Recalling Muhammad’s apocryphal last words about Muslims needing to take care of their slaves, Freamon, a Black American Muslim and professor emeritus at Seton Hall Law School, argues that they “have not lived up to this admonition” either in law or in practice. Writing with anguish in his large, rambling, and original study, he calls these “vexing problems … that have never been solved.” Possessed by the Right Hand explains this discrepancy and then offers a remedy.
Freamon expresses dismay at Islamic scholars’ endorsement of slavery: That they “would ignore and sometimes give their imprimatur to the horrific practices of slave raiders and slave dealers for over 1,300 years raises profound and deeply disturbing questions about the viability of Islamic law as an effective legal tool for reform and progress, particularly in the colonial and post-colonial eras.”
Thus, while “Hindu and Buddhist slavery eventually died out … slavery and slave trading in Muslim communities in the region [of South Asia] did not.” Rather, “the illusion of abolition occurred across much of the Muslim world.” Indeed, “the abolition of slavery in the Muslim world has been an illusion and will remain illusory if Muslims do not come to grips with the problem.” Worse, “attitudes toward [slaves] in the Muslim world have not improved and perhaps have even gotten worse.”
He offers several explanations. For one, “there is very little discussion and educational instruction on the history of slavery and abolition in the Muslim world.” For another, the Muslim use of slaves in elite capacities—not just military but also as “concubines, eunuchs, accountants, physicians, artists, entertainers, and other specialists”—helped prolong the institution’s existence; this “caused the idea of abolition to appear to be strange and foreign and perhaps even anti-progressive.”
Given this situation, Freamon asks, “Is it possible to juridically abolish slavery in communities in the Muslim world that seek to be bound or consider themselves bound by the Sharīʿa?” He acknowledges that “finding a right of freedom from slavery in the traditional Islamic sources is a difficult undertaking,” but insists that “a careful, detailed, and critical examination of the sources,” using “a fresh and dynamic approach,” will result in “a jurisprudential basis for the elimination of slavery and slave trading in Muslim communities … even under a government bound by the Sharīʿa.”
Juristic consensus (ijmāʿ), Freamon argues, provides that basis: “There are simply no lawfully owned slaves that could be purchased or obtained [by way of the civil administration of property and inheritance law] because slavery is illegal in all of the world’s jurisdictions, including the world’s Islamic jurisdictions.” Therefore “no self-respecting mujtahid [legal interpreter] would disagree with the conclusion that it is impossible to legally purchase a slave in any open market in the world today and that slavery and slave trading should remain illegal.”
Maybe.
Daniel Pipes
Founder, Middle East Forum
