Child Grooming Scandal,  Islamism,  slavery

Towards understanding Islamic Child-Rape gangs Part 1: Islamic slavery. A very brief overview.

By Jon MC

I was asked by Mirax to write on the topic of the mostly Muslim child-rape gangs, the issue which, briefly, reached great prominence within the UK once again (early 2025). In addition, other European countries are also finding that they have the same problem, except that in their cases the majority of perpetrators are North African Muslims rather than Pakistani (Mirpuri) Muslims.
To help understand the breadth of the problem, I am splitting my response into three essays so that each is relatively short. This first one gives an overview of the historical context for Islamic sex-slavery which continues to the present day.
In addition, and in the interests of brevity, I am presenting the information in a shortened form, so arguments will not be as fully developed as they could be.

Towards understanding Islamic Child-Rape gangs
Part 1: Islamic slavery. A very brief overview.

Throughout human history, slavery was  common and as such it was lawful in those countries that engaged in the practice. It is only relatively recently that slavery has been criminalised with some muslim countries only outlawing slavery by state-law in the mid-20th century (as will be shown later, slavery cannot be outlawed under sharia).

In reality, no major group in the world is innocent of the crime of historical slavery. Slavery was largely ubiquitous in history.
The Western Powers and especially Britain were at the forefront of efforts to ban legal slavery worldwide from the 19th century onwards, an objective that has not yet been totally achieved, though it has been achieved within the “West” and much of the non-Islamic world.

Slavery in Islam is a scarcely mentioned matter in the West, though books and resources are available, going right back to the records kept by Islamic Caliphs, Sultans, their advisers and other Muslim chroniclers, though their records are usually only available to speakers and readers of Arabic.
At its zenith the Islamic Empire stretched from India through Africa and into Eastern Europe.
From its very inception Islam practiced slavery as a part of war and raiding and then as a tax- or tribute-measure.
A survey of sources concerning the numbers enslaved by the “Islamic powers”, according to their own records (which are incomplete and thus will under-estimate the figures) show the following:

  • Europeans enslaved: 400,0001 (A secondary source4 places this figure >1 million.)
  • Indians enslaved: 6,000,00002
  • Africans enslaved: 12,000,00003 (This figure neglects slaves for the Western trade – see below.)
  • Total enslaved: 18,400,000

The figures shown above are, in each case, an under-estimate of the true figure. The Muslim Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye in his article LE GENOCIDE VOILÉ, (“The Veiled Genocide”) (Jan. 2008) says: “…[the] 17 million Africans who were brought to the Arab-Muslim world and transformed into eunuchs have disappeared … It was a programmed ‘ethnic extinction by castration” (Emphases mine). If this was the total number of male slaves, then the total number of Africans enslaved must have been much higher than that. Historically, Islamic slavery was in a ratio of approximately two females to one male (Muslims desired females as sex-slaves). On this basis, the total number of Africans enslaved would be about fifty-one millions. The terms “female” and “male” are used because Muslims regularly enslaved prepubescents and used the girl-children as sex-slaves (recall that Mohammed first ‘had sex’ with Aisha when she was less than 9 years old).
This, of course, is the number that survived to reach the slave markets.

A recent estimate of the number of slaves who died en route to the Islamic slave markets was made by John Alembellah Azumah in his 2001 book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa. He estimates that over 80 million Africans died en route to the Islamic slave markets, with about 20 million surviving (a similar figure to that of N’Diaye), for a total of 100 million Africans enslaved or murdered en route to the Arab markets.
The difficulty in accurately fixing the numbers of Africans enslaved by Muslims means that estimates range from a (very low) minimum of 12 millions from Islamic records that still exist up to numbers reaching into the hundreds of millions if the deaths en route to the slave markets are also considered.

The African authors N’Daiye and Azumah quote roughly comparable figures for those reaching the Muslim slave markets (17 and 20 millions respectively, though these numbers have a different sex ratio) and Azumah estimates that a further 80 millions, of both sexes, died en route.
Further it is also documented that the European slave trade was founded on the supply of slaves by Muslim slave-traders who supplied about 80% of the slaves for the Atlantic slave-trade.
Thus, and very conservatively, Muslims enslaved perhaps twenty-one million Africans – about nine million for the transatlantic trade and (as previously mentioned) a minimum of twelve million for the “internal” Islamic slave trade, although the upper bound for the African enslavement could exceed 100 million.

