Slavery and Islam pdf download

Slavery and Islam

Slavery and Islam by Jonathan A.C. Brow

Book Contents

• Does ‘Slavery’ Exist? The Problem of Definition
• Slavery in the Shariah
• Slavery in Islamic Civilization
• The Slavery Conundrum
• Abolishing Slavery in Islam
• The Prophet & ISIS: Evaluating Muslim Abolition
• Concubines and Consent: Can We Solve the Moral Problem of Slavery?
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2

Can We Talk About Slavery?

If you do not like the past, change it.

William L. Burton, ‘The use and abuse of history

The certainty of faith carries us over the fissures of doubt, but it does not resolve them. Memory marks well the questions we fail to answer. One moment I recall clearly.

 Not long after I had embraced Islam in my late teens I lay on my old bed in my old room reading a translation of the Quran. I remember the verse exactly. God compares the slave and the wealthy man, asking if they are alike.

The answer implied is no. This is a parable comparing powerless idols to the Almighty, but I was surprised that God was juxtaposing slave and free to make this point. Shouldn’t slavery mean nothing because slavery is horrific and people are equal? I passed over the question and read on.

In time, after I had become a professor and a Muslim scholar, I would occasionally be asked about slavery and Islam, but the question was too obscure to require me to master more than a perfunctory, stock answer.

In the summer of 2014, the fissure was opened wide, and Muslims had no idea how to mend it. Muslims in the West are used to bad news. But ISIS was the worst news.

The headlines refreshed and reproduced: ‘ISIS takes sex slaves,’ ‘ISIS and the theology of rape,’ and so on and so on. Jihadist arguments for killing civilians had always been bad.

ISIS’s reasoning on slavery cut deep because it was so clean. ISIS claimed to be the caliphate reborn, re-establishing the Shariah according to the Book of God and the way of His messenger.

The Quran had allowed slavery, the Prophet Muhammad had slaves, and this had all been allowed by the Shariah. So why shouldn’t ISIS do it?

The conversations on social media and in-person were passionate and combustible. Things were different back then, some Muslims pleaded. So

slavery was okay in the past? Well, the Quran and the Prophet were wrong, other Muslims admitted. Then why should anyone follow them? Yes, Islam had allowed slavery, but it wasn’t that bad.

Are you saying some slavery is acceptable? All that could be said was that what ISIS was doing was not Islam. It had never been and never could be. ISIS was the bête noire long dreamed of by an Islamophobia industry that had recently broken into the mainstream of American politics (though it was already a fixture on the European scene).

Even for those liberals who had long made excuses for Islam, Muslim slavery – especially sex slavery – was an ancient specter made flesh again, and it was simply a bridge too far.

There was no appetite or room for Muslims to make sense of what ISIS’s deeds and justification meant in their religion, what the communal consequences would be for condemning passages of the Quran and something is done by the Prophet, or how Muslims could reclaim their faith without doing so.

The Trump era dawned and crowds flocked to airports to protest the US government’s ban on Muslims entering the country.

Muslims in the US found themselves welcome at tables still hunched over by the surviving giants of America’s Civil Rights past, and many ordinary Muslims found pride and empowerment in doing what the more prescient among their leaders had long called for: joining the long train of the struggle for civil liberty and emancipation in America.

Muslims, Black Lives Matter, Palestine, Feminism: these were called out now side by side. Here was no space for discussing the moral and theological challenge presented by slavery. Slavery was the apotheosis of everything being fought.

Yet Muslims still read the same Quranic verse I had, and the fissure remained, obscured only by the swirl of denial and cognitive dissonance.

As the horror of ISIS filled the media, I decided I needed an answer to the ‘Islam and slavery’ question once and for all, so I started to research the topic.

As a white, male, tenured university professor for whom a reasonable day means not moving forty feet from his own French press, the topic of slavery had been peripheral for me prior to this.

But as I began to look into it I started to notice how often slavery appeared in the media. Kanye West suggested that American slavery had gone on too long not to have been ‘a choice.’

