Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a racialised capitalist system
and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime.
To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and structural racism
that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.
Text turns conspicuously evasive
Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.
While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century
that questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement
.
That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.
Intellectually dishonest
It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service
, and affirmed that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty
.
Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was too pure for slaves to dwell in
. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself — an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.
Intellectually dishonest
Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.
Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world — even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century ∼ when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery ∼ the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as savages
, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.
Muslims still slaved away
There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that even the most radical Muslim modernists
fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.
It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it — beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade contrary to the holy law of Islam
and any official who attempted to enforce it lawful to kill
.
Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania ∼ after repeated ineffectual measures ∼ in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of modern slavery
, eight are majority-Muslim.
Suffering olympics
But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn't exist. It declares the slave trade the greatest
crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty ∼ which converts the horrors of the past into a suffering Olympics
∼ is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.
It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust ∼ whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews ∼ were close to or above 90%. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport — and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.
In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes' lives
. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.
Black deaths declined dramatically
Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the middle passage
had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.
But to acknowledge those facts ∼ which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust ∼ might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.
Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.
Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries ∼ the US, Israel and Argentina ∼ had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren't we?
