Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

by Raymond Ibrahim

Thus began the caliphate’s centuries-long slave trade arrangement with pagan Scandinavian pirates who shared in Islam’s hostility for Christians. Starting in the mid-600s and for nearly three centuries thereafter, “Viking raids were elicited by the Muslim demand for white-skinned European slaves.”15 Indeed, it is “impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade,” argues M. A. Khan, a former Muslim from India, “because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.”16 Emmet Scott goes so far as to argue that “it was the caliphate’s demand for European slaves that called forth the Viking phenomenon in the first place.”