch Letter and The Making of a Slave, Kashif Malik Hassan-EL, February 1999,
at http://www.lojsociety.org/Lets_Make_A_Slave_The_Making_Of_A_Slave.pdf,
accessed August 11, 2014
2
http://www.metrolyrics.com/another-man-done-gone-lyrics-johnny-cash.html, accessed
August 11, 2014

The book starts with a parallel between the Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder that has been identified in survivors of great accidents,
catastrophes or wars for both fighting sides and for civilian bystanders or
collateral victims. It is quite obvious that even the worst war (WWII and the
final solution known as the Holocaust or the Shoah) or the worst civil wars
(there are plenty of examples) cannot compare in length with the African
Holocaust. 3
246 years of slavery represent at least ten generations of
people born and raised in slavery, once the first generation or the new
arrivals had been broken into the condition.
The book is clear as for the transmission from one generation to the
next (which cannot be considered hereditary since it is not genetic), the
parents educating their children to be ready to suffer the least hence to rebel
the least. That implied avoiding learning the language of the whites, English,
both spoken (keeping some gibberish form of it) and especially written. A
black slave found trying to read got his/her eyes enucleated and his/her
tongue cut out, which meant sure death in a short time, be it only due to
infections or just starvation, or even self-starvation to shorten the time
during which they were burdens to their communities. The second attitude
transmitted from parents to children was a necessary distance and
aloofness of the parents towards the children and of the children towards
the parents to be ready when they were going to be sold. The third
consequence is about the relations between men and women. Men were
breeding animals and could not attach themselves too much to the females
they were impregnating, and the women were breeding animals too who
had to be ready to be impregnated at any time by any male on the
plantation, and the children were slaves, a property to be exploited or sold
as an extra income.
The book came ten years before the recent film Django Unchained 4
that gives some examples of how some black males were turned into to-
the-death fighters (called gladiators in another era) for the entertainment of
3
http://www.africanholocaust.net/, accessed September 4, 2014: “The word '''Maafa''' (also
known as the African Holocaust) is derived from a Kiswahili word meaning disaster,
terrible occurrence or great tragedy. The term today collectively refers to the Pan-African
study of the 500 hundred years of ongoing suffering of people of African heritage through
Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, oppression, invasions and exploitation.”
Note this does not consider the slave trade imposed onto black Africa in Antiquity and
Islam. The latter over fourteen centuries (and still going on in marginal situations) has
concerned the same number of people as the trans-Atlantic slave trade that lasted five
centuries. Check too John Henrik Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan
Holocaust, Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism, Eworld Inc., Buffalo, New York,
1993.
4
Quentin Tarantino, director, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/combined,
accessed August 11, 2014. We could also think of the film, 12 Years a Slave, 2013,
though the book it is based on was published in 1853 by Solomon Northup.

the masters. Such fighters were condemned to be killed young, either by
their opponents if the latter won, or by the master when his fighter was no
longer able to win and hence earn his survival. And refusing to fight meant
instant death or being sold away to some mine or other punishing institution
in order for the rebel to die fast and in great suffering.
The interesting point is that the self-protective attitudes of the slaves
became the self-inflicted handicaps in the next period: to work as much as
possible to be accepted as a good nigger; to refuse any education not to be
seen as uppity and dangerous for the whites’ superiority; to refuse (as for
males) any marital commitment and yet to breed around multiple children
with multiple partners and in absolute lack of any stability; to be ready (as
for women) to enter relationships with any man available at any time to
avoid being ostracized because unwomanly; to look for easy money (as for
children) without any work or education behind leading to prostitution,
pimping, gangs, crime, and so on.
The book is going to surprise you. It defends the idea that during the
segregation and Jim Crow period the blacks were educated in all black
schools and thus could excel, even if it were in practical and vocational
subjects and with limited objectives. At least everyone got some education
and accepted to get it and not only the Talented Tenth of W.E.B. Dubois. In
contrast to this accepted education within segregation, when integration
arrived, the Black minority was confronted to the white majority in integrated
schools and that led to the reactivation of the negative attitudes of the time
of Slavery since they were once again face to face with the whites. This
book defends and advocates the idea that this PTSlaveryD can only be
solved by the Blacks with the Blacks and for the Blacks. No escape from
this principle.
I would like to insist on another idea that is essential still today and that
the authors call the “dumbing down process.” It is extremely revealing about
the PTSlaveryDisorder. In integrated education the Blacks are looked down
upon by the whites, which makes them feel inferior, hence become
rebellious, hence be classified asocial or even worse. They have been
dumbed down by the situation and by the whites. But they reactivate an old
reflex of the time of slavery when mothers always declared their children,
especially boys, as being dumb, ignorant, clumsy, lazy or whatever to avoid
their being sold away, at least as long as possible. In the new integrated
schools, the Blacks, particularly boys, push themselves down into some
dumbed down attitude to avoid being picked out and hence victimized in a
way or another. And the school system is very quick at classifying these
students as emotionally disturbed and/or socially maladjusted, and/or
consequently learning disabled, which leads the vast majority of Black boys

and a fair proportion of Black girls into special education instead of the
standard stream of mental and knowledge development.
This leads to a phenomenal concept of “mentalcide” (a cross of mental
with homicide and suicide, showing the two directions of the concept, down
against the Blacks and up in front of the whites, coming respectively from
the whites out of racism and from the Blacks out of fear). This mentalcide is
probably the most difficult symptom and phenomenon to repair, to heal in
order to salvage the minds of these young people, and eventually their adult
parents and relatives. But the authors also insist on mentalcide on the side
of the whites. The whites during the Jim Crow segregation period could be
violent with the Blacks, lynch them, humiliate them, kill them out of pure
pleasure or as simple game hunting, treat them as cattle in their
sharecropper positions because the whites had also spread over their mind,
their conscience, their ethical sense, their religious beliefs, over whatever
makes them human, a veil of mentalcide that enabled them to see the
Blacks as not human. During slavery, they were just plain real estate or
chattel possessions. But after the abolition of slavery, they were seen as
not human, not deserving any human treatment not because these whites
were necessarily criminals in their minds, but because their minds had been
killed by the situation (homicide) or by the shame they might have felt in
front of what they were doing (suicide): they killed their own minds when
confronted to Blacks.
Then the book proposes an important fourth chapter that explains how
the Blacks can get out of this absurd situation, hence can be healed from
PTSlaveryD. The main idea from my point of view is that the solution has to
be both individual and collective. Each individual has to make a personal
effort to grasp the seriousness of their situation and the urgency of a
treatment, but at the same time, meditation is not enough if it is not
collectively prepared and experienced. That means the healing process has
to be carried out in small groups with a qualified person to manage the
group. This means that this qualified person will have to get each individual
and the group to the consciousness of the past, of the causes, of the
symptoms, of the urgency and of the possible solutions. Then each
individual has to get down into their heritage, past and family genogram on
both sides of their families, their two parents and beyond as far as possible.
Then each individual will have to meditate on the lot, fate, curse, luck or
whatever, positive and negative of these ancestors. It is essential to
understand that sharing is central: sharing with the qualified person who is
managing the operation and sharing with the group in full open-mindedness
and critical sense.
Think in that line of Booker T. Washington’s insistence on having no
ancestry apart from his mother since he was born a slave from a mother

