Slavery and Islam

20 Historically Speaking July/August 2007 Slavery and Islam Lamin Sanneh In the course of field investigations I once found myself in the midst of a clerical Muslim community in Senegambia whose ideas on slaves and slavery were in open conflict with the scruples I had acquired from reading, among others, John Woolman, Thomas Clarkson, and William Cowper. I suddenly felt ill equipped and unprepared, to the ironic interest of my informants. To much fanfare, I had arrived in the community trailing an open-minded, objective, scholarly interest in the history and practices of the clerical center, including slavery, and yet my undeclared reservations and qualms on the subject showed I had something up my sleeve, which was to depict the slave owning clerics as cruel and benighted . As a consequence, I faced a swarm of pestering questions . In the interest of true scholarship, could I tell the clerics what my own personal views were before rigging up elaborate paraphernalia of objective data gathering , I was asked? What conscience would allow a scholar to write only about the things he or she approves of? How can that be trustworthy knowledge? "Kane' inuku — m - ma—don't hide from us," I was challenged. In that public setting fieldwork suddenly felt like an ambush, and only a speedy and unreserved acknowledgment on my part stood any chance of allowing me to salvage my academic mission . The sharp lesson I received about faithful historical representation made me hope that Clio, the muse of history, would never be a witness against me. Given the way the clerics brisded at mention of the subject, I felt justified in not yielding the ground entirely. I accepted the challenge to include information on slaves and slavery in my account of Muslim religious practice, and even to show how slaves contributed to the prosperous life of religious communities , but I would let stand the moral injunctions and the legal sanctuaries that upheld and burdened the principle of enslavement in Islam. I was struck, for example, by how my Muslim informants supplied details on slavery with the confidence afforded by natural entidement and the weight of objective social institutions. Slavery, I was told, is established in revealed law and upheld by apostolic example. Muslim slavery is based on knowledge and fidelity, not on ignorance and disobedience. Slavery is not a negation of religion or a discredit to the righteous life. That was not the way I was used to viewing the subject; could I do it justice? For Muslim jurists, slavery is not "a constitution of nature," for "the original state of the race of Adam is freedom"—aslhuwa al-hurriyah. Slavery is an accident of history, place, and circumstance, and may therefore be rescinded and in other ways restricted , thanks to the default norm of freedom. Its incorporation into the regular institutions of society surrounds it with the safeguards of ethical conduct rather than rendering it immune to those safeguards, such as they are. By mixing with the slave at home, in the mosque, in the market, on pilgrimage, and in travel, Muslims plant slavery with the seeds of its inhibition and potential dissolution. Slavery is not the Sources on slavery in the early Muslim world carry the sentiment that it acted as a barrier against ultimate wretchedness: mutilation, torture , gratuitous violence, and whimsicalpower. total negation of the idea of universal humanity, only its social restriction. Ultimately, the sentiment that prevented slavery from acquiring a permanent and absolute status was the view that the one God who enjoined it as punishment or as restitution was the one who also provided for its abrogation. Since there can be no contending power to the power of God, slaves belong to the order of free men and women. A theology of two natures, slave and free, never took root in canonical Islam, in spite of widespread and flagrant breach of the rules of enslavement . Unlike the transadantic experience, slavery and race might have been fused in practice, but not in principle, because in theory the door was open, however so slighdy, to freedom, advancement, and integration . Sources on slavery in the early Muslim world carry the sentiment that it acted as...