First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam by Daniel Allen Butler Page A

purchased in a slave market.This is unsurprising, as the Prophet Muhammed was a slaveholder, owning dozens of men and women; in his later years, having become a wealthy man through the tithes of the faithful, he frequently bought and sold slaves at the market in Medina.Some of the misogyny inherent in Islam is evident in Muhammed’s treatment of women taken captive in warfare: “Whenever Muhammed took a woman as a captive, if he imposed the veil on her, Moslems would say he took her as a wife, but if he left her unveiled they would say, ‘He owned her as a slave’; that is, she became a property of his right hand.”
As the teachings of Islam developed, it became an accepted doctrine that only children of slaves or non-Moslem prisoners of war could become slaves.Freeborn Moslems were never to be enslaved, although that was an injunction usually honored more in the breach than the observance.In the Sudan, permitting the taking of slaves as prizes in war eventually led to the concept of jihad being twisted into an awful perversion: Arabs regularly raided black tribes to the south—especially Coptic Christians—or even neighboring Moslem tribes for the sole purpose of taking captives to sell at Khartoum or Zanzibar, all in the name of “holy war.” There was never an unequivocable denunciation of slavery within either the Shi’ite or Sunni factions.
While Islamic law—the sharia — laid down strict rules for the proper treatment of slaves, historically there were no fixed penalties for masters who abused their slaves, leaving them at the mercy of clerical “judges” who had no codified body of law to constrain them and who could be entirely capricious in applying justice.Slaves, of course, had no legal rights whatsoever, not even the right to appeal for judicial relief against abusive owners.
In a passage that reveals one of the darker sides of Islam, particularly how it institutionalized the inferior status of women, the Koran declares that a freeman should be killed only for another freeman, a slave for a slave, and a woman for a woman; it is startling to note both that women rank below slaves in importance, and that there is no female equivalent of “freeman.” One hadith explicitly states that “a Moslem should not be killed for a non-Moslem, nor a freeman for a slave.” Islamic teaching also permitted a Moslem slaveowner to enjoy the sexual services of his female slaves.(Women were not permitted to own property, hence they could never be slaveowners.)
Many of the African males taken as slaves were made eunuchs.While castration was against Islamic law, this was just one more minor legalistic obstacle to be overcome by the slavers, usually done by taking their captives outside Moslem territory where Islamic law was not considered binding to perform the mutilation.For African captives, nothing short of “castration level with the abdomen” would do, rather than simply removing the testicles, which was the common practice with Slavic and Greek captives.The reasoning behind this extreme violation of the slave’s body is lost today, but whatever it was, it made African males who were subjected to this brutality especially prized as harem guards.
By the time of the Mahdi’s revolt, these details were known throughout the palaces, legislatures, salons, and pubs of Europe, and as European influence grew in Egypt so did pressure on the Egyptian government to bring an end to the slave trade in the Sudan.Under Ismail’s rule that wasn’t likely to happen, for much of the Khedive’s fortune came from the payments made to him by the slave traders in exchange for almost complete immunity.When dealing with the Europeans the Khedive would pay lip service to ending the slave trade, but as usual he proved long on words and short on action.
It wasn’t until the British and French took over financial control of the country and imposed a series of European governors for the provinces of Sudan on Ismail—and later on