who was a slave and a white man who just took advantage of her along the
way, which is called rape in any sexual dictionary. Here the authors insist
on rebuilding that ancestry as far as possible into the slavery period and
what’s more to get to some kind of balance of this ancestry with the main
emphasis on the positive achievements of these ancestors, the first one
being survival, but how did they survive, by doing what, learning what, all
things the present descendant could be proud of.
To conclude with this book, I would like to make two critical remarks.
The first one is that the past situation is often, too often, seen as mainly
negative and though it is asserted here and there, now and then, that there
were some Blacks who managed to get out of the disorder and pave the
way to some healing procedure, some exit from the exploitative situation;
though it is said from time to time that the slaves evolved some resisting
and adaptive procedures that could manage for them to avoid the worst
punishments and violence, it is not emphasized enough that human beings,
and the Blacks are human beings, are flexible, adaptive and always
dialectical. In the worst situations human beings, individually or collectively,
look for solutions that protect them and that liberate them. All along the
slavery and segregation periods the Blacks dreamed of their liberation, and
some fought individually (escape, the Underground Railroad) or collectively
(slow down work in spite of the whipping and the barking of both whites and
dogs). In a man there is always that dialectic and that’s why this PTSlaveryD
can be healed because, no matter how thick the veil of mentalcide might
be, there is deep under it the desire to get free, to get to the Promised Land,
to be liberated, a real Mosaic dream borrowed directly from the Whites’ New
– or Old – Testament.
The second remark is that we have to understand that any human
society has to be hierarchical because the human brain cannot think and
could not work in any other way, but hierarchy must not mean superior and
inferior but rather that everyone, no matter how qualified one is, still has
some knowledge to learn, some skill to acquire, some improvement to
achieve, for oneself for sure, but also for everyone else, because Homo
Sapiens from his very start in Africa could not have survived and spread all
over the planet without a fair dose of collective action and thinking. This
then means the way human society is managed has to be the management
of the people, by the people, for the people. Then in any society that forgets
these principles, even the supposedly most advanced democratic societies,
there is a dose of economic starvation used by some in power positions in
order to eliminate those who represent a danger for their power. And too
often there is no appeal procedure against the decisions of these powerful
or averagely powerful people, or if there is an appeal procedure it takes so
much time that when it succeeds the plaintiff, who is the victim in this case,

has died of starvation or has become completely depressive and suicidal,
or has already committed suicide giving the abusive people in these power
positions a victory they do not deserve.
More than capitalism, what is at stake is the selfishness of those who
climb up in the hierarchy of society and transform their positions into
authoritarian if not totalitarian fortresses that bombard those under the walls
of this fortress who do not want to get on their knees and worship the
master, the prophet, the leader, the dictator, or whoever this person
believes he/she is, maybe God himself. I would have the tendency to
consider that Stalinism, for example, is one such drift and is typical of an
unhealed Post Traumatic Proletarian Disorder/Syndrome since for them
industrial work is slavery. The struggle is thus far from just being that of the
Blacks in America. All Post Traumatic Social Disorder/Syndrome victims
should and can unite. We are coming to a widening of the concept which
will lead us to our conclusion after discussing the second book.
II./ Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome
This book is fascinating but if the previous one was from a Black Muslim
point of view and was published in 2002, this one is from a Christian point
of view and was published in 2005. We could wonder about the author’s
Christian reference page 122 where she quotes the first half of Proverbs,
23:7 (“. . . for as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”) Note her presentation
implies the first part of the verse is cut off whereas in reality it is the second
part that is cut off and the previous verse is omitted. But let’s widen the
quotation:
“6
Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire
thou his dainty meats: 7
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and
drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.”5
This quotation is a denunciation of a hypocrite who shows one attitude
but contains the opposite attitude deep in his heart, who is living with other
people and yet hates them. But her text drags that meaning to something
completely different:
“Beliefs can so color our minds that we become paralyzed, unable
to move beyond our fears and doubts, thus limiting our choices. Blind
to our potential, we wander aimlessly, searching for enlightenment, yet
remain barred from the infinite possibilities that are all around us. The
essence of belief’s influence was captured in this passage from
5
Proverbs 23:6-7, King James Bible

Proverbs, “. . . for as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Proverbs 23:7”
(122)
She is dealing with something completely different: mental alienation,
PTSS actually when what we think dictates our behaviors or blocks our
possible behaviors. She speaks of something negative in one individual,
whereas the Bible speaks of one type of hypocritical people: the bad thought
does not prevent him from doing the right thing: he just does it because of
the circumstances that force him to, yet he does not agree with, approve of
what he is doing, but he is saying nothing. Her reference to the Bible is a
ritual nod that does not mean any deep reflection on the original meaning
of the quoted verse which might not even have been checked. It is typically
taken out of its context here.
The difference in religious references between the two books we are
examining is fundamental particularly in the general feeling we get in Dr
Degruy’s book that the whites have to come out and express remorse and
contrition for what their ancestors have done, and the benefits of which they
are still enjoying, and beg for pardon and forgiveness. This side of the book
makes it at times very bothering if not just plain un-effective.
Let me be clear about the crime against humanity performed by the
Europeans when instating, developing and intensively practicing slave trade
across the Atlantic and then slavery in the plantations in the Americas in
general. It is unpardonable, unforgivable. And yet we should differentiate
the Anglo-Saxon later American Protestant practice from the French and
Spanish/Portuguese Catholic practice. But we’d better think the crime itself
over. The crime was performed and is now by far too far away to look for
some kind of justice against the criminals. We can always get Willie Lynch
out of his tomb, hang him, draw him and quarter him. That would not help
at all solving the problem. And we can go after his descendants but that will
not solve the problem either.
The book is well inspired in recalling the past and the horrifying
terrifying acts of the slave owners, though Joy DeGruy only considers the
English side of this slavery. Slave trade though was not invented by the
English and the first slaves in Virginia were brought in 1619 by the Dutch
who still controlled New Amsterdam, due to become New York. It would
have been a nice thing if she had added the Willie Lynch case in her
approach. He is the one who invented and advocated the extreme slave
system in the English colonies, though he was not from there and was only
invited to help in 1712. To define the Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, she

refers to Jack Hitt’s 6
general listing of the symptoms of Post Traumatic
Stress Syndrome:
• “Intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external
cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.
• Physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues.
• Marked diminished interest or participation in significant activities.
• Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others.
• Restricted range of affect.
• Sense of foreshortened future (in other words, does not expect to
have a career, marriage, children or normal life span.)
• Difficulty falling or staying asleep.
• Irritability or outburst of anger.
• Difficulty concentrating.” 7
As we can see these symptoms are personal and require to be
processed individually, but what is important here is the reference to
reparations: the processing has to be based on the “repentance and
reparations” of the whites seen as the American society and government.
But now reparations have been decided by American courts and paid by the
Federal Government, the Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is still there and
has to be dealt with.
We should also start thinking beyond 2005. A Black president was
elected in 2008 and reelected in 2012. I heard former communist Angela
Davis saying in Paris in March 2013 that everyone before the election was
convinced, he was not going to be reelected, and he was. Unluckily for
Angela Davis, she was badly informed or just biased. I followed the 2012
campaign and read the few whistle blowing articles on the opinion polls
about the elections that revealed the Latinos (absorbed in the “white
category” by the biased opinion poll designers and analyzers) and the
Blacks were going to vote in a landslide for Obama. And that’s what
happened, which gave Obama a very comfortable victory.
Joy DeGruy is on that same line as Angela Davis: she systematically
ignores the fact that the future of the Blacks can only come from them
6
Jack Hitt is an American author. He is a contributing editor to The New York Times
Magazine, Harper's, and This American Life and has also written for the now-defunct
magazine Lingua Franca. He frequently appears in places like Rolling Stone, Wired,
and Outside Magazine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hitt, accessed August 14, 2014
7
“Making the case for racial reparations: does America owe a debt to the descendants of its
slaves?” published in Harper’s Magazine in November 2000, and republished by
Raymond Winbush, PhD, ed., in Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate
on Reparations, New York, NY, Harper Collins, 2003.

