Jonathan Brown - Abolition of Slavery in Islam

About this lecture

In this lecture, Professor Jonathan Brown surveys the major Muslim scholarly responses to the question of abolishing slavery, examining how Muslim thinkers from the 19th century to the present have engaged with Western abolitionism while working within — or departing from — the Islamic legal tradition. He outlines six distinct approaches, from the claim that Islam never permitted slavery to a full-throated defense of slavery as valid under the Sharia, evaluating each against both classical Islamic jurisprudence and the modern global abolitionist consensus. The lecture raises searching questions about how any tradition rooted in pre-modern scripture can respond to demands for trans-historical moral condemnation of slavery.