Lecture
56 / 84
17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. I seek refuge with Allah from the accursed Satan, in the name of the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, to whom we ask for help. And peace and blessings be upon the Messenger and his family and companions. I'm sitting in my old house, my family's house, in my old room, and I was reading a translation of the Qur'an. And I came across the verse, obviously I was reading a translation, but the verse said, Allah gives you a parable of a slave who's owned and can't do anything. As opposed to someone who, we presume a free person, whom we have given a goodly sustenance. And he spends out of that in secret and in private. And this actually is not making any law about slavery, it's using this as a parable for talking about idols that have no power, versus God that has all power. But I remember being confused because I was thinking to myself, how can God talk about slavery just kind of randomly, and not say, slavery's wrong, because slavery means slavery's wrong. How can you just talk about it like that and treat it like it's no big deal? And I think maybe a lot of us read these verses in the Qur'an, maybe especially younger people read these verses in the Qur'an,
and don't really know what to make of them, and we kind of just pass over them, and then assume that there's some answer, but I think it causes a lot of doubt. And so when I decided to write this book was after the ISIS thing happened. Because that was really, it was 2015, it really caused a crisis for a lot of young Muslims, because they saw these people who said they were doing exactly what the Sharia, they were saying they were doing exactly what the Qur'an and the Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam, had done in taking slaves. And so a lot of young Muslims were sitting there saying, wait a second, not only does my scripture talk about slavery, but now people who say they're following that scripture, and who can point clearly to verses in the Qur'an and the Sunnah, are doing so in the name of Islam. And it was really, it caused a lot of people to leave Islam, a lot of people have doubts and a lot of anxiety. So that's why I wrote this book, which is here, Yasser has it, Sheikh Yasser, I'm sorry. And, Yasser's fine. So I also forgot to thank you for inviting me, and thank you all for coming. It's a really big honor, and I hope this will be useful for you. I'm going to talk about a huge amount of material. So I'm going to go, if you're used to books of fiqh, this is a dillil-free book. This is not a book with a dillil, this is a book that's muqtasab, because I'm going to go through a lot of material. So I want you to turn your brains on high power, right? I'm going to rely on high power, Texan high power brain functioning. Yes, yes, that's a thing. Let's do that. Let's go with that, okay? Texas high power brain functioning. All right. So, there's, remember, when we read these verses of the Quran, there's two issues, right? One is, this sort of, how can God just mention slavery and not say slavery is wrong, or you shouldn't have slaves?
And the second thing, which is sort of a compound problem, is how do we explain our sense of discomfort? So, if we believe that the Quran is the word of God, and we believe that the sunnah of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is inspired by God, and the Prophet is incapable of moral error, how do we also explain the fact that deep in our guts, we feel that slavery is wrong? I mean, how can the Quran be allowing something, and in our guts we feel that it's so wrong we can't conceive of it being allowed? How do we even conceptualize that? Just the existence of that feeling becomes a problem. So, these are the two things I want to talk about today. One, sort of, how do we make sense of the moral problem of slavery? And then, how do we make sense of our moral reaction to it? And these are really, what's called, these are problems of what's called moral ontology. And that's the only really big word I'm going to use in this lecture, I think, a moral ontology. Ontology is a study of existence. And so, moral ontology is really talking about what is morality? Where does it come from? What is the matter of morality? What is it made of? What does it weigh? What kinds of morality are there? We all know slavery is wrong, right? I mean, if I go out and I ask a random person on the street, or I ask one of you in the crowd, just off the street, is slavery wrong? You're going to say, yes, of course it's wrong. Okay, what does that mean? If it's wrong, how come the Prophet, alayhi salam, had slaves? How come the early Muslims had slaves? I mean, did they not know it was wrong? How do we answer this question? What does it mean to be, what kind of wrong is it? What kind of wrong is it? So, these are questions that I want to try and talk about today.
Okay, slavery is really hard to talk about. It's really hard to talk about globally. It's extremely hard to talk about in the United States. And there's a couple of reasons for this. The first one is that in the United States, slavery is intimately, and continues to be tied to the question of race. And you don't have to be very observant, or have been in this country very long, to know about issues of race in this country, especially between black Americans and white Americans. And this was an issue that was formed and shaped by, and then also shaped, slavery in the United States. Right, so, talking about slavery means talking about race. And it's especially painful because the injustices and the harms caused by slavery in the United States continue to be with us in our society. So, it's a live wire, not in the sense that it's sensitive. It's actually a real, living problem. Okay. The second reason it's very difficult to talk about is because it involves tying our brain in knots. It involves tying our brain in knots, and people don't like to do that. It causes them anxiety. I'm going to give you an example. Who remembers the Charlottesville protests in 2017, summer of 2017? Charlottesville, Virginia, University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson. Of course, there's a nice big statue of Thomas Jefferson there. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the leading thinkers of the American Revolution, a man who believed in freedom of democracy, and a man who had a lot of slaves, and had children with one of his slave women. Right? Those children were then also slaves. He eventually freed them, but they were also slaves. So, there were a lot of protesters at University of Virginia saying, slavery isn't evil. It's history's greatest crime.