themselves, as the Black Muslims say, and from the allies they might get in
the direction of improving the situation by making our reading of the
constitution better, more progressive, and then fighting together to get these
improvements implemented. It cannot come from any kind of repentance
from the whites because such repentance is unfeasible. It is too late for that.
It will have to come from daily struggle and democratic development.
She defends Affirmative Action, which is her right, but she is misled by
her a priori opinion. In North Carolina Charlotte was rocked in 1969-70 by
the Blacks against the bussing system that forced Black children to get up
at five to be bussed to predominantly white schools and with no return
movement from the whites because the white families decided to put their
children in private schools, menacing the concerned public schools with
losing classes. The Blacks themselves went against this inhuman – for them
– project of affirmative action.
In 1973 in Davis, California, Affirmative Action was asserted by the
Chancellor of the University, and then the famous Bakke case was partially
won in the US Supreme Court that ruled a student who has the grades to
be selected into any school cannot be sidetracked for any reason,
particularly his racial origin.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (No. 7811),
Argued: October 12, 1977, Decided: June 28, 1978
“The Bakke case aroused intense controversy. . . On June 27,
1978, the Court divided sharply in its decision, presenting six separate
opinions. Four justices chose to address only the statutory issue of Title
VI and found for Bakke, including his admission to the medical school,
because the quota in the university's admission plan had clearly
excluded Bakke on the basis of his race. Four justices addressed the
larger constitutional issue of the Equal Protection Clause and found for
the medical school because its intent was not to exclude Bakke but only
to include individuals of other races for compelling government
reasons. The deciding swing vote was cast by Justice Lewis F. Powell
Jr., who found for both. Powell's contention was that the Title VI plurality
was correct in that the university had violated the "plain meaning" of the
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT, which proscribed discrimination based on race, and
ordered Bakke be admitted to the medical school. But Powell also
found that the university could use "race-conscious" factors in selecting
its applicants in order to achieve the benefits of a "diverse student
body."
This divided decision settled the Bakke case, but it left the legal
issue muddled: what actions, if any, could the state take to protect

minorities in the marketplace? Subsequent court decisions struggled
repeatedly over this primary civil rights question.”8
When Affirmative Action deals with compulsory quotas it is
unacceptable. Only the students who have the proper grades are supposed
to be selected. If Affirmative Action is the organization of special reinforcing
classes or actions for ALL students who need them (meaning not registered
on any discriminating parameter, even positive) it is acceptable. To help the
weaker, not the darker, is ethical. To give the weaker a privilege is unethical,
and in this case to give the darker a privilege is unethical twice as much
(and racist since it assumes from the start the darker are necessarily
weaker), and in both cases anyway unfair to the others. Unfair to their future
public: would one trust a doctor who got his degree thanks to a 20%
premium in his exam results on the basis of ANY consideration whatsoever?
The question is not the color of the doctor, or his national origin, or his sex
or gender, but the very principle that he/she will be 20% under the
acceptable level.
And yet this book is essential. It reveals one fundamental crime that is
added to the selective functioning of Western society. A human society can
only be hierarchical because the brain, as I have already said, can only work
hierarchically, and nature furthermore is hierarchically structured. The point
is what we do with this hierarchy. Do we transform it into a hunt or a chase
against some categories of people, Blacks, Indians, Japanese, Christians,
Muslims, Jews, or whoever, we have put at the bottom of the hierarchy? Or
do we use this hierarchy to enable some excellence to come up to the top
with a strong social upward movement of the whole society and of any
individual in that society based on merit and only merit? Asking the two
questions tells on which side one stands, and the answers are obvious.
Then one asks, demands, requires justice which means the obligation NOT
to add anything else, positive like wealth or negative like color, to the merit
and motivation of all individuals and then one can look for all procedures to
help the weaker become more motivated and better. But quotas and all
reverse racism, reverse segregation, and reverse exclusion are
unacceptable for ethical, moral, and human reasons. What’s more, it would
kill the dynamic of a country in no time.
We should always wonder if we only consider merit and value when we
assess a person. We should wonder whether any dress code, behavior
code, religious or secular code, political or neutral code have negative or
8
West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All
rights reserved, http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Bakke+case, accessed
August 14, 2014

positive effects and if they have one single negative effect they should be
banned, because they become a segregation.
This book is essential to show the extreme extension slavery reached,
and after slavery segregation and Jim Crow laws. It is horrible, horrifying,
terrible, terrifying, and even ethically gross and out-grossing, sickening,
nauseating. But on the other hand, the book is weak on what we can do, all
of us, but first of all Blacks since they alone are considered in this book.
They have to take their own future in their own hands and first of all get as
many people as possible suffering from this Post Traumatic Slave/Slavery
Syndrome/Disorder, along with members of their communities who have
already negotiated the obstacle, in order to step beyond, clear their minds,
free themselves and start looking at their past and present in a balanced
way, both positive and negative.
When, for example, she says music is part of the alienation of Blacks
because it broadcasts stereotypes, she is biased. The gangsta rap she is
thinking of is produced by some Black artists who are down-casting their
own community for one. And for two the Blacks have brought polyrhythmic
music to the whole world and their contribution to modern music is
enormous. The Blacks have to recapture their contribution to the world and
start being proud of it. That’s the only way to step over their Post Traumatic
Slavery/Slave Syndrome/Disorder.
Barack Obama has done more by himself in six years now than anyone
else could have thought. If that is not an achievement of the Blacks what
is?
But the main criticism about the book is that it proposes no clear
procedure to heal this PTSS the way the Black Muslims’ inspired approach
does. It sets vast general objectives but no concrete down to earth method,
and that’s what the Blacks in America, African Americans need most of all:
a simple collective procedure for every single individual and the first step is
to reconstruct one’s genealogical past and then, with the help of family,
friends and community members, rebuild their ancestors’ balance sheets
and their own balance sheets with what they, as members of their
community and as individuals, have actually done in their life, both positive
and negative, and then maybe collectively all these individuals might be
able to start rebuilding their future.
If you waited for the whites to come begging on their knees for your
forgiveness you would be waiting in vain. If you astonished them with your
achievements, they would come to you and eventually congratulate you,
even if some would be envious, jealous, disruptive, and even destructive.
Quite a few white people did cast their votes, twice mind you, for a black
president. The aggressive and hostile minority will always be hostile and
aggressive. Build your community within the American society and excel

there and you will have the majority of the people on your side and the
minority will be controllable. Barack and Michelle Obama did it. So why not
every single Black man and woman, every single Black boy and girl? And
then the descendants of Black slaves and the descendants of slave owners
will be able to sit at the same table and eat together.
Joy DeGruy concludes: “I tremble with eager anticipation of change,
and with a profound certainty of victory.” And I am afraid she does not
realize the word “victory” implies a war and I dare say it is not a war, at best
a struggle in which no one will be victorious or defeated. The next stage will
be better, but it will be better for everyone, Blacks, Latinos, Indians, Asians,
and Whites alike. It has to be everyone, or the struggle would go on for ever.
Conclusion
These two books deal with a very particular problem that exists in the
USA but must not be reduced to the Blacks or the USA.
The Catholic Church of the United States has proposed a policy to
address Native Americans in their plight that is summarized by three words:
remember, reconcile, recommit, and this triad can be implemented here too.
It is indispensable to remember, and Black Muslims make it a duty for
everyone who has an ancestry problem to start here: recapture your
ancestry as far as you can. Then to remember is not only to put names on
the right people and in the proper order but also to balance their pros and
cons, their achievements and their failures, both from their points of view
and from a wider modern point of view. Booker T. Washington recalls how
when he was a child, and his mother was still a slave she came one night
with a chicken she cooked to feed her children. He explains that this chicken
had to have been borrowed of sorts from the planter’s poultry yard in the
most illegal way. But Booker T. Washington refuses to consider she had
stolen it and that it was a theft for her, though he admits in his modern mind
he would consider it as a theft now, but not then. He could have gone one
step further and the balance sheet of his mother was that she was able to
put her own life on the table to feed her children whose survival was more
important to her than her own life, because thieving was not exactly
welcome for a slave on a plantation in Virginia in the 1850s.
Then we have to reconcile.
We must reconcile ourselves with ourselves, each one of us with the
deeper self we have in us. This is the most difficult part. That’s where the
First book was fascinating because of the procedure it proposed. We have
to go down in our own self and then bring up all we can find and think of
and discuss it with others in a formal group of people engaged in the same
procedure. This is true for every single person in life, but those who have
been the victims of some kind of segregation or trauma are locked up in

