It is interesting that you now lay the association of Islam with slavery in 
my lap. I did not make that association, which is why I posed the question. 
We are supposed to be discussing Virginia history in general and American 
history in particular. I was simply attempting to bring the discussion back 
to Virginia History. BTW I was not posing the question to anyway in 
particular, so please do not take offense.

However, thank you for at least attempting to answer the question.

Anita


>From: David Kiracofe <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history         
>      <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Islamic Slavery (was Re: Slavery and immoral stance, etc.)
>Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:21:55 -0400
>
>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.

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