Francis Chartrand for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles

In 2004, the french universitarian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau explained in a scholarly book that is found in the history of Africa or the Arab world of slave trades worse than Western trafficking. A few days after the release of the book, he received death threats - taken seriously by the police - and preferred not to appear in public. But Malek Chebel, an anthropologist Franco-Algerian Muslim and author of the book "Slavery in the land of Islam", is not disturbed.

"If we ever launched a fatwa against me, I hasten to go on TV and say: you sentenced me to death, but you are only thugs, criminals subject to the tribunal in The Hague . You are not Muslims but murderers, you can send me 10 commandos killers if you want, but I do not hide!"

These words were picked up by the correspondent of La Presse in Paris who Chebel gave an interview last October Slavery in the land of Islam: a Muslim Liberal shakes the taboo, by Louis Robitaille, link.

"A delicate matter," admits Chebel speaking to the topic of his latest book. That is why I am waiting a bit before giving lectures in Paris. But unlike Pétré-Grenouilleau or other is inside that I criticize the excesses of Islam, extremism and sectarianism."

Author of some twenty books, including Manifesto for an Islamic Enlightenment published in 2004, Chebel is both a Muslim impeccable, connoisseur of the Koran, and a liberal without concession, a supporter of secularism and hostile to the door sailing. A determined opponent of "political Islam" and its claims to "regulate society." With this caveat: "Unlike others, I have the desire to be heard and thus avoid unnecessary provocations: I therefore take care of not insulting anybody." In the case of caricatures of Muhammad, Above all tried to "calm down the game."

But this time it is the subject of his book, which is taboo. Chebel stands a severe finding. Slavery in the Muslim world, three times more spread out over time that the West has also hit twice as many people, or 20 million people over 10 centuries.

"A slavery discreet and barely mitigated continues today. There are areas of non-absolute right to Saudi Arabia and some Gulf countries, for example. In Niger and Mali, you can buy - the unit - a child of 10-years-old and you do what you want. While the religious authorities in the West eventually switch in the abolitionist camp of the nineteenth century and still fly their coulpe for past crimes, I hear no preacher of Al-Jazeera condemn these practices."

Chebel also criticises Islam for their disturbing silence. Maybe they preferred, he wrote, "the arrivals mystique of the great thinkers, philosophers and theosophists of Islam to the realities scabreuses merchants of human flesh." They knew, but their empathy for Islam the inclinait to find that religion and men who demanded an apology which are not justified.

What makes Malek Chebel revolt "is that, more or less explicitly, it invokes Islam to justify the enslavement. But on only 25 verses of the Koran that refer to the subject, almost all lean on the side of the postage. Strictly nothing in the texts to justify the slave system. But it is this: in various forms, a coterie religious venal, the orders of dictatorships, keep a total grip on Islam and its interpretation. It was 30 or 40 years ago, Islam Enlightenment which I refer was in full progress, including Egypt, and democracy was in sight. Today is a full regression: if there was now free elections in the Arab-Muslim world, Islamists would win almost everywhere. However, I do not think this is irreversible: Egypt could become a land of the Enlightenment. And there are democratic shivering in the Maghreb or elsewhere. "

Mohammed Ennaji - slavery, power and religion in the Arab World

For the academic Moroccan Mohammed Ennaji, the worst is perhaps in the impact that slavery had on the political mores of the Arab world. In a recent book, it explains how slavery founded the report in power and therefore absolutism that is still often the norm in this part of the world.

Labels: Arab World, Francis Chartrand, Islam, Secularism

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 1:04 AM