A Texas school teacher asked students to list slavery’s pros and cons. A Filipino-American journalist admitted his family had brought a slave with them to America. Activists in the US denounced the ‘modern-day slavery’ of prison labor and called for statues of Thomas Jefferson to be

taken down because he had owned slaves. White nationalists said their indentured-servant ancestors had been slaves too, and President Trump asked rhetorically if Americans were going to remove statues of the slave-owning George Washington as well. Someone at a Republican campaign rally in Alabama asked a reporter to ‘show [him] where in the Bible it says slavery is wrong.’

The problem with writing books is that you start to see your subject everywhere. Whether it was Solo or Sorry to Bother You, I kept having to turn to my wife and ask, ‘Am I crazy or is this movie about slavery?’

ISIS had raised the question of whether enslaving non-Muslims was the real face of Islam and posed the perennial question in its most alarmed tone: ‘Why can’t those barbaric Muslims just join the modern world?!’

But after only a few months of screenshots and link-saving, I realized that Americans had the same problem Muslims did.

 Anne Norton has observed that the West’s ‘problem with Islam’ is really a projection of its own enduring internal anxieties, and Roxanne Euben has shown how the Islamist ideologues that Western national security pundits love to demonize were engaged in many of the same critiques as twentieth-century Western philosophers.

 With slavery, however, it is not a question of projection or some mimetic blockage. The moral and communal challenges that slavery poses to the traditions of Islam and America (both as a nation and part of the Christian West) are simply strikingly similar.

 If slavery is a manifest and universal evil, why did no one seem to realize this until relatively recently, and what does that mean about our traditions of moral reasoning or divine guidance?

 Why do our scriptures condone slavery and why did our prophets practice it? How can we venerate people and texts – the prophets, Founding Fathers, a scripture or founding document – that considered slavery valid or normal?

 And, if we see clear and egregious moral wrongs that those people and texts so conspicuously missed, why are we venerating or honoring them in the first place? This book is devoted to engaging and, hopefully, answering these questions, especially as pertains to the extreme case of sex slavery.

This is a book for people who want to understand how Muslims conceptualized, practiced, and eventually abolished slavery in Islam.

It is also a book for those interested in how traditions that venerate the past confront realizations of its profound moral failings and how they manage the crises that ensue. First, however, we look at the problem of defining

exactly what slavery is and whether there is one thing we can call ‘slavery’ across history (Chapter One). Then we tour how Islamic law and theology envisioned riqq, the system of slavery in Islamic law (Chapter Two), as well as how Muslims from Senegal to Sumatra actually practiced, purchased, and employed various forms of servile labor (Chapter Three).

Then we tackle the heart of what I term the ‘Slavery Conundrum’ (Chapter Four) before turning to Muslim debates over ending slavery and evaluating their convincingness (Chapters Five and Six). Finally, we address the painful topic of slave-concubinage in a concluding discussion (Chapter Seven).

As I was writing this book, my response to the routine social prompt of ‘So what are you working on?’ elicited varied reactions. My observation has been that most people – Muslims and non-Muslims – do not like talking about slavery.

This is understandable. Some, including many academics, feel strongly that acknowledging – let alone studying – the moral problems presented by it is unnecessary.

I believe that what they mean is that the subject makes them uncomfortable. People are not uncomfortable with settled issues.

They are uncomfortable when they sense that a thin layer of social consensus on a divisive and painful topic is being disturbed. Whether for Muslims or Americans (or both), the issues of slavery and the moral problem it presents lurk just below the surface and rear their heads again and again.

As a brief scan of the media in the US reveals, they are not going away any time soon. For Muslims, ISIS made addressing the place of riqq in Islamic scripture and law essential. As Kecia Ali wrote, ISIS laid bare ‘the untenable nature of Muslims burying their heads in the sand and refusing to come to terms with slavery in Islam.

We cannot pretend it is not part of our religion; it is present in the Quran we read every day in prayer. But neither can we deny our visceral certainty that slavery is repugnant.