Furthermore, there are some aspects of Islamic slavery that are uniquely cruel to Islam.
The wide-spread Islamic practice of killing all the adult males captured in war or slave-raiding and only retaining the females, especially the children and fertile women. The latter were widely used as sex-slaves. (Harems containing many hundreds or even thousands of sex-slaves are well documented in history.)
When the males were not killed they were frequently castrated. (Again the presence of numbers of eunuchs within the Islamic system is well documented.)
These two practices (slaughter and/or castration) had the consequence that the enslaved population had little or no chance to reproduce itself which meant that the surviving slave women could only have children fathered by their Muslim owners. Since in Islam the child of a slave-woman is a slave, the practice of castration was often carried out on subsequent generations also, thus the descendants of the slaves died out over time or, on occasion, were assimilated within the Muslim population.
Sometimes Mussalmen married a slave – usually freeing her as her Mahr5 – in order to acquire legitimate offspring.
That the killing of the majority of the male population would have had a devastating effect on both the population of the peoples raided for slaves in particular and the population balance between Muslims and non-Muslims is self-evident and well documented in the case of India2.
White slaves were particularly prized by the Muslims from the time of Mohammed6 resulting in constant attacks on Byzantium, in order to capture these sexually desirable females who were also thought of as as being sexually immoral (sluts, whores, etc. in today’s terms). Thus white women were, at one and the same time, carnally desirable and utterly depraved.

The “Islamic Golden age” and in particular the Muslim states of Al-Andalus (Iberian peninsula), is often spoken of, particularly by Anglophone writers, in glowing terms as a place where all faiths lived in harmony in the so-called “convivencia”. The reality is rather different. Jihadist raids on the surrounding countries and slave-taking (inevitably involving the capture of European women for sex-slaves) was at times a biannual event in these states and Córdoba was a slave emporium of European flesh for centuries, and female flesh in particular.
The Ottoman empire was a slaving empire. The practice of Devshirme was a form of Jizya7 in which the children of non-Muslims, usually Christian and often Greek and/or Balkan, families were levied as ‘payment’ for taxes. Their sons were forcibly converted to Islam and raised to be the often fanatic Janissary troops that were then used to impose (sometimes unwillingly) this particularly cruel form of Jizya-slavery. Less talked about is that the daughters ended up as sex-slaves in harems. A Greek blessing of the time was “May all your daughters be ugly” as in this way they would not be taken as sex-slaves.

The arrival of Islam in India brought with it mass-slavery and sex-slavery of Hindus and Buddhists along with (inevitably) mass slaughter of males (bar those castrated to serve as eunuchs). Indian slaves were exported in the Islamic slave trade to Central Asia and West Asia and Africans were also imported via the same trade. Over the course of a millennium, from the 8th to 18th century Islamic slavery was responsible of the enslavement of at least 6 million Hindu and Buddhist Indians2 at the hands (or swords) of waves of Islamic invaders and many of those enslaved were forced to profess Islam. Once Islamic Sultanates (etc.) were set up those surviving non-Muslims were often driven into poverty by Jizya and then, in a similar manner to the Ottoman Devshirme system, their children were enslaved as Jizya. (See 2 for details.)
American readers may be familiar with events that led to the formation of the US Navy and Marine Corps. The Muslim “Barbary Pirates”, who were also slavers, preyed upon European shipping and regularly slave-raided the Christian countries of Europe, including, on occasion, Britain and Ireland. Most European countries bought the safety of their vessels from acts of piracy by paying the Muslims off – another form of Jizya payment. With US independence, this ‘protection’ racket no longer applied to US vessels.

In a letter Jefferson wrote in March 1786 to John Jay, he recounts a meeting he and John Adams held with the ambassador from the Barbary state of Tripoli, Abd Al- Rahman, to discuss the matter of the enslavement of Americans. The Ambassador’s response to the questions was as follows.