themselves and have lost the conscience of what caused the trauma that
now causes the handicap.
We must reconcile with one another within our group, be it the family,
the neighborhood, or the ethnic, social, or cultural group(s) we belong to.
And this means we have to share our exploration of our ancestry and
ourselves. That’s the second most difficult part: we have to reveal to others,
things we consider very secret, but trauma can be solved only if we make it
public, if we face it in public, knowing that some people will be supportive,
and some will be very hostile. By making it public I do not mean advertising
it in the press or on TV but sharing it with a group of people who are
anonymous witnesses of our process of liberation because they are going
through the same process of liberation as us within the same group.
Finally, we have to reconcile ourselves as social beings with society as
a whole. For some, that means to forgive and be forgiven. But when we are
dealing with an evil that officially stopped 150 years ago, five generations
ago, forgiving does not mean much for the people of today. We have to
accept to let bygones be bygones. But we must not forget the past nor must
we not put the past on the back burner for later use or revival. We must put
it away in the glass case of past events, past crimes, past achievements, or
whatever. There Blacks meet Whites because on both sides they must let
bygones be bygones and that means getting over the idea that color has
any force in determining the value of anyone and one’s attitude toward
anyone. This is the most difficult and the longest process of them all. It may
take a couple of generations to get through, and even so.
Finally, we have to recommit ourselves to the basic principles and
objectives of Homo Sapiens himself: to create and support a society based
on merit, founded on development, constructed on freedom, equality, and
empathetic love, entirely centered on knowledge, finding and accessing
knowledge, acquiring and assimilating knowledge, sharing and intertwining
knowledge. This is the knowledge society and the knowledge economy of
today and tomorrow. And that has been the fundamental human mental
orientation all along.
From sensation to perception and identification (first conceptualization
of language); then observation, experimentation, and speculation (second
conceptualization of religion, science, philosophy, and the arts). If Homo
Sapiens were able to integrate some Homo Neanderthalensis when they
met; if Homo Sapiens was able to move from Africa to Latin America,
following the stars via Siberia, generation after generation, because of their
language(s), their understanding of the world and the universe; if Homo
Sapiens was able to dedicate some of his survival time to painting animals
in caves, carving animals on stones or assembling stones to represent
animals or some cosmic wheels on hills and mountains, there is no reason

why modern human beings should not be able to recommit themselves to
these vast objectives in the full respect of human nature and Mother Nature.
And the Black descendants in the United States of African slaves in
America are blazing the trail and showing the way. And we can easily think
of Post Traumatic Colonial Syndrome/Disorder, or Post Traumatic Feudal
Syndrome/Disorder, or Post Traumatic Proletarian Syndrome/Disorder, or
any other Post Traumatic Syndrome/Disorder after any traumatic even in
the history of the world, a country, or a collective human entity.
MURRAY GORDON – SLAVERY IN THE ARAB
WORLD – 1987 – 1989
The book is a little bit old and does not integrate what was discovered
since its first publication in Paris (in French) or the USA. The printed paper
back edition I have just put my hands on, printed in the UK by Amazon.co.uk
Ltd would deserve additional notes to integrate the enormous progress we
have made in the field over the last twenty years. It centers practically
exclusively on the Arab world when it became Islamic. It sure considers
ancient times but superficially. The Greeks are hardly mentioned. The
Romans are vaguely mentioned. The Biblical Jews are mentioned but not
explored as much as they should have been explored. For example, the two
sons of Abraham are not mentioned, though Isaac is famous in the West
and Ishmael is famous in the Islamic world. Ishmael or Ismail is supposed
to be the link of Islam to Abraham, hence to Moses, Adam, and Eve. This
Ishmael is Abraham’s son he gets from his slave servant Hagar. It is a whole
section of the Book of genesis. Let me quote it in full.
“16 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she
had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2
so she said to Abram,
“The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave;
perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3
So after Abram had been living
in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and

gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4
He slept with Hagar, and she
conceived.
When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her
mistress. 5
Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the
wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she
knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the LORD judge between
you and me.”
6
“Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever
you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so, she fled from her.
7
The angel of the LORD found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it
was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8
And he said,
“Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you
going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
9
Then the angel of the LORD told her, “Go back to your mistress
and submit to her.” 10
The angel added, “I will increase your
descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
11
The angel of the LORD also said to her:
“You are now pregnant, and you will give birth to a son. You shall
name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard of your misery.
12
He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward[b]
all
his brothers.”
13
She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: “You are the
God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen[c]
the One who sees
me.” 14
That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi[d]
; it is still there,
between Kadesh and Bered.
15
So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name
Ishmael to the son she had borne.16
Abram was eighty-six years
old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.” (Genesis 16, New International
Version)
This is important because Hagar is Egyptian and a slave. A slave can
obviously be mistreated but a slave must according to the Angel of God
“submit to her mistress.” Note a slave can be sexually given to a man by his
own wife. The slave has no choice about it, and we are many centuries
before the Prophet Muhammad.
He should have studied the Dead Sea Scrolls because their own beliefs
and sense of purity are extremely close to what Islam was going to preach.
These Dead Sea Scrolls are closely connected to James, the brother of
Jesus, the first bishop of Jerusalem, the trend in Judaism that is rejected by
the Temple and the priests, to the point of getting James stoned to death

some thirty years after Jesus’ crucifixion at the request of the same priest
of the same Temple. Islam is thus inheriting from a general situation at the
time and from a deep tradition in Judaism, the other Semitic religion from
the Middle East. In fact, Arabs are quite commonly quoted in the Old
Testament. It is by far not enough to only quote what is said about slaves in
the Old Testament, though it proves slavery was accepted and practiced by
the Jews or Israelites, even if softened, meaning it was currently a lot
harsher.
The result is that slavery among Arabs seems to be starting with Islam
in the Arab world, though the title of the book is misleading on this point
since it is in fact dealing with slavery in the Islamic world, including of course
the Ottoman Empire, the Indian Subcontinent (Pakistan, Bangladesh and
India), Iran and other Muslim countries around the Pacific Ocean that are
not Arab at all.
The book has another shortcoming: it is very often repetitive because
it uses the same facts over and over again in the various chapters. Instead
of having a straight and unique timeline, we constantly go back and forth in
the timeline to facts that come up over and over. We are at times not sure
what period is concerned because of these frequent flashbacks and flash-
forwards.
Despite that this book is essential about the Trans-Saharan slave trade
and about the African East Coast and Red Sea slave trade. Many facts are
given, though the author hammers on the idea that we do not have feasible
and trustworthy figures and facts. We are too often led to use conjectures,
in other words guessing figures and numbers. The slave trade we are
speaking of though is enormous in the long run, though rather reduced,
even when it is at its top level, in the short run. Yearly figures are often in
thousands rather than tens or hundreds of thousands.
The book insists on the fact that the future slaves are captured by
Africans who provide the Arab merchants with their prisoners to be turned
into slaves. It actually tries to evaluate the real cost of such raids and he is
maybe slightly vague. Some empires in Eastern Africa, or the vast Sudan
crossing the whole African continent south of the Sahara, are plagued by
wars whose objective is to capture the others, those who are defeated, in
order to make them slaves. The Tuareg raided Timbuktu just for that reason,
but the various empires in West Sudan, including the Manding Empire in
what is today Mali and its Kurukan Fuga Charter of the 13th
century is the
result of several wars between the Muslims and the Animists, and on each
side when they win, they capture all the others and make them slaves. The
Kurukan Fuga Charter actually has an article on slaves. Slavery was a war
measure, and the Arab merchants did not invent something that must have

