[jbooth]

My usual take on these things is it's more about money and what you can get away with locally than the character of the religions themselves.

Lots of very christian Americans had very christian outlooks on slavery being legal in the 1850s, and on unequal rights being the way of things (noah and ham) up until the 1960s. If I were looking for a religion that didn't have a history of justifying slavery, I'd point to maybe buddhism and taoism, maybe. Certainly none of the abrahamic religions (old testament) or hinduism.

[levosmetalo]

Well, there are different flavours of crhistianity as well as different flavours of islam. While christian Americans did indeed support slavery, the eastern (Orthodox) christianity was never involved in such behaviour. I'm pretty sure that not all islamic countries were openly supporting slavery, it's just the desert ones.

That being said, I agree that it's more middle east phenomenon that islam phenomenon.

The other poster also mentioned women rights as a part of islamic slavery. How is that different than, for example, Switzerland, where women got a right to vote only after black americans got it? And it's not like extremist christians treat their women in any way better, except they mostly allow only one woman per man.

[konstruktor]

Women not being allowed to vote is actually an inherent flaw of democracy: Those who are allowed to vote decide who else may vote. All democratic countries make this kind of decision for many groups. Voting age, if and when immigrants may vote, whether to let people convicted of a felony or prisoners vote: all of these are cases of the voters deciding on who else will share their privilege. Switzerland was just slightly different because referendums are binding and were not overturned by the supreme courts, and the discriminated group was more visible/obvious.

[levosmetalo]

So you want to say that just because it's called democracy, the voters have the right to deprive the other of basic human rights? The same way as in ancient Greek/Athens democracy where we had both free elections by popular vote and slaves.

[konstruktor]

I was, obviously, saying the very opposite, i.e. that what you are describing is an inherent flaw of democracy, and that some discrimination is just more obvious for cultural reasons. Usually, institutions like the supreme court save the day in the worst cases, but when this control fails, like with the popular votes in Switzerland on Voting rights for women, democracies can be quite barbaric.

[jbooth]

Not to nitpick, but the byzantine empire, seat of orthodox christianity for its first 1000 years, condoned slavery:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674036116

[mike_esspe]

Orthodox church supported serfdom, monasteries owned peasants.