“The Ambassador answered us that it [raiding and slavery] was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their [the Muslims] authority were sinners, that it was their [Muslims’] right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Mussalman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”8

Here, again, we see a clear justification of Jihad (including piracy) and slavery in Islamic religious terms.
Another source9 claims that Jihad caused up to 270 million deaths. Given that jihad and slavery are inextricably linked in Islamic history, it is not beyond the bounds of reason that the upper limit for Islamic slave-taking is in the 100’s of millions range010.
Returning to the African trade, and quoting N’Diaye again, he points out that “The slave trade of Negroes … was an invention of the Arab-Muslim world. It was the Arabs, Berbers, Turks, and Persians, who originated this infamous practice long before the Europeans began the African slave trade. For one thousand years, they [Muslims] were trading in African people, from the 7th to the 16th centuries. They resumed the practice from the 19th to the 20th centuries, long after the Western nations had abolished this trade.” (emphases mine). The only mistake here, due to the date of N’Diaye’s writing, is that Islamic slaving continues into the 21st century also.

From the above the ubiquity, as well as the savagery, of Islamic slavery throughout history since the advent of Islam should be clear. Muslims, as stated by Ambassador Abd Al- Rahman, believe themselves to “have the right to … make slaves of all [non-Muslims] they could take as prisoners” in war and raiding and that this is sanctioned by the Islamic canon (Koran, Ahadith, Sirat and Sharia)11 and by the actions of Mohammed12.

The modern situation13

In the West today and much of the rest of the world, slavery of any sort is illegal. Slavery (here meaning the legal forms in history) should not be conflated with criminal human-trafficking, also termed “modern slavery”, that still takes place within the West and indeed the whole world for the purposes of prostitution, work-gangs etc, and that no (Western) Country sanctions, even though it takes place within those Countries.
The only (quasi-legal) slaves still found in the West are those that arrive as part of the entourage of Muslim diplomats (and some others) who, due to their diplomatic immunity, are not prosecuted on the occasions when a slave escapes and goes to the police.
Despite world-wide outlawing of (legal) slavery, it still exists today in the Islamic world, though on a reduced scale. One reason for this continuance is the conflict between state-law by which slavery has been banned and Sharia law (to which state-law is often subordinated – either de jure or de facto) which maintains the legality of slavery.

The abuse (both physical and sexual) of servants in Arab (esp. in Saudi Arabian and Sudanese) households is well documented as are the conditions under which they are kept prisoners within the “employer’s” household. Whilst this could be considered as parallel to human-trafficking in the West, the comparison is false; whereas Western Countries try to rescue the victims and will prosecute those caught in this heinous activity when possible, no such redress – legal or civil – exists within parts of the Islamic world.
Girl-children as young as five years old from North African Countries such as Mauritania are sold as sex-slaves (under the guise of marriage to elderly men) into the Middle East, especially Yemen (though the Yemeni civil war has largely halted this practice), Saudi Arabia and UAE, from whence numbers have been rescued by Save the Children rather than government agencies. Again this is not parallel to the general pattern of human-trafficking since these “child-brides” are knowingly sold for sexual purposes by their own families. (To be fair, from the Islamic perspective, there is nothing wrong with this child-marriage – except that the families get the bride-price or “Mahr” rather than the girl herself.)
In the Sudanese civil war (1983 to 2005), which cost two million (approx.) non-Muslims their lives, the Arab “Janjaweed” militia and the Islamic government forces both made a practice of enslaving the young women and girls when they razed villages and killed the men. Several charities bought these slaves back (thus freeing them) and helped them return home. Almost all had been raped many times and many were pregnant by their rapists, all of which is clear evidence of sexual slavery. The recent resurgence of this war has again resulted in genocidal (Jihadist) action against the African inhabitants of Dafur by the “Rapid Reaction Forces” and their allies. This grouping is merely a re-branding of the Janjaweed militia14. Mass killing of males (including infants) and mass rape of females is reported along with “other forms of brutal sexual violence” – almost certainly including sex-slavery.
In Mauritania slaves and their off-spring are still handed down as chattels generation to generation. A 1990s investigation of the slavery of hundreds of thousands of black Africans in Mauritania by Arab-Berber masters was undertaken by African-American author Samuel Cotton and the author was “stunned” to discover that African children were still being kidnapped into slavery by Arabs who transported their victims by placing them in large baskets attached to camels and who then disappeared into the vast desert of Northern Africa.
A 2008 UNICEF report, stated that Egyptian children are being bought and sold for about $3,000 for “domestic work and farming, among other things.” in the Gulf states. There can be little doubt as to what the “other things” for the females would have involved in many, if not all, cases.
Abduction, rape and forced conversion of non-Muslim girls and women in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and elsewhere is also reliably documented. In these last cases the situation is more akin to that of claiming women as “war booty” rather than “conventional” slave-raiding, but in many respects the effects and the (lack of) response of the authorities (police, legal system) is similar. In any case, this is still the Islamically acceptable abuse of non-Muslim women for sexual purposes, irrespective of what state-law may say.
The trade in child camel-jockeys, which only came to light in 2004 after secret filming undertaken at considerable personal risk to the photographer is another case in point. It is now known that children as young as four were purchased from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sudan to work as child camel jockeys. They were/are kept in desert camps, malnourished, heavily overworked and abused – both physically and sexually. Officially the UAE has now banned (for the second time) camel jockeys under the age of 16, but there are indications that this has merely driven the practice underground rather than fully preventing it.
Neither is the harem a thing of the past. Saudi and Brunei royals have harems in recent times15. In other examples, girls had been purchased in South Asian and South-East Asian countries and were forced to provide sexual services for a Saudi prince and his friends. The female sex-slave trade between Asia and the Gulf is well documented, including the trade of young, pregnant women. The woman will be destined to become a sex-slave and her child either a camel-jockey or other menial (if male) or a sex-slave if female; thus perpetuating slavery generationally.
Post the collapse of the Libyan regime slave markets sprang up again in Libya where Black Africans, male and female, are openly bought and sold. The fate of the female slaves is to be sex-slaves, that of the males is less certain 16.
It is also worth noting that the ubiquity of Islamic slavery has had its impact on language. The Arabic for slave “abeed” or “abd” is considered synonymous with “Black” (as in the person)17.

