FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 643 13 August 2015 SLAVERY’S COMEBACK

ISLAMISM IS BRINGING BACK SLAVERY. THE ECLIPSE OF WESTERN HEGEMONY AND THE DAWN OF A NEW PARADIGM?
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The return of a slave-owning society – sick fantasy? Yet feisty writer Tom Holland accuses the jolly Caliphate-promoting outfit, Hizb ut-Tahrir – the Party of Liberation – exactly of seeking that.

Hizbis are not so foolish. It is just that in their draft constitution’s articles the Caliphate boys state that a vital qualification for the Caliph is that he (definitely a ‘he’ - the ruler has to be a bloke) should be FREE, not a slave. The extrapolation, fair or unfair, is that in the Hizbis’s model Islamic state slavery would be restored.

Note the discussion is theoretical. Because slavery is already back. ISIS, the existing Levant Caliphate has done it. Captive women from the Yezidi minority are sold and bought on a public slave market in Raqqa. Of course, ISIS is abhorred and fought against by the West. Hizb ut-Takrir, by contrast, is legal in Britain. Hence the alleged scandal.

Sharia’, the holy law of Islam, once countenanced slavery but no longer. Still, ‘if a thing once was legal in sharia’, no one can make it illegal’, a distinguished Sunni scholar told me. I am not, unlike Holland, having a go at Islam – not even at Islamism. There is no single divine command against slavery in the Bible. Abraham, the father of faith, owned slaves. When the Son of God walked the earth 2000 years ago, he had ample opportunity to condemn slavery – Christ did not. St Paul merely urged its mitigation. The arguments of Christian abolitionists have been sentimental, rather than Scriptural. Even church tradition has not sharply repudiated bondage.

Slavery: morally wrong by definition? A supreme philosopher like Aristotle did not think so. Some people are slaves by nature, he held. Such creatures were no more than ‘living tools’. Nonetheless when Aristotle debated whether a free man could be friends with a slave, he perhaps betrayed qualms about the tool’s status. You could hardly imagine being friends with a hammer or a hoe, could you?

High sounding phrases like ‘the dignity of man’, ‘human brotherhood’, ‘the intrinsic rights of the human person’ and so on are regularly invoked to signify the alleged inhumanity of slavery. Their force is rhetorical and emotional, rather than intellectual. Assume someone voluntarily decided to sell himself into slavery, in return for some benefits – would that be really impermissible? ‘No wrong is done to him who wishes it so’, again old Aristotle maintained. You cannot be unjust to yourself, in other words. So, if you rationally chose to become a slave, of your own freewill, why should the state deem that unjust and stop you?

But how could you sensibly determine to enter into such an awful, wretched condition? Like choosing to cut off your arm? Correct if you think of the chattel slavery of the ante-bellum American South – not so in other cases. The law of Islam enjoined treating slaves with mildness. Slaves were considered members of the family. And if a slave was not satisfied, he could legally compel his master to sell him. Poet Gerard de Nerval once purchased a pretty Javanese slave in Cairo. He assumed he had got himself a housemaid. But the girl adamantly refused to do any housework. ‘I am a lady’, she haughtily affirmed. ‘If you do not treat me well, I will demand you take me back where you bought me’. Bully to her!

Does slavery entail racism? Not so in antiquity. Slaves were war captives from all races. Greek slaves were as white as the driven snow. Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who had the temerity to rise up against Rome, was no black man. White Europeans captured by Barbary pirates also ended up as slaves – race mattered not, although Caucasian slaves were highly coveted by Turks and Arabs. You can’t argue about a preference, can you?

Slavery, voluntary or involuntary, sharply contradicts the Western paradigm of human rights, sure. But that raises the question: is that category truly universal? It certainly claims to be. It seeks to impose itself on all non-European civilisations and cultures via the UN, international law, institutions and treaties. President Obama recently upheld it in Kenya (concerning gays), only to be told by President Kenyatta that for Kenyans that was ‘a non-issue’. A most instructive episode.

It does look crazy, I know. Slave-based economies – are they not archaic, overtaken, things of the past? Capitalism has replaced them in a more efficient manner. But the need for sexual gratification is not archaic. It is as topical, as burning as ever. Granted that, as even trendy sociologists acknowledge, men’s erotic urges and drives outweigh women’s, dare I say that slavery might provide a rationale for that?

Both ISIS and the Hizbis, the latter theoretically, the former practically, have thrown down the gauntlet to the West. I mean European enlightenment-based ruling ideologies and fundamental dogmas. From liberal democracy to socialism, Marxism, feminism and egalitarianism. In that sense Islamism really represents the only concrete, operative challenge to the unipolar supremacy of the US and its cultural colonies and satellites, from Britain to France, Germany and other miniscule political nonentities. Slavery’s return could be the first, momentous crack in the mighty edifice of Western supremacy, destined to bring it crashing down, while ushering in another system, another paradigm.

Implausible? Cannot go back to the past? Maybe but peruse, pray, Russian theorist Alexander Dugin’s provocative thoughts on the reversibility of time. And look at the Caliphate. The past is back already!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli


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