by Shareef Muhammad
In contemporary discussions of anti-Black racism, structural inequality, and the enduring legacies of slavery in the United States, a recurring rhetorical maneuver has become commonplace across ideological spectrums. From Afrocentric scholars and Black Orientalists to Christian apologetics circles and online polemicists, critics frequently invoke the so-called “Arab Slave Trade” or allegations concerning the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as a slaveholder. These interventions function less as genuine historical inquiries than as strategic deflections, shifting moral scrutiny away from the specific architecture of Western racial capitalism and toward a purported Islamic equivalence. Such maneuvers obscure more than they illuminate, flattening complex historical systems into simplistic moral theater.
The phrase “Arab slave trade” is a white colonialist term. It is historically misleading. It implies a centralized Arab system of unilateral control over African populations maintained by a racialized structure comparable to the transatlantic slave trade. None of these implications are accurate and are exposed as false scrutiny. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted, “in this whole story of the so-called ‘Arab slave trade’ the truth has been strangely twisted.” What has been twisted is the structure, scale, and agency within that system. Invocations of the “Arab slave trade” deliberately exaggerate Arab control, erase African sovereignty, and falsely equates a premodern system of servitude with the racial-capitalist slave regime that built the modern West and led to the globalized racial empire.
Islam’s earliest presence in the Western Hemisphere was not aligned with slavery but against it. The first recorded uses of the word jihad in the Americas were tied to slave revolts. From its debut in the New World, Islam was a force violently opposing racial domination.
The term “Arab Slave Trade” suggests Arab domination over African societies. The historical record shows something very different. African polities were sovereign, militarily capable, and economically autonomous. They controlled trade routes and determined the conditions of exchange. There is no evidence that Arab merchants possessed the capacity to penetrate the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, conquer states, and systematically enslave populations. Even in East Africa, where Arab commercial presence was most visible, their role was largely confined to coastal nodes and mediated through African and Swahili intermediaries who controlled inland access.
The commercial networks linking Africa to the wider world were complex and multi-directional. Slaves were one commodity among many, alongside gold, ivory, and other goods. The reduction of this system to an “Arab slave trade” isolates one group while obscuring the broader structure in which Africans, Swahili traders, Indian financiers, and later Europeans all participated. The image of marauding Arab raiders sweeping through Africa is not supported by the evidence. As historians have shown, this image is a myth that developed around the East African trade rather than a reflection of its actual dynamics.
The scale of the trade has also been exaggerated to sustain comparisons with the Atlantic system. Estimates remain uncertain, but even the highest projections do not approach the demographic or economic magnitude of the transatlantic trade. More importantly, slavery in the Islamic world did not function as the foundation of plantation economies requiring continuous mass importation. It was embedded in domestic, administrative, and military structures rather than industrial agriculture. This difference is not incidental. It is structural.
The difference is not merely demographic. It is civilizational. New World European slavery produced a capitalist world order. It created plantation economies, commercial banking networks, insurance markets, commodity chains, maritime empires, and racial states whose wealth depended on the permanent extraction of Black labor. The Atlantic system did not simply move enslaved people across water. It reorganized the world around race, capital, and empire. The “Arab slave trade,” by contrast, did not produce a comparable global economy, a modern racial state, or a durable Arab racial empire. That is the point the polemicists have to avoid, because once structure enters the discussion, their favorite equivalence collapses.
In the Atlantic world, slavery helped Europeans produce and maintain racial dominance. In the Islamic world, slavery did not help Arabs preserve racial dominance. Quite the opposite occurred. Slavery contributed to the decline of Arab political supremacy because many of the enslaved and slave-descended military populations who entered Islamic service eventually became the ruling classes themselves. The Turks are the clearest example. Turkic military slaves and soldiers became indispensable to Abbasid power, then overtook Arab authority through the Seljuks, the Mamluks, and later the Ottomans. The Mamluks ruled Egypt for centuries. The Ottomans inherited and governed much of the Arab world. This is not a story of Arabs building a racial empire through slavery. It is a story of Arab political authority being displaced by the very non-Arab military populations that Islamic imperial systems had incorporated.
This is why the racial composition of enslaved populations matters. Africans were not the majority of enslaved people across much of Islamic history. Large numbers came from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean. These enslaved populations were not locked into a permanent racial underclass. Many entered military and administrative institutions and became instruments of state power. The Mamluk example is decisive because it reverses the Atlantic logic. In the Americas, enslaved Africans and their descendants were legally degraded so that Europeans could rule permanently. In much of the Islamic world, enslaved soldiers and their descendants could become rulers. That does not make the institution humane. It means the institution did not operate as a racial caste system designed to preserve Arab supremacy.
