Teleologies of abolitionism in modern popular understandings of the history of Islam and Christianity

There are a lot of misleading teleologies in the modern appropriation of abolitionism by contemporary Muslim and Christian faith communities. In the eagerness to uncover an 'abolitionist' impulse in their religious past, one frequently observes scholarly and popular efforts to 'prove' that some Muslims or Christians abolished slavery before it became a global norm. There have also been many efforts to portray the founders of these religions themselves as abolitionists. This is complicated by the long history of warfare on the frontiers of Christian and Muslim states, which produced many slaves.

 While I appreciate efforts to uncover these 'lost' histories, I also think it is helpful to define what 'abolitionism' is and what it is not, in the interest of greater clarity about the past. Most Christian and Muslim faith communities have historically had strong prohibitions on enslaving co-religionists. This attitude had long coexisted with a tolerance of enslavement as punishment for being captured in a battle or a war. Prohibiting the capture and sale of co-religionists is not functionally equivalent to an abolitionist viewpoint, although it may have helped in certain ways and at certain times, to stimulate abolitionism's more universalist vision. The prohibition against selling or enslaving co-religionists did not extend to those outside of the 'civilization' created by these universalist faiths, or to the idea of slavery, ownership by another, as being inherently immoral.

 If prohibiting capture and sale of co-religionists was functionally equivalent to abolition, In fact the impulse to extend the name 'abolitionist' to anyone who tried to curtail or regulate the slave traffic of co-religionists, leads to logical and historical absurdities. Are we to regard Bathilde, wife of Clovis II, as an early abolitionist because she outlawed the traffic in Christian slaves in the Merovingian state? Is the Ethiopian emperor Gälawdéwos an abolitionist, for propagating an edict against the illegal slave trade in Christians in 1548? Were the slaveowning founders of the United States 'abolitionists' for banning the slave trade from Africa? I have similar doubts about labeling West African Muslim leaders from the 17th and 18th centuries who similarly tried to curtail the TRADE in CO-RELIGIONISTS, as abolitionists. I would distinguish between people who wanted to end the slave trade or who were outraged by its excesses, from the militant position of abolitionism. Perhaps this makes me a bit out of step with recent scholarly trends, which have tended to take a 'lumping' approach to the phenomenon of abolition, rather than the 'splitting' approach I favor.

 I have argued in the Journal of Global Slavery that abolitionism is a modern discourse with origins in the brutal regime of trans-Atlantic slavery and can only with great difficulty and inconsistency be mapped onto the further past of most faith communities. There is a nonviolent wing exemplified by Quakers, the Great Awakening, and the anti-slavery efforts of people like Olaudah Equiano and Otto Cugboana, as well as an armed resistance wing exemplified by Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Sam Sharpe, the Haitian revolutionaries and the Bahian Muslim rebels. Abolitionism was not the natural working out of the 'inner logic' of the Abrahamic faiths, but a modern response to the contradictions in those discourses which had allowed slavery and the slave trade to continue to flourish. I think it is valuable to make these distinctions so we can gain a more sophisticated historical sense that, just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged as a response to, and was influenced by the Holocaust, the modern human rights revolution of abolitionism was a response to the brutalities of forced migration of Africans across the modern Atlantic, and was first and foremost a diasporic phenomenon of the Americas. My JGS article.

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Omar Suleiman on slavery in Islam

Great lecture by Sheikh Omar Suleiman.

I post it here, because it shows how brilliant people like Omar Suleiman can still be led into cognitive dissonance and unsustainable claims on this explosive issue. They know the Islamic sources with incredible erudition and expound them with clarity, but frequently go astray when engaging in comparative historical analysis.

 Here are some brief comments on the talk:

At 1:11:13 he states there were no ethical systems, before, during, or even for 700 years after the Prophet that, encouraged freeing slaves. Actually the Druze (a group which I doubt Omar Suleiman would claim as Muslim) abolished slavery in the 11th century. Also, the Sassanids (under the influence of Zoroastrianism, I believe) had before Islam elaborated a series of laws regulating treatment of slaves, and encouraging emancipation. Gregory of Nyassa, going much further than the Prophet Muhammad, and several hundred years before he lived, says: "...God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?" Because of these overlooked examples, I don't think Sheikh Omar Suleiman's particular historical claim can be sustained.

