The American writer, Daniel Pipes, attacked the Islamic religion in an article, which was published by the press recently, from his personal website, www.danielpipes.com. In it, he says that the Muslims learned slavery from the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs, among whom it was prevalent. He denounces the participation of such slaves in the Islamic armies that invaded countries.
Yet the author does not mention that the rulers resorted to using slaves to support their armies only after the general Islamic populace had abandoned religious learning, especially in everyday matters. Thus there were no reliable people [kawadir] to count on for raiding or for the achievement of political or military victory. Nor were slaves used as professional soldiers on a large scale except in the Islamic state, where always they served as emergency forces, personal servants and assistants, or (in other countries) to prepare cannons.
Nor do we find much of a pattern of taking care of slaves in armies, especially in the sixteenth century—except in the Islamic state. In the British Museum, we have a glimpse of how slaves were treated [in Europe]. Over all, they were not treated in a humane manner. The museum pictures portray how these slaves slaved away [at building] roads with their bare hands, at a time when there were no construction tools in Europe. And they were abandoned on the oceans' islands, such as Jamaica, naked and homeless, left to contemplate their plight and meet their deaths in the jungles.
However, in Islam, slaves were raised properly and great leaders emerged from them, especially in the era of the Mamluks who ruled the world. That is, slaves were not treated in a manner that did not respect their humanity and dignity; on the contrary, they attained power in Egypt. Otherwise, why would they have displayed such courage in the field of battle?
For instance, the Egyptian Mamluk ruler Qutuz [d. 1260] was brought up like the other mamluks [military slaves]. Purchased as a youth, he went on to learn how to read and write the Arabic language. Then, the mamluk was pushed into learning the Noble Koran, the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, [fiqh] and the morality of Islamic law [Shari'a]. Afterwards, if the mamluk attained maturity, he learned horsemanship and battle training; he was instructed in the arts of war, the riding of steeds, archery, and swordsmanship, until he attained a very high degree of martial skills and physical strength so as to withstand challenges and difficulties. Thereafter, he would be trained in matters pertaining to leadership, administration, strategic war-planning, the solving of military problems, and behavior in difficult circumstances. Thus would the mamluk grow unsurpassed in the military and administrative arena.
