Episode Details

Islamic scholar John Andrew Morrow, founder of the Covenants Initiative, discusses his new book Islam and Slavery.

Everyone knows Islam is against debt slavery, the inevitable consequence of usury. But what about other forms of slavery? One school of thought holds that since domestic slavery was ubiquitous and unquestioned at the time of the Prophet (saas) and is not clearly and directly banned by Islamic scripture, it is permissible. In Islam and Slavery Dr. Morrow takes the opposite view: “The Qur’an encourages and even requires Muslims to emancipate enslaved people. As far as the exponents of Islam’s spiritual, moral, ethical, and egalitarian tradition are concerned, the Qur’an, the Prophet, and Islam introduced a system that would reform the practice of slavery and abolish it entirely and forever.”

Extract:

As an academic, I'm asked to peer-review articles that are submitted or to write reviews of books. Reading Religion, which is the name of the journal, sent me the list of books that were available for review and I proposed a few of them. They came back to me and asked me to review Slavery and Islam.

(Reads) In Slavery and Islam, Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University, devotes over 400 pages to support his conviction that slavery and concubinage are permissible according to the Quran and the teachings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad. He is adamant that God and His Messenger allowed, condoned, and supported them. In his words, the permissibility of slavery and concubinage is undeniable in the Quran. Rather than abolish sexual slavery, Brown asserts that Muslim jurists embraced the practice fully and took it to its maximum. He admits that the number of concubines taken by Muslims jumped dramatically with the early Islamic conquests. Brown also stresses that, in Islamic law, consent for sexual relations was assumed or irrelevant. Not only does he argue that sex slaves played a central role in Arab and Ottoman slavery, but he goes as far as to trivialize the age of consent. Moreover, he argues that freedom is not a fundamental human right in Islamic law, and treats serial polygamists who had hundreds of sex slaves as moral exemplars. Brown equates opposition to the institution of slavery and sexual servitude as opposition to the Messenger of God. He considers those who oppose slavery but refuse to condemn the Prophet to be hypocrites. When faced with dissenting views on the disputed subject of the legitimacy of slavery in Islam, Brown's strategy is to respond with a loaded trick question and a theological trap: Did the Prophet Muhammad commit a grave moral wrong? For Brown, a Muslim does not remain a Muslim if he or she answers in the affirmative.

Consequently, he provides a jurisprudential justification for the practice of Takfir, namely the excommunication of so-called heretics and apostates, and provides ample evidence that Muslims of a long history of enslaving other Muslims who do not share their ideology. Brown may claim to believe that slavery is wrong. However, he makes an important disclaimer: “As a Muslim myself, I cannot condemn it as grossly, intrinsically immoral across space and time. To do so would be to condemn the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and God's Law as morally compromised.” However, rather than support Islamic abolitionists, he assumes the role of the devil's advocate, devoting an inordinate amount of time in his book to dismissing, debunking, and repudiating their arguments as violating the Quran, the Sunnah, and the Sharia.

If one rejects the views of Muslim scholars who spurn slavery, is one an opponent or supporter of this evil and abominable institution? In fact, Brown wonders whether slavery is in the DNA of Islam. In his words, “we can't pretend it's not a part o