You mean those slaves "you" and some folks from Africa exported? Genius.
There are still slaves in Mauritania that have an "inherited" status though "officially" they abolished slavery it persists. When speaking of slavery Muslims should avoid standing on any pedestal, their fellow Muslims will probably sell them.
Persia (as it was then) is not responsible for the actions of others simply because we are today a majority-Muslim nation.
Is the US guilty of the crimes of the Spanish Inquisition because many of its people are Catholic?
No, Persian (Iranian) slavery was not race-based in the way transatlantic chattel slavery was.
It was not the US version; hereditary, legally codified system that enslaved people solely or primarily on the basis of African ancestry or skin color, with rigid racial hierarchies enforced by law across generations.
Instead, it operated more like slavery in much of the pre-modern Islamic world, as a product of war, conquest, raids, debt, or purchase, where circumstance mattered rather than race.
Slaves came from a wide range of ethnic and "racial" backgrounds—East African (Black), Caucasian (Circassian, Georgian, Armenian—often called "white"), Central Asian, Turkic, and even Iranian captives from internal raids.
No, you do not make a valid excuse for US slavery. US chattel slavery—the race-based, hereditary system of owning people as property, primarily Africans and their descendants, which was embedded in law, economy, and culture from the colonial era through 1865—is indefensible on its own terms. It involved kidnapping, forced labor, family separation, rape, and brutal enforcement, all while the US proclaimed liberty and equality.
Pointing elsewhere doesn't erase or justify that. It's a crude 'whataboutism' rebuttal.
You must know that Africans themselves exported slaves to the transatlantic trade.
Yes. European traders (Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, etc.) did not typically raid the African interior themselves. They bought captives at coastal forts from African kingdoms, merchants, and warlords who captured people through intertribal wars, raids, and debt.
Slavery was already entrenched in many West and Central African societies long before Europeans arrived. Demand from American plantations fueled the trade, and African suppliers actively participated for profit, guns, and goods. Historians estimate 10–12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic; African — not Iranian—complicity is well-documented. The fact that some of the traders were Muslim does not excuse US hypocrites in any way.
Slavery (ownership of people as property) was legally abolished in Iran in 1929—long before the Islamic Revolution. Unlike Mauritania, where descent-based slavery persists openly despite official bans, Iran has no equivalent inherited slave caste.
But the US is widely-known as a racist society to this day.