 Right after that he says, "we [as Muslims] only expand within permissible bounds." But if you apply that universally, there is nothing absolutely prohibiting slavery in the Quran or hadith. There is only 1)limits on treatment of slaves & 2) encouragement of manumission. There is nothing absolutely prohibiting slavery in the original sources of Christianity by the way.

 I am not convinced by his 'abolitionist' trajectory and invoking of the 'sunset clause' around 1:16. Presentism on this issue is fairly rampant in our community, and I think he is engaging in it here. Slavery didn't wither in Islam, after the death of the Prophet. In fact it grew as Islamic civilization grew. And its death was hastened not by the Prophet's call for manumission, but by radical abolitionists, western and non-western.

Suleiman's discussion of zakat immediately after thoroughly confuses the issue. He then follows up with an allusion to the world economy of the time being dependent on slavery, implying that Islamic civilization somehow ended that dependence. But the historical record is pretty clear that Islamic civilization increased the dependence of the world economy on slavery and significantly expanded the slave trade.

Finally, a word about the practice of manumission. We often view it as a liberal practice. But manumission also sustains slavery. It doesn't solve the root cause of inequality between people. More importantly, it can subtly encourage people to think that slaves will be a permanent part of the moral landscape, and thus divert more radical approaches to human equality by the enslaved themselves by saying that Muslim or Christian virtue is already attainable for slaves...ergo no need to be free! Nevertheless, I appreciate Sheikh Omar's attempt to sincerely deal with a difficult topic.
 

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Yasir Qadhi on slavery in Islam

Some thoughts on this thoughtful presentation from probably the most prominent Muslim traditionalist in America. I very much respect his attempts to engage this serious and important issue. Here are some points where I agree and where I disagree:

1. I appreciate how he tries to contextualize slavery, the terms for it, and the meaning of it in the context of different times. This is an important first step.

2. He is right that slavery (broadly understood) was a universal practice across many cultures globally.

3. He is incorrect that Islam was the first belief system to create rules about slavery. Not sure how he could claim this. He later claims that many other cultures had no 'rules' about slavery. Also incorrect.

4. He is also slightly in error about the 'legitimate' source of slaves in Islam. I think that is probably because he's focused on deriving notions of 'legitimacy' from text, rather than from actual practice. That is a long side debate which I will not take up here.

5. The virtues of manumission are frequently mentioned in the books of law. The interpretation we give to this practice, however, is KEY. See point 7.

6. I find the argument that, because there is no specific law legislating FOR slavery, therefore Muslims don't need it and can preserve the tradition intact...interesting. I'm not fully convinced, mainly because I don't think Qadhi has fully faced the historical and epistemological difficulties of this position.

7. I'm glad to see he raises this past disagreement among the ulama. But he studiously avoids the colonial context of abolition (I am sure he is aware of it, as he has spoken out on the impact of colonialism on Muslims before). This silence is curious. If Qadhi is a traditionalist, and he follows the pious ancestors, then what right does he have to call abolition 'more humane' than previous practices? How can he avoid that abolition was almost always and everywhere forced on Muslim countries by colonial invaders? Finally, we should ask ourselves, how does Qadhi know the INTENTION (his word) of Allah apart from The Quran and the actual practice of the early community? The companions took female captives as slaves or sex slaves (there are plenty of documented instances of this in the hadith tradition). By most accounts, even the Prophet practiced this. Isn't Qadhi saying that the generation of Muslims now who have gotten rid of slavery know better than the early Salaf and the Prophet did, since the later generations were the one to fulfill what he claims is the internal logic of the tradition? I would like to know more about how Qadhi would square this with his veneration for the early companions, and the Prophet himself.

