Slavery and Islam by Jonathan A.C. Brown

Author:Jonathan A.C. Brown [Brown, Jonathan A.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

5

Abolishing Slavery in Islam

. . . There, under whip and chain and sun, he lived out his youth and his young manhood dreaming the death of slavery two thousand years before it finally would die.

Spartacus (1960)

Kubrick was not given control of the script, which he felt was full of easy moralizing.

Rolling Stone interview with Stanley Kubrick, director of Spartacus (1987)1

Debonair and wielding a pen that cut with the sharp, anti-colonial insights of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and soothed with the Persian ink of the Shiite tradition, Ali Shariati (d. 1977) was one of the most compelling Muslim writers of the twentieth century. The colonized, the Third World, Muslims, Iranians, they were all the Quran’s ‘weak and oppressed of the earth’ (8:26). Islam had come to free them. The Prophet had smashed the false idols, all the false idols, that bind minds and bodies. He had come down from the cave of Hira, Shariati wrote, to ‘declare war against the capitalists and the slave dealers of Mecca.’2 A decade before the Shah had Shariati assassinated, the Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) had been executed for his influential manifesto Milestones. Nationalism, communism, capitalism, these were all graven images, Qutb had taught. Islam had come to free men from being slaves to one another (ʿibādat al-ʿibād) by calling them to be slaves to God alone.3

Shariati and Qutb were Islamists – they believed that Islam held the key to political mobilization against imperial powers – and during their lives and since their deaths they have attracted fierce criticism from Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Many have accused them of disguising foreign political ideologies in Islamic garb and insinuating them into Muslim minds. But their portrayal of Islam as at heart a liberating message can hardly be dismissed as a modern re-reading or imposition. The Quran refers over and over to human beings as ‘the slaves of God (ʿibād Allāh),’ continuing the tradition of Semitic cultures and the Bible by fusing the idioms of slavery and worship.4 The image that the Prophet uses to describe someone who abandons the worship of God alone in favor of some lesser power (shirk) is that of a runaway slave, a slave who has turned away from their true Lord.5 One of Qutb’s favorite stories is of the encounter between a Muslim emissary and the leader of the Persian army on the eve of the Muslim conquest of Persia. Why had they come?, the Persian general asks. The emissary answers, ‘God has sent us to bring whomever wishes from the servitude (ʿibāda) of men to the servitude of God alone.’6 Another vignette from the early days of Islam tells how the caliph ʿUmar (d. 644) rebuked the Muslim governor of Egypt for letting his son unjustly lash a subject; ‘Since when have you made slaves of people when their mothers gave birth to them free?’7

But if Islam is a call for the slaves of God to remember to whom their worship and service are truly due, its scripture treats the enslavement of man by man as an unremarkable reality.

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