Shahid Bolsen is a fraud, an apologist for islamic slavery – well, Muslims have to be, since the Quran endorses slavery.
If you point out to ordinary Muslims that the Quran approves of slavery, they may first deny it. Then they will make excuses for it existing at the time of Mohammed, while forgetting momentarily that the Quran is supposed to be the perfect book for all time.
That leaves nothing else for Muslims to do, than to agree with the Quran, that slavery permitted in Islam.
Shahid Bolsen grits his teeth, digs a deeper hole, and tries to tell us that Islamic slavery was basically a Social Service of its time, as well as a great job opportunity, even if for some takers they had to have their testicles removed … but what a benefit system!
The man is a clown of epic proprtions. Don’t let his swathy appearance and impecible English accent fool you. He’s another Zakir Naik.
His video is astonishing. Lies, half truths, and delusions of grandeur: Muslims have no need to flinch on the topic of slavery.
What’s one of the big moral claims of the West? The abolition of slavery, right? They say, “We abolish slavery, while you Muslims still have slavery in your laws today.”
This is as correct as he’s going to be. It’s downhill from here.
Let’s be honest, there are more slaves today than there ever have been. Why? Because power in the US, Europe and elsewhere in the West, power never makes a decision for moral reasons, but only for financial reasons.
This is a lie, and absolute and utter lie. Because the power of the West not only abolished slavery for itself, it helped free slaves around the world, many that were slaves under Islam. And the slavery that does exist is criminal, cross-national, and difficult to police.
What Bolsen is getting at in what follows is that the West has been unsuccesful in its abolishon of slavery, and still engages in it – of course the dark and secretive ‘elites’ are at it all the time, I suppose. And does Bolsen think the Islamic world is immune from sex trafficking and other slavery activities? Or is it that he thinks that sex slavery in the Muslim world is so different, so admirable, that the sex slaves must just love it? Those groomed children across many many towns and cities have nothing to complain about I guess.
Islam is a power system and it makes decisions for nonsense reasons, and immoral reasons. It is immoral to punish apostates and blasphemers with death – Muslims are slaves to Islam, as well as owning slaves when implementing Islamic slave ownership laws. In Islam, this is not accidental but intentional – submission to Islam is slavery.
Now, those financial reasons may coincide with moral reasons, and that’s accidental. Now that’s the case with slavery.
Another lie. The British government in 2015 finished paying off for all the slaves it freed – that was a cost to Britain and the British people. Britain used its finances to pay off slave owners. It also paid for a navy that delivered British power around the world and freed more slaves. Was Britain perfect? No. Did Britain fail in its duty to the places it used its power? Of course. Was it part of a colonial system being employed for financial benefit? Yes. And it could have been all those other things with less expense had it chosen not to abolish slavery. So, Bolsen’s misrepresentation of the abolishion movement is dishonest.
When the moral reasons coincide with the financial reasons that gives you a moral rationale, for what is actually a strictly financial decision, to make it look like you’re altruistic, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Again he lies. There is plenty of documented evidence of the politicians and public opinion in Britain opposing slavery. The irony here is that Bolsen is acknowledging the moral aspect of abolishing slavery, and merely saying our abolition of it was coincidental, not a moral motive. Later, he endorses slavery. So is slavery immoral or not? Bolsen will try to convince you that while Western slavery, for the short time it exists was immoral, Islamic slavery is not.
The emancipation process took place during the civil war, not before it. It didn’t cause the civil war. It was just an economic weapon by the North against the South. That wasn’t a morally driven decision, …
Another lie. If you make a decision for more than one reason it doesn’t mean that any of those reasons are a fake altruistic ones tagged on to the financial one. If that were true, then we could just as easily claim that Muslims never do anything for moral reasons but for the promotion of Islam – lying for Islam is a well known theme, and one he is employing in this video.
… but it allowed them to package their cause as a moral one. They’ve been packaging it like that ever since. Because the truth of the matter is you didn’t abolish slavery, you deregulated it.
Another lie. It was not merely deregulated it was abolished, and the laws about slavery in the West testify to that fact. If Islamic slavery is so great, why is it abolished now in Muslim lands?
You know some historians estimate that up to as much as 90% of the profits that were generated from slave labour and ended up being spent of the slaves themselves, on some plantations, not all.
Another slight of hand. There is no evidence to back up his claims. There is evidence to the contrary. The quote below is from 2023. There are many earlier references.
