Salman Rushdie Quotes
The world is always terrible.
Rushdie, Salman. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Random House, 2015.
Many of the Americans captured by the Islamic Barbary pirates in the years leading up to the Barbary War were sold into slavery. Eaton, who was the American consul at Tunis, couldn’t help but notice the tragic parallel between the suffering of those captured by the pirates and slaves in the American South.
The British Empire had outlawed the slave trade and the United States had also done so. However, there was still a brisk slave trade where Black Africans were captured by Arab slavers and sold into slavery in Arabia. It was the open sore that had to be healed. See {609754}. He also used the phrase in his last letter, and it was engraved on his tomb in Westminster Abby. The Arab states were the last countries to legally abolish slavery in 1963—a century after this quotation. Still the anti slavery laws are weakly enforced so there is some slavery ongoing in the Middle East, Africa an parts of Asia still.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie FRSL is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.