8. I have said it once, and I will say it again: The abolitionist hermeneutic is a modernist hermeneutic. And once you have accepted a modernist 'logic' of history where you believe (as Qadhi seems to here, though implicitly) that history has moved progressively towards abolishing a practice that the early companions openly practiced without sanction, then you have rendered most articulations of traditionalism anachronistic. Progressive history makes a lot of traditionalists nervous, because it undermines their absolutist claims to an 'ethical ground'. Keep this in mind whenever traditionalists accuse liberals of undermining the basis of a 'traditional' Islamic ethics. More often than not the 'tradition' they practice is as modern and anachronistic as anything Muslim progressives have yet dreamed of.

9. I say all of this, not to beat a tired old dead horse, but because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and emotional polemics on both sides of this issue. We need more clear sighted analysis. I think Qadhi himself might benefit from a serious engagement with scholars working on the links between slavery and law, both in Atlantic and Indian Ocean contexts.

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Some Thoughts on Islam, Feminism and Tradition

Some Further thoughts on islam and Feminism after reading Daniel Haqiqatjou's post: https://muslimskeptic.com/2016/10/15/a-parade-of-contradictions-when-feminists-are-inconsistent/

 A lot of Muslim traditionalists rightly point to tensions between Islam and feminism. There is plenty of real tension between the two, otherwise there wouldn't be such a vociferous debate about their compatibility. One recent blogger on this issue even called Muslim feminism an oxymoron. It is his position that Islam has a secure methodology for finding the truth, and is in no need of reform from feminists. (https://medium.com/she-zaadi/islamic-feminist-oxymoron-level-over-9000-3c15f773d975#.z0py6a74t)

 One of the ways that Muslims who argue against feminism have been able to argue is through the powerful idea that they are the stewards of something sacred and unchanging. Yet many traditionalists I've dialogued with seem unaware that the tradition has in times past absorbed many many foreign ideas and made these ideas its own. This absorption did not proceed through a strict methodological logic. Rather most of the absorptions were the product of historical contingency. And yet the tradition survived.

The abolition of slavery was one such foreign idea. A good analogy for the debates currently roiling the ummah around feminism are the debates around the abolition of slavery in the late 19th century. Then, as now, the issue was the relationship to a powerful bundle of discourses about human rights emanating from the West. The question was: is abolishing slavery legally justifiable?

Scholars were divided into two camps at the time. One camp, the traditionalists, rightly pointed out that there was no legal basis for abolition in the fiqh tradition, that the meanings of Quranic verses around slavery were unchanging and not to be abrogated, and that to follow the European countries in abolishing slavery would be a reprehensible innovation. One of the 20th century's most illustrious Sufi Sunni scholars, Yusuf al-Nabhani, held these views. al-Nabhani doubted the sufficiency of human reasoning to abrogate that which God in his book did not prohibit. He and others believed that the abolition of slavery was a doctrine aimed at weakening Islam. The textual criterion was self sufficient, and one could only err in assuming an independent standard for moral progress. In short, the traditionalists then were making the same arguments against abolition that many Muslims now make against feminism.

 The second group were the Muslim modernists/reformers. They argued that the new circumstances of the time called for new rulings and new interpretations on issues previously thought settled, such as the role of women, and the legality of slavery. They argued that abolishing slavery was the right thing to do, Islamically. They used Quran and Hadith, but more abstractly, since there was no clear statement about the evil of slavery therein. But to them, freedom was the essence of the teachings of Islam. Their arguments were premised on the idea that Islam, as a vehicle of human progress, has the capacity to accept change, if it leads to beneficial moral progress, thus assuming that the standard for progress exists independently of the textual criterion. (Amal Ghazal "Debating Slavery and Abolition in the Arab Middle East")

 Something strange seems to have happened in this divide on the way to our present moment. The modernists are still the modernists, still arguing from moral essence, often using an implicit societal standard. But the traditionalists by and large accepted the modernist view about abolition, and made it their own. And they did this without much sound traditional Islamic legal reasoning to support it. Although this was the right thing to do, it also, In my view, fatally undermined any authority the current conservative argument from Islamic tradition has in the contemporary world.

