While the West Cries Islamophobia, Sexual Slavery Continues Unchecked

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. They murdered 1,200 people, burned families alive, and wounded over 5,000. They tortured and raped women, and abducted roughly 250 hostages, including babies, children and women, many of whom were later killed. 

The world watched in horror, shocked by the astonishing brutality. But this was not the first instance of jihadists kidnapping and enslaving Jewish women and families. In fact, the first victims of Islamic sexual slavery were Jewish women and girls in Arabia during the seventh century. 

Arab Muslims’ first military target was Arabia, which was then home to a thriving Jewish community. For almost a thousand years, Jews had lived in the Arabian Peninsula’s oases of Teyma, Khaybar, and Yathrib (later known as Medina). 

Islam’s treatment of Jews was violent and annihilationist from the start. Muhammed eliminated the Jewish tribes of Medina, namely the Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qurayza tribes.

After the Banu Qaynuqa were invaded, they were expelled by Muhammed in 624. Muslims then took the community’s property as their war booty. A year later, the Banu Nadir Jews were expelled by Muslims. 

Muhammad and his associates then attacked and subdued the prosperous Jewish tribe Banu-Mustaliq near Mecca in 626. Men were slaughtered, and the “booty” included women. Juwayriyya was considered the most beautiful captive. She was the daughter of the Banu al-Mustaliq’s leader, and she was taken as a “bride” for Muhammad himself. 

The Banu Qurayza were besieged in 627 by Muslims under Muhammed’s leadership for 25 days until they eventually surrendered. The Jewish men were killed, their property divided, and the women and children taken as slaves. Nearly all male members of the tribe who had reached puberty were shackled and beheaded. 

A year later, Muhammed led Muslims in the massacre of the Jews residing in Arabia’s town of Khaybar. After the attack, Muhammed and other Muslims took the surviving women as slaves or wives. The Muslim invaders charged the surviving Jews a 50 percent tax on their crops. In 637, after Muhammad’s death, the Caliph Omar expelled the remaining Jews from Khaybar.

Even today, during anti-Israel protests, Islamists scream “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud,” which means, “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.” They aim to remind Jews of the Islamic genocidal intent towards Jews.

Dr. Bill Warner, the president of the Center for the Study of Political Islam International, calls this period “the seventh century Arabian Holocaust against Jews.”

This pattern was repeated throughout history with Christians and other non-Muslims in parts of Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and South Asia. The unpopular truth is that the Arabization and Islamization of all those regions started through mass killings and enslavement. 

When Islam started targeting North Africa in the seventh century, places which are today called Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, among others, were part of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. The Arab conquests were accompanied by massacres and the enslavement of non-Muslim women and men.  In 642, for instance, Arab Muslims invaded Tripoli (Libya) and forced the Jews and Christians to submit their wives and children as slaves to the Arab Army as part of their jizya (tax on non-Muslims). 

After Islam’s emergence in Arabia during the seventh century, one of the first objectives of invading Arabs was the conquest of Europe’s Iberian Peninsula. Parts of Spain and Portugal (which the Muslims called ‘al-Andalus’) were occupied and ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties for almost 800 years, beginning in the 8th century. Muslim-occupied Spain’s history was largely marked by a severe persecution of Christians and Jews through several expulsions and pogroms. Al-Andalus was a slave state that included eunuchs and the widespread sexual slavery of non-Muslim women.

This practice of sexual slavery by Muslim Arabs of Africans and Europeans continued for centuries. Every jihadist military conquest was followed by a large-scale enslavement of non-Muslims. 

In the period 1529–43, for instance, Ethiopia was occupied by a jihadist army raised from the sultanate of Adal. 

The Muslim seizure of Ethiopian provinces led to a tremendous expansion in the slave trade within the region. It included the enslavement and forced conversion of large numbers of Ethiopian Christians. During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, jihad was a primary method of obtaining Ethiopian slaves.

