Visit BetMDM Casino and check out the newest exclusive, The Price is Right Fortune Pick! BetMDM and Game Stents remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus the wager, Ontario only, please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact the next Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge, BetMDM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, evidence shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's S-P-R-I-N-G-50 at press.prinston.edu. This day will only last for a month, so go and get some books.
Welcome to the new Books Network. Asalaamu Alaikumu, welcome to another episode of Network Free Audient. Today we have with us Professor Bernard Freeman, who will be discussing his latest book, Possessed by the Right Hand. Today we are looking to be joined by Professor of Law at Seton Hall University, Professor Bernard Freeman.
Thank you so much for joining us Professor Bernard. How are you today? You're welcome, Hamdi Leila. I'm doing fine.
I'm doing very well. Hamdi Leila. That's great to hear. Now Professor Freeman has worked extensively on Islamic law and slavery, contributing a number of Edd's and articles on the topic.
Most recently Professor Bernard has published a book entitled Possessed by the Right Hand, The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures. To begin with, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience Professor Freeman and tell us a little bit about yourself and speak about what led to your interest in this topic? Well, thank you very much. Asalaamu Alaikumu Alaikumu Alaikumu.
Asalaamu Alaikumu Alaikumu. To everyone out there listening. I am a law professor, a practicing lawyer and a law teacher. I've taught at Seton Hall for about four years.
And I'm a Muslim. I've been a Muslim since I was a young adult. And in 1985, I traveled after having gotten an interest in Islamic law. I traveled to East Africa.
And while in East Africa, I took a trip to a place called Zanzibar, which is an island off the coast of Tanzania. And I discovered that there's a rich and very deep history of slavery and slave trading in Zanzibar. And that during the time after the death of the Prophet Muhammad up until recent times, Zanzibar had been a major entropole for slavery and slave trading conducted by Muslims. Now, when I studied Islam, my teachers told me and I internalized and I'm an African-American Muslim, which is so the topic of slavery is just important in terms of the African-American culture as well.
I was told that, well, you know, Islam took this very almost an anti-slavery or emancipatory or egalitarian approach to slavery. And then when I went to Zanzibar, I discovered that the actual facts in terms of the history of slavery and slave trading, especially in the Indian Ocean world, did not support that idea. So when I came back to the US, the second thing that happened was I taught a class just as a guest lecturer in Islamic ethics. My students asked me about Islam's position on slavery.
And at that time, there was a lot of concern about what was going on in Sudan. It's died down to some extent, but the rating of the gen jaweed and the oppression of the people from Darfur and much talk of people being enslaved and transported to other parts of the Middle East from that area of Sudan, not me interested in doing research on this topic. And I wrote an article. My first article was in the Harvard Human Rights Law Journal on the question of consensus, whether there was a consensus.
I asked the question as to whether there's a consensus of opinions from scholars on the question of slavery. And I discussed that in that article. And it's really that article, the publication of that article, which led ultimately to this book. The book does a it's really the first, as far as I can tell, comprehensive legal history of slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean world.
And then at the end of the book, I consider the problem of slavery in terms of what's happened lately with the in terms of ISIS and Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf and the Philippines. And then I propose toward the end of the book, a means by which slavery could be abolished under Islamic law. And that's primarily because one of the arguments in the book is that the effort by the West to accomplish abolition of slavery in the Muslim world has been a failure. Sure.
So let's let's dive right in then. That's firstly, absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing that. Let's dive right into the arguments in the book, because I find it I found a book very, very interesting.
Your first chapters explore different forms of slavery pre Islam and in the early period of Islam. And you make the argument that the Quran and early Muslims, they limited the avenues for the ingress of slaves. Now, could you elaborate a little bit on this and perhaps explain what slavery looked like in the early period of Islam? Yes, that's a very good question.
Most of the scholarship on slavery, pre Islamic slavery has focused on Rome and Greece. And the Roman and Greek slavery, they were important influences, but in my first chapter, I detailed the fact that there were also influences on how the Muslims came to practice slavery that came from other areas of that part of the world from Ethiopia, which was then called Abyssinia, as well as from Iran and India, and also from Southeast Asia to a lesser extent and most Mesopotamia, which is also what is today modern day Iraq. So the practice of slavery when the Prophet Muhammad first got his revelations was really quite a horrific kind of thing in that there were, I think in my book, I denominated about 12 or 14 different ways that one could become a slave. And the argument made in the second chapter is that the revelations of the Quran and the statements of the Prophet Muhammad, which are now described as hadith, eliminated all of those means of ingress, for example, being a foundling, a child who is unknown, his his heritage is unknown could be enslaved, or enslave someone for payment of a debt, or the selling of a wife, or a child into slavery because someone cannot afford to support them, or even selling yourself into slavery.