This article revisits the scholarly debate on the profitability of historical slavery. The article examines the case of the antebellum US South, using slave hire rates as a proxy for the net rent on investments in slavery. It employs empirical data and a more advanced methodological approach to the issue than in previous research. The results suggest that the profitability of slavery was much higher than what most previous research has shown, around 14–15 per cent per year on average after adjusting for mortality risk, but that the return also fluctuated over time. It was on average more profitable for Southern capital owners to invest in slaves than investing in many alternatives such as financial instruments or manufacturing activities in the US South, as long as slavery remained a legal institution.
Revisiting the Profitability of Slavery, Slave Hiring Rates and the Return on Investments in Slaves in the Antebellum US South, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden (2023)
Bolsen continues …
Spending on their food, their shelter, their clothing, their medical care and so on. It was in the interest of slave owners to maintain a slaves physical wellbeing, to one extent or another, because it was expensive to buy a slave, …
This is a laughable claim, or it would be if it were not so disrespectful to the many slaves that suffered. What’s more, his same point, were it true, would imply Islamic slavery was not profitable – unless he’s saying Muslims treat their slaves much worse that those in the US South and care so little for them that slaves of Islam are profitable. Well, he actually claims the opposity. So, if Westeren slavery was so unprofitable, and Islamic slavery treated slaves better, what was the financial benefit?
Of course he’s a total liar. The point of slavery is you use other humans as a resource by owning them. It’s the ownership of slaves that is the immoral aspect, not their profitability.
… but you don’t have to spend any of that money on a wage slave.
Well, of course you do, because you have to pay wages so that they can afford to buy clothes and housing. It is true that in some cases wealth and well being of poor white people and black slaves wasn’t so different. But the white people were not owned, they were not the property of someone else. If a poor white person could find a route out of their condition, they were free to leave – as many did. This option was not open to slaves, who were tracked down like wild animals, and brutalised when caught.
It’s a lot cheaper to rent someone that to buy them.
Absolute nonsense. The evidence refutes his lies. When you buy a slave you have them for life. If you buy a male and female slave, both work for you, and their children are yours too, for the whole of their lives, unless they are sold, at a profit.
The demand for a slave is a derived demand, as is that for any productive resource. It is derived from the demand for the output that resource helps to produce. There was an active market for slaves throughout the antebellum period, meaning that slave owners believed the purchase of a slave would prove to be a profitable expenditure, even though that expenditure required a considerable amount of money.3 As we will explain below, at the time the South seceded from the Union, the purchase of a single slave represented as much as $180,000 and more in today’s prices. This was twice the average of 14 years earlier, indicating a sustained growth in the demand for slaves. Economists would say that these observations alone indicate that the profitability of “investing” in a slave was increasing substantially.
Why would a slave have so much value? A short answer is the value of a slave is the value of the expected output or services the slave can generate minus the costs of maintaining that person (i.e., food, clothing, shelter, etc.) over his or her lifetime.4 A quick list of the data that have to be considered in determining the value of a slave’s expected revenue would include sex, age, location, how much he or she is likely to produce (a factor that included a slave’s health and physical condition), and the price of the output in the market. For a female slave, an additional thing to consider would be the value of the children she might bear.
In addition, there is considerable evidence that slaves were worked harder than free labor in Southern agriculture; what slaves could be induced to produce in bondage was greater than what they could be expected to produce with the freedom to make their own choice of labor or leisure.
He is using the fact that free people found themselves subject to unfair employment conditions to equate that to slavery. It isn’t. At all. If another employer offered better wages, the ill treated employees could leave and move on. Slaves cannot.
He is employing a well know rhetorical ploy of Socialists – Newspeak – changing the meaning of words – “wage slave”. The same abuse of words occurs today: Treating criticism of Islam as if it is racism, by employing the term ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s not a phobia to oppose the horrific political ideology of Islam.
He goes on to talk about the standard of brutality towards slaves in the American South. It is true that black slaves in the USA were treated brutally. Slaves in Islam were treated brutally too – and for many more centuries, until 1962 in Saudi Arabia, and 1982 in Mauritania. Why did these two countries abolish it at all if it was so benign?
Conditions for Muslims in Islam have been no better. Look to Saudi and other rich Arab states for how they treat Muslim immigrant workers. Arab Muslims in London have been exposed for using their Muslim house maids as sex slaves. So, Islam has no better a record on slavery than the West, but Islamic slavery pre/post-dated Western Atlantic slave trade. The West has made laws abolishing slavery, while Islam is based on its holy book that not only doesn’t outlaw slavery but endorses it.
