Jonathan Brown - Slavery and Islam

About this lecture

In this wide-ranging lecture, Professor Jonathan Brown (Georgetown University) examines slavery through the lens of Islamic ethics, history, and law, addressing why the Quran does not condemn slavery outright while also demonstrating Islam's profound and historically unparalleled obsession with emancipation. He introduces the "slavery conundrum" — the logical contradiction between our modern moral certainty that slavery is always wrong and our reverence for historical figures who owned slaves — and argues that moral norms around slavery are shaped by economic and technological conditions rather than timeless intuition. The lecture concludes with a survey of Muslim scholarly responses to abolition and makes the case that abolishing slavery today is the most authentic fulfillment of the Sharia's own aims.