gone on for millennia. They just gave wars another reason to be waged: to
capture slaves in order to sell them to the merchants for a profit.
Note that the same procedure existed among Native Americans. A
prisoner after a war in which his side had been defeated, had a simple
choice, and it did not depend on his decision, to be used as some
ceremonial sacrificial animal, generally going through slow killing and live
cutting up, or to become the slave of a family who had lost one of their
members in the war or battle.
The point here should be that the merchandizing of these prisoners
turned a common practice into a frightfully inhuman commercial and
profitable activity. The worst part is then that the raided villages or
communities were mostly wiped out: the defending victims, the captured
future slaves, and the others probably vastly massacred. That’s the vision
we get since there are no precisions about the outcome of such wars or
raids. It is impossible to evaluate the number of victims, slaves, and
collateral victims. But if you were in the slave trade area you had a serious
interest to be on the side of the merchants. This would explain that one tribe
would be on the side of the merchants and the other tribes would be the
victims of this trade because the merchants did not have the manpower to
wage the war itself, and they did not want to take risks. Such phenomena
are extremely long-lasting, and their consequences may last for very long
centuries, even after the end of the phenomenon itself. The slave trade
across the Sahara or along the Eastern Coast has thus produced tribal
oppositions that nourish today’s tribal wars and conflicts with genocidal
practices. Rwanda was in the very heart of the East Coast slave trade along
with Burundi, Uganda, the Congo (at least the eastern part of it), etc. All the
sub-Saharan countries of today were directly concerned by the Trans-
Saharan slave trade, just like Sudan and Ethiopia. We often say about the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade the Europeans used the service of a village chief
to get the slaves they wanted. In fact, it is a lot more vicious than that in real
facts; they used one tribe against another, and they also used in Western
Africa one religion, the Muslims, against another, the Animists. In fact, the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade just amplified what was already happening before
and made it even more profitable.
We have to go beyond the idea of slicing up the slave trade. We are
dealing with a vast phenomenon that has been going on since agriculture
appeared because then and only then human society needed some heavy
work in some periods with a mass of workers who had to be taken care of
by the rest of the community since they could not provide for themselves.
We are talking here of the post-ice-age period, particularly what is known
as the Neolithic period. The Arabs and the Muslims in general, but also the
Indians practiced slavery as a common day-to-day social organization in

line with this division of labor going back to 12,000 years ago, and we must
not forget that Hinduism had decreed that the Dalits were slaves they did
not even have to care for directly, and they still are. Speaking of slavery
here with the Dalits we have a form that is still very present in a country that
is neither Arab, Muslim, nor tyrannical.
The book would have been a lot better inspired if it had tried to capture
slavery as a universal human monstrosity and then qualify various periods
and forms according to the periods. The great care with which the Old
Testament and the Quran specify that slaves have to be treated properly,
the way the Kurukan Fuga Charter says the same thing, are there to
demonstrate that slaves were treated a lot worse before and that many
approaches, including the Islamic approach, actually made that social
organization better. It does not mean it is right, but it is better, nevertheless.
We do not seem to understand that in these areas in Africa where every
four or five years a raid was organized to get some slaves, and where that
has been going on for millennia, the villages tried to find some way of
dealing with the phenomenon, such as negotiating with the raiders and
delivering on a willing basis the slaves they want and it is the interest of the
raiders not to go beyond a certain level of exploitation otherwise they would
dry up their sources of profit. All civilizations have myths about tyrannical
neighbors or monsters like the Minotaur who (?) or which requires the
delivery every year or so often of a certain number of young women and/or
men. That is the mythical form of the exploitation of your neighbors by the
delivery of slaves. If you have to deliver twenty young people every year
you will manage the number of young people in the community so that you
can deliver.
In Auvergne in France, the military slavery of the First World War killed
or maimed fifty percent of the male population. That destroyed the
agriculture of the region based on intense and numerous labor, and it has
not yet recuperated. That produced a tremendous level of in-breeding that
is still visible today. And one century after that war and its sacrificial military
slavery the effects of the slaughter are still present and improving very
slowly with the arrival of people from outside the region. This case is far
from being unique in the world. The book does not study at all such
phenomena. Before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Kurukan Fuga
Charter was a way to organize the community within such surrounding
phenomena as the raids by the Tuaregs and some other northern Muslims.
One answer was actually to convert and build mosques because Muslims
may absolutely not enslave Muslims. That explains why the slave
merchants constantly had to go farther into Africa. Slavery was an excellent
argument for conversion.

The main fact the author mentions is not sufficiently developed. The
Trans-Atlantic slave trade was mostly men (maybe two-thirds if not even
more at the beginning) whereas Trans-Saharan and Red Sea slave trades
concerned mostly women (maybe two-thirds if not more all along). But it is
clear that the author is only considering the United States in this Trans-
Atlantic slave trade, and what’s more the Protestant English colonies and
then the United States. The role of France, Spain, and Portugal in the
Americas is totally ignored, and the case of Mexico is not even mentioned
where slavery was mostly for a long time if not for two centuries urban and
not rural. In the same way, he sees the Americas as only using slaves in
plantations, and that is not correct either. Cortez himself was aware of the
cost of such human chattel and he constructed in Mexico the first water-
powered sugar mill, and he was not the only one. When the rules dictated
by the Catholic churches of Spain, Portugal, and France were respected
slave labor was not that interesting nor that profitable: the obligation to
christen the slaves, the obligation for the slaves to marry and the slave
owners to respect this sacrament in daily life, obligation to respect the
relation between children and parents, obligation to have an active
manumission procedure, the fact that slaves were supposed to be
supervised by both royal and clerical courts, etc.… And I do not speak of
the respect of the life of these slaves.
The second fact, and the author exploits it properly, is the fact that on
the Muslim side, slavery was essentially ancillary and urban: mainly
servants of all styles and qualifications within the urban homes of the rich
or well-off. It is true that except for Mexico, and with a mixed system in most
other Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies in the Americas, slavery
was mostly agricultural and within plantations on the English side of the
Americas. In fact, only in the USA do we have a two-tier society with the
one-drop-of-blood theory, whereas everywhere else we have a three-tier
society both ethnically and socially, the medium group in slavery time (and
that is fundamentally visible still today) being constituted of free people of
color, all kinds of free mixed blood and poor whites, between the slaves at
the bottom mostly pure or dominant black and the upper class that could
also have some rich blacks or mixed blood.
The book though is best when it examines the slow and still unfinished
process to get rid of slavery. The dates are numerous and detailed, and the
documents and treaties are also numerous and detailed. He is proving it
was the interest of the colonizing powers in the 19th
century to get rid of the
over-exploitation of the black population by slave traders. There he should
have seen the important role of the various catholic churches and the
Anglican church, and he should have explored a little bit the free and yet
not so free, certainly not equal, status of the colonized people. He could