In the Muslim world, slaves were more like proteges, like wards.
What an complete joke. Slaves were taken when Islam attacked and occupied other lands. It killed those that resisted and took their wives and daughters as sex slaves. They bought slaves from other cultures, particularly in Africa.
They were not wards, you clown. This is a complete white washing of Islam.
‘slave owner’ had the connotation of custodian, or caretaker, or someone who is responsible for someone else.
OK, so, you won’t mind if I come to your house with a few friends, take your children, and hold them as their ‘custodian’, and use them as slave labour, to own them, for them to be my property, to use your wife and daughters as sex slaves? That’s how ridiculous this man sounds.
Slaves were taken from their homelands, hundreds or thousands of miles away, homelands that no longer existed as independent nations after Islamic conquest. That some of them were valuable to their owners, and achieved status, is no more than a means of coping with and even taking advantage of their predicament. I dare say some slaves had better lives as slaves of Muslims than their lives previously.
But they were still slaves. Owned. The human property of other humans. Does this mean nothing to Muslims?
slavery in the Muslim world wasn’t based on race or ethnicity
So, Islam is a multi-ethnic equal misfortune slave ownership system. It’s still ownership of other humans. And of course there was racism in Islam. Black slaves were treated as less than Arabs. And it continues today. Darcus Howe, the late anti-racism activist of the UK was horrified to find out what British Muslims thought of black people. He documented his findings in the programme “Who are you calling N*****?”
there wasn’t some sick quasi-scientific rationale claiming that they were inferior human beings that’s unique to American slavery.
Another lie. Racism was common throughout the word and with many cultures, and was not unique to American slavery. Many indigenous peoples of he Americas and elsewhere looked on other humans as sub-human.
The one thing that Islam happens to get right (in its theory if not its practice), anti-racism, is ironically self-refuted when Muslims treat Islam like a race and claim it’s racist towards Muslims to criticise Islam; because if that’s true, then Muslims are racist to non-Muslims and Islam is an apartheid system.
In Islam slaves could register cases against their master in court. Slaves in the Muslim world had more rights and more upward Mobility.
Well, Islam had slavery as such a natural institution, with so many slaves, that of course there would be variety in local conditions, but that relied on the whim of the governing body and the owneers of slaves – slaves didn’t get to vote on their treatment of their freedom.
But as for ‘mobility’, this wasn’t unique to Islam – it wasn’t some great Islamic achievement. It was just as normal in the Roman world, where some slaves were freed outright, and others were allowed them to buy their own freedom.
Islam is in the habit of stealing religions, land, people, and cultural ideas, it seems.
But why did Muslims need slaves at all?
Mohammed could have said, “Oh Muslims, release all slaves now and take no more. Wherever you go, free any slaves you find.“
When I’ve put this to Muslims they often repeat what they’ve been told: it would not be economically feasible to free all slaves.
For one, that would defeat the argument that slaves are not as economically viable. If they are not economically viable you’d benefit from a non-slavery society.
But more important, just think what Muslims are saying, when they say freeing slaves is not feasible, or that Islamic slavery was somehow OK.
They are committing blasphemy. They are saying the Almighty Allah could not abolish slavery and and compensate slave owners for their loss (something that the British government managed to do, but not Allah?). They are saying that he could not provide for freed slaves. Blasphemy.
So, how does Bolsen see Islamic slavery?
because we never approached this institution the way you approach that institution, we didn’t do it the way you did it
True. We never went into Africa so capture slaves. We bought them of Muslims and other Africans. Muslims were the experienced slave traders.
So when you went around the world telling everyone how evil slavery is, they didn’t know what you were talking about. The slaves didn’t know what you were talking about because they had not experienced your form of slavery. They had not experienced American slavery.
Look, slavery is something that has always existed and it still exists today, but like with everything else that is part of the human condition, Islam regulated it to ensure that it was practiced morally and humanely, …
And there you have it, the endorsement of slavery, right out of the Quran.
I don’t think it’s the slaves who didn’t understand the West when they abolished slavery, it’s Muslims that don’t understand that making another person your actual property has always been the depth of human depravity, and here we have a Muslim not merely excusing it but telling us how good it was.
This is Islam.
We know that when you deregulated the way that you did, it’s not going to stop, it’s just going to make it even more inhumane and more exploitative than it was before.
