I'm a bit put off with your association of Islam, which is a cultural
and religious system, with the institution of slavery as practiced in
its various locales.   Yes, Islamic law validated the holding of slaves,
but so did Christianity and numerous other faiths.  But surely the
association of the buying and selling of people should be with the
people who did the buying and selling and not their presumed belief
systems.  Neither the African Muslim seller (and not all sellers were in
fact Muslims) nor the European Christian buyers were behaviing in ways
that one would call specifically religious, rather they were engaged in
a very secular economic activity.

To get to your question though (I wouldn't want to be accused of evading
it), Europeans began associating Africans with exploitable labor well
before Columbus.   The Portuguese who acquired the first African slaves
(around 1440) did so from Muslim merchants in West Africa.  The
degradation of people who were so different from themselves validated
Europeans' sense of occupying a higher place in the hierarchy of nature.
  Europeans were quick to exploit Native workers in the Americas as
well.  When desease and other problems with Native workers created
shortages, the contacts with those West African merchants were already
in place and ready to fill the need.   Muslim merchants didn't create
this worldview, their role was simply to make it concrete for Europeans.

To jump ahead to Virginia, we can see that the English came to the new
world with pre-existing social notions about the nature of the universe
-- in which some were of higher order than others -- and economic ideas
about the exploitation of the labor of lower orders, including both
Native Americans and Africans as well as other Europeans.   If Native
American people resisted coerced labor, those who were prepared to be
dominant were ready to turn to other "lower" people.   In Virginia that
meant principally the lower orders of English society and so there was
the massive migration of lower class servants.   

One result of bringing over people from the English-speaking world was
that the society of early Virginia was very fluid: one could serve one's
time and then acquire freedom, and possibly land and status, and so move
up from the lower ranks.  As the colonial society matured, however,
there was a desire to make a more fixed, less fluid, society (more like
that of England where rank was very clearly delineated) and so there was
a need to settle on a labor system where labor was unable to achieve
freedom and its material and social benefits.  Therefore we see the
movement toward slavery and particularly African slavery.   It wasn't
all about race and yet race was so central to the practice of it as to
make the distinction all but irrelevant. 

I know this is a very truncated history of the beginnings of slavery in
Virginia, leaving out the perhaps anomalous experience of the first
Africans brought to Jamestown, and further skipping past the
developments in Virginia law pertaining to labor and race, but I will
leave it there and if anyone wants to add, subtract or even just
quibble, well, that's what we're all here for.

David Kiracofe


David Kiracofe
History
Tidewater Community College
Chesapeake Campus
1428 Cedar Road
Chesapeake, Virginia 23322
757-822-5136
>>> Anita Wills <[log in to unmask]> 06/14/07 12:53 PM >>>
My question is what did Islam have to do with Europeans enslaving
Indians? 
No one seems to want to answer that.