have shown the enormous improvement, but he could have shown that the
status of these colonized people was closer to that of serfs in medieval
times, hence it was some kind of feudalism, and it is this feudalism that
explains the failure of colonization, along with the inerasable traces and
wounds of the millennia of slave trade for outside countries and slavery in
the local countries. That would of course have made relative the hypocrisy
of all leaders of the Muslim countries that used slavery and the slave trade
because the Europeans were just as hypocritical since it was their interest
to stop the slave trade and slavery to develop colonial feudalism.
An important book though the circularity of its composition makes it
difficult to read.
JACQUES HEERS – LES NEGRIERS EN TERRE
D’ISLAM, VIIème-XVIème SIECLE– PERRIN 2003-
2007
Le projet de ce livre est louable et nécessaire. En effet en France on
réduit trop l’esclavage au seul esclavage du commerce triangulaire (qui
n’était pas très triangulaire, soit dit en passant) de la France et de
l’Angleterre. Il rappelle le rôle joué par le Portugal, mais il oublie de
mentionner l’Espagne. L’Espagne et le Portugal par décision du Pape lui-
même au 16ème
siècle reçurent respectivement l’ouest (le Nouveau Monde,
sauf le Brésil par un accord subséquent qui le donna au Portugal) et l’est
(l’Océan Indien). Mais il oublie aussi le rôle important des Pays Bas : les
premiers esclaves noirs furent livrés aux Anglais de Virginie en 1619 par
les Hollandais justement, et n’oublions pas quelques autres colonisateurs
et esclavagistes annexes pour cette traite triangulaire.
Mais son objet principal est de refuser l’attribution de l’esclavage au
seul monde chrétien, et à cette fin il étudie l’esclavage de l’Islam, Islam qui
ne peut exister qu’à partir du 7ème
siècle bien sûr. Et ne considérer que cette
alternative et que le créneau 7ème
-16ème
siècles fausse complètement le
propos historique et le fait apparaître anti-islamique. Je tiens à faire
quelques remarques non pas sur le fait que le monde islamique dans son

ensemble, loin de se réduire bien sûr au monde arabe, a pratiqué la prise
de prisonniers immédiatement transformés en esclaves, que ce soit après
une guerre ou simplement par des razzias systématiques qui ne sont de
toute façon que des actes de guerre, voire de guerre sainte.
Il déforme le discours historique possible sur le phénomène de
l’esclavage et donc la possibilité de comprendre que c’est la naissance de
l’agriculture quelques douze à dix mille ans avant notre ère, soit après la
dernière glaciation et quand l’eau commence à remonter et donc que les
Homo Sapiens peuvent remonter vers le nord pour s’y réinstaller et surtout
qu’ils sont confrontés à un changement climatique et même géographique
capital puisque l’eau va remonter de cent vingt mètres, recouvrant
d’énormes zones qui avaient été découvertes pendant au bas mot dix mille
ans, remettant tous les fleuves que nous connaissons aujourd’hui à flot bien
que la plupart existaient avant la glaciation, même si leurs cours et vallée
sont pu changer.
C’est dans ce creuset de l’invention de l’agriculture que deux choses
se décantent fortement et rapidement : d’une part des religions non plus
fondées sur le seul surnaturel monde des esprits des religions animistes,
qui ont survécu cependant dans certains continents et en particulier en
Afrique, mais fondée sur l’assertion d’un monde divin d’abord à plusieurs
dieux puis progressivement à un seul dieu (principalement les trois religions
d’origine sémitique, judaïsme, christianisme, islam, en ordre chronologique
de développement) ainsi que le cas particulier du Bouddhisme qui nie
l’existence d’un créateur de nature divine, et même le concept de création.
D’autre part la nécessité d’une nouvelle division du travail pour avoir
les moyens humains de grande quantité de travail en fonction des besoins
de cette agriculture. L’esclavage trouve sa logique dans cette nouvelle
division du travail agricole. On notera que les esclaves sont la main d’œuvre
nécessaire pour les travaux agricoles mais aussi pour la construction de
tous les temples et autres bâtiments de grande taille servant pour protéger
les récoltes et pour abriter les populations de personnels dédiés à
l’administration et le commerce de ces récoltes et du travail humain les
produisant, à l’exercice de la religion et des rites qui vont avec y compris
funéraires, et au travail des champs et des entrepôts, sans oublier bien sûr
les bâtisseurs. Beaucoup de ceux-là sont des esclaves. Pensons aux
pyramides d’Egypte par exemple ou à Göbekli Tepe en Turquie qui date de
neuf mille ans avant notre ère, soit très longtemps avant les pyramides
d’Egypte.
Cette décision de ne rien considérer, ou presque, avant le 7ème
siècle
lui permet ainsi de ne pas voir cette logique agricole de l’esclavage que la
religion va systématiquement justifier.

Cela lui permet aussi de ne faire qu’une vague allusion à l’esclavage
romain et d’oublier l’esclavage grec et surtout la pratique du sacrifice
humain courante dans le monde antique (le célèbre Minotaure) qu’il soit
d’origine indo-européenne (Grec en soi) ou turkique (la Colchide de Médée
intégrée à la mythologie grecque). Le sacrifice humain est encore accepté
dans la Bible puisqu’Abraham a bien failli sacrifier son propre fils (version
judaïque, Isaac, comme version islamique, Ismaïl), sans parler de Jephté
immortalisé par Carissimi et Haendel. Mais pire encore pour Jacques
Heers, l’esclavage est absolument justifié dans l’Ancien testament. Dans le
chapitre 9 de la Genèse par exemple où Noé impose une malédiction au
fils Canaan de son fils cadet, en le vouant à être « l’esclave des esclaves
de ses frères ». (Nouvelle Edition de Genève, 1979, Genèse 9 :25) Et que
dire de la loi mosaïque dans l’Exode 21:1-11 que je me permets ici de citer
en entier, et nous devons bien considérer qu’il s’agit uniquement de Juifs
ou Hébreux, rien n’est dit sur les esclaves non-juifs, comme par exemple
l’esclave d’Abraham qui lui donne le fils qui sera le géniteur même de
l’Islam. Je ne commenterai pas, le texte se suffit à lui-même.
Relations de maître à esclave
21 Voici les lois que tu leur présenteras.
2
Si tu achètes un esclave hébreu, il servira six années; mais la
septième, il sortira libre, sans rien payer. 3
S’il est entré seul, il sortira
seul; s’il avait une femme, sa femme sortira avec lui. 4
Si c’est son
maître qui lui a donné une femme, et qu’il en ait eu des fils ou des filles,
la femme et ses enfants seront à son maître, et il sortira seul. 5
Si
l’esclave dit: J’aime mon maître, ma femme et mes enfants, je ne veux
pas sortir libre, 6
alors son maître le conduira devant Dieu, et le fera
approcher de la porte ou du poteau, et son maître lui percera l’oreille
avec un poinçon, et l’esclave sera pour toujours à son service.
7
Si un homme vend sa fille pour être esclave, elle ne sortira point
comme sortent les esclaves. 8
Si elle déplaît à son maître, qui s’était
proposé de la prendre pour femme, il facilitera son rachat; mais il n’aura
pas le pouvoir de la vendre à des étrangers, après lui avoir été
infidèle. 9
S’il la destine à son fils, il agira envers elle selon le droit des
filles. 10
S’il prend une autre femme, il ne retranchera rien pour la
première à la nourriture, au vêtement, et au droit conjugal. 11
Et s’il ne
fait pas pour elle ces trois choses, elle pourra sortir sans rien payer,
sans donner de l’argent. (Exode 21 Nouvelle Edition de Genève –
NEG1979 (NEG1979)
Et je ne dirai rien de la caste des Intouchables, ou Dalits, de
l’hindouisme, esclaves internes à la société indo-aryenne elle-même par