It's wrong no matter where you are or when. And we don't want a statue of a guy who was a slave owner and who raped a slave woman up in front of our university. That's a pretty good argument, right? I mean, that's a pretty good logical argument. Slavery is evil. This guy did slavery. Statue's got to go. Donald Trump came out, and he summarized the situation in a way that, remarkably, only he could do. He said, George Washington's a slave owner. Are you going to take down a statue of George Washington? Imagine taking down every statue of George Washington. Imagine renaming everything that's called Washington. It's topographically, or toponymically exhausting to think about that, and it's just impossible politically in the United States to talk about this issue. Wait a second. We have a contradiction here. Slavery's evil. George Washington was a slave owner. Why do we name everything after him? So, this is what I call the slavery conundrum. There's an American slavery conundrum, and there's an Islamic slavery conundrum, and they're very similar to one another, but I'll give you the basis of the slavery conundrum. The slavery conundrum is that there are three things, there are three axioms, that we have to hold in modern America, and in the modern West, and maybe in the modern world. There's three things, three axioms we have to hold in our mind, but it's impossible to hold all three in your mind at the same time, because they're contradictory. What are they? First, slavery is an intrinsic and gross moral evil. What does that mean, intrinsic? It means that slavery itself is evil. It's not slavery's evil because it makes you sad. It's not slavery evil because you're miserable. It's not slavery evil because it causes abuse of rights.
Slavery in and of itself is evil. And it's not just, you know, a little evil like me, you know, smacking the ass around the back of the head for no reason. This is a gross evil. This is never the lesser of two evils. This is never the thing you can do because there's something you think is more harmful. It is never excusable. It is a gross and intrinsic evil across space and time. What do I mean across space and time? Was slavery wrong when Thomas Jefferson did it? Talk to me like Americans. Tell me. Give me the American answer. Was slavery wrong when Thomas Jefferson did it? Yes. Okay, was slavery wrong during the Roman period? Yes. Was slavery wrong during the Egyptian times? Yes. It was throughout space and time. Second, so that's the first axiom. What's the second axiom? Imagine this. Go into a, what you guys have instead of dinner parties here? Barbecues? Biryani parties. Yeah, but I want something with non-Muslims. Yeah, barbecues. Okay, barbecues. Imagine you go to your company barbecue and someone asks you about slavery and Islam. And you say, yeah, there was slavery, but it wasn't that bad. How is that barbecue going to go for you? Well, I don't know actually. Texas, I'm not sure. I don't know. I'm not sure. Okay, I'm going to retract that comment. Edit that out of the video. Half my family is from Texas, so I have love for this place. But the point is, the second axiom, all slavery is slavery. There's no, you're not allowed to make distinctions within slavery. There's no good slavery and bad slavery. There's no benevolent slavery and harmful slavery. All slavery is slavery. Okay? So that's axiom number two. Axiom number three.
Our past, our past has some kind of moral or legal right over us. It has some kind of moral or legal power over us. It has some kind of moral or legal authority over us. If you're Muslim, we know what that is, right? The Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet are our sources of guidance and morality. If God commands us to do something, if the Prophet commands us to do something, we say, سَمِعْنَا وَأَطَعْنَا. Right? What is justice? It's what God commands. What is injustice? What God forbids. If you're American, maybe it's not that dramatic, but the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, these people have authority over us. I mean, we might disagree with them, but their ideas, their writings define our political life. I mean, try going into a barbecue and just say, you know, George Washington was a real piece of, you know what. See what happens. You know? It's not going to go very well. What's the problem here? These three axioms cannot be held at the same time. So I say, okay, yes, Thomas Jefferson had slaves, but it was different back then. Can't say that. Slavery is a trans-historic evil throughout space and time. Yeah, yeah, there is slavery in the Bible, but slavery in the Bible is not that, I don't like slavery in America, it's not that bad. Oh, you're saying there's some kind of slavery that's okay? So here's the problem. There is no religious or philosophical tradition that I know of, and I've done a lot of research on this.
There is no philosophical or religious tradition that I know of that did not either defend, accept, or condone slavery until the 1600s, at the very earliest 1600s. So there's nobody who's going to be okay to follow. There's no one who's going to be free of the taint of slavery, from world history essentially, before the 1600s. So we have a problem. We have two axioms, slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time, all slavery is slavery, that force us to condemn everything in our past, essentially. Whether you're Americans or Muslims, or Hindu or Buddhist, that's a really big problem. So we have in our minds a knot that is something that actually cannot hold together, it can't hold together. And the second you start picking at that, or talking about that, the pieces start to fall apart. People don't like to talk about it. Why does this conundrum exist? Why does this conundrum exist? It's actually a result, it's also a result and a product of abolitionist discourse. So abolitionist discourse in the United States and Britain, from the late 1700s into the mid-1800s, argued that all slavery was a gross and intrinsic evil that had to be gotten rid of immediately. Why did it make this argument? If you're an abolitionist and you're willing to talk about some kinds of slavery being good and some kind of slavery being bad, what is the slave owner you're arguing going to say? Oh, look, yeah, I agree with you, slavery is evil, I mean, when it's done badly, but my slaves, come look at them, they're so happy. Look how good I take care of them.
Or, yes, we know slavery in the Caribbean is bad, or in the Americas is bad, but slavery in India, this is very different, right? This is not severe. So the second you start allowing distinctions within this concept of slavery, you lose your, you're essentially unable to force your opponents into accepting your position. It opens the door of negotiation. So ultimately the abolitionist position became all slavery in and of itself, by fact of it being slavery per se, cannot be accepted. It's all intrinsically evil. The problem is, if you're a historian who wants to look at slavery in world history, what are you going to notice? You're going to notice that slavery, let's say in India, is really different from slavery in the Americas, or that slavery in Istanbul is really different from slavery in Southeast Asia. And so you're going to start actually talking about these distinctions that will start to unpick, pull the threads out of this abolitionist argument. So that's why this discussion cannot, it's not easy for us to have it, because it starts to pick at the very abolitionist consensus that is held worldwide today. Okay. The abolitionist movement, as I said, that developed in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, defined slavery illegally. It defined it through a legal definition. What does that mean? It talked about a certain kind of relationship or institution that it called slavery. It didn't talk about conditions. So it looked at the legal definition of relationship, not at conditions. Why would it not look at conditions? Why would it look at a legal definition, in this case the idea that someone is owned by another person? Why would it do that and not look at conditions?
