By Nathaniel Mathews
April 18,
2017
A number of
years ago I gave a lecture on Swahili coast history to a group of educators and
students on Chicago’s South Side. During the Q&A period, one older
gentleman asked me why I didn’t say more about Muslim-led slavery of Africans
in the Indian Ocean.
I responded
somewhat inadequately that slavery in the Indian Ocean wasn’t a religious issue
but an economic one. The gentleman wasn’t satisfied, explaining that he was
disappointed in Louis Farrakhan’s silence on the issue and testifying to the
continuing presence of slavery in African Muslim countries like Mauritania to
this day, explaining that slavery was justified by sharia.
The man in
question was not a conservative Christian, nor part of Islamophobia Inc. but
rather part of a generation of Afrocentric black nationalists in the
intellectual tradition of John Henrik Clarke. He was condemning the practice of
slavery globally from his commitment to Afrocentrism and part of the broader
tradition of black nationalist liberation politics in the United States. He
wondered why Muslims were seemingly behind in that fight or ambivalent to the
practice of enslavement.
In spite of
my historical understanding of slavery and the slave trade as practices that
many non-Muslim African as well as Muslim African societies often willingly
engaged in, his words forced me to reckon more seriously with how Islamic law
treats the abolition of slavery. I am especially interested in this issue as
someone trained as a historian of East Africa, where the abolitionist movement
predated and then became part of the first wave of European colonization of
Africa, post-1885.
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Abolition of Slavery, Including Sex Slavery in Islam
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My position
is that the Islamic tradition has already developed an abolitionist ethos and a
strong commitment to liberation, out of a set of social and political
struggles, including resistance to European colonialism, that took place in the
historical encounters between Islam, Africa, and the West in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
Afrocentrists
often point to the Quran and Hadith’s sanction of slavery. It is true that
Islam accepted slavery as a part of Arabian society, but there is no evidence
the tradition actively encouraged the taking of slaves. If one wishes to speak
of a particular ‘trajectory’ of Islamic interpretation based on the Qur’an and
Sunnah, it is a trajectory of manumission, not abolition [1]. The Prophet
Muhammad assumed that if manumission continued to regularly occur, then slavery
could continue to exist without being a trans-generational status, and would eventually
die out.
The Prophet
Muhammad challenged the practice of slavery in Arabian society by compelling
the powerful to care for and protect the less powerful [2]. If masters and
slaves could share some basic moral assumptions, powerful masters would feel a
social obligation to protect and show kindness to their slaves. In Islam, this
is exemplified by a hadith enjoining the believer to treat their slaves as they
would treat their own children [3]. Slaves in Islam would (ideally) function
more like kin and less like a separate caste of sub-humans [4]. Their
offspring, again ideally, would be free to assume their place alongside the
freeborn. None of these reforms radically challenged the ‘natural’ reality of
slavery itself [5].
Why didn’t
Muslims abolish slavery earlier? This is a valid question and it is worth it
for Muslims to reflect very hard and critically about, especially if one is
seriously committed to practicing the tradition. But when Afrocentrists ask
Muslims why Islam did not abolish slavery, there is a hidden assumption that
non-Muslim African societies had already abolished the practice. But in fact,
many powerful non-Muslim African societies depended on slavery for their wealth
and resented European imposed abolition for that reason, for instance, the
Asante empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Abolition
as an ethical dilemma only occurs because we inhabit a very different time from
the early Muslims, as well as most pre-colonial African societies. We often
forget that for Jesus, Muhammad, and other moral teachers of the past, the
master-slave relationship was both a fact of life and a metaphor of our
relationship with the Divine [6]. The more relevant question then, is not ‘why
didn’t Muslims abolish slavery?’, but ‘what makes our time different from the
time of the early Muslims?’
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Also Read:
Reviving a Sunnah? How ISIS Justifies Slavery
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One
possible answer to that question is that we now live in a global society where
we take the freedom of an individual as an irrevocable human right. Although
this ideal is often traced to Western origins, it is important to note that it
has other global, non-Western genealogies that are both Muslim and African.
Haitian revolutionaries, among whom were African Muslims, were first among
those insisting on this freedom in their struggle to end slavery in the late
1700s. At around the same time, the West African Muslim ruler Abdul Kader Kane
sought to abolish the slave trade in his realm, in order to protect his
subjects from the French-controlled slave trade at Saint Louis [7].
Formerly
enslaved Muslims also helped to reshape community perceptions of slavery. In
East Africa especially, the abolition of slavery coincided with the new
popularity of Sufi brotherhoods as tools for the mass propagation of Islam.
Sufism became the language by which formerly servile people appropriated the
message of Islam to undermine the ijma around the social status of slaves and
ex-slaves. In Lamu, Kenya, the ‘Alawi shaykh Habib Saleh angered the town’s
former slaveholding elite by teaching ex-slaves. In Bagamoyo, Tanzania, an
ex-slave from the Congo rose to become a Sufi shaykh and one of the most
knowledgeable scholars of the region; he faced strong opposition from former
slave owners [8].
