Just today I was browsing through a history book (mostly an atlas of maps really) that illustrated the slave trade from Africa, Europe and Central Asia to the Mohammedan world. I read that in one century alone over 600 000 slaves were taken from Europe alone and that the ones from Africa numbered in the millions (the Arabian Peninsula being much closer to east Africa naturally).

The black slaves in the Islamic world were known as "Zanj". On the map there were also locations of the so-called "Castration points" which I am sure you can guess what that refers to. One major castration area was Urganj in what is now Uzbekistan, a former Persian city destroyed by the mOngols around the 13th century. There was one in what is now TUrkey and one in Egypt and another in the Sudan.

Hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken from the Sudan and Ethiopia alone, within the first century of Mohammedan incursions in those areas.If you look at the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula today, you will find a very large proportion of black people of African ancestry, all descended from those slaves.

Slavery however was of a different nature in the mOhammedan world for conversion to Islam almost certainly meant release from captivity, which caused a large number of Persian, Grek, Slavic and African slaves to accept Islam in the lon grun in order to be freed from servitude. The Amerias offered no such option however.

Still, slavery in Arab countries must not be taken lightly and it probably constituted one of the most vile and cruel forms of slavery on the planet at all times. Women were outright sexual properties of the mohammedan captors and the men were without exception castrated and made to serve as palace guards.

THe mOhammedan mentality was that people severed from their lands and people and placed in such situation had no choice but to offer full obedience to their masters for they no longer had any ties with their new surroundings.