Because if you're an abolitionist, let's say, arguing with a southern slave owner in the United States, and you start saying slavery is about someone being in bad conditions, work conditions or living conditions, that southern slave owner is just going to say, oh yeah, look at your factory workers. They look actually more miserable than my slaves. So you don't want to have that discussion. You want to open that door. So slavery is defined as a legal relationship. So what are the... The problem is, though, sorry, the problem is that this... One of the premises of the slavery conundrum is that slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil across space and time. It's not about slavery's evil in our society. It's not about slavery's evil in the modern West or in Western Europe or in the Americas. It's slavery's evil throughout history, backwards and forwards in time, across the world, wherever you are. So the problem is, coming up with a definition for slavery that works in all those times and places, it's basically impossible. It's basically impossible. You end up with definitions that are so abstract, they're so abstract that they ultimately result in us projecting our own assumptions and understandings onto the past. What do I mean by that? Let's just look at three ways that have been used to define slavery. First, slavery is lack of freedom. Slavery is when someone is not free. Okay, here's a problem. We could say, let's say in the United States, we could define freedom. We could maybe even define freedom in the West. But how do you define freedom throughout human history? What is it to be free?
In Roman law and in Western legal tradition, free means you can do whatever you want, except what the law prohibits. Okay, but what's being a slave? Slave is you can do whatever you want, except what your master prohibits. So freedom and slavery are not, freedom is not a complete lack of restraint or constraint. Freedom is just less constraint than a slave has. And exactly what constraints a free person has on them and exactly what constraints a slave has on them differ from time to time and place to place. And if you were to sit around and say, or you're gonna make an argument that, well, a slave is always denied basic rights. What basic rights? Actually, you can't find a consistent notion of what the basic rights that slaves or non-slaves should have in human history. You could say, well, at the very least, let's say a slave, can't, you know, a slave, maybe you can just go and kill and you can't do that to a free person. That's actually not true. Most slave systems in world history, most slave systems in world history, you could not just kill a slave, even their owner. And by the way, under Roman law, until the second century AD, in theory, a father could kill his own child with no legal consequences. It's called patria protestas. So in Roman law, a father or the head of a family, the male head of a family, could kill anyone in his own family with no legal consequences in theory. Didn't really happen, but in theory. So even the notion that, you know, the idea, oh, well, a slave, you as someone you can just do anything to and have no consequences, that doesn't help you in Roman law because that also describes a father of a free person or the status of a free child.
You could say, well, let's define slavery as property. Somebody being the property of another person. How do you define property? In the Western legal tradition, we can define property, usually it's like a bundle of rights, the right to use, the right to exclude, the right to sell, the right to destroy. But sometimes you have some of those rights and you own something. For example, you can't do whatever you want with your house and you own your house. You can't do whatever you want with your pets and you own your pets. You can't sit there and torture your pet, right? It's against the law. But if you have a, let's say, a Van Gogh painting and you just feel like being a jerk, you can destroy that Van Gogh painting if it's yours. So property, what it means for owning different things is different, even in one society. Then try and come up with a definition for property across world history. You end up with something like this. Property is a person having some kind of rights over something. And then so slavery would be one person having some kind of rights over another person, which basically describes almost any relationship. Sometimes we talk about defining slavery as coercion, coercive power over somebody. Same problem. How do you define coercion? We could come up with a clear understanding in the United States about what was unacceptable coercion in a relationship. But then to say we can make this, project this definition across world history, almost nobody in world history would be free if they lived up to modern American labor standards for what is a coercive relationship. One example of this is in the 1790s in England and Scotland, there were these people working in Scotland in coal mines. And there was actually a debate about whether or not these people were slaves or not. In fact, they would sometimes wear collars with their master's name on them. These were white, like Scottish people.
And the main argument for them not being slaves wasn't about how they were treated or whether or not they were born into slavery or not. It was the fact that people had decided there was no slavery in England. After the 1770s, there was no slavery in England. So it was basically a political statement about the nature of British society that defined whether these people were slaves or not, not how they were treated even. Another great example of this is this notion of modern day slavery, which I'm sure you read about in the newspaper or in magazines, hear about on the news. So in 1957, there was a major convention called the, 1926, there was a major convention for the outlawing of slavery globally. And in 1957, there was a supplementary convention. So the 1926 convention is about outlawing slavery. 1957 convention is about outlawing things that are like slavery, but not slavery. And one of those is what's called bonded labor. Bonded labor means I agree to work for you for a certain amount of time, and in return, you pay for my trip to Dallas Tech, I move to Dallas, Texas, and you pay for my housing, and I work for you for 10 years, and then after that, maybe I can stay here, but we're done. So that's, sometimes it's called indentured service or bonded labor, right? So in the 1957 convention, bonded labor is not slavery. It is servitude that is similar to slavery, but not slavery. According to the, what's called the new slavery or modern day slavery, as it's been understood from the late 1990s until today, the major portion, one of the largest, if not the largest portion of global slavery today is bonded labor. So what you see is actually, it's like an inflation, inflation in the context of slavery. What was not slavery in 1957 has become slavery today.