Thus Muslims still believe that the enslavement of others (that is non-Muslims, especially women and girls) is acceptable. Indeed the Muslim Sudanese claim that it is sanctioned by Islam itself, which whilst no more than the truth, is a bold claim to make in today’s world.
Under the sharia law systems which govern Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Muslims are legally allowed to own slaves (as of 2010). As a result, state legislation to abolish slavery tends to be a “paper exercise” rather than actually implemented. It should also be remembered that many (if not most) Muslims think that Sharia Law (“Allah’s laws”), take precedence over state-law (“mere man-made law”) and so when the two conflict, will (where possible) choose to follow Sharia. This view is backed by Islamic Theology.

A brief note on Sharia Law and some consequences.

In this essay Sharia has been repeatedly referenced as the legal underpinning of Islamic slavery. It is important to realise that, despite differences in the formulations of Sharia with Islam, theologically Islam regards Sharia as “Allah’s laws” which, since Islam is the final revelation according to Islamic theology, means that Sharia Law is immutable. In turn this means that the provisions of Sharia cannot be altered and hence the Sharia regulations and permissions of slavery cannot be repealed within Sharia.
Furthermore, since Allah is the “ultimate” law-giver (a not unreasonable stance from the Islamic viewpoint) then whenever state-law and Sharia law come into conflict (by, for example state-law banning slavery), then those laws are, by definition, “un-Islamic”. To avoid this charge a number of Muslim states explicitly subordinate state-law to Sharia which in turn means that even if such “un-Islamic” provisions remain on the statute books, they can be ignored in practice.
Consequently, the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation/Conference) in its “Cairo Declaration on human rights in Islam” 18, a counterpoint to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, explicitly subordinates all the ‘rights’ granted to Sharia. Thus whilst on a prima facie reading the ‘rights’ look similar to those in the UN charter, in fact they are very much less than the sum of their parts.