décision religieuse, héréditaire et à jamais sans aucun droit que ce soit,
réduits à l’état le plus misérable et aux tâches les plus avilissantes et
inhumaines, sans compter la ségrégation, y compris pour l’eau, et le fait
que les Dalits peuvent être exploités, violés et tués à merci par les membres
des autres castes. Et cela est en grande partie encore vrai. Ce n’est fondé
ni sur la race, ni sur la couleur, ni sur l’ethnie, uniquement sur la naissance
de parents Dalits, eux-mêmes Dalits parce que nés de parents Dalits et un
parent suffit à rendre toute sa descendance à jamais Dalit. On a là la
« théorie de la goutte de sang » si chère au Ku Klux Klan et à Marcus
Garvey aux Etats-Unis poussée à un extrême incroyable puisqu’il n’y a pas
de rachat possible, malgré les évolutions des cinquante dernières années.
Cela aurait donné au discours de Jacques Heers une dimension
infiniment plus forte. Il dit que le développement de la traite transatlantique
est du au développement de l’agriculture de plantation et il ne cite que le
sucre et réduit cela au 18ème
siècle.
Or Cortez lui-même au 16ème
siècle construit la première raffinerie de
sucre du Mexique et la quatrième qu’il construira, de son vivant bien sûr,
sera à énergie aquatique, donc fonctionnant avec un moulin à eau. Cela lui
aurait alors permis de comprendre pourquoi les moulins à eau se sont
multipliés à partir du 10ème
siècle en Europe : la réforme féodale donnait à
tous le serfs 75 jours de non-travail minimum dans l’année. Comme
l’esclavage était interdit à partir de la réforme religieuse du 9ème
siècle, il
fallut remplacer le travail humain par le travail mécanique, et ce furent les
moulins à eau, cependant inventés par les Romains au premier siècle avant
notre ère mais jamais vraiment développés par eux. Cortez introduit le
même principe car dès la fin du 16ème
siècle dans la Nouvelle Espagne
(Mexique) l’esclavage devient minoritaire et l’importation d’esclave au
Mexique sera interdit à partir de 1622, si bien qu’alors la majorité des
« hommes de couleur » sont libres ( et très nombreux du temps de Cortez
lui-même) et surtout l’équilibre sexuel dans ces hommes de couleur, toutes
teintes confondues, ne sera atteint qu’à la fin du 17ème
siècle, ce qui
explique la disparition des noirs au Mexique par simple métissage (le mot
espagnol est « mestizaje ») avec les Indiens, les autochtones qui ne sont
pas ou peu mis en esclavage, qui sont hors juridiction de l’Inquisition royale
(installée en 1571) et des tribunaux religieux car considérés comme « Extra
Ecclesiam » (hors de l’église et tolérés en tant que tels).
Cela le fait dire en définitive des choses fausses sur l’église catholique,
espagnole, française, ou simplement Romaine, qui n’a accepté l’esclavage
qu’à condition que les esclaves soient christianisés et ainsi deviennent, en
contradiction avec leur statut de « propriété servile » ou « bétail humain »
(l’anglais a un mot spécifique, « chattel »), à la fois des sujets du roi
espagnol ou français, et des Chrétiens avec tous les droits attribués à ces

Chrétiens comme à tous les autres et en premier lieu le droit marital : le
mariage est un sacrement qui doit être consenti librement par les deux
parties en dehors de toute pression extérieures. Cela est inscrit très tôt dans
les textes : « Siete Partidas » espagnol et « Code Noir » français. Ce qui
est étrange c’est qu’il ne dit rien de tout cela alors que c’est la preuve que
l’église catholique en tant que telle n’a pas laissé faire les esclavagistes
comme ils l’entendaient. En fait sa vision des Chrétiens et de l’esclavage
est l’attitude des protestants puritains ou anglicans d’Angleterre. Sa volonté
de contrebalancer cette vision étroite de la chrétienté coupable de la mise
en esclavage vue comme extrême systématiquement des noirs africains au
Nouveau Monde par la simple référence aux pratiques de l’Islam est
largement erronée.
L’esclavage au Mexique a été introduit pour le travail dans les mines
(d’argent et d’or principalement, parallèlement à la main d’œuvre
autochtone qui avait un statut d’esclaves non christianisés, bien que cela
évolua très vite, ne serait-ce que pour sanctifier les « mariages » des
esclaves africains avec les femmes indiennes, puisque tout rapport sexuel
non marital est condamné, et pour le travail sur les plantations, et là le sucre
vient en premier, bien que Jacques Heers oublie le tabac : l’Espagne aura
le monopole du tabac en Europe jusqu’en 1616 et la première production
de qualité de tabac en Virginie apporté à Londres par John Rolfe et la
Princesse Pocahontas, épouse Rebecca Rolfe. Mais il oublie aussi que ces
plantations se sont développées bien avant le 18ème
siècle, qu’elles ont
concerné beaucoup d’autres produits en particulier le café, l’indigo, le coton
bien sûr, etc., et que dès le 19ème
siècle l’énergie de la machine à vapeur
va remplacer le travail humain comme l’eau l’avait fait avant elle. Sans
prendre tout cela en considération il manque une immense efficacité de
raisonnement.
Sans développer le point suivant, disons qu’il ne tient pas compte de
l’esclavage comme enjeu entre les animistes et les musulmans dans les
royaumes ou empires d’Afrique occidentale avant le 15ème
siècle. La Charte
de Kurukan Fuga (1240) de Soundjata, Roi du Manding, correspond à la
prise de contrôle de l’Afrique Occidentale par l’Islam et reconnaît
l’esclavage, même si elle le codifie en adoucissement (Article 20) bien que
le seul droit qui est reconnu à l’esclave est le contrôle de son « sac » qui ne
doit en aucune façon être envahi par le maître : « Ne Maltraitez pas les
esclaves. On est maître de l’esclave et non du sac qu’il porte. » On peut
bien sûr imaginer des sens métaphoriques qui n’auront qu’une valeur
métaphorique justement.
Ce livre cependant est important car il donne à lire une tranche de
l’approche historique de l’esclavage qu’en Occident nous hésitons à
aborder, parfois même censurons : la pratique de l’esclavage, des Noirs et

autres populations soumises par le monde islamique qu’il soit arabe, turc,
ottoman, perse ou autre. Cependant évitons de faire de l’Islam le centre
d’une approche de l’esclavage dans l’humanité. Ce serait une erreur, qui
plus est franchement raciste. Je ne dirai rien sur l’insistance sur le rôle de
quelques Juifs dans ce livre concernant la pratique commerciale de
l’esclavage. Il y eut des Juifs, comme il y eut aussi beaucoup d’autres
personnes de toutes nationalités ou religions. Le fait que certains étaient
juifs ne saurait être un argument contre les Juifs en général, ce qui
relèverait de l’antisémitisme. Le livre n’est pas clair sur ce point.
ENGLISH VERSION
The project of this book is laudable and necessary. Indeed in France,
slavery is reduced too much to the sole slavery of triangular trade (which
was not very triangular, by the way) of France and England. He recalls the
role played by Portugal, but he forgets to mention Spain. Spain and Portugal
by decision of the Pope himself in the 16th century respectively received
the west to Spain (the New World, meaning South America and
Mesoamerica, and a little bit of North America, except Brazil which, by a
subsequent agreement, was given to Portugal) and the east to Portugal (the
Indian Ocean). But he also forgets the important role of the Netherlands:
the first black slaves were delivered to the English in Virginia in 1619 by the
Dutch, and let us not forget a few other colonizers and slaveholders involved
in this triangular trade.
But his main objective is to refuse the attribution of slavery to the
Christian world alone, and to this end, he studies the slavery of Islam, Islam
which can only exist from the 7th century of course. Only consider this
alternative and that the 7th-16th century niche completely distorts the
historical statement and makes it appear anti-Islamic. I would like to make
a few remarks, not on the fact that the Islamic world as a whole, far from
being reduced of course to the Arab world, has practiced the taking of
prisoners immediately transformed into slaves, whether after a war or
simply by systematic raids which are in any case only acts of war, even holy
war.