Another example of this is prison labor. So in the late 1990s, some advocates for prison rights, prisoners' rights in the United States started saying that prisoners in the United States are essentially slaves because the 13th Amendment in the United States Constitution does not allow forced labor and slavery except for people who are in prison. Those people can be forced to work for essentially no pay. People didn't really accept this argument, but now what do you see? Even scholars of new slavery and people who are major advocates of what's called new abolition, new abolitionism. In 2006, they did not accept that slaves, that people, prisoners in American prisons were slaves. Now those same people are saying we're reconsidering it. We're reconsidering it. What changed? Did the conditions of American prisoners change? No. Did the definition of slavery change? No. It's just a political, political circumstances changed. Things like Black Lives Matter, movies like, documentaries like 13th. And now, again, yes, I'm sorry, but this is research. Thor Ragnarok, who saw Thor Ragnarok? Okay, I shouldn't ask these questions at this mosque. Okay, none of you saw Thor Ragnarok, nor should you. I did it for research purposes. In Thor Ragnarok, there's this alien master of this planet who runs like this gladiatorial competition played by Jeff Goldblum. And he's sort of this very shmarmy politician, kind of corporate politician. And these gladiators are rebelling. And his minister comes up and says, sir, the slaves are revolting. And he says, no, no, don't say that. Don't say that word. And they said, what, revolting? He says, no, no, the S word. Don't say the S word. And then the person says, sorry, the prisoners with jobs are revolting. So then when you get Hollywood behind you, Hollywood behind the idea that American prisoners
are actually slave laborers, you can see how much this has changed since the late 1990s. When saying American prisoners were slaves would just sort of fall on deaf ears and maybe even be considered unpatriotic. Okay, so you have this notion of, even in the last couple of decades, an inflation, an inflation, like a devaluing, a devaluing of the moral power or the power of the word slave. Another example, by the way, is, I know this is in Texas, the idea that the Irish, that the white people who came to America were slaves because they were indentured servants. I think this, isn't this taught in the Texas school curriculum? Someone told me this. Okay, I don't know about this, but someone told me this. I'll have to reevaluate this. Anyway, so there's this, you see the idea that, like my ancestors, some of them came to the US to then the North American British colonies as indentured servants. And so the argument of some kind of white nationalists is that, well, yeah, we had slavery in America, slavery of black people, but white people were also slaves because they were indentured servants. And to which a lot of African Americans would say, what the hell are you talking about? Those people chose to come, whereas my ancestor was just grabbed and sold. But here's the problem. By the modern definitions of new slavery, those white people were slaves. So when you start talking about projecting some of these definitions backwards in time, it starts to mess with how we conceptualize slavery in history, what we're willing to accept as slavery versus what we're not willing to accept. Okay. So we end up with situations where we come up with definitions for slavery,
but those things, that definition, ends up including something in history that we don't really think is slavery versus other things that look a lot like slavery to us, but don't fit our definition. So we end up with definitions that don't really work. We're not able to put everything we want into the definition and exclude the things we don't want. So up here on the screen, you have two figures. On the right would be Malik Ambar. Malik Ambar died in 1626. He's an Ethiopian slave general who was brought to the Deccan city of Ahmednagar and was a senior general there, and then eventually became the power behind the throne and the regent in that city. On the left-hand side, you have Sokullu Mehmed Pasha. He's sitting there presiding over a bunch of heads. Yes, those are heads of enemy soldiers. He was the grand vizier. He died in 1579, the grand vizier of three Ottoman sultans. Three Ottoman sultans. His family made him a slave when he was 18 years old. He was from a Serbian Christian family, and they made him a family, they gave him to the sultan as a slave when he was 18 years old so that he could become a powerful member of the Ottoman administration because the senior administration of the Ottoman Empire at this time and for another century after that were all slaves. He was the most powerful, except for the sultan, the most powerful person in the Ottoman Empire for decades. The richest and most powerful. He was married to one of the sultan's daughters, actually, and yet he was technically a slave. So are we really gonna say that Sokolom Hamed Pasha is an example of the same phenomenon as a field hand being lashed in the summer heat of South Carolina in the year 1750?