This also exposes the poverty of the phrase “Arab slave trade.” It makes “Arab” do work that history will not support. Arab political dominance did not extend across most of Islamic history. By the mid-eleventh century, effective control over large parts of the Islamic world had shifted to Turkic powers such as the Seljuks, and later to the Mamluks and Ottomans. To attribute the slave systems of these regimes to “Arabs” is not analysis. It is ethnic ventriloquism. It allows polemicists to attach every slave system under Islamic civilization to Arabs while ignoring who actually ruled, who traded, who financed, who mediated, and who benefited.
In the modern period, the dynamics shift again. In East Africa, Omani influence lasted little more than a century and depended heavily on local intermediaries and Indian capital. In the Nile Valley, slave raiding expanded under Ottoman and Egyptian authority in response to changing economic conditions. These developments occurred in a world already shaped by European expansion and demand for slave-produced commodities. As Walter Rodney noted, the so-called Arab trade cannot be separated from the global economic system in which Europe played a central role.
The contrast with the modern West is sharper still. No wealthy Arab country today can trace its national wealth to medieval enslavement of Africans. The wealth of the Gulf monarchies is overwhelmingly a twentieth-century petroleum story, especially the oil boom and price shocks of the 1970s. Roger Owen notes that during that decade enormous sums accrued to the major Arab oil exporters after they gained greater control over reserves, pricing, and production, producing massive infrastructural investment and labor migration. The 1973 oil crisis and the subsequent rise in oil prices transformed Gulf states into major holders of capital. That wealth did not come from plantations, racial slave labor, or centuries of Black extraction. It came from hydrocarbons, nationalization, price leverage, and the geopolitical economy of oil.
The United States is different. The wealth of the modern Atlantic world cannot be separated from slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Cotton, sugar, tobacco, shipping, insurance, banking, and industrialization were all bound to enslaved Black labor. The plantation was not an embarrassing side feature of capitalism. It was one of its engines. Orlando Patterson’s formulation of slavery as “social death” captures the internal logic of that order: enslaved people were stripped of kinship, honor, legal personhood, and social belonging so that they could be converted into instruments of production. In the Atlantic world, race was not decorative. It was the governing grammar of labor, law, property, and citizenship.
This is why anti-Blackness in the Arab world must be studied on its own terms. To assume anti-Blackness in the Arab world became the organizing principle of a modern racial state in the way it did in the Americas is false. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates were imperial formations, but they were not racial empires in any way that resembles the modern Atlantic. They did not levy an Arab Jim Crow that fostered a permanent Black caste as the foundation of their economy, law, and political identity. They did not produce a civilizational order in which the wealth of the ruling Arab race depended on the hereditary degradation of Black people across continents.
Nor did the Arab-Islamic world generate an equivalent to the European epistemology of race. There was no Arab-Islamic Linnaeus who classified humanity into ranked biological types to stabilize imperial rule. There was no Arab-Islamic Blumenbach whose anatomical categories helped shift European thought from geography into physical race. Linnaeus’s classifications became part of the eighteenth-century roots of modern scientific racism, while Blumenbach’s fivefold division of humanity helped consolidate the language through which Europeans imagined “Caucasian,” “Ethiopian,” and other racial varieties as natural categories. Whatever racial prejudice existed in Arabic literature, it did not become a state-backed scientific apparatus comparable to European racial taxonomy, craniometry, eugenics, and biological hierarchy. The Islamic world had ethnocentrism, color prejudice, and status hierarchies. The modern West produced race science and then used it to govern the planet.
As stated the phrase “Arab slave trade” is a European colonizer invention. British missionaries and colonial administrators over-emphasized Arab involvement in slavery in order to justify their own intervention in Africa. By constructing Arabs as primary perpetrators of slavery, European powers could use this as a diversion while presenting their colonizing project as moral reform.
David Livingstone helped manufacture the moral panic that made the “Arab slave trade” into a colonial talking point. He did not merely describe slavery in East and Central Africa. He reorganized it into a British abolitionist drama in which Arab and Swahili traders became the face of African suffering and British expansion became the cure. His formula of “Christianity, commerce, and civilization” fused humanitarian rhetoric with imperial penetration. It turned British commerce into salvation and Arab commerce into barbarism.
Livingstone’s narrative performed a calculated displacement. Britain had already enriched itself through Atlantic slavery, plantation capitalism, maritime commerce, and colonial extraction. Livingstone shifted the moral spotlight away from that history and toward a new African theater where Britain could appear as rescuer instead of perpetrator. The result was not neutral observation. It was imperial propaganda with a missionary conscience.
His writings became public ammunition. Missionary societies, abolitionist organizations, newspapers, and Parliament circulated his depictions until “Arab slavery” became a ready-made justification for intervention. By the late nineteenth century, the figure of the Arab slave trader had become politically useful because it gave Britain a villain and gave the empire a moral disguise.
