Everywhere in chains

FOR ANY system of belief that vests ultimate authority in the past, slavery is a big moral problem. That goes for all three of the monotheistic faiths, and even for civil creeds such as traditional American patriotism, which is now wrestling hard with the fact that human equality’s most eloquent advocates, the republic’s founders, were also slave-owners.

For several reasons, this dilemma is an acute one for Muslims, as emerges in a scholarly but digestible new book, “Slavery and Islam”, by Jonathan Brown, a professor at Georgetown University and himself a Muslim convert. He focuses on both theology and history right up to the mid-19th century—when slavery became a bone of contention between European imperial powers, full of new-found abolitionist zeal, and traditional Muslim authorities across the Middle East and beyond. Like everything else about the Muslim encounter with European colonialism, this is a painful memory, and many Muslims insist that the European stance was patronising and hypocritical.