 

Conclusion

Taken together the evidence- religious, historical and contemporary- shows that:

  • Islamic slavery of non-Muslims was pervasive, ubiquitous, endemic and religiously sanctioned.
  • That Islamic slavery continues to this day in the Islamic world (and beyond) where at best it is ignored and at worst actively and openly practiced and supported.
  • Islam regards the enslavement of non-Muslim females for sexual purposes as normative and legally regulates both this and slavery more generally within Sharia codes which cannot be repealed because Sharia law is claimed to be immutable, being from Allah.
  • Muslims still believe, in the 21st century, that they have the legal right to enslave and rape non-Muslim females, a fact shocking to those unfamiliar with Sharia and appalling to those who have read Sharia.

It has been shown that Islamic slavery ranged throughout the continent of Africa, much of the European sub-continent, especially the East, and the Indian sub-continent. In fact it might well not be much of an exaggeration to say that wherever Islam came to power, slavery, both that of the remaining non-Muslim population and slave-raiding of surrounding areas followed.
As K.S.Lal wrote in his book “The Muslim Slave System in Medieval India”:

From the day India became a target of Muslim invaders its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country. To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to go into the origins and development of the Islamic system of slavery. For, wherever the Muslims went, mostly as conquerors but also as traders, there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.”

A neat summation of the ubiquity of Islamic slavery.
It is also notable that the only time in which Islamic slavery was largely suppressed was in the (now much reviled) European Colonial era and that since the retreat of those same Colonial powers, Islamic slavery has been at least somewhat resurgent.

 

 

References, Bibliography and notes.

1.White Slaves, African Masters, The University of Chicago Press 1999
2.Islamic Jihad, M.A.Khan, iUniverse inc.
3.Slavery in the Arab World, Murray Gordan, New Amsterdam Books, 1989, similar figure quoted by “Arabslavetrade.com”, a Muslim-authored site.
4.Sharia Law for the non-Muslim, Bill Warner. CSPI. Available as pdf.
5.A quick survey of “Sharia and slavery” shows an incredibly wide range of sources from all parts of the social-political spectrum (inc. Wikipedia and the BBC) all agreeing that Sharia regulates rather than abolishes slavery.
“Mahr” is a “bride-price”, money or valuables given to by the man to the woman to buy her vagina for sexual pleasure and procreation.
6.https://www.meforum.org/mef-online/why-islamists-have-always-preferred-blondes
7.Jizya. This is an Islamic tax levied exclusively on non-Muslim inhabitants of Muslim lands. In essence it is a head tax (both in the sense of being “per head” – often of “able-bodied males” and also in that it enabled the non-Muslims to keep their heads). Generally, no excuses were permitted for non-payment and failure to pay could result in enslavement or death.
8.https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1054&context=pat_pnw
9.The Submission of Women and Slaves, CSPI Publishing, p.181
10. “The scourge of slavery”, Christian action. This source suggests that ~140 million Africans were “victims” (either through being killed or enslaved) of the Muslim slave trade. However, I acknowledge that the source may be less than impartial.
11.Interestingly, the translators of the Sharia manual “Reliance of the Traveller” do not translate the entire “book” devoted to slavery on the grounds that “it is no longer relevant” (!) and they also assert that it is a fallacy to understand Islamic slavery in terms of Western slavery. Were the latter the case, they should have no qualms about presenting the translation!
12.Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292-1350 AD) who is one of the greatest scholars and chroniclers of Islam. In “Zad al-Ma’ad” (Part I, p. 160), commenting on the “holy” actions of Mohammed, he writes: “Muhammad had many male and female slaves. He used to buy and sell them, but he purchased more than he sold, especially after God empowered him by His message, as well as after his immigration from Mecca. … He was used to renting out and hiring many slaves, but he hired more slaves than he rented out.” Comment: This states that Mohammed increased his slave-dealing and use of slaves after the advent of Islam and in particular once he had gained power in Medina. Thus Mohammed was hardly an “abolitionist” and this gives the lie to the apologists’ oft touted claim that “Islam abolished slavery”.
13.The evidence for my statements in this section are freely available on the web.
14.https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/sudan-rapid-support-forces-committed-genocide-says-u-s
15.See for example: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-394769/I-wife-No2-Kings-Harem.html and https://nypost.com/2009/12/27/my-nights-at-the-harem/
16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Libya
17.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61112459
18.https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cairo-Declaration-on-Human-Rights.pdf , see the introduction & articles 2, 12, 16, 23b and in particular 19, 22, 25.