The phrase “Arab slave trade” condensed this propaganda into a category. It collapsed trans-Saharan commerce, Red Sea traffic, Indian Ocean exchange, Omani Zanzibar, Ottoman-Egyptian expansion, Swahili intermediaries, African polities, Indian capital, and European demand into one ethnic accusation. That is not historical precision. It is narrative laundering.
Edward Alpers exposed the mythology directly: “the old stereotyped idea that most slaves were seized by marauding bands of Arab and Swahili traders is just another one of the myths which have grown up around the East African slave trade.” Livingstone helped give that myth moral authority. He transformed a complex regional history into a colonial morality play. Arabs became the villains, Africans became the helpless victims, and Britain became the adult in the room.
That is why the term survived. It is useful. It allows critics to invoke slavery without discussing racial capitalism, empire, or the Atlantic system that built the modern West. It gives them Arab guilt without European accountability. It gives them humanitarian outrage without historical proportion. In all honesty, the term ‘Arab Slave Trade’ is colonial residue masquerading as moral seriousness.
Once the equivalency is exposed as the distortion that it is, the comparison between Islamic slavery and the transatlantic system implodes on itself. The Atlantic system was defined by its scale, its racial ideology, and its centrality to global capitalism. It produced a hereditary caste system in which Blackness became synonymous with permanent exclusion from social and legal personhood. That system has no equivalent in the early Islamic world despite its anti-blackness.
This brings us to the claim about the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The assertion that he was a slave trader or morally equivalent to modern slaveholders in the Americas depends on importing this distortion. To achieve this one must misread the primary sources. Islamic texts do not present slavery as a racial institution. They present slavery as a condition that already existed and introduce a set of constraints that worked against its perpetuation. The Prophet ﷺ stated that those under one’s authority were to be treated as brothers, fed from the same food, and clothed in the same manner. He prohibited the language of absolute ownership, instructing believers not to refer to others as “my slave” but to use terms that emphasized shared servitude to God. He mandated emancipation as expiation for sins and encouraged it as an act of piety.
The example of Bilal ibn Rabah illustrates this trajectory. Bilal was not simply freed. His emancipation was elevated into a moral statement about human equality within the early Muslim community. He became one of the most honored companions of the Prophet ﷺ, entrusted with the call to prayer. This is not incidental symbolism. It reflects a deliberate reordering of social hierarchy.
The legal category often translated as slavery, riqq, must also be properly understood. Riqq referred to a condition of unfreedom that carried obligations on the part of the owner, including provision, protection, and limits on exploitation. It was not racialized as there were wards who were Arab and owners who were racially–by contemporary standards—Black, nor was it structured as a permanent hereditary caste as emancipation was attainable in one’s lifetime and the stigma of having been a “slave” did not follow them into freedom. The consistent encouragement of manumission within Islamic law as a religious act indicates a trajectory toward reduction rather than expansion.
Critics often cite isolated reports to substantiate the claim that the Prophet ﷺ owned slaves yet have shown no direct evidence of this. Instead, what these reports are referring to is the riqq system which does not equate to Western chattel-capitalist slavery. Typically their claims are made from a mistranslation and decontextualization of sources. For example, the term ghulām, frequently translated as “slave,” could simply refer to a young man in classical Arabic. Reports describing Ethiopian performers in the mosque have been misrepresented as evidence of their supposed enslavement when they actually describe cultural performance. These are not interpretive differences. They are lazy errors that persist because they serve a polemical agenda.
The broader claim that Muslim societies failed to abolish slavery independently is equally false in its overstating the facts. There are historical cases such as the reforms of Abdul-Qadir Kan in West Africa, which restricted and in some cases abolished slave trading practices prior to British abolition. Kan’s abolitionist movement was a Jihad as it was grounded in Islamic ethical reasoning and not a product of the European Enlightenment. In fact, Kan would go on to inspire British abolitionists. Reverend Thomas Clarkson, founder of the Society for the Abolition of Slaves expressed admiration for Kan’s efforts in ending the slave trade, describing him as “the wise and virtuous Almaamy” who provided an “illustrious example in extirpating the commerce in the human race.”
The persistence of these false-equivalencies is driven by their utility. The bad faith distortion of Islamic history allows critics to relativize Western slavery, disrupt contemporary solidarities across anti-imperialist movements, and present the West as the primary source of moral progress. By flattening history, ignoring context, and applying categorical errors that originated in colonial discourse .
As we have discussed the claims that the ‘Arab Slave Trade’ or the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ are structurally and morally equivalent to the architects of transatlantic slavery is a strategic falsehood built on collapsing distinct systems that erase the role of racial capitalism in constructing the modern world, and recycling colonial narratives designed to redirect moral scrutiny away from Western empire. The real agenda of these anachronistic claims is to alienate Black Americans from their Islamic heritage—a heritage where Jihad was synonymous with slave revolts.
