The early Islamic empire exhibited all the characteristics of anti black racism, and blacks suffered the lowest form of bondage. Europeans took photographs of chained black African slaves in Arab slave trading vessels on the East Coast of Africa in the eighteen eighties.

Slavery persisted openly in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, one hundred years after slavery was abolished in the United States. As late as the nineteen sixties, African Muslims still sold slaves when they arrived on pilgrimages, as a way to finance their pilgrimages. Arab nations lagged far behind the rest of the world in abolishing slavery: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in nineteen sixty two, United Arab Emirates in nineteen sixty three, Oman in nineteen seventy!

However, unlike the rest of the Arab nations, hereditary racial slavery persists in Mauritania despite multiple official attempts to abolish it.