Thursday 16 July 2009

White slavery as one form of jihad

From Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa:

The Tripolitan ambassador in London had explained to Thomas Jefferson years earlier that the Barbary states’ policy toward the Christian world “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” This duty to war on the infidels was called jihad. The Barbary corsairs’ jihad was not based on xenophobia, nihilism, or religious fundamentalism, although the deys varied in their religious fervor and asceticism. Rather, it was the Barbary way of life, a state of perpetual, organized, state-regulated maritime violence and kidnapping, sanctioned by time and the Islamic sense of superiority over Christians. Although their jihad did not have an explicit political goal, as restoring the caliphate (the furthest geographical advance of Islam into southern Europe) is to twenty-first century militant Islam, slave-taking was jihad, and the tactics employed by the corsairs were a form of terrorism, a method of seaborne violence meant to intimidate the peoples of Europe. [pp.17-18]

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