“An important aspect of Lewis’s approach was his comparison of slavery in the Islamic world with the Atlantic slave trade. By claiming that the Muslim history of slavery was worse, Lewis deflected scrutiny from the transatlantic trade. Similar arguments are now made by the European far right. The French journalist and politician Éric Zemmour has claimed that the issue of historical slavery is ‘banal’, since ‘all civilisations’ practised it. Why should Europeans be the only ones to feel guilty? The idea that Muslims did it first and did it worse has been used more broadly to contextualise European colonialism. “ This is not to diminish the use of slavery in the Muslim world . As the historian Ehud Toledano has shown, there has long been a tendency within Islamic society to minimise its violence. According to this view, a ‘softer’ form of slavery prevailed in the Muslim world, one that was domestic, almost familial. These arguments can be traced back to 19 th -century Islamic defenders o...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51