 Muslims the world over, of all ideologies, rightly regard all kinds of slavery with a moral repugnance. Their attitude shows to what degree Muslims are inheritors (and even champions) of Western abolitionist assumptions about modern human rights. A true empirically sound traditionalist position on Islam is extremely rare in our modern world, because a true empirically sound traditionalism would have to acknowledge that abolition of slavery has no unequivocal textual and legal basis in Islam. In other words, a truly consistent traditionalist could still potentially regard slavery as something to be practiced within the limits set out for it in the Quran and Hadith, not as a morally outrageous anachronism. Most if not all Muslims are modernists, even many Salafis, because they accept the assumption that slavery is inherently immoral. Once you start extracting the idea of 'moral essence' separate and above the clear meaning of the text, you can no longer call yourself a traditionalist.

 I wrote all this because, if you're Muslim and feminist, there is little need to spend a lot of time worrying overly much about contradictions that alleged traditionalists point out between feminism and Islam, from an empirical standpoint. Most, if not all traditionalists themselves have their own empirical contradictions to deal with in the way they formulate tradition. Next time a traditionalist asks 'why, if feminism is so important, there is no mention of it in the Quran?', ask them 'why, if abolishing slavery is so important, is there no mention of it in the Quran?' The abolitionist hermeneutic IS the feminist hermeneutic. The Islamic tradition has survived inconsistencies greater than this, and it will survive traditionalist hostility to feminism, and feminism's alleged contradictions to Islam. It will survive, not because of human vigilance, but because of our nearly boundless ability to keep changing, all the while imagining we inherit our moral code from an unbroken chain of tradition.

 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, abolition also became accepted because the formerly enslaved struggled for knowledge, rights, and attained positions of religious authority. Similarly, a true and profound synthesis between Islam and feminism is already occurring because women are struggling for knowledge, rights and for attaining positions of religious authority. Each and every tradition is an arena of social struggle. The tradition itself will change as a result of these struggles. Accepting those changes will be difficult, especially for men. But I am confident the changes themselves will strengthen Islam and make its conceptions of equality more and more robust. (Bernard Freamon "Conceptions of equality and slavery in Islamic law")

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From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925

I wish I had read this book (From Slaves to Squatters) when I was in Professor Tutino's Comparative History class , writing papers on peasants and revolution. Fred Cooper takes a 'Barrington Moore' approach to the Zanzibar Revolution by framing his post-abolition history of land and labor on the Swahili coast with a final insight into how the colonial policies of the period may have contributed to the turmoil of 1964. In The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore seeks to explain the variegated routes of political modernization through the framework of lord and peasant relationships. Moore contends that the socio-political character of the landed upper classes and the producers of agricultural surplus are decisive factors in determining whether a nation adopts democracy, fascism, or communism.

Cooper's story is by no means so teleological, and I am oversimplfiying Moore's very subtle argument anyway. One of the virtues of Cooper's work is that it is the other side to the narrative that sees that revolution as a vengeful and capricious strike by a band of barbarians. (ala Ali Muhsin) Spontaneous though it was--poorly executed as well as wantonly violent--nevertheless the revolution was due to the fact that the masses of Zanzibaris correctly traced their problems to a planter class who had been artificially propped up by the British, and whose continuing viability rested on maintaining the paternalistic ties of slavery.

In Zanzibar society at the time of the revolution, most of the planters were still Omani Arabs, descended from those who came to Zanzibar in the 1830s with Said bin Sultan Al Bu Saidi. By the early 19th century, Sultan Said already had an extensive economic base in Zanzibar, founded on trade in ivory, spices, textiles, and slaves. Moving his political base to Zanzibar was Said’s attempt to establish a greater degree of dominance over the trade routes of the East African coast and capitalize on potential profits from this strategically important island. He attempted to make cloves the foundation of a profitable plantation economy. The Omanis expropriated the most fertile land for clove production, and amplified an existing and profitable trade in enslaved Africans. Said created an Omani Arab landholding aristocracy and effectively marginalized the old Swahili elite. The high mortality of the clove plantations led to a constant influx of enslaved Africans from the mainland. Many indigenous residents migrated to the eastern areas of Unguja, where they continued to grow land on the kiambo (kinship based holdings) and the uwanda (common village land). The relative autonomy of this group, including their strong associations of kinship and landholding, created a cohesive intra-group identity and excluded outsiders. The self-distinction they made in referring to themselves as Shirazis would complicate later attempts at political unity.