Wow! This is pure lying for Islam, so much so he’s convinced himself.
Yes, the world has been a terrible place for many people, and there are ups an downs in every society. But as a general trend the following is certain:
- Being a slave is the bottom of any social hierarchy. You are owned. Your life is not your won. You are not free to leave of your own accord. You are required to obey your owner.
- An indentured employee is next on this short list. You have agreed to be an employee, on a fixed term contract, but you have not agreed to be a slave. If you become a slave, under the power of a cruel employee, then you have been captured into slavery and you are not longer an employe.
- An employee, free to look for work elsewhere, free to leave, whether you find it or not. The freedom to leave is underestimated, even while many in employment may feel like ‘wage slaves’.
- An employer, as an owner of a business is clearly better off than his employees. But many businesses are employed by yet others.
- Land owning aristorcrats and royalty are at the top of the food chain. This is still so in Islam – unless Bolsen would like to pretend Caliphs where men of the people in some idilic Islamic Socialist state.
… and you can fill in more details or add other levels, but there is clear and obvious improvement as you move from slave to various other staions in life, even if there are cross-hierarchy ups and downs.
I said you have more slaves now than at any time in human history and the United States is the top destination for human trafficking especially for children and for women so you need to stop bragging about abolition you didn’t abolish anything you just made slavery even more lucrative and more brutal than you had already made it and nobody practiced a more brutal form of slavery than you.
Have you noticed the ‘we’ and ‘you’ that he uses to generalise the moral difference he is trying to portray. Well, if 18th century slavery in the USA is the ‘YOU’ of the West, then ISIS is the ‘WE’ of Islam, if you want to play this dishonest rhetorical game.
Now look around your cities, look at San Francisco, look at Detroit, look at the homelessness epidemic that you have. Imagine if those people had the option to be taken in, to be taken under the wing of more well-off people, people who would share their homes share their clothes share their food pay all their expenses take care of their health, look after them, teach them skills, give them training and education, give them a job, a job that would have even less restrictions on their rights and their freedom than someone working today at Amazon or Walmart. Because that’s what slavery was in Islam that’s what regulated slavery looks like taking in the most vulnerable economically deprived people who are going to exist anyway.
This is a delusional and outrageous misrepresentation of Islamic slavery. Is he really suggesting that Islamic slavery was a beneficial social system for the poor? It wasn’t. It’s a lie. Islam didn’t invite poor Muslims to become slaves of the wealthier Muslims. The non-Muslim slaves were captured by Muslims, or bought by Muslims from people who did capture them. Britain and other European countries were raided and people taken against their will, not offered job opportunities in nice warm ‘Muslim (conquered) lands’.
Yes they would be legally bound to that person but that bond goes both ways. There’s a reason why slavery has always existed in human societies, and it’s not because human beings are just barbaric and savage and cruel. Just because that’s the way YOU did it, just because that’s what YOU made slavery mean.
It didn’t always mean that, and it wasn’t always practiced that way. It wasn’t always practiced the way that YOU practiced it. It always has existed in human society because there were always going to be people in society who are especially vulnerable and down and out and they can’t just be trampled on and used and abused.
Again, slavery is not a social institution for the poor. If you wanted a social system you’d provide social service to free people, not demand they enslave themselves to you for the privilege. This whole story is as much fantasy as Islam itself.
Their situation, their condition, their circumstances, have to be regulated and the way people deal with them has to be regulated, and the way to regulate that is to have them connected to someone in society who isn’t down and out. They have to be connected to someone in society who isn’t, uh, deprived and vulnerable; they have to be connected to someone who can take care of them, and from that connection they can get respect and they can get opportunities, and they can move up move up and on in life. That’s the way it was practiced in Islam, completely polar opposite to the way it was practiced in the United States, where if you were a slave you were going to always be a slave and you were treated like a beast of burden that’s the way you practiced it
But that’s not the way ‘WE’ practiced it. When I’m talking positively about slavery you will infer from that that I’m talking positively about the way YOU practice slavery.
Despite YOUR attempt to mind read, you are mistaken. I will infer no such thing, and I don’t think anyone that’s aware of slavery would infer that. What I do infer is that you approve of slavery, the ownership of one person by another, that one person should be the property of another. I also infer that you are lying by omission (as YOU Muslims often do when it comes to the Quran).