The first
five decades of the twentieth century in Africa revealed Muslims reshaping the
consensus on slavery. This process of reshaping ijma was not only an elite
scholarly one; it included formerly enslaved Muslims, who contested their
rights within the idioms of Islam, molding Islamic cultural repertoires to
critique the exclusionary social practices of Muslim elites.
Traditions,
Islam included, are not closed caskets but open conversations and debates often
characterized by shifting notions of what is permissible. Slavery is one such
shifting notion. There is nothing in the Islamic tradition mandating slavery.
Thus, the overwhelming majority of Muslims today find slavery distasteful and
have no desire to practice it. They have internalized a desire not to own
people that is very modern. This is a direct result of the most oppressed and
vulnerable elements of human global society forcing the world to accept a more
robust and inclusive concept of individual freedom.
Concepts of
abolition and freedom are the product of centuries of struggle by enslaved
Africans and others to radicalize and decolonize the values of the societies
they found themselves forcibly dragged into. They constitute a valuable tool
that a range of activists today, from the Rabaa Square protests in Egypt to the
garment worker strikes in Bangladesh to Black Lives Matter activists in the US,
use to launch more radical critiques of global inequality, exploitation, and
other conditions analogous to slavery.
The Prophet
Muhammad’s attempt to protect the enslaved and to grant them protection and
rights, without abolishing slavery, was not a moral failing, but an advancement
to the limits of what it was possible to envision within his era. If we do not
acknowledge this, we will continue to reproduce two stale arguments of past
Muslim apologists: that abolition is a Western concept that fetishizes consent
and freedom, or that the Prophet Muhammad was an abolitionist.
Neither of
these are tenable positions, and there are severe moral costs to holding them,
that compromise the moral compass of Muslims and leave serious and inquisitive
outsiders with a suspicion that Muslims are more interested in theological
apologetics than an honest reckoning with history. For instance, it is but a
short step from saying abolition is a Western concept to making the argument,
like the late Islamist philosopher Abu Ala Mawdudi, that we need to retain
slavery as a mark of Muslim moral independence from the West [9]. And there is
simply no evidence from our tradition that the Prophet Muhammad ever
contemplated abolishing slavery.
My argument
is distinct from both of these extremes. I have argued that Western notions of
abolitionist freedom have already fused with Islamic values and that it is
dangerous to try to extract one from the other. There are a number of positive
benefits from embracing this position. For one thing, it provides Muslims with
a powerful language not only to challenge slavery, but many other forms of
similar domination and exploitation that go by different names.
It seems to
me that Muslims who are using this fusion of moral horizons to critique both
Muslim and Western complacency with regards to forms of oppression analogous to
slavery are engaged in an urgently necessary and positive reinvigoration of the
Islamic tradition.
Notes:
1] Trajectory hermeneutics originated
with Christian theologian William Webb. For more on their use, see his 2001
book, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural
Analysis.
[2] Jonathan Glassman. “The Bondsman’s
New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili
Coast” Journal of African History 32(2): 1991, 277-312.
[3] Ṣaḥīḥ
al-Bukhārī º30; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim º1661.
[4] The walāʾ system then,
whatever its faults, was a social compact between master and slave, and thus
often a tool of integration of the latter. See Ulrike Mitter. “Unconditional
Manumission of Slaves in Early Islamic Law: A Hadith Analysis.” In The
Formation of Islamic Law (ed. Wael Hallaq). New York: Routledge, 2008.
[5] Unlike the status of ex-slaves even in
many postbellum Western societies, the formerly enslaved in the Islamic world
could raise their status considerably. But that did not erase an existing
hierarchy placing the enslaved at or near the bottom of society.
[6] Luke 12:43-48; Qur’ān (Sūra az-Zumar)
39:36. The Apostle Paul’s advice to the runaway slave Onesimus in the Book of
Philemon is filled with admonishments about a new community of belief between
slaves and masters that does not upend the social hierarchy but nevertheless
creates a sense of moral obligation between the two.
[7] For the Haitian revolutionaries and their
creation (not merely co-optation of) Enlightenment values, see Laurent Dubois,
“Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French
Atlantic” Social History 31(1): Feb 2006, 1-14. For the abolitionists, see Adam
Hochschild. Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free An
Empire’s Slaves. London: Mariner Books, 2006. For Abdul Kader Kane and the
abolition of slavery in Futa Toro, see Rudolph Ware, The Walking Quran, Chapter
3.
[8] For Habib Saleh, see Patricia Romero.
“‘Where Have All the Slaves Gone?’ Emancipation and Post – Emancipation in
Lamu, Kenya.” The Journal of African History 27 (3): 1986, 497-512. For Shaykh
Ramiya, see August Nimtz Jr. Islam and Politics in East Africa. The Sufi Order
in Tanzania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980, 45.
[9]
Abu Ala Mawdudi was unabashed about this stance. See W.G. Clarence-Smith, Islam
and the Abolition of Slavery, 188.
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Original Headline: A Trajectory of Manumission:
Examining the Issue of Slavery in Islam
Source: The Sapelo Square
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