Are we really gonna say this is the same phenomenon? And if we say we can't make internal distinctions, internal distinctions, because all slavery is slavery, what does that, it really handicaps us morally. I mean, we end up making the same moral judgment for these two different situations that are so dramatically disparate from one another. And just so you know, this isn't just a, what you think you're gonna get in trouble for saying at a barbecue. This is even true amongst academics. There's one of the leading scholars of slavery in American history. I was listening to a speech she gave, and she was talking about the conditions between slaves in the field versus slaves in urban areas in the American South. And someone asked her, so how did the conditions differ? And she was about to say something, and she stopped herself. And she said, I was about to say one is better than the other. But she says, basically, we don't, this is not appropriate. We don't like to talk about one thing being better than the other because they don't want to introduce the concept of saying one kind of slavery is better than the other because actually number two is all slavery is slavery. You can't make internal distinctions. Okay, so this leads us to two major handicaps. One, we can't make different moral judgments about things that are very different. And two, the political nature of this means that slavery is usually what other people do. This has changed a little bit in the last couple of years because of increased American willingness to really turn a critical eye on, let's say, American prisons and American labor market. But you probably all recognize that this discussion about American prisoners being slaves, this is not very popular. This wasn't very popular a few years ago. It's only kind of become popular, I think, as a result of Donald Trump and sort of a notion
of a far-left resistance to Donald Trump, which has really made palatable a lot of ideas that would not have been acceptable at all in mainstream American society 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Okay, that's the first issue about kind of thinking about the definition of slavery and the slavery conundrum. Why is it so hard to talk about? Because it ties on bind and knots. It makes us hold internally contradictory ideas. So let's talk about abolition and the origins of abolition. There's two narratives about this. The popular narrative, which is also, by the way, a major scholarly narrative, is what? You can call it the moral awakening narrative. So what happens? Some point in the distant past, there was a few voices who said slavery is wrong. And those people went out and argued, and then more people agreed with that, and then more people agreed with that, and then more people agreed with that. And then in the 1700s, it sort of grew into a, sort of snowballed to have real substance and real mass. And then in the 1800s, especially in places where humans had become enlightened by the enlightened, like Great Britain and the United States, Northern United States, people realized slavery was a gross, intrinsic evil and had to be ended. And then they eventually convinced everybody in the whole world. And that's how we get to the modern day abolitionist consensus, which is that slavery is trans-historical moral evil, and it needs to be removed from the face of the earth. That's what we can call the moral awakening narrative. There's a couple of problems with the moral awakening narrative. As I said before, there's no religion
or philosophical tradition that condemns slavery, qua slavery, that condemns slavery as slavery, until the very earliest of the 1600s. Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, the Buddha, Jesus, Moses, the Prophet Muhammad, Saint Thomas Aquinas. You just name, I mean, I can just go through the history of humanity. There's nobody who said slavery is, in and of itself, a moral evil. They could criticize abuses of slavery. They could criticize the wrong people being enslaved. But there was no moral minority. Same with slavery was evil. I've counted, and I've done a lot of research on this. I've counted one person, like, I don't mean one group of people, I mean one person prior to the 1500s who said slavery, qua slavery, was evil. It was a person named Gregory of Nyssa. He died in 1394, sorry, 394, my bad, 394, the Common Era. He was from Cappadocia and Andalusia. And he was a church father there. He said philosophically and theologically, slavery is wrong. That's it. Until the late 1500s, there's a guy named Jean Baudin in France, died 1596. He says also slavery is wrong. It's evil, it harms the slave, it harms the master. And then in the late 1600s, you see it amongst American Quakers. There's when you see the real beginning of abolitionists, about abolition, the idea that slavery, as an institution, needs to be gotten rid of. And then it really picks up in the 1700s and the 1800s. So, if this is a moral awakening,
it means that basically all of humanity was sound asleep, out to lunch, until the 1600s. The greatest minds, the most righteous and pious souls of every single religion and philosophical tradition, didn't know that slavery was wrong. Or what's worse, maybe they know and didn't say anything. وَإِن كُنْتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمْ فُوَ تَلْكَ مُسِيْبَةٌ وَإِن كُنْتُ تَعْلَمْ فُوَ الْمُسِيْبَةُ أَعْظَمُ What's the, I forget which one it is. Yeah, so if you, if you, you know, what's worse, that they didn't know, or they did know and they knew and didn't say anything. The point is, does this mean that a person today, who knows slavery is wrong, is more morally intelligent than Plato or Aristotle or Jesus or Moses or the Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alayhi wa sallam? I mean, forget about the theological problem that caused for Muslims. Just think about what that means about, I mean, why do we read any of their books? Why do we have any respect? I mean, if we're gonna take down Thomas Jefferson statues, let's get rid of all the books. If we're gonna take down Thomas Jefferson statues, let's get rid of all this, this entire heritage. So that's the second problem with the moral awakening narrative, is what was brought up by, especially historians from outside the first world, outside kind of the US and Europe in the mid 20th century. And this is what was called the kind of economic narrative or economic explanation. Okay, so I told you before, it's really in the 1700s that abolitionism starts gaining a lot of momentum, and the 1800s. Does anyone know anything else that's been happening in that time period? Industrial Revolution, right?
So is it a coincidence, is it a coincidence that people start to say that slavery is a moral evil in precisely those places, namely Great Britain and the Northern United States, precisely in those places where, one, the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution take place, and two, where people achieved unprecedented wealth without reliance on slavery? Is that coincidence? Aristotle made a very prescient point. You guys know Aristotle, died 322 BC. Greek guy, lots of statues. He said, there will be slavery until looms spin themselves. You guys know what a loom is? Like a thing that weaves cloth. Until they move themselves, they'll be slaves. When did slavery become something that people talked about getting rid of? When human beings discovered that you can use water power and then fossil fuels to move things that used to be moved by animals and humans. I just simply can't accept that as a coincidence. Right? Here's the problem. Wait, you say, Professor Brown, you're telling me that abolition became a phenomenon with strength, that even became something of note at all because of technology and economics?
But what I feel in my heart isn't technology and economics. What I feel in my heart is, like when I hear the word slavery, or when I see a movie like 12 Years a Slave, or Amistad, what I feel in my gut, you can't explain that by technology, you can't explain that by economics. That's moral revulsion. I feel moral revulsion in my gut. Correct? But here, there is great wisdom, great wisdom in the Islamic tradition of ethics and the Islamic tradition of moral epistemology. Muslim scholars, the vast majority, except for the Mu'tazillah, we were talking about this earlier, right? This is why they were wrong, I think. The vast majority of Muslim scholars did not trust your gut. That reminds me of George Bush. Do people remember that now? You guys are a lot of old people in the crowd, so you remember George W. Bush. Remember he made decisions about his gut. Muslim scholars do not trust your guts. Why do they not trust guts? Why do they not trust someone feeling morally revolted? Because they were dealing with a world that spread from Egypt to Central Asia, from Southeast Asia to Senegal. And there's a... Have you ever seen the movie? I don't know what to tell you. This is all research, people. The movie, The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas, it's about Muslims, people. The Muslim is the hero of the movie. So it's halal, huh? Yeah, and there's no hanky-panky. There's a lot of violence. No hanky-panky.
