The Western left has made the atonement of Western civilization (guilty of colonialism, slavery, or patriarchy) a religion. But it carefully silences the Arab-Muslim slave trade, for example, even though it is older, deadlier, and still alive in some countries. There is no moral coherence here. No other civilization imposes such a level of intellectual self-destruction on itself.
In 2001, France passed the Taubira law, which recognizes the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery as crimes against humanity. Statues fall, streets are renamed, and the left celebrates. Atonement becomes state policy.
That same year, no one proposes recognizing the Arab-Muslim slave trade. A silence that speaks volumes…
For fourteen centuries (from the 7th to the 20th), the Eastern slave trade took between 14 and 17 million human beings from sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates by specialized historians. More than the Atlantic trade (of course, I do not intend to downplay the latter, I just want to highlight the double standard applied here). Over a period six times longer. With a particularity that textbooks never teach, involving the systematic castration of enslaved men, which explains why there are no large diasporas arising from this trade, unlike in the Americas. The victims literally disappeared from history.
Senegalese historian Tidiane N'Diaye dedicated his career to documenting what his book calls the veiled genocide. His work is serious, rigorously documented, and academically impeccable. It is almost absent from French school curricula (or in the West).
This is not forgetfulness. It is a choice.
The reason is simple: the Arab-Muslim slave trade does not fit into the progressive narrative. It does not portray the white West as the universal executioner. It complicates the colonial/anticolonial reading grid on which an entire intellectual, political, and electoral architecture rests. To evoke it is to risk weakening the Western monopoly on guilt: a monopoly that is, in reality, an instrument of ideological domination.
And slavery is not just a matter of the past in Africa and the East. Mauritania has only penalized slavery since 2007, six years after the Taubira law. In 2017, CNN showed images of slave markets in Libya, where sub-Saharan migrants are sold in broad daylight. The kafala system in Gulf countries keeps millions of migrant workers in a state of servitude documented by the UN and Amnesty International. But progressives look the other way, towards the West, it is much easier and less risky.
Western self-criticism is not a form of moral clarity but an identity stance, to signal its virtue, without questioning. It costs little to those who practice it and is well-received among the electorate.
The problem is not recognizing the crimes of the West; those are real, documented, and deserve to be studied. The problem is the systematic asymmetry. A morality that is applied to some and exempts others is not moral. It is politics disguised as conscience. And an identity politics that selects its victims based on their electoral utility has no lessons to teach.
Truly combating inequalities and crimes would require fighting them everywhere and always. Even where it is uncomfortable