The British were keen to develop their interests in export crops while maintaining existing relationships of ‘indirect rule’ through the Sultanate. Abdul Sheriff, describing Zanzibar, accurately sums up the dominant impulse behind abolition: “the ultimate reason for the abolition of slavery was rooted in the knowledge that free labour would be more efficient than slave labour.” The overriding interest of British authorities in Zanzibar was to guarantee a supply of cheap labor for the agricultural economy.

These new colonial labor needs eroded the relatively autonomous position many indigenes enjoyed in the eastern parts of Unguja. Many indigenes were pushed off their land and forced to work in a clove economy characterized by instability and depression for much of the early 20th century. As an instrument of coercion, the British imposed a hut tax, forcing the indigenes to work for wages to pay it. Many moved to the urban centers, or commuted on a regular basis to find wage labor. Others squatted in various arrangements of tenancy or sharecropping. The dislocation caused by colonial labor arrangements created a transistional class, or a ‘semi-proletariat’, with a foot in both subsistence agriculture and wage labor, as well as urban and rural contexts. Squatters combined wage labor with subsistence farming and tenancy, utilizing these strategies to simultaneously up their cash flow in a money economy, and position themselves outside of the vagaries of changes in the price of export crops which the British were encouraging them to grow. (On the Kenya coast, a similar situation prevailed, but with white settlement being encouraged in the highlands, increasing numbers of Kikuyu and Luo migrants came to Mombasa--at this time the center of coastal labor demand-- seeking cash to meet their subsistence needs. However, I felt that Cooper's section on Zanzibar made a more forceful point than the section on coastal Kenya, perhaps due to the more homogenous nature of Zanzibar's economy.)

It is obvious that a substantial degree of responsibility for the 1964 violence rests on the shoulders of the British. They remained largely unaware of the growing ethnic tensions of Zanzibar and generally contempous of African peasants in general. Of this obliviousness Moore writes, “The upper classes have to display a substantial degree of blindness, mainly the product of historical circumstances…before a revolutionary breakthrough becomes feasible.” The Arab plantation owners also bear responsibility—their racial arrogance and brutality are not debatable. The arrogance by which they pursued their policies toward the peasantry made the uprising of 1964, led by John Okello, seem more extemporaneous than it actually was. Like Nat Turner, Okello claimed to see visions which he interpreted as his appointment as an instrument of God for the liberation of Africa. He was of Ugandan origin, but had moved around East Africa and eventually settled in Zanzibar, beginning work on a Pemba plantation in the late 1950s. His anti-Arab, pro-African statements called for the overthrow of imperialism, but he insisted on the peaceful treatment of British citizens. His takeover of the radio station and broadcast during the early hours of the revolution proved crucial to winning the masses over to the idea of a fundamental social transformation, while his rhetoric helped stoke an outbreak of violence against Arabs and Asians. The Zanzibar revolution reinforces Moore’s observation that “in any violent conflict the social composition of the victims will not by itself reveal much about the social and political character of the struggle.” The violence was not about ethnic cleansing per se. It was the culmination of a building frustration with the power structure and its most visible element: the planter class, made up largely of Arabs.

Cooper writes, "Yet ideologies that underplay the importance of power and overplay the importance of the force of law or the legitimacy of authority can deceive the rulers far more than the ruled. Ex-slaves proved to be unawed by planters or the state and quite unwilling to regard the amelioration of the conditions of slavery as the limits of their aspirations. Mobility and flexibility were precisely what the ex-slaves wanted..." This statement perhaps sums up the aspirations of peasants worldwide--the right to organize life on their own terms, without interference of any kind. It put me in the mind of Leon Litwack's classic Been In the Storm So Long, which talked about the choices and ideologies of the freedmen in the immediate postbellum South. Litwack shows us the ordinary but moving aspirations of a formerly subject people and their attempts at reclaiming economic and social dignity. It also ought to remind us as would-be revolutionaries that the masses are motivated not by any pet ideology, liberalism communism, nationalism, anarchism, anti-(or is it pro?) syndicalist Maoism, etc. but by the need for dignified work and the ability to feed one's family.

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