Sun Jun 10, 2018 4:50 pm
jon1959 wrote:Are you claiming that Islamic states/societies invented slavery?
'Another Islamic first'?
I'm pretty sure that slavery was around for millennia before the start of Islam.
I thought you were one of the posters earlier in the thread that wanted facts?
Sun Jun 10, 2018 5:32 pm
Sun Jun 10, 2018 5:48 pm
jon1959 wrote:Fair enough.
I'm not out to defend Islam (or Christianisty, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, or the Jedi Knights) but most religions are a mixed bag of good and bad traits and sometimes there are periods when their followers are progressive and tolerant, and others when they are conservative and brutal. Almost all of them are complex and rich in contradictory history.
I understand and accept the general point you were making in that paragraph. We should see the whole balance sheet to reach a conclusion about people or religions - not just the good bits and not just the bad bits.
As far as slavery goes I accept that Islamic slavery in Arabia, Asia and Africa pre-dated the Western Atlantic slave trade by many centuries, but that is just one chapter, even if it is the biggest. Western slavery goes back millennia. There was slavery in Viking, Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh societies - sometimes captives from wars, sometimes people seized in cross border raids, sometimes people traded like goods. That was in Christian as well as pre-Christian societies!