It distorts the possible historical discourse on the phenomenon of
slavery and therefore the possibility of understanding that it is the birth of
agriculture some twelve to ten thousand years before our era, that is to say
after the last glaciation and when water began to rise, and henceforth Homo
Sapiens could go back north to resettle there and above all they were
confronted with a major climatic and even geographical change since the
water will rise by one hundred and twenty meters, covering enormous areas
which had been discovered for at least ten thousand years, putting all the
rivers we know today back afloat although most existed before the
glaciation, even if their courses and valleys may have changed.
In this crucible of the development of agriculture, two things settled
strongly and quickly: on the one hand, religions were no longer based solely
on the supernatural world of spirits of animist religions, which have
nevertheless survived in certain continents and in particular in Africa, but
based on the assertion of a divine world first with several gods then
gradually with a single god (mainly the three religions of Semitic origin,
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, in chronological order of development ), as well
as the particular case of Buddhism which denies the existence of a creator
of divine nature, and even the concept of creation.
On the other hand, the a need for a new division of labor to have the
human resources for a large quantity of work according to the needs of this
agriculture. Slavery finds its logic in this new division of agricultural labor. It
should be noted that slaves were the labor force necessary for agricultural
work but also for the construction of all temples, and other large buildings
used to protect crops and to house populations of personnel dedicated to
administration and the trade of these crops, and the human labor producing
them. In the same way, society is transformed by the exercise of religion
and the rites that go along with it, including funerary ones, and by the work
in the fields and warehouses, without of course forgetting the builders. Many
of these are slaves. Let's think of the pyramids of Egypt for example or of
Göbekli Tepe in Turkey which dates from nine thousand years BCE, a very
long time before the pyramids of Egypt.
This decision to consider nothing or almost nothing, before the 7th
century thus allows him not to see this agricultural logic of slavery that
religion will systematically justify.
This also allows him to make only a vague allusion to Roman slavery
and to forget Greek slavery and especially the practice of human sacrifice
common in the ancient world (the famous Minotaur) whether of Indo- or -
European origin (the Greeks by themselves) or Turkic (the Colchis of Medea
integrated into Greek mythology). Human sacrifice is still accepted in the
Bible since Abraham almost sacrificed his own son (Judaic version, Isaac,
Islamic version, Ismail), not to mention Jephthah immortalized by Carissimi

and Handel. But even worse for Jacques Heers, slavery is absolutely
justified in the Old Testament. In chapter 9 of Genesis for example Noah
imposes a curse on the son Canaan of his younger son, dooming him to be
“the slave of the slaves of his brothers”. (New Edition of Geneva, 1979,
Genesis 9:25) And what about the Mosaic law in Exodus 21:1-11 which I
allow myself here to quote in full, and we must consider that it is only
speaking of Jews or Hebrews, nothing is said about non-Jewish slaves,
such as, for example, the slave of Abraham’s wife who gives him the son
who will be the very progenitor of Islam. I will not comment, the text is quite
enough by itself.
Master-slave relationships
21 These are the laws which you shall present to them.
2
If you buy a Hebrew slave, he will serve six years; but on the
seventh, he will go out free, without paying anything. 3
If he enters
alone, he will go out alone; if he had a wife, his wife would go out with
him. 4
If his master gave him a wife, and he had sons or daughters by
her, the wife and her children shall be his master's, and he shall go out
alone. 5
If the slave says, I love my master, my wife, and my children, I
do not want to go free, 6
then his master will bring him before God, and
bring him near to the gate or to the gate-post, and his master will pierce
his ear with an awl, and the slave will be in his service forever.
7
If a man sells his daughter into slavery, she shall not go out as
slaves go out. 8
If she displeases her master, who had proposed to take
her as his wife, he will facilitate her ransom; but he will not have the
power to sell her to strangers, after having been unfaithful to her. 9
If he
intends her for his son, he will deal with her according to the rights of
daughters. 10
If he takes another wife, he shall not take away anything
from the first wife's food, clothing, or marital rights. 11
And if he does not
do these three things for her, she will be able to go out without paying
anything, without giving money. (Exodus 21 New Geneva Edition –
NEG1979)
And I will say nothing about the caste of Untouchables, or Dalits, of
Hinduism, internal slaves of the Indo-Aryan society itself by religious,
hereditary decisions and forever without any rights whatsoever, reduced to
the state the most miserable and with the most degrading and inhumane
tasks to fulfill, not to mention the segregation, including for water, and the
fact that Dalits can be exploited, raped and killed at will by members of other
castes. And much of this is still true. It is not based on race, color, or
ethnicity, only on the birth of Dalit parents, themselves Dalits because born
to Dalit parents and one parent is enough to make all his descendants

forever Dalit. Here we have the “drop of blood theory” so dear to the Ku Klux
Klan and Marcus Garvey in the United States taken to an incredible extreme
since there is no possible redemption, despite the developments of the last
fifty years. .
This would have given Jacques Heers' discourse an infinitely stronger
dimension. He says that the development of the transatlantic trade is due
to the development of plantation agriculture and he only cites sugar and
reduces this to the 18th century.
But Cortez himself in the 16th century built the first sugar refinery in
Mexico and the fourth that he built, during his lifetime, of course, would be
water-powered, therefore operating with a water mill. This would then have
allowed him to understand why water mills multiplied from the 10th century
in Europe: the feudal reform gave all serfs a minimum of 75 days of non-
work per year. As slavery was prohibited by the religious reform of the 9th
century, human labor had to be replaced by mechanical labor, and these
were water mills, however, invented by the Romans in the first century BCE
but never really developed by them. Cortez introduced the same principle
because from the end of the 16th century in New Spain (Mexico) slavery
became a minority and the importation of slaves into Mexico was prohibited
from 1622 so that the majority of “men of color” were free (and very
numerous in the time of Cortez himself) and above all sexual balance in
these men of color, all shades combined, will not be achieved until the end
of the 17th century, which explains the disappearance of blacks in Mexico
by simple interbreeding (the Spanish word is "mestizaje") with the Indians,
the natives who are not or only little enslaved, who are outside the
jurisdiction of the Royal Inquisition (installed in 1571 ) and religious courts
because they are considered “Extra Ecclesiam” (outside the church and
tolerated as such).
This ultimately makes him say false things about the Catholic Church,
Spanish, French, or simply Roman, which only accepted slavery on the
condition that the slaves were Christianized and thus became, in
contradiction with their status as "servile property" or "human chattel," both
the subjects of the Spanish or French kings and Christians with all the rights
assigned to these Christians as to all others and first of all marital law:
marriage is a sacrament which must be freely consented to by both parties
without any external pressure. This is written very early in the texts: the
Spanish “Siete Partidas” and the French “Code Noir”. What is strange is
that he says none of this even though it is proof that the Catholic Church as
such did not let the slavers do as they wanted. In fact, his vision of Christians
and slavery is the attitude of the Puritan or Anglican Protestants of England.
His desire to counterbalance this narrow vision of Christianity guilty of the

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