All of those means of ingress into slavery were eliminated by the Quran and the interpretation of the Quran by the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims around the Prophet Muhammad and after his death, and under the Islamic law as it developed very early in the Islamic history, there were only two means of ingress that were permitted, either capture in war, and of course war was narrowly defined by the Quran, it must be a j'ad or religious war, and or birth from two lawfully enslaved parents, both of your parents had to be enslaved in order for the child to be enslaved, either of the parents were free, then the slave was free. Some of that's borrowed, actually, from some of the Sassanian rules that existed prior to Islam, the Sassanians had similar rules in terms of birth, but all the other means of ingress into slavery, except for those two means were abolished. So, then especially with the actions and the policies established by the caliph Omar, there was quite a bit of an emphasis, a shift in emphasis to emancipation as the rule rather than enslavement. And so the Islamic approach to slavery was what I described as an emancipatory approach, and based upon the idea of t'q'wa that the person who possesses t'q'wa, which is fear of God, emancipates slaves, that's one of the duties of the Godfearing person to emancipate slaves, and I spend quite a bit of time in my second chapter on that.
That's really, really interesting and fascinating. I'd like to move on in the book to the chapter in which you speak about the Mamluk and the Golan phenomenon, and you also use the fantastic term slave sultans. Now, you covered the vastly different roles occupied by enslaved peoples in the Muslim world. You mentioned that there were slaves on the plantation, domestic servants, but also military leaders and even rulers of the Muslim world at certain points.
Now, two modern years, the term slave sultans will sound almost like a square circle, that's the same as possible. How can a former slave become the ruler of the land? Could you elaborate on this a little and explain why it was the case that enslaved peoples were able to occupy such vastly different spaces in Muslim societies? Well, that is a, it's still even to me somewhat of a mystery, and I think it's mystified scholars over the years, and it's been ignored by even scholars of slavery, the, what I call the Mamluk Goulam, I hope I pronounced that correctly, a Goulam phenomenon.
There was a historian named David Eiland, who first did much work on this, and he's passed away now, and I try to try to take up some of the work that where he left off. One of the things about the conception of slavery in the Islamic approach is the idea of loyalty, that there is a relationship of loyalty between the enslaved person and the owner of the slave, and then what happened in Iraq during the Abbasid Caliphate. One of the caliphs determined that he could not rely on the loyalty of the typical kinds of slaves that he and his lieutenants owned, and so they began to import in large numbers non-Muslim at that time, non-Muslim Turkish soldiers from the steps of Asia, and they developed a means by which these soldiers could actually take over the military, and to some extent also the economic activities of the state of the Islamic state at that time. And so what happened, which is this did not happen in many other circumstances, what happened was the slave, it sort of made true Hegel's observation that oftentimes the slave becomes the real master in a relationship.
I call these kinds of slaves the sultanic, or you could call them Mamluk or Goulami slaves, where they actually, because of their knowledge, because of their training, and because of their ability to move throughout the state, they actually took over the running of the state, even though they were technically slaves or recently emancipated slaves with a duty of loyalty to their owner, but really it was the slave that became the sultan, oftentimes in actual fact the emancipated slave or an enslaved person would be the actual commander of the military and the head of state. I'm not the first person to use that term, first historian to use that term slave sultan's, I actually owe it to a historian who's at the University of Wisconsin who wrote this on this practicing media, and his name is Andre Wink, but the practice was beyond just what happened in India, the Egyptian state for 300 years was run by the Mamluks, the Mamluk, and it's probably in terms of Egyptian history, one of the greatest aspect of Egyptian history is full of good and fascinating circumstances, but one of the most important in terms of Egyptian history is especially early modern and modern Egyptian history is the Mamluk phenomenon, anyone who's been the Cairo and sees the architecture and the communities and the hospitals and schools for orphans and schools for the blind and all the other kinds of things that the Mamluks did, it's just an amazing part of history, and so I incorporate that, I do a taxonomy of slavery in the Islamic approach to it, and what's been ignored and what I try to incorporate in my taxonomy, is the Mamluk phenomenon or the Gulam phenomenon, the Gulam in the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia, and what that means in terms of slavery, my argument is that it really is a different conception of slavery, beyond what you find in many other societies, completely different conceptions. That's really, really interesting, and it makes me wonder to what extent is difficult to find common features in the experiences of slaves in the Muslim world, I guess what I'm trying to say is slavery meant different things to different people in different situations, clearly the slave on the plantation didn't have the same experiences as the slave Sultan, for example, would that be a fair statement? Yes, that's true.