So, it's actually a real story, except for the part with the monsters. But until the part with the monsters, it's actually a real story of an Arab diplomat named Ahmed ibn Fadlan, who in the 900s gets sent by the Abbasid Caliph to the land of the Bulgars in Central Asia. And on the way, he meets a bunch of Vikings. And he witnesses a Viking funeral. This is in the book, and it's in the movie. And what's in the movie is accurate to what's in the book. He sees them. I can't describe what they do. It's so disgusting. Just watch the movie, okay? It's so disgusting, I can't describe it. How they clean themselves? I'm going to tell you. They all pass around a little bowl of water, and they all blow their nose into the same bowl and spit into it, and they pass around and they're drinking it. It's like the worst thing you can imagine. And then, what they do to the body of the person they're burying and to the people involved is, this I actually can't talk about. It's really disgusting. And ibn Fadlan asks them, he says, how can you possibly do this? This is disgusting. And they say, what do you mean? This is totally normal. You guys are the disgusting ones. You take your dead bodies and you put them in the ground where the worms eat them? This is disgusting to them. How can you do this? So they understood that what grosses people out, what people think is morally disgusting, is really not a product of some way that your body or your mind is in tune with some kind of moral reality that transfuses in the world or that permeates the world. It's just custom. It's just urf. You guys know the concept of urf? It's just urf. And here's a good example today. If I brought you, if I brought, where are you from?
Okay. If I brought you a plate of dog meat, like puppy meat, with little puppy toes and ears, and said, here's your puppy, here's your dog meat, what would you do? I mean, I tell you, I'd probably, like, I'd feel sick to my, first I'd feel this is morally wrong and I'd feel disgusted. Just imagine you're a random American. A random American would be outraged, morally outraged, and they'd be disgusted to the point of vomiting. In southern China, they have dog meat restaurants. Actual restaurants. The stuff that feels like it's wrong in your gut, that something has to be inherently morally wrong about this, for another person, to another person in the world today, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, it just wasn't a big deal. I want to ask you this question. This is really, I think, very good point to keep in mind. If I asked you, if I told you that last week someone had been brutally murdered outside of this neighborhood, what would your reaction be? You'd mean, yeah, that's bad. Like, is that, if they catch the person who did it, do I know the person who got killed? Let me ask you a question. I want to see how explicit I can be to this audience. If I told you that somebody married a 10-year-old girl, what would you say? A 50-year-old man? We all know the example. It doesn't work for us.
I actually, I want to ask, I feel disgusted by that. In my stomach. But guess what? Murder is wrong. Every society in human history considers murder to be wrong. Yet I told you someone was murdered, and yeah, it's bad, but I mean, okay. Until basically 100 years ago, slavery was completely normal in many parts of the world. Unremarkable, unobjectionable morally to many people in this world. And until the mid-20th century, getting married to teenage girls or younger was normal in the United States. And in fact, it's still normal in lots of parts of the world today. So the things we feel the most disgust about, I'd say in America, the things we feel the most moral disgust about are slavery and pedophilia. Those are the two things we feel the most moral disgust about. These are two things that were common and unremarkable in the recent past. And the thing that is universally prohibited throughout, universally wrong in all societies, namely murder, yeah, it's wrong, but we don't get disgusted by it. Because disgust is a cultural construct. Disgust is culturally conditioned. What disgusts somebody in one society, I'm not just talking physically, I'm talking morally, what disgusts someone in one society doesn't disgust someone in another society.
Because disgust is a way that a culture affects moral change. It's a way the culture affects moral change. So it's not surprising that on those issues where the change has been most dramatic, you find the most intense senses of disgust. For Muslim scholars, Muslim scholars talking about law and ethics, Usuli scholars, what God commands is right. What God forbids is wrong. Those things we can talk about being absolutely right and wrong. But for pretty much all other moral feelings we have, those are based on custom. Those are based on urf. Something is ma'ruf or something is munkar. Slavery was ma'ruf and now slavery is munkar. And someone could say, Professor Brown, are you telling me that our moral condemnation of slavery is just based on custom? Like the same thing that tells me what kind of wedding gifts to give somebody? How dare you belittle my moral objection to slavery? I'm not belittling at all. In fact, that objection belittles the concept of custom. It belittles the fact that human beings, for most of their moral transactions in the world and most of their moral actions in the world, their judgments are based on custom. Not based on some kind of universal moral law. And in fact, it's a very unique feature of modern Western society that we assume that everything that we feel is right and we feel is wrong must be universal.
So when we decide that, let's say, it's proper for women to dress with their hair showing and wearing short-sleeved shirts, or for guys not to wear a hat or something like that, we just assume that this is the normal thing that everybody in the world should do. And that women or men who are not allowed to dress like this in other countries are being oppressed. Because these are universals. If we decide that it's right for people to be able to engage in all sorts of relationships before marriage, just based on what they feel with no consequences, this must be universal. That everyone in the world should follow. And if they're not being allowed to follow wherever they live, then they're being oppressed. So we live in a society that takes custom and makes it into moral universals. Whereas Muslim scholars understood that custom is really important. It has real legal meaning for people. It has real moral meaning for people. But that you can't universalize it because it's not fair to do that to other cultures. So for example, if we were to have Sharia courts in America, I'm not advocating Sharia Creed, but if we were to have Sharia courts in America, I'm advocating Sharia law in America. And my wife were to go and say, my husband, he sits around, he doesn't do any work around the house, he doesn't take care of the kids, he just goes out and hangs out with his friends all the time. And I think he's a lousy husband and I want to get divorced from him. My guess is that Muslim scholar applying Islamic law in America would say, yes, your husband is not giving you your Haq. Because in American Urf, these are not the duties and rights and obligations of men and women to one another in marriage. The obligations of a husband, the obligations of a wife, the rights of a husband, the rights of a wife, in Islamic law, these are determined by custom.