Islamic slavery has never been fully abolished largely because sexual slavery is condoned by Islamic scriptures. The mass rape of the captured women by coitus interruptus—sanctioned by Islam’s prophet Muhammad—is described in a canonical hadith. According to Islamic sources, Muhammed captured slaves in battle. He then had sex with his slaves and instructed his men to do likewise. Islamic sexual slavery started with the advent of the religion itself. 

Muslims are encouraged to imitate Islam’s prophet Muhammad, a slave owner and trader. According to the Koran, Muslim men can keep women as sex slaves. Koran 4:24 extended the “privilege” of having sexual intercourse with captured slave women to all Muslim men.

As Dr. Andrew Bostom notes:

From the advent of Islam, through the present era, Muhammad’s sacralized behaviors have engendered jihad chattel and sexual slavery on a massive scale.

Indeed, the enduring scale and scope of Islamic slavery in Africa exceeded the far better known Western trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. Professor Ralph Austen’s working figure for the composite of the trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean traffic generated by the Islamic slave trade out of Africa, from 650 through 1905, is 17 million. According to Bostom, the actual scale of enslavement by Muslim conquerors of non-Muslim peoples through history is even larger, as these figures do not take into account “vast domains of jihad slavery: throughout Europe (Mediterranean and Western Europe), as well as Central and Eastern Europe, involving the Arabs, and later the Ottoman Turks and Tatars; Muscovite Russia (subjected to Tatar depredations); Asia Minor (under Seljuk and Ottoman domination); Persia, Armenia, and Georgia (subjected to the systematized jihad slavery campaigns waged by the Shi’ite Safavids, in particular); and the Indian subcontinent …”.

And all this is not history: to this day, Muslim Arabs continue enslaving Africans. In the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, for instance, slavery of blacks at the hands of Muslim Arabs has a long history. The Bidhans, of mixed Arab-Berber descent, hold black Mauritanians as slaves. Slave status is passed down from mother to child, and anti-slavery activists are regularly tortured and detained. In general, all Blacks in Mauritania are referred to as ‘Abd,’ ‘Abid’ (slave, slaves).

In the Middle East and Africa, jihadists continue to abuse women and children. During their occupation of Syria and Iraq from 2014 to 2019, ISIS (Islamic State) terrorists took thousands of Yazidi girls and women as sex slaves. Over 2,600 Yazidi children and women remain missing to this day.

On April 14, 2014, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 Nigerian schoolgirls from a school in Chibok. The majority of the hostages were Christians. Whilst some managed to escape, and others have since been released, it is estimated that today (a decade later) at least 90 of the schoolgirls are still in captivity. Thousands more children and women have since been abducted by Islamic terrorists in Nigeria. 

Dr. Al Chukwuma Okoli explains that Boko Haram “victimizes women by subjecting them to rape, armed abduction, forced marriage, and captivity. Boko Haram also objectifies women by using them as instruments and objects of war such as sex slaves, human shields, and suicide bombers.”

In Pakistan today approximately 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are stolen each year from their families by Muslim men. The Hindu American Foundation reports that, once abducted, these girls are subject to a continuous barrage of violence that includes forced conversion to Islam, forced marriage, and rape. Most are forced to live with their captors, never to see their families again.

As Dr. Bostom notes:

ISIS’s practice of jihad sex slavery, persistent large scale chattel slavery in Mauritania, and even the mass acts of sexual assault just committed New Year’s Eve by Muslim males in Cologne, Germany in 2015, and elsewhere across Western Europe, all fit squarely within a normative doctrinal, and historical Islamic context, patterned after the behaviors of Muhammad, and the nascent Muslim community.

In fact, the grooming and raping of  thousands of mostly white British children and women by almost exclusively Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani origin, also fits into this pattern. Millions of children and women have suffered as victims of sexual slavery at the hands of Muslim men for over 1400 years. It is high time for that violence to stop.