To pretend that ANY slave taken by Muslims went willingly for the social benefits is itself an apologetics for the barbaric slavery that it was, ripping families apart, killing those that would not submit, using the young girls as sex slaves, or marrying them and force converting them. To pretend now that this was a benefit is to excuse and approve of the barbarity that was employed to conquer and enslave people that made ‘Muslim lands’ as big as they are.
But let me be clear there’s nothing to say about the way YOU practice slavery except the strongest possible condemnation, but the way it was practiced in Islam there’s nothing wrong with it at all, not a thing wrong with it. So look, I don’t have any hesitation about this issue and no Muslim should. You can’t make me Flinch by talking about slavery.
Wow! Really, wow! I get it, I really do. YOU, Bolsen, are a barbaric individual hiding behind a smug mask of Islamic supremacism, and you are deluding yourself that Islamic slavery was a system for moral good.
Just like with everything, else Islam came and regulated what is a constant reality of The Human Condition to make it moral.
Wow! There you have it. He approves of slavery. He approves of invading other lands, killing those that resist, and capturing the rest, carting them off to Muslim lands, and selling them off to the highest bidder with absolutely no sense of who you are selling them to. YOU are condoning owning people, not providing a social service you clown. THAT is what I infer from what you say, Bolsen.
This man comports himself as if he’s a moral intellectual. He’s an immoral imbicile.
We don’t pretend that it’s something that you can get rid of.
What?! So you shouldn’t try? Well, of course he must think it’s not only not worth fighting, it’s something that should be encouraged to the benefit of all. Why would he WANT to get rid of such a great moral social system? Let’s have more of it then, is that what you are saying Bolsen? Please form an orderly queue for slavery.
There’s always going to be vulnerable people. There’s always going to be people who are subject to exploitation.
That’s no reason for YOU to exploit their vulnerability, and take advantage of them. YOU are totally delusional – though that in itself is no surprise, you believe in Allah.
You can’t get rid of it and you didn’t get rid of it all.
What? By his own logic, Muslims should not engage in charity, because there will always be people that need it, and all this time Muslims have been engaging in charity they did not get rid of all need for it. So, rather than have charity, we should have more poverty! This is the mental gymnastics of Islamic apologetics. This man is the smooth talking Zakir Nik, a total idiot that talks himself into knots.
What you did was make it worse and somehow because perception is reality in your culture you get to pretend like you did something good well.
This is why Islam is incompatible with the West, and with humanity. It’s the apologetics of ISIS enslaving Yazidis.
Tell that to the 20 to 30 000 women and children that YOU traffic every year in the West.
Yes, there are depraved sections of all societies that mean slavery is extremely difficult to eradicate. What we call trafficking now is what Muslims thought was a thoroughly decent cultural service. Bolsen is moronic.
You want to pretend that you’re a form of slavery was everyone’s form of slavery and you like to talk about the Arab African slave trade as if it bears any resemblance to the transatlantic slave trade. Well it doesn’t. Yes there were African slaves in the Muslim World. African slaves who were enslaved in Africa by Africans and sold to the Muslim World along with Europeans along with Arabs along with Persians and plenty of other ethnicities and none of them were treated as sub-human.
Taking someone’s liberty, to own them, for your open benefit, to serve you, IS to treat them as sub-human, you clown.
None of them were regarded as less than human and many of them went on to achieve high positions in Muslim society, positions of high respect and influence and if you want to bring up eunuchs and castration – yes that’s a thing that happened and it happened on route before they reached Muslim lands.
YOU do know that you wanted eunuchs, right? They were bought as eunuchs to serve various purposes. YOU drove the market for eunuchs while pretending it was barbaric to castrate people. And YOUR society did it too, so pretending YOU didn’t won’t wash. YOUR society chops off hands and feet, and you think you can convince us you disapproved of castration? You are lying to yourself.
YOU used to castrate young boys just because you like the way it made them sound when they sing in church.
No, idiot, that was not US, it was the Catholic church. Another insane religion that at it’s worst came close to the barbarity of Islam.
You’re in no position to moralize on this issue. Your perception is not our reality. We can see the way things really are. We can see what you really did. We can see what you’re really doing, and we know our own history and we know yours.
This is Islamic supremacist BS. Muslims are clearly in denial about the reality of their history, which had more in common with ISIS that the Social Services system this idiot is pretending it was.
While the West has its issues, we do at least try to eradicate slavery, even if sections of our societies support it. What YOU are actually saying is that it’s a force for good.
YOU are insane.
Ramblings 