I mean there's a few like outlines or boundaries and pillars that are determined by the Quran and the Sunnah, but the details, it's determined by custom. And this is legally meaningful. People will get divorced on this. Have to pay mahr or not pay mahr. Okay. The last thing I want to talk about, two things, I can't believe I've actually gotten through what I talked about. I'm going to talk about two other issues. One is the change in slavery that was brought by Islam, and the second is abolition of slavery in Islam. It is not exaggeration. It is not, and I will happily go in front of the most skeptical academic audience and say this. This is not me doing some kind of Muslim cheerleading, you know, Islam is great, Muslims invented ice cream, I'm not doing that kind of thing. This is completely true. This is absolutely true. The Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet and the legal understanding of the early Muslim community completely revolutionized slavery in the Near East. And slavery in kind of what we would think of sort of the Western world, one of Central Asia, Mediterranean world, Europe, and then the Americans. The main routes into slavery, the main ways that someone became a slave prior to Islam in the Near East were debt, you owed money, you couldn't pay, you became the person's slave. Capture, as a basically being raided. Self-dedition, which means giving yourself as a slave. This is, people don't know this, but many, many millions of people in human history gave themselves as slaves to other people. Why would they do this? Because they were starving, because they were poor, because they were foreigners in a place where no one protected them, to protect them.
And being protected and taken care of was more important to them than their freedom. Selling your children into slavery. This is a major source of slaves in the Ancient Near East, in India, until the 20th century in Southeast Asia, in medieval Europe, was giving your, selling your children into slavery because you couldn't afford to keep them or because you owed money. Islam eliminated all of these. There is no debt slavery. And this is very clear in the Sharia. Every once in a while in Islamic history you see it, for example in Southeast Asia, in the 1500s and 1600s you see some debt slavery. This is a pre-Islamic tradition that continues. The Sharia prohibits debt slavery. The Sharia prohibits self-dedition. You cannot give yourself as a slave. The Sharia prohibits selling your children into slavery. So the major routes into slavery are all cut off completely. What's interesting is these are actually not mentioned in the Quran or in the Hadiths, but they're simply, it's just like understood by consensus in the early Muslim community, ended. There's only one way to become a slave in Islamic law, which is for a Muslim to capture a non-Muslim outside the abode of Islam in a war. That's the one way. Or you can be born into slavery if your mother is a slave woman. Alright, another really important change that Islam brought for slavery was what happens to the offspring between a male slave owner and his female slave.
So remember I gave you the example of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson's children were born slaves. They were born slaves and they were born members of an oppressed class in the United States, which are African Americans. What's an African American? How do you define African American versus white in the United States? Anybody know? Skin tone? I mean, can you be like, let's say all my ancestors are white except for one person, but I'm, am I black or white? One drop means you're black. White means no blackness. Unless you're able to pass, which means no one can tell that you're black, you have black ancestry. But you can be extremely dark or you can be extremely light, but if you're black, you're black. And otherwise, you can't be part white. You're either white or you're fully white or you're black, right? If Thomas Jefferson had been a Muslim, his children would have been born free. They would have been legitimate. They can inherit from him. Their mother would have been freed when their father died. And this is important. They would have had the same social standing as children born of a free wife. This is also agreed upon in Islamic law, completely. Very important. The offspring of a male slave owner and his female slaves are born free, they're legitimate, and they have the same social standing as people born of free women, free wives.
That's why almost all the Abbasid Caliphs and all of the Ottoman Sultans except one were children not of wives, not of free wives, but of slave women. This is what leads to what the scholar of African history, Ali Mazru'i, may Allah have mercy on him, who died recently, called ascending miscegenation. Whereas in America, people who were the result of mixed free and slave unions went down into the enslaved oppressed class, people who were born of those unions in Islamic civilization went up into the free Muslim community. The final change brought by Islamic law, or the Quran and the Sunnah, is an obsession with emancipation. Emancipation is different from abolition. Emancipation means freeing people. Abolition means getting rid of the institution of slavery as a whole. The Quran does not propose abolition. Why not? Because nobody proposed abolition until the early modern period. There's no society that had slaves, which is almost every society in human history, and certainly every civilization in human history. No one proposed the idea of abolition until the early modern period. I want you to understand this very clearly. Who saw the movie Sparta? Spartacus. Come on, that's an old movie. That's okay, right? You guys didn't watch Spartacus? This guy watches everything. Somebody needs to talk to him. Spartacus, if you see in the beginning of the movie, Kirk Douglas, he's like a slave, he says he labored under the sun, and the hot sun, and the dreaming of a day
where slavery would die 2,000 years before it ever would. In the movie, Spartacus gives a speech where we're going to fight to free all the slaves in the world, or all the slaves in the Roman Empire. That's not at all what Spartacus' rebellion was about. Spartacus wasn't fighting to end slavery. He and his friends, they just didn't want to be slaves. And in fact, they took their own slaves. And all pre-modern slave rebellions, they're not trying to end slavery. They're just trying to get out of their own situation, slavery. And they very often took their own slaves. Yes, abolition is not indigenous to Islam, in the sense that it's not present in the Quran and the Sunnah. But it's not indigenous to any religion or any philosophy. It's only something that emerges as an idea in the early modern period, really in the 1700s. What the Quran and the Sunnah do do is they provide an impulse, an impetus for emancipation that does not have an equal in any religious or philosophical tradition that I've seen, pre-modern religious or philosophical tradition. The Quran introduces a few things that are unprecedented. One is it ties the charity tax, the zakat, to freeing slaves. One of the eight groups that can get zakat are slaves, to help free themselves. Two, the idea of freeing slaves as expiation for certain sins or as partial punishments or as things you do to expiate sins or crimes. Three is the notion of making the notion of mukataba highly recommended or required. Mukataba is when a slave says, I want to basically buy my own freedom on installments. So the Quran says, if a slave wants to do this,
