The trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed 200 years ago. Many throughout the world are commemorating the bicentennial with articles, conferences, discussions, classroom lessons, history tours, church services and respectful contemplation.
The horrors of chained servitude are recalled, the violence of the Middle Passage remembered: Africans stolen from their villages, tribes, families, stripped of their rights and identities, forced to labor thanklessly for others, sustain an economy that provided them little benefit.
Who today would not say this was a horrible age that revealed the full scope of mankind’s weakness and brutality?
Two hundred years later ”” still today ”” 27 million people are enslaved throughout the world. They are the products of the sex trade, workers in sweatshops, domestic servants trapped and threatened, indentured fruit pickers unable to escape the clutch of their masters.
In terms of Islam we should note that slavery is a permanent and irrevocable aspect of the shari’a. I have written about it here:
Intro to the Shari’a