Now I don't want to, I'm glad you brought that up, I don't want to minimize shock or to devalue the fact that there were many, many, many people who suffered in slavery and who lived very degraded and terrible and horrific lives, and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean, I would say is what is ignored, is that it actually lasted longer and transported more people across the ocean than the transatlantic experience. And so you have more people in slavery and more people actually in horrible circumstances in the Muslim world than in the transatlantic, where although the transatlantic slave trade was a horrific thing. So you have, so for example, in transatlantic slavery, people talk about middle passages, the middle passage, which is the horrific transportation across the Atlantic Ocean, many people died being thrown over the side. In the Islamic history, there are about six or seven middle passages, the Sahara Desert, the Silk Road, transportation from Southeast Asia into India, transportation from East Africa to India.
So you have a good number of horrific transatlantic circumstances that when people teach slavery in Islamic education, they ignore, the teachers often ignore that history, which is one of the points I make in my book. Yeah, this is a really fascinating topic. Professor Freeman, one of the main arguments of your book, sorry, in one of the main arguments of your book, you state that ISIS, Boko Haram and groups like this have revived the slave trade. And in order to challenge this, Muslims need to purport and present a reading of their tradition that exemplifies the egalitarian intention of the some tradition.
Would that be a fair reading of the word? It's not just egalitarian, but also emancipatory. It's actually, my argument is that the Islamic legal tradition prioritizes the effort based on a conception of what God would want, the effort to eliminate and emens, eliminate slaves and emancipate, eliminate slavery and emancipate slaves. That's a priority in the Islamic tradition.
And that's one of my main arguments. And that that priority has been ignored based on the history and also that these groups, there are three or four of them now, they're mostly Salafist groups. They also be emphasized or want Muslims to continue to ignore that priority. Sure.
Okay, I think there are a great number of people who would agree with your argument. But just to play devil's advocate for a moment, it could be argued that the general consensus of Muslims is that these groups and their actions are unislamic and problematic and virtually all Muslim nations and communities reject them. But ISIS and Boko Haram, they don't really very much care what you and every Muslim scholar out there has already said. So would it necessarily dissuade them and stop them from doing the things they do if there were different readings that were pushed towards them, if that makes sense.
Well, if they are sincere in terms of their understanding and interpretation of the texts and of the norms and the texts that they purport to be following, then they should engage Muslims in a dialogue on those texts, on the meaning of those texts, and the implications and application of those texts in modern life. Now, one thing that they want to ignore is the fact that there's been a 300 year history of action against slavery in world history, that Muslims are not the only ones who have had problems with slavery in their history. So those groups have to acknowledge at least have a dialogue with other Muslims about how those texts should be applied in our modern and actually postmodern social circumstances. So if you look, for example, especially at the actions of ISIS, it's not really the slavery that they sought to introduce and the slave trading.
So, if you look at the slavery and slavery that was done during the Abbasid Caliphate, it's mostly just what I would describe as modern day human trafficking, focusing on girls, focusing on concubinage, focusing on sex trafficking. And so all the other, for example, they don't have any talk or discussion of the Mamluk phenomenon, or any of the other aspects of slavery that I discuss in my book. They're very narrow, and it's only a slavery for purposes of advancing empire, rather than, I think, what the text really intended. The argument of my book is that the text intended that this pre-Islamic approach to slavery that the Muslims came into when they got the revelation of the Quran should be eliminated, that that should be eliminated, and that if Muslims followed the examples that are given in their texts, and in our texts, and in the norms that are laid down by the text, slavery would disappear.
That's a good Muslim emancipate slaves, a good Muslim doesn't create more slavery. Yeah, that's a really compelling argument for a stream, and my final question isn't so much about the book specifically, but just working on these types of issues more generally, these types of sensitive issues. And that's, I guess the question is how do you negotiate working on sensitive issues regarding questions of Islam and reform in a time in which Islamophobia and the fear and suspicion of Muslims is rising exponentially. Is this a tension that you've ever felt when you've been doing this type of work?
Yes, that's a very good question. I think about it quite a bit. First of all, it's sometimes dangerous work, not just because of Islamophobia, but even from extremist Muslims, you have to contend with the fact that people sometimes want to take violent action, so you have to confront that idea. But the greater good, in my view, which is the combating human suffering and combating the degradation of human beings and the diminution, especially women and children, is worth that struggle.
I agree with your observation that it's a struggle and sometimes a dangerous struggle, but I'm not the first one to have done that, and others also would do that, have done that, and will continue to do it. Thank you so much for sharing, and thank you so much for joining us. It was an absolute pleasure speaking to you, Professor Bernard Freeman. And a pleasure for me too.
Salaamu Alaikum. Alaikum Salaam. This has been another episode of Network Reorient. Thank you for tuning in.
Please have a listen to some of our other episodes, and we'll be very happy.