then do it, in alimtum feehim khayran. If they are able to do it, if you think they're going to be able to do it, then you should agree. And in the Muwatta of Malik, the Caliph Omar, actually makes Anas agree to a mukataba request from his slave. So these things are really unprecedented in history as far as I know. And the hadiths, the rewards you get for freeing slaves, is incredible. The rewards in the afterlife. Now what's really interesting is, not only are there lots of sahih hadiths about this, but Muslims crank out forgeries. If you look at books of forged hadiths, like Suyut al-Irbina and Jawzi, you find the most outrageous hadiths that are doing what? Urging Muslims to free their slaves. One hadith that's made up in the 800s, I mean, I'm not saying it's made up. Muslim scholars said it's made up. Suyuti ibn Hajar al-Qalani said this. And if Suyuti says it's made up, it's definitely made up. Because he's very lax in his standards, rahimahullah, right? So this one, it's supposedly one of the last khutbas given by the Prophet, alayhi salatu wasalam. He says, if you walk to the mosque, think about this, if you walk to the mosque, every step you take is the equivalent of freeing a slave. Now that's interesting. That hadith isn't telling you to free slaves. But freeing slaves has become so important, that freeing slaves is like the unit of measurement you use to talk about the reward you're going to get for something else. Another hadith that's made up in the 900s, the Prophet allegedly says, he tells a woman, sabbihi, sabbihi, do tasbih of God, right? For every tasbih is the equivalent of freeing a hundred slaves.
So slavery, freeing slaves is such a basic unit in Muslim understanding of pious life, that it becomes a way to count other good deeds. And this impetus to free slaves, this drive to emancipate, is so widespread and consistent, that if you look in Islamic history, now Islamic history is very long and very broad geographically, but in general, in general, this is a generalization, but I think it's a fairly accurate one, people who were slaves to Muslims were not slaves for their whole lives. They were usually slaves for like seven to ten years, and then they were freed. And if they became Muslim in that time, they entered the Muslim community as members in good standing, as citizens like anybody else. And by the way, this is another argument for why there was not an indigenous movement for abolition in the Islamic world like there was in the Americas, especially the Caribbean in the 1700s and 1800s. Why? If you were, first of all, the majority of slaves brought into Islamic civilization were women, who then were made part of families and who had children with those families. So they were integrated into those communities. The second reason is if you were a freed slave in the Caribbean or in the United States, you're still a black person. You could still be re-enslaved like in the movie Twelve Years a Slave. You're still treated like garbage. And worse, you weren't an enfranchised member of society. So the only way, as long as slavery existed, you were under threat of re-enslavement. The only way to get rid of, to ever feel safe was to end slavery or to do what's called maroonage, which means you basically go and you live in some isolated part of an island
with other escaped or freed slaves. For Muslims who were freed slaves, they were part of the society. They could be successful merchants. They could be Muslim scholars. They could be saints. In my book, there's a whole section on slave saints, by the way. Saints who were slaves. I'm an awliya. The way that we can talk about abolition in Islamic tradition that I think is the most accurate is to say that, and this is entirely authentic in the Sharia tradition, that as a legal maxim says, يتشوف الشارع إلى الحرية The lawgiver, God, looks expectantly towards freedom. And actually you can find this in one of the earliest books that survives in Islamic tradition, the Kitab al-Tahrish of Daraa ibn Amr. There's a hadith, we talked about this hadith actually. It comes from the very early period. We don't know if the Prophet said it or not, but it's a very early idea. If a man says to his wife, انتِ طالق إن شاء الله She's not divorced. Because God doesn't want divorce. If you say to your slave, انتِ حُر إن شاء الله The slave is freed. Why? Because God wants freedom. So one of the, even if you look in the Kitab al-Muafiqat of Ash-Shatibi, died 1388, a major scholar of the maqasid of the Sharia. He says one of the maqasid of the Sharia is الاتق, freeing slaves. And if we now live in a time when it's economically, not just economically feasible, but economically profitable not to have slaves,
if we can remove the harm of slavery, and this is something I forgot to mention which I'll shoehorn in really quickly. Muslim scholars always recognized that slavery was harmful. They talked about دَرَرَرِك, the harm of slaves. What was the harm of slavery? They realized that being a slave was not pleasant for a lot of people. It was, you were unable to make your free choices. You were, like you couldn't, let's say, lead prayer or lead a Jumu'ah prayer. You were unable to benefit from the fruits of your own labor if you wanted. So that's why they understood that freeing people was a good thing. That's why there's فَضَلَنِتْخُ, you get a reward for freeing people. But they also understood that it wasn't the most, they believed it was not the most important thing. So if someone was too old or too sick or too incompetent to handle themselves, it was actually wrong to free them. Because they were going to be in worse off if they were freed. So if we are in a position in world history where slavery is not needed economically, if we're in a position where we can remove the harm of it from people, then the best way to fulfill this مقصد, this aim of the shariah, of emancipation, is simply to do a categorical emancipation and get rid of the institution as a whole.
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